Kendrick Lamar has revealed he’s currently producing his final album for his label Top Dawg Entertainment. On a new website called Oklahoma, there’s a graphic of a file folder labeled “nu thoughts” that leads to a written statement from the rapper. It reads:
I spend most of my days with fleeting thoughts. Writing. Listening. And collecting old Beach cruisers. The morning rides keep me on a hill of silence.
I go months without a phone.
Love, loss, and grief have disturbed my comfort zone, but the glimmers of God speak through my music and family.
While the world around me evolves, I reflect on what matters the most. The life in which my words will land next.
As I produce my final TDE album, I feel joy to have been a part of such a cultural imprint after 17 years. The Struggles. The Success. And most importantly, the Brotherhood. May the Most High continue to use Top Dawg as a vessel for candid creators. As I continue to pursue my life’s calling.
There’s beauty in completion. And always faith in the unknown.
Thank you for keeping me in your thoughts. I’ve prayed for you all.
See you soon enough.
-oklama
Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, CEO and founder of Top Dawg Entertainment, confirmed Lamar’s next album, writing, “With this being Dot’s last album on TDE, this is more of a VICTORY LAP, a celebration. I know he will be successful in whatever it is he decides to do and will have our FULL support.”
Since releasing his last studio album, 2017’s Damn., Kendrick Lamar curated and contributed to the Black Panther soundtrack and launched a new company called pgLang with Dave Free, the former president of TDE.
“There’s something moving over me/ I want to remember everything,” Karly Hartzman sings on ‘Cody’s Only’, a highlight off Wednesday’s new album Twin Plagues. As the band drifts through the chaos of memory and between the realms of shoegaze, noise-pop, and country, that something remains as elusive as the everything is overwhelming – a haze of trauma and anxiety percolating underneath her and Jake Lenderman’s distorted, feedback-drenched guitars. On their third album and second as a full band, the Asheville five-piece – which also includes Xandy Chelmis on pedal steel, Margo Schultz on bass, and Alan Miller on drums – expand on last year’s stunning I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone to deliver a collection of devastating beauty and striking dynamism. Hartzman’s vocals barely crack through the swirl of instrumentation; the music mirrors the emotional weight of her writing, which is both painful and tender, evocative and surreal, often alluding to a real-life car crash and other events from her upbringing. The effect is immediately transfixing, sometimes disorienting, always compelling, and ultimately cathartic: try to remember everything, they suggest, and something new might come along.
We caught up with Wednesday for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about the band’s relationship to country and indie rock music, the process of making Twin Plagues, and more.
Part of the conversation around your new album revolves around a sense of nostalgia for a certain type of indie rock, but hearing that cover of the late Nanci Griffith’s ‘Love at the Five and Dime’ with Xandy on pedal steel reminded me just how much of a country influence there is in your music. Could you talk about what draws each of you to country music, and how do you think it intersects with your interest in heavier music?
Karly Hartzman: It’s hard to avoid a country influence when you’re from the South, because you’ll go to the grocery store and they’re playing pop country, or like, in the car, most of the stations we have autosaved to our thing is country stations, outlaw country music. Lyrically, I feel like the most out of anything I’ve been affected by country music, like, Lucinda Williams kind of stuff is more who I’ve been taking writing inspiration from. Anyone that talks about their life in detail and what it’s like living in the South is going to be a country song, even if the instrumentation isn’t country at all, because that’s just how it feels to describe where we live. It’s always going to come off that way, and I find that really comforting.
Xandy Chelmis: It’s funny that you just brought up Lucinda Williams, because it actually made me think of something that I’ve never really thought about. And that’s like, when I was growing up, everyone including myself was like, “Oh yeah, country sucks. I like every kind of music but country.” But I’d totally get down to Lucinda Williams and really liked that music a lot, and I just never realised that it was country. Same thing with like Johnny Cash and just older stuff. People always say that they don’t like country, but I feel like everybody definitely does, they just don’t even know.
Jake Lenderman: For me, what got me into country music was like – you know, we get compared to a lot of ‘90s bands, and the first country music I got into was the alt-country music from the ‘90s like Drive-By Truckers, Richmond Fontane, Sun Volt. That’s some of the most formative music to me, but it got me into older stuff, and the thing I like about it is that it’s simple music, but it’s really lonesome music. And it’s really funny music and clever, and I think just the prettiest. It can be anything.
