Jim Jarmusch, the critically acclaimed film director and Tisch School of the Arts graduate, has been creating films since the 1980s. Over the years, Jarmusch has become known for creating mood-driven films that don’t follow clear plot progression. He chooses to transport the audience through subtle and mellow moments rather than big dramas and thus creating unique experiences that let viewers think.
To find out more about him as a filmmaker, we made this list of top five films.
Paterson (2016)
Starring Adam Driver, Paterson follows a bus driver who follows a daily routine through which he observers the city and finds out his passengers. For this film Jim Jarmusch was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, whilst the dog Nellie who plays Marvin in the film won the prestigious Palm Dog.
It’s a stunning piece of cinema that makes you fall in love with Adam Driver just that more.
Dead Man (1995)
The film to watch for people who want a deeper understanding of Jarmusch is Dead Man; it’s a slow-moving piece that lets you contemplate life more than it explores. Jarmusch’s mellowness is transparent throughout the film and, at times, can be unbearable. It’s a deep thought session film that isn’t for your average cinema goer and certainly not a movie that anyone would put on for the family. However, it still stands as one of the better projects by Jarmusch’s for its score and acting.
Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
The mood of sadness reappears consistently in the films of Jarmusch, and this film has it too. Only Lovers Left Alive accompanies a depressed artist who reunites with his lover. Although they have already been in love for centuries, their romance is disrupted by her unruly younger sister.
Other than having a great cast, Only Lovers Left Alive also features a majestic score.
Night on Earth (1991)
Starring the fantastic Winona Ryder, Night on Earth follows five diverse cab drivers in five cities across the world. The film follows their remarkable fares on the same eventful and memorable night.
Jarmusch did a superb job of exploring many common themes without dragging the audience throughout the film
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
Having won the Special Jury Recognition prize at Sundance and the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s hard to disagree that Stranger Than Paradise is one of the better films Jarmusch has created over his career. The film itself follows a New Yorker whose life is thrust into a tailspin when his younger cousin surprise visits him, causing a newfangled, inconstant venture.
Stranger Than Paradise is a unique experience for any film-goer and certainly stands at the top of the mountain with the rest of Jarmusch’s filmography.
It’s been over a decade since Annika Henderson released her self-titled debut album under the Anika moniker, but the lengthy time taken to release her sophomore effort thankfully hasn’t dulled her style and sophistication. Change is surprising and sexy, playful and powerful; its greatest contradiction, though, is that between hope and hopelessness, a true-to-life interplay for an album with a 2021 release date.
Sonically, the former political journalist has struck a fine balance between alluring post-punk – the Brtish ex-pat is based in Berlin after all – and lighter, more delicate art-pop. Often dramatic but mostly dry, she delivers it all with languorous panache. It’s why her voice has drawn comparisons to the legendary Nico; current post-punk acts such as Dry Cleaning and Sinead O’Brien have found critical success by using a similarly deadpan talking vocal delivery. The incessant eerie percussion of ‘Naysayer’ is innately indebted to her Berlin surroundings, as is the cleverly-titled ‘Sand Witches’, Anika sounding very much like Nico if she fronted Broadcast in the droning electronica piece.
Anika makes use of repetition to enforce her points throughout. “I’m not being silenced by anyone,” she powerfully intones in ‘Freedom’, its strength wrought from its repetitive quality. “And now you’re never coming back,” she chants again and again in ‘Never Coming Back’. Much of Change sounds nihilistic, particularly in its droning and unrelenting rhythm, but Anika’s words shroud it in contradictions. It’s never clearer than in ‘Critical’: “I always give my man the last word,” she sings, seemingly admitting to lying down to a partner, before she wryly notes that she’s also given him the little gift of cyanide; it’s a sublime lyrical twist that expertly captures the balance between power and powerlessness.
