Second album of electronic soul from the London-born producer who’s worked with Beyoncé, Drake and Kanye West
7/13
Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a 1970 allegorical novella by Richard Bach in which the titular bird looks to break away from his flock and their closeted thinking. He wants to prove that it is possible to fly higher, fly faster and stretch the boundary of what it means to be a seagull. While the story’s simplistic message of individualism and self-belief might seem a little basic these days (the dreadful 1973 film adaptation was deservedly the subject of much piss taking on a recent episode of the How Did This Get Made? podcast), it is a message that has resonated with Sampha since his brother read it to him as a child. On his second album LAHAI, it’s referenced directly in lead single “Spirit 2.0”, a central track shares its name, and there is a motif of flight and ornithological references throughout.
For Sampha, there is a purity to the idea of flying free, above and away from daily weights and worries; of connection with greater power somewhere beyond the earthly realm. LAHAI begins with Sampha waking from a dream and the rest of the album he coasts on breezes, buffeted by time, memory and grief – but pulled on by belief instilled by friends and family, both living and passed.
These duelling forces are wonderfully rendered in the sound palette that Sampha has pulled together here, with production assistance from El Guincho on a number of tracks. The presence of myriad other talents including Yussef Dayes, Yaeji, Laura Groves, black midi’s Morgan Simpson – to name just a few – emphasises the album’s underlying theme of communality.
On his 2017 debut album Process he told us how no one knows him like the piano in his mother’s home, but the instrument was then sidelined for much of the remainder of the album. LAHAI corrects that by including piano on every track – though not in such a stately manner, but instead chopped up or interwoven with technical African rhythms, dextrous synth use, subtle strings and carefully deployed vocal layers. Bass is a minor factor here, and that leaves plenty of space to appreciate the richness of Sampha’s gorgeous voice as it swoops to those lower tones or soars high in moments of release or anguish.
Lyrically, Sampha is consistently trapped in a cage of his own remorse and regret, lamenting the lack of a time machine. However, as he expresses in “Spirit 2.0”, there is plenty around to support him; “light will catch you / love will catch you / spirit gon’ catch you” he summarises, before developing the thoughts further in later tracks.
Romantic love is a constant, explicitly so on standout “Suspended” with its memories of walking around Florence and his significant other’s ability to ease his troubled mind. “Inclination Compass” uses the bird metaphor to simple but great effect as he pleads for reconciliation with his lover by suggesting “how about we fly towards the source again / let’s switch from cold to warm again”, his all-encompassing voice resonating the warmth he desires. The neo-soul of “Jonathan L. Seagull” finds him coasting on drizzles of violin away from the confusion of the world to “puzzle into your embrace” where other concerns seem miles away.
It is the twin powers of time and spirituality that are Sampha’s poles for the most part, though. Where Process was rich with his grief at his recently-departed mother, LAHAI continues that feeling but with greater distance – and at times, despair. The clipped-cadence rap of “Satellite Business” finds him stressing over the seconds ticking by and the memories fading. The interlude “Time Piece” features spoken French from Ibeyi insisting that time doesn’t exist before the following track “Can’t Go Back” finds Sampha continually bumping up against the title’s empirical truth despite his heart and mind’s desire. Regret comes hand in hand with this frustration at time’s unrelenting march; “What If You Hypnotise Me?” finds him wishing he could make the ‘what ifs’ fly away. On “Only” he’s sticking his fingers in his ears to block out the stresses and strains that come with mortal life; “I’m moving on faith / and faith only” he determines.
And it is his belief that consistently pulls him through these moments; the concepts of faith and spirit crop up consistently as lights among the confusion. This most breathtaking examination of this is “Evidence”, a sprightly choral pop number where he finds clarity in the faces of his loved ones: “without the evidence / you’re evidence enough for me” he states, simply, honestly and powerfully.
Communal connection and love are the framework on which all of LAHAI’s doubts, dreams and wishes hang. It comes to the fore in the closing “Rose Tint”, where the production reaches its spaciest, the piano a delicate twinkle in the background while Sampha’s thoughts disassociate. He admits he’s been “lost in my own world / preoccupied with my own hurt”, but he wants to spend more time drinking and dancing with his friends and family. “I found this stretch of coast” he sings, fluttering above the perfect setting he’s dreamed up with his community around him; “Everybody gather round / Gonna take this picture now” he commands. This is LAHAI’s ultimate message: life and living may be far from perfect, but when Sampha connects with his loved ones – no matter how ephemerally – it feels like the clouds have cleared and the sky is open to soar high and free. It’s a moment worth savouring forever.