KH: I think the element of humour especially is something that country music does the best. Almost nothing is going to connect faster to people than sadness and humour, and a mix of two that emphasises both and brings out the beautiful parts in both. Because being able to laugh at pain in the way that country music kind of helps you do is like, transcendent.
Margo Schultz: I’m from Maryland, which really pushes away the southern identity pretty aggressively. I feel like I’m probably the latest comer to country music out of everyone in the band, but I just love it so much and it makes me feel even more at home here in North Carolina than almost anything else.
Would you say that getting into indie rock and other kinds of alternative music was kind of a reaction to what was always in the background growing up?
KH: Yeah, for sure. I feel like I actually got more into alternative and indie stuff because my friends that would carpool me to school every morning were playing Christian radio stations, and it can be country-adjacent sometimes, the music on there, and I never felt more alienated by music. I was Jewish, and so being in a car with a group of people that just seemed to know the words to these songs, I literally had never even come close to feeling what they were feeling. Definitely in middle school I found indie rock to be a safer place for me to bond with people music-wise.
XS: I had a cool older friend who sat me down and made me watch Garden State when I was 13 years old. [laughter] No, I know, but I was like 13 years old and like, hormones coursing through my body and I was like, “This is it. It has to be.” Him yelling in the rain, and I was like, “Hell yeah, I love indie music.” [laughter]
To me, it’s kind of limiting to view it as nostalgia for a certain genre, because it also is nostalgia for a physical place and the personal memories that are attached to it. And the kind of nostalgia that’s not necessarily musical is a little bit harder to pinpoint, but on the album it’s evoked in such a way where the listener can relate to it regardless of where they grew up or what kind of experiences they’ve had. For you personally, has writing and releasing these songs made you reflect on your upbringing any differently?
KH: Yeah. My motivation for this album as a whole was to close the book on any trauma I had experienced in high school, any memories I kind of wanted to write about so I would never have to think about them again. I’ll be like, “Okay, here’s the song I wrote about this, now I can move on emotionally.” I definitely learned through that process that that’s not how that works. Reflecting on your past in the first place is always going to just reopen the box of pain – newer music I’m writing still is dealing with old memories that I’m just sitting on and that affects me every day. Because in a way, your upbringing never goes away – I grow more every year that I live, obviously, and I’m growing in a positive direction, but I’m also constantly reminded of the things that got my brain to where it is now, like in the way of certain things are harder for me now because of things that happened in the past. I mean, that’s how trauma works, but it never goes away, even if you really – the point of the album was to make it go away, and that’s not how it works, and I think that was a valuable lesson to learn. So I learned a lot from making it, but I didn’t necessarily achieve what I set out to do. I think I’ll just always write about my upbringing and my past because that’s literally the only thing that makes a person who they are, otherwise you’re not writing about yourself, in a way.
There’s a line on ‘Cody’s Only’, and even though it comes late on the album, it feels kind of like starting point: “There’s something moving over me/ I want to remember everything/ I cannot figure out what I meant/ By living all those ways I did.” I was wondering how early on in the process of making the album those lyrics came to you.
KH: I think ‘Cody’s Only’ was probably the first song I wrote for the album, I don’t know if it was intentionally a starting point. That song is probably the most abstract; I think that song just overall is based on wandering around your house trying to figure out how to deal with pain. And I have this vision of myself in my junior year of high school, just not knowing how to be at my parents’ house anymore. Like, emotionally, how to live in this space where I’ve experienced something terrible happen to me. And I guess it is like a starting point in a way, emotionally, but it was completely unintentional for the writing process. This isn’t a concept album in any way, like I couldn’t have planned any of the songs or how they interact with each other. Because I just write the songs I have to to feel better, is my process.
Something the essay that came with the release of the album made me think about is how it can make the listener reflect on their own past selves. It made me wonder how everyone else in the band was affected by or saw themselves reflected in these songs before it came to building them to what they are now.