After eerie post-punk rhythmic flashes and songs named after sexual slang and interplay between nihilism and optimism, it’s a genuinely surprising touch when Anika closes the album with ‘Wait For Something’, beholden to only an acoustic guitar. It’s welcomingly tender and much-needed light relief after the seriousness of what preceded it. In its anxious atmosphere and messy sprawl of emotions, Change is challenging but worthwhile music. You only hope that it’s not another decade before Henderson is prepared to secede to the Anika project again; such power and hopefulness in the face of mordant futility is always needed.
As jazz continues its recent renaissance in the UK, Yellow, Emma-Jean Thackray’s debut album, is a force of energy that will push her right to the movement’s forefront. Originally from Yorkshire, hardly a hotbed for the genre, the London-based multi-instrumentalist and bandleader appealingly wishes to make jazz more approachable to the casual listener, and she mostly achieves this aim here.
Unity, unsurprisingly, is the main theme on Yellow: unity between the general public and jazz, unity between bandleader and bandmates, unity between everyone during these turbulent times. It’s a winning message that comes off as sincere and never sanctimonious. Even when it dips into trippy territory – the album is also meant to simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience – it never indulges too much in pretentious posturing.
And for those not inclined to mind-altering drugs, there’s plenty of power and spirituality emanating from these songs to overcome one anyway. There are dizzying left turns throughout, Thackray eager to overwhelm the senses and never let the listener settle into comfortability. So, for instance, the ominous and slightly cultish ‘May There Be Peace’ – sounding awfully like a cut from an A24 horror film – is upended immediately by the swarming instrumentation of ‘Sun’, which zips forward at a gleeful pace.
Thackray underpins the layered jazz with both solo and group singing, providing a nestling emotional hook. “To listen is to know and to know is to love,” she states as her thesis statement in the opening track ‘Mercury’, urging us to pull closer in search of connection. When the band chants together, their messages are simple but meaningful, whether celebrating the sun in the joyful ‘Sun’ (“The sun it grows us… The sun is life”) or discussing humanity’s similarities in the earnest and life-affirming ‘Our People’ (“We are all our people… We are one and the same”). Thackray’s vocals dominate on their own in the personal and intimate ‘Spectre’, her voice calm and composed, confident and assured.
It’s clear that Thackray is a student of the entirety of music, not just jazz. The sprawling instrumentation on ‘Green Funk’ and ‘Third Eye’ are indebted to funk; crossovers between jazz and hip-hop, such as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, appear to be an influence on the atmosphere in ‘Golden Green’; the swirling trumpet sounds in ‘About That’ might be pure late-night jazz, but there’s also spiritual jazz, psychedelic, and dancefloor music flourishes elsewhere. Composed yet chaotic, cosmic yet human, Yellow stands as a profound work of passion, both for music and other forces.
“Everything I knew about love I learned from watching movies,” Molly Burch sings in ‘Games’, the second song on her new album Romantic Images, and that line is its central statement. Burch, like so many other women, grew up under the intoxicating spell of romantic movies, believing truly that Prince Charming was out there waiting for them; what happens, then, when this turns out to be far from true? This is the question at the heart of Romantic Images, a thoughtful album of reflection and change.
Burch consciously chose to work with more women collaborators than ever before on this LP, which is buoyed by a strong sense of collective unity and vision. She sounds spurred by their feminine spirit, particularly in the album’s second half, which burns with power and positivity. Before then, there are two lovelorn tracks: ‘Heart Of Gold’ is about wanting someone you just can’t have, while the title track is seriously yearning, Burch insisting “If there’s some type of cure/ Well, I want to stay sick.”
As soon as ‘New Beginning’, the fifth song, begins, Burch sounds supremely confident and ready. “This is me trying to write you a love song,” she wryly sings on ‘Took A Minute’, imbuing the atmosphere with a delightful lightness, while ‘Honeymoon Phase’ discusses her wish to remain in the warmth and comfort of the honeymoon period. “I wanna try harder/ To love myself like I would another,” she ponders on the contemplative closing track ‘Back In Time’, emphasising her journey to self-love and self-discovery.