The latest release from the rock veterans, and first album of original material since 2005, includes guest appearances from Elton John, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Bill Wyman
7/13
The release of a new album by a storied band used to be considered a major event, one that was highly anticipated and greeted with excitement, enthusiasm, and all the other additives that generally accompany any momentous occasion.
That doesn’t seem to be the situation anymore. With the advent of streams, digital releases, and the other byproducts of the so-called cyber world, the physical album has become a vanishing breed. Singles and single tracks herald the arrival of new work, often negating the importance of an album and relegating it to little more than a collection of selected songs that preceded its arrival.
If any band could defy that trend, it’s naturally the Rolling Stones. The fact that it’s the band’s first new album since their 2016 Grammy-winning blues covers album Blue & Lonesome, and more, significantly, their first studio album of original material since the 2005 A Bigger Bang, Hackney Diamonds is a milestone to be reckoned with. It provides proof that even with the tremendous loss of drummer Charlie Watts and the fact that Mick Jagger is an octogenarian and Richards is on the verge of becoming one himself, they and “new boy” Ronnie Wood remain as undeterred as ever, rocking on without regard to age, expectation or, for that matter, any additional consideration.
Happily then, Hackney Diamonds justifies that attitude entirely. Built on a series of reliable riffs, it’s classic Stones, somewhat perfunctory perhaps, formula-fitting and comfortably comforting to a signature sound. Anyone speculating about what the album would have to offer can probably guess without hearing even a single strain of music. “Angry,” “Driving Me Too Hard” and “Get Close” are singularly Stones, built around ready refrains, angular guitar riffs, and Jagger’s signature snarl. They’re “Start Me Up” and “Jumping Jack Flash” reimagined with contemporary credence. “Dreamy Skies,” on the other hand, recalls the bottle-neck acoustic blues of “No Expectations” and Beggars Banquet. Likewise, a ballad titled “Tell Me Straight” gives Keef the prerequisite lead vocal. “Rolling Stones Blues,” is, as the name implies,” an opportunity to get back to basics.
In general, it’s easy to imagine the band taking their cues from some roughshod jams, adding lyrics, and letting things fly. The pointed titles tell it all. Clearly, too, each of these songs is easily finessed to become standards in their live sets.
Ironically, the edge and intensity find the Stones more or less harkening back to an earlier era. Certain songs—“Bite My Head Off,” featuring a sturdy bass line from Paul McCartney, and “Whole Wide World” and “Mess It Up,” one of two tracks recorded with Watts, along with echoes of ‘70s punk and new wave through a combination of melody and menace, shared with defiance and determination. “Live By the Sword,” the other effort featuring Watts, also marks the temporary return of bassist Bill Wyman, a reunion of sorts of the Stones’ essential ‘70s and ‘80s line-up.
Nevertheless, the band buttresses its ranks with any number of special guests. Besides McCartney, Hackney Diamonds features cameos by Lady Gaga sharing a high-pitched lead vocal on the weary yet emotive ballad “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” (with Gaga filling the longstanding role of Jagger’s female foil), Elton John playing piano on the rollicking “Get Close and “Live By the Sword,” Stevie Wonder providing keyboards on the aforementioned “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” and Don Was and Benmont Tench adding their touches as well. Steve Jordan takes on the bulk of the drumming duties while Grammy-winning producer Andrew Watt serves as a stringer, playing pretty much everything else that’s needed, including bass, guitar, percussion, keyboards, backing vocals, strings, mixing, and production.
Consequently, Hackney Diamonds is quintessential Stones, a fine comeback by any measure. Some 60 years on, the Stones are rolling as effortlessly as ever. Welcome back, boys.
The release of a new album by The Rolling Stones used to be considered a major event, one that was highly anticipated.