MS: Good question! I feel like whenever Karly writes one of the demos that’s basically just lyrics and guitar, I always listen to it like crazy and try to, a) imagine how it would sound, but b) also just think about what the lyrics mean and how that would match the music. And I feel like there’s certain songs that definitely affect me more than others, lyrically. I feel like ‘Cody’s’ probably the most; from my interpretation, it just sounds like a song sort of about being depressed but still feeling hopeful. I feel like the lyrics are very beautiful and abstract and poetic, but I mostly connect really hard with the music itself, the whole fleshed-out product.
XS: For me it’s like, I hear a demo and I like it and I can hear some stuff in my head, but especially with lap steel and the way I play it with Wednesday, it’s usually when we’re playing all together and fleshing out a song – I’m not even listening at that point to the lyrics as a totality, there’s some lines that will stick out but mostly I’m just responding with my instrument. And it’s not usually until we have a decently fleshed-out demo where I can hear Karly’s voice, and then I’ll start listening to it, and then… It’s kind of like a lot of music for me, even my own music that I write, when I revisit it or listen to it, wherever I am in my life it usually means something different. But I really like these songs because they are really meaningful to me consistently.
When it comes to fleshing out the songs, did you have any conversations in terms of where they sit emotionally, or was it something that came more naturally?
MS: I feel like we throw these songs into the pit. [laughs] We just get together and we’re like, “What are we thinking?” And we try every single thing anyone’s thinking, and it’s a beautiful mess. And then it’s a song eventually.
XS: I feel like it’s usually not a conscious emotional response that we’re trying to invoke. It’s probably more intuitive.
JL: You can talk about something all you want before you try doing it, but it’s never going to turn out how you talk about doing it, so it’s kind of pointless.
KH: Actually, I feel like, what usually happens is… I don’t use a guitar chord if I don’t feel like it translates to the emotion I’m going for, and so we usually have a pretty good idea – a good example is ‘Birthday Song’, when we were first playing that, I bet when we were practising it in the space they couldn’t tell what I was saying, but they could tell that it was painful and they adapted to that and they made the instrumentation work around that. And usually there’s a moment down the line after we’ve already fleshed out the song where I’m like, “This is what this song is about.” I usually wait to tell anyone what it was even about until after we’ve already decided the instrumentation.
I remember once me and Xandy were sitting in this venue where we both used to work and listening to our last album through the PA after a show one night, just sitting around in the dark, and as each song went by I was explaining what each one meant to me. It’s hard for me to get into what they’re about in the moment, too, because it’s hard stuff to talk about. And I mostly just kind of blurt out whatever the song is about whenever I feel like I’m in a place to talk about it.
XS: And that night when you were telling me about those songs, we’ve been playing them for like months at that point. It was kind of wild to suddenly get context gaps filled in.
I was actually going bring up ‘Birthday Song’ in relation to what you were talking about before, especially with the line “Couldn’t laugh at it yet/ Wasn’t far away from it yet.” To me, it’s a reminder that just because you get to process something through songwriting, it doesn’t mean it won’t come back or that you won’t revisit it in the future. But with it being tied to the album now, are there any joyful memories that you associate with the recording process that you think will also stay with you in a more positive way?
KH: Songwriting is extremely painful and dwelling on the memories is painful, but when it comes to like, I got to make these songs with my best friends and record them with people I would say I capital-L love now – I mean, every album we make, every song we write, every tour we go on, we get closer and we understand each other more. And Jake was added to the band like a year ago, but him and Xandy are already telepathically communicating with each other on stage, and Margo does shit on the bass somehow which, I didn’t know the bass could be an emotional instrument to me…
MS: [laughs]
KH: But Margo does stuff sometimes that makes me completely nuts, because she understands the unspoken meaning of the song emotionally and how to translate that into a bassline, which I don’t understand how she does that. And then Alan, I have another really special and happy bond to because he started playing drums right when I started playing guitar, and so we’re learning our instrument together from the ground up. And he’s not in this conversation right now, he’s not here, but I mean…
MS: You can say whatever you want Karly, he’s not here.
KH: [laughs] I don’t know, I have like an insane bond with everyone in this band now that would be impossible to replicate. And I think that has made most of this experience happy. It’s hard to translate that this has been like a happy experience.
JL: You’re not mentioning that there was a pool in the studio.