Romantic Images is also a wonderful pop record. From the first exhilarating piercing piano notes of ‘Control’, this sonic evolution suits her well. ‘Took A Minute’ is pure campy fun electro-pop, swiftly followed by the standout track ‘Emotion’ (featuring Captured Tracks rostermates Wild Nothing); both are clearly indebted to the carefree disco of pop icons Kylie and Madonna. Burch’s vocals remain sublime, whether they’re smoky and crooning in ‘Heart Of Gold’ or light as a cloud in ‘Control’.
Burch turned 30 last year and wrote most of these songs in the months leading up to that birthday milestone; little wonder it’s such a self-reflective work. It’s also liberating for both her and the listener to imagine what’s set to unfold in this decade as she possibly moves further into pure pop territory. If Romantic Images is about finding confidence in your true self, perhaps that also goes for music too.
Slipknot founding drummerJoey Jordison has died at the age of 46. According to a statement issued by his family, Jordison “passed away peacefully in his sleep on July 26th, 2021.” A cause of death has not been revealed.
“Joey’s death has left us with empty hearts and feelings of indescribable sorrow,” his family’s statement reads. “To those that knew Joey, understood his quick wit, his gentle personality, giant heart, and his love for all things family and music. The family of Joey have asked that friends, fans, and media understandably respect our need for privacy and peace at this incredibly difficult time. The family will hold a private funeral service and asks the media and public to respect their wishes.”
Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Jordison came up in the local heavy metal scene and in 1995 joined Slipknot, then called the Pale Ones, with percussionist Shawn Crahan and bassist Paul Gray. Known for his high-speed drumming and dynamic performance style, Jordison was the band’s primary percussionist and played on the band’s first release, 1996’s Mate. Kill. Feed.Repeat., through their fourth LP, 2008’s All Hope Is Gone. He was also a key songwriter in the group, having co-written some of Slipknot’s best-known songs.
In 2013, Slipknot announced they were parting ways with Jordison, who said he was “shocked and blindsided” by the decision. A few years later, he revealed he had been fighting a neurological disorder called transverse myelitis since 2010, which affected his ability to play drums. “It was a form of multiple sclerosis, which I don’t wish on my worst enemy,” he said. “I got myself back up, and I got myself in the gym, and I got myself back in therapy to beat this… If I can do it, you can do it. To people with multiple sclerosis, transverse myelitis or anything like that, I’m living proof that you can beat that shit.”
Following his dismissal from Slipknot, Jordison went on to form the bands Scar The Martyr, Vimic, and Sinsaenum, and continued playing in Murderdolls, a revival of his pre-Slipknot band the Rejects.
Smile Machine is the project led by Jordyn Blakely, who’s long been an integral part of Brooklyn’s DIY scene, having played drums for bands like Stove, Night Manager, Butter the Children, Jackal Onasis, Maneka, and more recently, Bartees Strange. The band’s debut EP, Bye for Now – released earlier this month on Exploding in Sound – finds Blakely reintroducing her voice and carving out her own vision, influenced as much by Elliott Smith and the Microphones as Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine. The EP’s five songs are raw and lo-fi, simultaneously juxtaposing and oscillating between fuzzy, scorched guitars and dreamy, warm melodies. Yet opener ‘Bone to Pick’ is early proof that Blakely isn’t afraid to play outside of that familiar structure, her screaming vocals breaking through to the surface before gently floating back down. Her open-ended approach reflects the way she views the project as a whole: a space for collaboration as well as a product of circumstance. Though Blakely started recording the EP with Dan Francia before the pandemic, it inadvertently ended up becoming more of a solo endeavour – and though she cannot be certain of what the future holds for Smile Machine, at least for now, the emotional thrust of these songs is more than enough to cut through the noise.
We caught up with Smile Machine’s Jordyn Blakely for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about her musical journey, the origins of the project, her new EP, and more.
Do you mind sharing some of your earliest memories of enjoying music?
I’d always been into music, but I didn’t play a lot as a kid. My parents liked a lot of good music, a lot of ‘70s and ‘80s music. It’s funny when you’re a kid, you always want to reject what your parents listened to. Like, even though my parents really liked Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson and Fleetwood Mac and stuff that’s really good, as a kid I always wanted to find something more aggressive-sounding. I think it was in middle school, I got into blink-182, Green Day, and a lot of emo and screamo.