Tenth studio album from the Detroit-born indie folk singer-songwriter features contributions from Adrienne Maree Brown, Pauline Delassus, Bryce Dessner and Nedelle Torrisi
11/13
Once when Sufjan Stevens was in college, he brought an injured crow to the biology lab to help save its life. “You are doing the universe a great favor,” a woman who ran an animal sanctuary told him once he called her to the scene. This is one of several stories Stevens tells in his 10-part essay included in the elaborate physical edition of his latest album, Javelin, all in service of exploring his ever-expanding definition of “love.” He writes in an inquisitive and self-aware tone, joking about how that experience with the crow provided “endless fodder” for his collegiate creative writing: “So much meaning, so little time,” he reflects. But if a young Sufjan once sought these encounters for their symbolic potential, the present-day writer of this essay, and of these songs, tells a more pressing story: even more meaning, even less time.
Over and over again on Javelin, Stevens contemplates the end. Sometimes his language, along with the hushed longing of his voice and the romantic sweep of his largely acoustic instrumentation, points toward the demise of a very long relationship. “I will always love you/But I cannot look at you,” he explains, tracing the broken logic governing the loss. “It’s a terrible thought to have and hold,” he admits after wishing ill to someone he once held dear. “Will anybody ever love me?” he asks in the aftermath.
Instantly, the songwriting feels as raw and direct as ever. And indeed, Javelin is Stevens’ first proper album in a long time that seems designed with no grand concept to unify the material or inspire theatrical adaptations; no autobiographical insight to make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about him; no jarring musical change-ups to remind you he is a proud member of the Beyhive. Running under 45 minutes, Javelin begins with a deliberate inhale and ends with a cover of a deep cut from Neil Young’s best-selling album—a track that Stevens manages to make sound even sweeter and more hopeful than the 1972 original.
Like much of his defining work, Stevens wrote, recorded, and produced Javelin almost entirely alone, minus a few key appearances: some guitar from the National’s Bryce Dessner in the dazzling eight-minute “Shit Talk,” and frequent vocal accompaniment from a small choir that includes Megan Lui, Hannah Cohen, Pauline Delassus, Nedelle Torrisi, and the activist and writer adrienne maree brown. It’s got at least one song that instantly joins the ranks of his very best (“Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”) and plenty that draw direct lines to previous high-water marks, both thematically and musically. Centering the devotional melodies and heart-tugging intimacy that characterized his early masterpieces, it’s the type of record, two decades into an artist’s career, that tends to be called a “return-to-form,” suggesting an embrace of his strengths and a diminished instinct to surprise or provoke.
But is anything ever so easy? The intricacy of Javelin is central to the essays and art accompanying the album: collages that overflow with faces of friends and family and heroes, paintings whose colors seem intended to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder. Many songs follow the path of these maximalist projects, beginning with gentle fingerpicking or piano before fireworking into electronic symphonies, orchestral crescendos, and choral rounds. The cumulative effect suggests that, while each story might begin as a stark, personal inquiry, Stevens strives to lead us somewhere divine, an altitude where our lives might appear more beautiful and still.
It is through these trajectories that Javelin, despite its tone of endless searching, becomes one of Stevens’ most uplifting records. In “Should Have Known Better,” a sudden burst of Casio keyboards accompanied an optimistic glance to the next generation—a rare bright spot on 2015’s grief-stricken Carrie & Lowell; Javelin is filled with these kinds of turns. With the notable exception of “Shit Talk,” which dissolves into a long ambient coda that lingers like fog after heavy rain, each song ends somewhere brighter, fuller, and lusher than it began. “So You Are Tired,” which includes Stevens’ most heartbreaking set of lyrics since Carrie & Lowell, climaxes with a lapping wordless refrain from the choir. As his words zoom in closer to a separation (“So you are tired… of even my kiss”), the soothing, major-key resolution suggests an elemental sense of peace, leading to a blend of emotions that feels entirely new within his songbook.
If there is anything Stevens learned from his last proper solo album, 2020’s pared-down synth-opus The Ascension, it is to tell these complex stories in simple ways. Take, for example, “My Red Little Fox,” a love song cast in waltz time, where Stevens uses one of his most classically beautiful melodies to express a series of escalating refrains: “Kiss me with the fire of gods,” he sings, then, “Kiss me like the wind,” and eventually, “Kiss me from within.” Here is the story of Javelin in miniature: The first two are seductions, spoken from person to person; the last is more like a prayer. If the lyrics on Javelin lack the proper-noun touchstones of Stevens’ story-songs, these ones gain authority from an intrinsic sense of self and place. They are approachable like pop songs, but delivered with the same precision as his folk confessionals. They break our hearts from within.