KH: [laughs] Oh yeah, there also was a swimming pool in the studio, so… But overall, very positive experience. And the thing is, if I’ve written a song about it, I have moved on in a way that makes me comfortable to talk about it, and that is a healing moment in itself. Even though it doesn’t solve the problem, it doesn’t make it go away, it puts my brain in a space where I can remove myself from the situation and figure out what had I learned, what did I gain from that, even though it was some of the worst stuff that could have happened.
MS: And recording was so fun. It was in the middle of such a horrible, horrible time, I feel like it was everyone’s depression peak – it was such a fraught and depressing time for everyone individually, but together, it was very joyful. Because I know I was really depressed, I feel like I had a conversation with each of us one-on-one where I was just like, “Yeah, this is the worst my life has ever been. But I’m happy I’m here, and there’s a pool. [laughter] And Xandy and Jake have been playing feedback for two full hours, that’s really cathartic, just listening to a feedback recording session happening in the background.” It was amazing, and I feel like it’s even more cathartic now to see such a positive reaction to it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
When your debut album has been as anticipated as Oscar Lang’s, perhaps it’s acceptably bold to title the first track on it ‘Our Feature Presentation’; Lang, the London singer-songwriter, knows his own worth. After a string of well-regarded EP’s and many buzzy singles, his first full-length, Chew The Scenery, is an endearing hodgepodge of styles and fronts that demonstrates plenty of promise, even if his place in tomorrow’s music landscape remains unclear.
Several of the album’s tracks – ’21st Century Hobby’, ‘I Could Swear’, and ‘Stuck’ – are too reminiscent of bravado-fuelled indie landfill, the sort of scuzzy rock that marked post-’90s Oasis. That rollicking but vapid trio of tracks almost undoes the great work of that aforementioned opening, a cleverly-constructed introduction whose electronic flourishes sound very much indebted to Tame Impala (another instrumental interlude arrives later, ‘Intermission’, which recalls the weird fuzz of Daniel Johnston).
It’s when Lang settles into his groove as a pleasant and unthreatening presence that the album finds its feet. Coldplay marched at the front of the post-Britpop era, providing melancholic contemplation in lieu of macho posturing, and although it might not be as overtly ‘cool’, it undeniably has its place. So ‘Write Me A Letter’, with its lovelorn piano line, seems to capture the spirit of Lang As Artist better. After its aching falsetto opening, ‘Final Call’ contains sweet strings and tender keys. The jaunty ‘Are You Happy?’ might be more buoyant territory, but it doesn’t lack for that thoughtful palette.
There is a strong lyricist in Lang, too. These songs possess mature and honest outlooks, belying the youthfulness of their writer (Lang was born in 2000). ‘Quarter Past Nine’, with its darker and subdued hue, sees him questioning the merits of the Other Man a potential lover has chosen; ‘Take Time Out’ then contrasts this ruefulness by placing Lang as the ‘bad’ person, as he sings of being unwilling to deal with a relationship quarrel (“My head is throbbing/ Her eyes are sobbing/ It’s too early for this”). ’21st Century Hobby’ sees him bemoaning how addicted his generation has become to social media, sneering “How loud do you shout/ To drown others out/ It’s all for a show.”
Aged just 21, there is clear potential in Lang’s career. He’s already wisely disregarded the formalities of bedroom pop to explore indie rock, delicate electronica, and dream pop on this debut, mostly to success. He’s a capable songwriter with a mature and maturing perspective, which, distilled further, should provide hope for a more enjoyably cohesive second album.
Lorde is back with her third studio album, Solar Power. The follow-up to 2017’s Melodrama was co-produced by Jack Antonoff and features the previously shared title track, ‘Stoned at the Nailed Salon’, and ‘Mood Ring’. “The album is a celebration of the natural world, an attempt at immortalizing the deep, transcendent feelings I have when I’m outdoors,” Lorde explained in a statement. “In times of heartache, grief, deep love, or confusion, I look to the natural world for answers. I’ve learned to breathe out, and tune in. This is what came through.” Phoebe Bridgers, Clairo, and Robyn provided vocals on the record, which is being released as a disc-less, “eco-conscious Music Box” designed to minimize its carbon footprint.