I played guitar a little bit, but I feel like drums just came easier to me. My little brother had a little kid drumset, and he’s like six years younger than me – his father, who is my stepdad, collected guitars and had the little kid drumset for him in the garage. So I would mess around on the drum kit a little bit, and I asked for a drum set for a few years and then got one for Christmas a year after that. I always felt like I didn’t start playing music until much later – I think I was around 14 or 15 when I started playing drums on a regular basis.
When did you realize that music was a passion of yours, rather than an interest or a hobby?
It sounds kind of sad, but honestly, when my stepdad passed away, I think that was – it felt very sudden. It was like my mom and my brother and I, and I was like 16 and my brother was kind of young, and it was just intense. I felt kind of isolated and I felt like drums was my only way to not have to think about it. Listening to music can be helpful for that, like if you’re listening to music and you’re in a dark place it helps you move out of that place or it can help you indulge and understand those feelings, which is I think why I was attracted to bands like Thursday and Taking Back Sunday. But with playing, it felt like I can be focused on this for hours and not have to think about reality right now. With drums especially, it’s really aggressive, it’s really loud, you can be angry. I don’t think women are always encouraged to express themselves in that way, like you’re not allowed to be angry, you’re not allowed to be upset. You just have to be easygoing and nice all the time. The kind of music I was interested in, but also drums, was a way to be like, “Yeah, I’m angry about this, and this is one way I can process it.”
And also, that’s how I made a lot of friends. I moved a lot, so in high school I was, like, new and I didn’t know anyone there. Playing music was a great way to be like, we can connect over this thing, we can hang out together, we can have friends over and we can play music and get to know each other in that way.
When did you start immersing yourself in the DIY scene in Brooklyn and found a sense of community there?
I always wanted to live in New York my whole life. My older brother, who did the music video with me, has lived in Brooklyn for over 20 years. And whenever I would come to visit him, I always felt like, “I want to live here, I just love how people look and how everyone dresses so weird and there’s music here.” So I moved to New York in 2010, right after college, and it took a while for me to really meet people. I lived in South Brooklyn and I didn’t really know anybody here – I had like one or two friends and then my brother in New York. I found bands on Craigslist a lot, I would just look on Craigslist and try to play with everybody, any kind of music. I joined this band called Life Size Maps that I met on Craigslist, and we played with bands like Night Manager and Total Slacker. I would fill in a lot for people, just if someone needed a drummer – I can learn stuff quickly and I liked a lot of different kinds of music, so I just wanted to play this as many people as I could. I always think how lucky I am in a way, because there are so many different communities in New York, but not everyone has to accept you into it. And I feel like people are really accepting, and I just felt like I finally found what I was looking for. I always just wanted to move here and meet people who liked music as much as me and who wanted to play music all the time, and I’m just really happy that I found that.
Did you know at the time that you would want to pursue a solo project at some point? What prompted you to do that, and why did it feel like the right time?
Honestly, I always just considered myself as someone who played drums. Writing music intimidated me, I think, because I felt like it’s so vulnerable, like, “I don’t know what I want to say, I’m not good at it, I don’t want to be the front person in the band and have all that responsibility. I just like being able to show up and play drums.” But I also in college had a band called Michael Jordn and Greg, it was me and two other people, and we were really into bands like The Bad Plus, the Microphones, Quasi. And sometimes they would ask me to sing the melody of the song and write words for it, so that was kind of my first time doing that. And then eventually, when I was playing with Jackal Onassis, I didn’t really write. It was Alex [Molini] who wrote the songs, but sometimes she would ask me to write lyrics or a melody. And then in Stove, Steve [Hartlett] often had me record vocals, just doubling his part. But it was like, someone always had to ask me to do it. I felt like I needed someone to validate, which is kind of why I started trying to do it more on my own with this music.