“I know I’ve often been the poster child of pain, loss, and loneliness,” Stevens recently wrote to his fans. “But the past month has renewed my hope in humanity.” He was referring to his ongoing treatment for Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare auto-immune disorder that left him learning to walk again after losing feeling and mobility in his hands, arms, and legs. In the lead-up to Javelin, he has taken to Tumblr—long his preferred method of communication—to give frequent updates on his recovery. Sometimes he finds humor in the situation—a post about his dream wheels, the “Porsche 911 of wheelchairs”—and sometimes his words are more troubling (“Woke up feeling trapped”). But nearly every post ends with a positive affirmation, or at least a sign-off with a series of X’s and O’s.
This is the tone that Stevens now favors, something familiar and close, where the stakes are high and his sense of empathy is pervasive. This tenderness is partially how “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?,” with its Morrissey-level self-deprecation and whispered instructions to “pledge allegiance to my burning heart,” manages to feel less like a breakdown and more like time-lapse footage of a flower turning toward the sun. Throughout his career, Stevens has used the language of love songs to express religious devotion, and vice versa. Across Javelin, he seems intent on understanding and being understood, with the purpose of exposing the common thread between his pet subjects: raising the endless questions that lead us to seek meaning in one another, and rejoicing in the euphoria of sometimes finding it. And if it sounds like he is occasionally singing to us from rock bottom, it’s only so we can witness the steady ascent onward.
Studio album number thirteen from pioneering folk rock band produced by Cate Le Bon
7/13
I was quite wary of Wilco’s direction nearly a decade ago - not only was Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s brilliance far in the rearview mirror by that point, but the releases of Star Wars and Schmilco didn’t inspire great confidence. On their own merits, I’ll defend both of those records as pretty great, but the former’s half-baked jam session feel and the latter’s laconic vibe (not helped by a throwaway album title) both gave the sense that Wilco was settling into a late-career phase of simply resting on laurels. Since that time, I’ve been happy to be proven wrong.
The band’s resurgence began with 2019’s Ode to Joy - one of Wilco’s most mellow records, but its delicate nature doesn’t obscure the catchiness, beauty, and emotion present in spades. This was followed by 2022’s Cruel Country, a sprawling double album advertised as the group’s long-awaited return to country, the genre that spawned them long ago. While it did add a steady touch of roots and twang, most of the expansive tracklist fit rather well alongside the mild fare of recent Wilco and solo Jeff Tweedy efforts, but if the marketing felt a touch overblown, the record still delivered, a rock-solid eighty-or-so minutes anchored by multiple career highlights. And now, only a year and change later, we have Cousin, the third installment of a perhaps overlooked but undeniably impressive run by one of contemporary indie’s iconic groups.
Cousin is an incredible-sounding album. By that, I don’t mean that the ten songs here are reliably great (but they are!), or that the musicians on the LP play their instruments well (they do!), or that the record is arranged perfectly into a nicely-flowing forty-three minute listen (it is!). Rather, it’s the standout production job which proves particularly notable, courtesy of Welsh musician Cate Le Bon. Le Bon’s involvement itself is a relevant departure, as she is the first outside producer on a Wilco album since 2007’s Sky Blue Sky. As someone without any expertise in production at all, but who is in possession of two working ears, I’d say the band hit a home run. Not only do the songs sound lovely, but the colorful, glossy, shimmery-ness which results gives the music of Cousin a distinct identity in its own right.
More on that last note - I single out the production so heavily not just because it’s wonderful, but also because in most other respects Cousin feels like more-or-less a “standard Wilco effort”. There are some “different” songs like the exceptional opener “Infinite Surprise” or the future classic “Pittsburgh”, both of which have an artsy tinge that the band have often wielded at their finest, and mark a transition from the more rustic feel of last year’s record, but a good chunk of the tracklist could’ve been pulled from various other Wilco albums - “Evicted” seems like a perfect Ode to Joy cut, for example, and the noisier title track wouldn’t be out-of-place on Star Wars. However, they all work together nicely, buoyed by the kind of drifting and ethereal vibe which the production style furthers.