Deafheaven have returned with their latest LP, Infinite Granite, out now via Sargent House. Following 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, the band’s fifth album was produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen and includes the singles ‘Great Mass of Color’, ‘The Gnashing’, and ‘In Blur’. George Clarke’s black metal howls are largely absent on the record, while guitarists Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra bring in more synth textures than on previous records. “I think that for us, the only thing that’s really paramount is that we can continue to be inspired and continue to write music that’s inspired,” McCoy said in a recent Apple Music 1 interview.
Dublin-born singer-songwriter Orla Gartland has put out her debut full-length album, Woman on the Internet. Following a string of singles and EPs, the album was written during the first lockdown of 2020 at Gartland’s studio in Acton and recorded in October at Devon’s Middle Farm Studios. “The narrative of a lot of the songs, it jumps between songs I’m singing about someone else and songs I’m singing to myself,” Gartland explained in our Artist Spotlight interview. “There’s a lot of that self-awareness and self-reflection. In my head, the woman on the internet, she’s no one in particular, but she’s almost this like Wizard of Oz, a faceless, nameless figure who has all the answers, and is much more exciting for the fact that you have no real access to her.”
Sturgill Simpson has released a new concept record called The Ballad of Dood and Juanita. Out now digitally, with vinyl to follow on December 3, it marks the singer-songwriter’s third album in twelve months following last year’s Cuttin’ Grass albums. Simpson wrote and recorded the new album, which he calls “a simple tale of either redemption or revenge,” in less than a week. “I just wanted to write a story—not a collection of songs that tell a story, but an actual story, front to back,” Simpson stated in press materials, further describing the album as a “rollercoaster ride through all the styles of traditional country and bluegrass and mountain music that I love, including gospel and a cappella.”
Morly, the alias of singer-songwriter Katy Morley, has issued her full-length debut, ‘Til I Start Speaking, via Cascine and Sweet Entertainment. Following a series of EPs — 2015’s In Defense of My Muse, 2016’s Something More Holy, and 2017’s Sleeping In My Own Bed, the new record includes the advance tracks ‘Dance to You’, ‘Wasted’, and ‘Eliogy’. The album came together during stints in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and London as the artist found herself falling in love with someone across the Atlantic. Working with regular collaborator Christopher Stracey, Morly describes her process as a “subconscious exorcism”: “It’s in my own silence that the world really comes alive, and I see the deep connections.”
Bnny, the Chicago-based band led by singer Jess Viscius alongside her twin sister Alexa Viscius, have unveiled their debut LP, titled Everything (via Fire Talk). Written over a period of several years as Jess processed the death of her partner, the album was recorded at Chicago’s Jamdek Studios and “various bedroom closets” with producer Jason Balla of Dehd, while Collin Dupuis handled the mixing. Viscius originally considered releasing only the songs she wrote following her partner’s passing, but, she explains, “that would only tell half of my truth. It seems more honest to include all of it, which is why I decided to call the album Everything. Because these songs, these memories, are everything I’ve got.”
American black metal act Wolves in the Throne Room have dropped their latest album, Primordial Arcana, via Relapse. Featuring the previously released singles ‘Mountain Magick’, ‘Spirit of Lightning’, and ‘Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)’, the LP marks the band’s first completely self-contained effort; performed, composed, and recorded in its entirety by brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver alongside guitarist Kody Keyworth, with production and mixing done at their own Owl Lodge Studios in the woods of Washington state.
Other albums out today:
Pile, Songs Known Together, Alone; The Joy Formidable, Into the Blue; Alien Boy, Don’t Know What I Am; Villagers, Fever Dreams; Tropical Fuck Storm, Deep States; MarthaWainwright, Love Will Be Reborn;Kool and the Gang; Perfect Union;Trippe Red, Trip at Knight; Palmistry, wyrdo.
MUBI, the home of art cinema, unveiled their list of films for September. The list includes few MUBI releases such as Visit, or Memories and Confessions by Manoel de Oliveira and Wife of a Spy by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The month will also celebrate the cinema of Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine. MUBI will be screening selected films by Chahine, including The Blazing Sun, Cairo Station and The Land.
This is the current list of films on MUBI in September 2021.