There was a Stove tour that we did with Mannequin Pussy in 2016. It was one of the craziest tours most of us have been on – we’re just in this really big van for like nine people, and it was in the summertime and there’s no AC and we’re in like Florida and Georgia. It was really fun though. When we got home from that tour, I was just really broke and I couldn’t really go out. So I got home from that tour, most of my friends were out of town for some reason that weekend and I was just feeling really – I’m kind of stuck at home, but I don’t have any money, I can’t really buy any food, I don’t really know what to do with myself. And I was playing guitar just because I was bored, and like, just wrote a song. I don’t even know how it happened. So I recorded it with Stove and then we used it for Stove and that made me feel more empowered, because most of time if I ever had an idea I’d be too shy to really show it to anybody.
I kept trying to put out more ideas, and it wasn’t until Stove took a hiatus – any songs that I was writing I just would use for that band, so I just figured I’ll just keep trying to write, and it wasn’t until I started recording that I was like, “Maybe this could be a real band.” I didn’t have any big plans, and even when I was putting out the EP, Dan [Goldin] from Exploding in Sound was like, “What do you want to do with this, how far do you want to go with it?” I was like, “It doesn’t matter, I just want to prove to myself that I can finish it. I want them to be out in the world.”
One of my favorite songs on the record is ‘Pretty Today’, which you’ve said is about figuring out your sense of identity in relation to your environment. Could you talk more about what was on your mind while you were making it?
The imagery in the song is inspired by this cat that my old roommate and I got. When she was a kitten, we were so excited and we just wanted to pet her all the time. You know how it is, you just feel like you want to smother your pet because they’re so cute, and that’s not really her personality. She likes to have her space, so I had to learn how to really just let her do her thing. And there’s another thing she does where like, when you go to pet her, she’ll take her paws and put them around your hand, but she holds them so tightly. So it just made me think of how sometimes when you’re holding your pet and kissing them, you think like, “I’m just giving you love,” but to them it’s like, “Get the fuck away from me.” [laughs] So it just made me think about how in many relationships with other people I might have, you know, not been empathetic to their point of view. Or like, family can be really overbearing sometimes, where there’s not a lot of boundaries. I don’t know if anyone else can relate, but sometimes your family expects you to be a certain kind of person, and if you have your own way of doing things or your own emotions that are different, they take it personally or it’s seen as wrong. It’s kind of a long story, but it just made me start thinking about that – you put expectations on people to be what you want them to be, but that’s not really who they are, and that’s not real love.
When I was making the video, I was able to dive deeper into that. I feel like this has only been discussed in recent years, but like, stuff with gender – I always felt like I never wanted to, like, wear a purse or wear makeup when I was a teenager because I was really into skateboarding and drums and guitar and punk rock. There wasn’t a lot of people around me who were women who were into that kind of stuff, and even getting like guitar magazines, it’s all men. Like, I would tell people I want to play drums and they would just look at me like, “You want to play drums? Really?” I think now it’s been more normalised, but growing up I always felt the struggle to be like, “You need to wear more makeup, you need to wear more dresses, you need to be more girly and more feminine.” And I always felt boxed into that. And in the video, it’s kind of represented in that way, like the makeup and the tea party – just having this etiquette where everyone’s looking over your shoulder, making sure you’re behaving in a certain way.
Do you ever think about what you would say to your younger self from your current perspective?
Yeah, I think about that a lot, because I think, you know, you still have that inner child in you and everything. I would probably tell my younger self to just not worry about what people think as much – and I think as women, especially, you’re trained to please other people and worry about what people think about you. I felt really self-conscious about my looks and like, developing, so I would always wear baggy clothes to try to hide my body because I felt sexualized. And I wish I could tell myself like, “People are gonna do and think whatever they will, and you should just do whatever makes you happy and comfortable. Just don’t worry so much, and try to figure out what you want instead of what everyone else around you wants.”
Thank you for sharing that. Could you tell me about the idea behind the cover artwork?
There’s this artist who I really like, her name is Shana Von Maurik, she does watercolours like this, where it’s like animals and flowers and butterflies. So I asked my friend Steve [Hartlett] to draw something because we’re close friends and he definitely empathises with a lot of the themes on the record and has always been really supportive of me trying to write songs. I asked him to draw something that was either a butterfly or a moth to kind of represent – I think that’s also where Bye for Now comes from too, even though I wasn’t as intentional about it, where it’s like, sometimes I just need to go away and figure out what I’m feeling, spend some time alone, process everything. Coming out of that relationship and having so much death in my family, like, sometimes it feels very… just trying to process who you want to be. I was also in my late 20s, and I feel like so much shit happens in your late 20s – you’re 25, 26 and you’re hanging out and then suddenly shit just gets really intense and real. Especially living in New York, there’s a lot of spaces to just be self-destructive. You can go out and drink all the time – you never really have to sit with your feelings. And so, a lot of me trying to write songs was just me sitting down and being like, “What would it be if I just tried to understand how I feel and work on it instead of smoke weed about it or go hang out with friends and drink and just forget, you know, escape?”
So, the cover, I asked him to draw something with a butterfly or a moth to try to be an emblem of like, coming out of your cocoon, working on yourself, bettering yourself. But then I wanted it to be in a setting that was really beautiful, like trees or mountains or some kind of body of water. I think he did a perfect job, too, because with the butterfly flying towards the mountains and the water, there’s such a long way to go, so it’s sort of symbolic of like, it’s a never-ending journey to work on yourself and to get to know yourself, especially with so many social constructs and pressures to be a certain person. And then I watercoloured it, just because as a kid I always played with pastels or watercolour.
Do you feel like this process has brought you any clarity in terms of how you see yourself as a person and an artist?
Yeah. Going in – I have so many friends who are so amazing at writing songs, I just really felt like these really aren’t that great, like it’s not for anyone, it’s just sort of for me to do it and get better at it. And I feel like I got a lot better at guitar, which was really fun, just thinking about the leads and what I wanted them to sound. That was definitely challenging, especially with COVID, trying to finish everything on my own. But I’m really proud of myself for just doing it, because there’s a lot of times I just felt like, “I’m so sick of these songs, this doesn’t matter.” And I’m really happy that this is like a new way I have to express myself that I didn’t know that I had before. It wasn’t ever this thing, it was just like, “Oh, sometimes I’ll write songs and maybe Stove can play them.” And now it’s like, “I can have my own voice, and it’s cool.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Grouper has announced a new album. The follow-up to 2018’s Grid of Points is titled Shade and it arrives October 22 via Kranky. The Pacific Northwest artist recorded the LP’s 9 songs over a period of 15 years; some were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency, others longer ago in Portland, and the rest were tracked more recently in Astoria. Listen to the new single ‘Unclean Mind’ below and scroll down for the album’s cover artwork and tracklist.
Shade Cover Artwork:
Shade Tracklist:
1. Followed the Ocean
2. Unclean Mind
3. Ode to the Blue
4. Pale Interior
5. Disordered Minds
6. The Way Her Hair Falls
7. Promise
8. Basement Mix
9. Kelso (Blue Sky)
Boy Scouts, the moniker of singer-songwriter Taylor Vick, has announced a new album. It’s called Wayfinder, and it arrives October 1 via ANTI-. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the new single ‘That’s Life Honey’, alongside an accompanying video directed by Jake Nokovic. Check it out below and scroll down for the LP’s cover art and tracklist.
“This song is about trying to make light of a shitty situation,” Vick said of ‘That’s Life Honey’ in a press release. “Having a circumstance that sucks, like wanting to go to therapy but you can’t afford it, and fantasizing about a world where you could get a chip implanted or have some surgery that rewires your brain and resolves you from whatever problems you have. This song is mostly my attempt at writing a tragicomedy, combined with true experiences of figuring out how to open up to people.”