1 September | Yellow Cat | Adilkhan Yerzhanov | Festival Focus: Venice
2 September | Visit, or Memories and Confessions | Manoel de Oliveira | Rediscovered | A MUBI Release
3 September | Holy Motors | Leos Carax | Leos Carax Focus
4 September | Knight of Cups | Terrence Malick | States of Grace: Terrence Malick Double Bill
5 September | Song To Song | Terrence Malick | States of Grace: Terrence Malick Double Bill
6 September | Mama | Li Dongmei | Festival Focus: Venice
7 September | Genus Pan | Lav Diaz | Festival Focus: Venice
8 September | Wife of a Spy | Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Luminaries | Festival Focus: Venice | A MUBI Release
9 September | Fucking with Nobody | Hannaleena Hauru | Festival Focus: Venice
10 September | New Order | Michel Franco | Dystopia | A MUBI Release
11 September | The Unbelievable Truth | Hal Hartley | Hal Hartley Triple Bill
12 September | TBC
13 September | Dona Flor and her Two Husbands | Bruno Barreto
14 September | Downstream to Kinshasa | Dieudo Hamadi | Dieudo Hamadi: A Double Bill
15 September | Our Defeats | Jean-Gabriel Périot | Undiscovered | A MUBI Release
16 September | The Blazing Sun | Youssef Chahine | Focus on Youssef Chahine
17 September | Sweat | Magnus von Horn | MUBI Spotlight
18 September | David Lynch – The Art of Life | Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergaard-Holm | Portrait of the Artist
19 September | The Heiresses | Márta Mészáros | Independent Women: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros
20 September | Scenes with Beans | Ottó Foky | Hungarian animated shorts
21 September | Cairo Station | Youssef Chahine | Focus on Youssef Chahine
22 September | Editing | Dustin Guy Defa | Brief Encounters
23 September | Limbo | Ben Sharrock | The New Auteurs | A MUBI Release
24 September | Simple Men | Hal Hartley | Hal Hartley Triple Bill
25 September | TBC
26 September | TBC
27 September | The Guerilla Fighter | Mrinal Sen | Voice of the Unheard: A Mrinal Sen Retrospective
28 September | Mandabi | Ousmane Sembène | MUBI Spotlight
29 September | Anne at 13,000 ft | Kazik Radwanski | The New Auteurs | A MUBI Release
30 September | The Land | Youssef Chahine | Focus on Youssef Chahine
How much can you make of a short time spent in a small town? If your heart’s in the right place, the Killers suggest on their new album, the answer is quite a lot. Arriving less than a year after Imploding the Mirage, one of the biggest and most triumphant efforts of the band’s career, Pressure Machine emerged from a period of reflection for Brandon Flowers, who recently moved back to Utah, showing his kids scenes from the town that defined much of his childhood and adolescence. What the new record sets out to do isn’t all that different: though markedly quieter and less theatrical in sound, it doesn’t find him looking inward so much as trying to gather pieces from his upbringing, presenting often tragic stories of people who are rarely named in a way that can resonate with a wider and less invested audience.
In this attempt to narrativize parts of his past, Flowers’ own perspective can get lost, creating a false sense of distance between narrator and subject and undercutting some of the album’s emotional pull. But this newfound lyrical focus – for the first time, Flowers wrote lyrics for the songs before recording them – also opens the door to some of the frontman’s most compelling and refined writing to date. He starts with some scene-setting, painting a broad-strokes portrait of his boyhood town of Nephi, in the hills “where the light could place its hands on my head,” populated by good people who “still don’t deadbolt their doors at night,” and where the opioid crisis looms large: “When we first heard opioid stories, they were always in whispering tones/ Now banners of sorrow mark the front steps of childhood homes.” He still sees himself as that “stainless kid” in the midst of all the grief and suffering, trying to make sense of how it managed to cast such a dark, impenetrable shadow over this small town.
Then, he zeroes in on the particularly affecting story of a closeted teen and childhood friend contemplating suicide: “The cards that I was dealt/ Will get you thrown out of the game,” Flowers sings on ‘Terrible Thing’, recorded using the same Tascam model Bruce Springsteen used on Nebraska. Later in the tracklist, “terrible” becomes “desperate”, as Flowers takes on the perspective of a married cop who murders his girlfriend’s abusive husband on the striking ‘Desperate Things’. For most of the song’s runtime, Flowers’ sorrowful vocals are backed by deep, reverberating guitar and subtle flourishes that give way to haunting noise. The Killers have always been more interested in melody and feeling than delivering the perfect marriage of lyrics and sound, but here, and throughout Pressure Machine, the attention to detail pays off. More than just a stylistic choice, the dusky, ‘90s-indebted tones evoke a kind of solitary dread that not only serves as the backdrop for these tales but also helps bring them to life – or, in the case of ‘Desperate Things’, cut it short.