Recorded in Anacortes, Washington at The Unknown, Wayfinder sees Vick reuniting with longtime collaborator Stephen Steinbrink. The album, which includes collaborations with Taylor’s brother Travis and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, takes its name from Sallie Tisdale’s book Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying. “For my whole life, music has been a crucial part of my identity and how I relate to the world,” Vick explained. “The act of making music has been my wayfinder during the past year.”
Ada Lea has announced her next album: the follow-up to 2019’s what we say in private is called one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, and it’s out September 24 via Saddle Creek. To accompany the announcement, Ada Lea has today shared a new song, ‘damn’, alongside a music video directed by Monse Muro. Check it out and find the album’s cover artwork and tracklist below.
The new album is set in Alexandra Levy’s hometown of Montreal, with each song existing as “a dot on a personal history map of the city where Levy grew up,” according to a press release. It was recorded with producer and Phoebe Bridgers collaborator Marshall Vore, who had previously worked on Lea’s 2020 EP woman, here. “Marshall’s expertise and experience with drumming and songwriting was the perfect blend for what the songs needed,” Levy said in a statement. “He was able to support me in a harmonic, lyrical, and rhythmic sense.”
Last month, Ada Lea released the album single ‘hurt’, which made our Best New Songs list.
one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden Cover Artwork:
one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden Tracklist:
1. damn
2. can’t stop me from dying
3. oranges
4. partner
5. saltspring
6. and my newness spoke to your newness and it was a thing of endless
7. my love 4 u is real
8. backyard
9. writer in ny
10. violence
11. hurt
How has it been over 10 years since Willow Smith’s springy banger ‘Whip My Hair’ came out? The only thing scarier than finding that out is discovering that its creator is still only 20 years old and has just released her fourth studio album. The album in question is called lately I feel EVERYTHING and the purposeful stylistic choice in the title is crucial, for these 11 songs live in ALL CAPS ferocity. After making several albums of thoughtful and exploratory R&B and soul, Willow has pivoted to the extreme, capitalizing on the au courant genre of the mainstream moment, youthful pop-punk.
If being punk demands realness and authenticity, though, Willow seems to have it: her mother Jada Pinkett was famously in a nu-metal band called Wicked Wisdom (who Willow sweetly reunited a couple of months ago) and Willow has spoken confidently of her love for bands such as My Chemical Romance in the past. This turn to pop-punk from R&B feels clever but never contrived. She’s the latest young star to be guided in the genre by the ubiquitous Travis Barker from Blink-182, who appears on several tracks (his incessant drumming only threatens to overwhelm on ‘Gaslight’). Lead single ‘T r a n s p a r e n t s o u l’ runs with the intent and speed of early Paramore, sizzling with attitude from the very beginning.
Despite her famous upbringing, Willow has always possessed a fiercely independent spirit, and it powers everything in the album. ‘F**k You’ is an angsty spoken-word diatribe whose lyrics deal with race and relationships, the bare drums recalling the ersatz spirit of no wave. In many of the songs, Willow contends with remaining true to herself and finding her own path forward: “I blew out the gaslight, now I feel a different way,” she sings in ‘Gaslight’, a song about leaving a controlling lover.
The instrumentation is always forceful and never underdeveloped. Memorable and gritty guitar lines power ‘Don’t SAVE ME’ and ‘XTRA’; there’s a razor-sharp industrial rhythm in ‘Lipstick’ and a fiery rock prowess on show in ‘!Breakout!’ (aided by LA’s excellent rockers Cherry Glazerr). The tempo is slowed on the melancholic ‘naive’ and ‘4ever’, with its ponderous indie guitar sound and solemn and sweet ‘oohs’. It’s then fitting that pop-punk queen Avril Lavigne features on the album, lending her undying angsty spirit in the supremely fun ‘G R O W’, her voice immediately recognizable.
Lately I feel EVERYTHING is spiky and provocative, joyful and passionate. It might not boast a breakout blockbuster track like Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘drivers license’, but Willow’s whole record more than matches her contemporary pop-punk peer’s exemplary effort. If being punk is to show rage and power, then the raw and liberating outpouring here ensures Willow satisfies the conditions. After a decade of sonic exploration, she might have found her natural home.