For the Killers, this level of sonic restraint is almost liberating. These songs aren’t quite antithetical to the anthemic type of music the band usually deals in – the grandeur of opener ‘West Hills’ and the propulsive ‘In the Car Outside’ come too close to that kind of thrill – but they’re so committed to the album’s concept that they seem content to throw away otherwise essential components of the formula. There’s no escapism here, no end in sight, and as the narrator in ‘Cody’ puts it, “we keep on waiting for the miracle to come.” Part of what keeps the record grounded in reality are the snippets of interviews with local residents that are interspersed throughout it, providing both a vivid embodiment and a fascinating contrast to Flowers’ songwriting.
The lack of catharsis can be frustrating, and Flowers’ relentless sincerity can be both inspiring and limiting. To understand how he chooses to channel the stories of small-town America, though, it’s worth quoting his response to why he never gets tired of playing ‘Mr. Brightside’: “I’m able to hear it through the hearts of the people in the venue.” This kind of heartfelt approach never gets old, even if it prevents him from embracing the subtlety that Pressure Machine’s finer moments lean into. On the title track, where Flowers’ hair-raising falsetto will have you checking for a hidden second Phoebe Bridgers feature, you can feel him drifting through memory lane, rhyming Power Wheels with Happy Meals. But when he sings of looking up at the sky and wondering how small we are, his home is suddenly everybody else’s.
Vince Staples and New Jersey singer Fousheé were the musical guests on last night’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Seated back-to-back on a rotating platform, they delivered a performance of ‘Take Me Home’, their collaboration from Staples’ self-titled album. Watch it below.
Vince Staples, the follow-up to the rapper’s 2018 effort FM!, dropped in July. More recently, he released the Pokémon-inspired track ‘Got ’Em’. Next year, he’s set to join Tyler, the Creator on his arena tour.
A multi-disciplinary artist and multi-instrumentalist, Steph Yates has clearly done a lot. A brief perusal of her website brings up compositions, animations, and sculptures, even before getting to the music. Known for Ontario musical projects Esther Grey and Cupcake Ductape, Yates now operates under the Cots name, and this debut album, Disturbing Body, is intensely thoughtful and emotionally complex. There are weighty ideas here: Yates is concerned with mysteries of love and attraction within our universe. “These songs, for the most part, have to do with the heart,” Yates said, and you can sense it in this collection of songs; the record is an evidently personal creation.
Perhaps given the grand subject matter, one would have expected a sonic palette of equal majesty, but it’s missing on Disturbing Body. Instead, Yates opts for simpler instrumentation, favouring brushes of acoustic guitar, hints of furtive bossa nova, and slight jazz interjections. What the meagre backdrop does too, however, is present Yates as a writer of terrific ability: the intricate and contemplative narrative in ‘Our Breath’ and the poetic structure of ‘Last Sip’ mark her as a writer in musician’s clothing (from her website, only one chapbook relating to art appears under ‘Writing’). “The saddest breath of the bottle is your last sip,” begins ‘Last Sip’, a supremely gut-wrenching line. The closing song, ‘Midnight at the Station’, also sees Yates paint a wonderful snapshot of the busy goings-on at a train station.
The atmosphere is disruptively eerie and haunting throughout, from the first erratic notes of the title track to the depressive strumming in ‘Last Sip’ to the slow and hazy jazz of ‘Sun-Spotted Apple’. When bossa nova is incorporated, it’s never domineering, remaining just slightly danceable. One such track, ‘Bitter Part of the Fruit’, is an upbeat ode to accepting the good with the bad in life (“In needing the antidote/ Look for the bitter part of the fruit”). Illuminating horns and strings also colour the stunningly morbid ‘Flowers’, Yates singing coyly, “Flowers on the body dead/ Flowers I sent.” She might not possess an expansive vocal range, but her confrontational and haunting delivery matches the words and the atmosphere exquisitely.
The Montreal-based artist’s achievement on Disrupting Body is considerably modest but appealingly so. As an intimate presentation of the strange balance between love and attraction, life and death, the album holds a delicate beauty. Yates is a true artist, no matter which form she takes.
Devendra, I’ve a feeling we’re not listening to freak folk anymore. After gaining acclaim as the slightly comical but effortlessly talented pioneer of the genre in the mid-2000’s – not so much a pioneer as a sudden revivalist, as its lineage can be traced back to the wonderful Vashti Bunyan in the 1960s – Banhart has come a long way in the last decade and a bit. On Refuge, his collaborative album with frequent collaborator Noah Georgeson, there are no psychedelic flourishes or wandering acoustic guitars to be heard; instead the pair have created a delicate ambient record that seeks to be the sonic equivalent of its title.
It sometimes feels like the COVID-19 pandemic has aged us all quickly and terribly. There have been bouts of mourning for a way of life lost; we have grappled internally and externally with now existing in an even more fragile and uncertain world. A freak folk album, as reflective art, wouldn’t have made sense, but these soothing sounds do. It’s why Banhart said “we’re hoping to create a sense of comfort and coming back to the moment” about the album, which is, essentially, an elongated way of saying ‘Refuge’.
Banhart and Georgeson’s relationship stretches a long time back, when the idea of a life-altering pandemic would have been cause for scorn. Georgeson has co-produced several of his friend’s albums, including some of his finest (2007’s Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon and 2013’s Mala). And it’s really not that much of an ungraspable sonic leap to Refuge either: Banhart has been steadily transitioning from freak folk since the start of the last decade, Mala, Ape in Pink Marble, and Ma all possessing more considered songwriting and melancholic notes. The beard has more flecks of grey, the thoughts are more pensive.
When considering an ambient record, it’s always helpful to return to the form’s greatest practitioner: “it must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Brian Eno said, and on this front Refuge succeeds. It can be played under deep focus, as you look for lurking patterns and conjured emotions; it can also be supreme soothing background art, finishing its journey before you even really noticed it had begun. Its strength lies less in the qualities of the individual tracks than the collective picture that Georgeson and Banhart paint – that they recorded their parts separately during last year’s lockdowns is testament to their understanding of each other’s vision. They recruited a plethora of other wondrous musicians to embellish the canvas too, including Mary Lattimore on harp and Nicole Lawrence on pedal steel; their contributions might be minimal but they’re still felt. Flashes of strings and woodwind dip in and out throughout the haunting droning.
Refuge is entrancing and enveloping, its subtle strokes allowing for quiet rumination. One’s compassion for an ambient record like this will depend on their need for escapism, for refuge. Maybe this was the case for Banhart and Georgeson too: to witness two old friends, their artistic lives intertwined, come together at a most frightening time for contemplative collaboration, is a gift in itself.
“I wanted to find a way to make this song hit in a completely different way, but still retain some of the big and small moments that make the song special to me,” Bartees Strange said of his reworking in a statement. “At first I was thinking through how I could use the stems, but the more I got into it the more I wanted to take it somewhere else entirely. Crushing tune, glad I could mess around with it.”
Of their remix, Los Angeles band the Marías said: “I remember seeing Phoebe years ago at an open mic here in Los Angeles, and I knew right off the bat that she was really special. Working on this remix was a sort of full circle moment for us. ‘Kyoto’ is an amazing song as-is, so with the remix we were just curious to see what it would sound like with the vocal slowed down and adding some of our favorite synth sounds behind it.”
Glitch Gum, who previously covered the track, commented: “All I know is one day, when I was in between Zoom classes last Fall, I thought, ‘Man, what if Phoebe Bridgers did hyperpop?’ That idea turned into a 30-second snippet of ‘Kyoto’, which turned into a full song, which turned into working with Phoebe and her team to make this little quarantine project come full circle in ways I could never even fathom. It was so fun deconstructing the musical realms of both Phoebe and I and combining them into something that filled the hyperpop-indie-crossover-shaped hole in my brain. I am just really happy with how it turned out and forever thankful for Phoebe, her friends, and their continuous support.”
Dublin-born singer-songwriter 
Sturgill Simpson
Morly
American black metal act 