All in all, the vibrancy of the cover art couldn’t feel more appropriate, with Cousin coming across as drenched in warmth - if still rather melancholy, it seems notably bright following the oft-grim Cruel Country. There may only be a few songs here which will take a place among Wilco’s finest, but this is a consistently strong album, and the band has never sounded better, at least from a studio recording perspective. And Tweedy’s songwriting remains in top form - the apathetic delivery of mass shooting-pondering “Ten Dead” hits harder than the more obvious enraged approach likely would’ve, while closer “Meant to Be” captures a sense of yearning beautifully - “our love is meant to be”, he sings, expressing the thought more as an aspiration than a fact. I won’t try to assess where Cousin fits within the panoply of Wilco albums, but it’s another worthy addition to a burgeoning discography. It’s a wonderful feeling when an old favorite is still in a groove and pumping out quality music after so many years. Here’s hoping that there’s decades more in the tank.
Wilco - Cousin review: Strange as it seems, I’ve outlived my dreams
Album number sixteen from Australian-born pop singer-songwriter featureing contributions from Oliver Heldens and Lostboy
7/13
In a 2021 interview with BBC Radio 2, Kylie Minogue was asked about the sound of her then in-the-works 16th album. Coyly, as if about to upset her legions of fans, she revealed it would be built around TikTokcore… No, of course not, she said electropop, the scene of her greatest achievements. Eyebrows were not raised. In fairness, as is her occasional wont, the relatively restless pop legend recently drifted away from her musical bread and butter, with 2018’s country-inspired Golden and 2020’s Studio 54-indebted Disco, adding, well, disco to the sonic mélange.
So it’s chiefly back to the electropop of Fever, X and Aphrodite on her new opus Tension, an album given an almighty boost by the undulating meme generator, Padam Padam, her best lead single since Slow 20 years ago. That the sweaty, sex-positive anthem eventually shimmied its way into the UK Top 10 – her first time there in a decade – despite Radio 1’s initial reluctance to playlist a 55-year-old woman, speaks not only to the song’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head-esque hypnotism, but also to Kylie’s enduring ability to tap into shifts in the cultural mood. While her recent singles – Golden’s Dancing and Disco’s Say Something – mused on death and enforced separation respectively, Padam Padam leans into our collective need for some post-pandemic frivolity.
It’s a feeling that courses through Tension’s 11 songs. The playful title track mixes huge 90s house riffs, the odd vocoder embellishment (including an incredible bit where her treated voice elongates the phrase “call me Kylie, don’t imitate”) and at least three different choruses. Like Padam Padam, the song is hot, heavy and primarily controlled by Kylie’s deepest desires: “Almost there, touch me right there,” she demands at one point. On Vegas High, she muses, “make my eyes roll back when I feel that Vegas high”, as synths strafe laser-like around her.
Dubbed SexKylie in the early 90s for daring to grow up into a woman who prioritises pleasure, Kylie also knows her audience enjoy her ability to find joy in situations that aren’t so heady. The excellent, synth-slathered Hold On to Now is loaded with confusion and mentions lonely heartbeats – “Baby, what are we holding on to?/ Baby, where do we want to run to?” – but the unknown is quickly romanticised into a gift rather than a curse. “We’ll figure it out somehow, keep holding on to now,” she sings as a propulsive New Order-esque bass riff drives things forward. Things We Do for Love, meanwhile, opts for seizing the day (“so just kiss me here right now, we’re running out of time”) over an explosive pop tornado that recalls vintage Xenomania, all featherlight electronics on the verses, hints of guitar throughout, and then a sudden sonic whoosh that rockets the chorus skywards.
It’s when she strays away from Tension’s core sound that things unravel slightly. Both Hands and Green Light – two of the three songs on the album not to feature Kylie on the songwriting credits – dip into funk and disco territory (the former also, questionably, has some light rapping). While neither are awful, they feel like they’ve sashayed in from another album. They also slow the album’s frenetic pace (there are no ballads), offering the option for a quick breather when all you really want to do is rejoin the sweaty throng on the dancefloor.
While the penultimate 10 Out of 10’s hi-NRG mix of 90s house and 00s Europop fits nicely in context, the closing Story opts for something darker. “I had a one-way ticket that was going nowhere,” Kylie softly sings in the first verse, later adding: “Everything is fun until the walls come closing in.” The excellent middle eight, meanwhile, continues to show flashes of a side we’re not always privy to: “I was fighting the dark light/ Raging hard on the inside.” Just when it feels as though our protagonist is spiralling into irredeemable depths, Kylie, as she does, reels us all back in with a transcendent, glitter-bomb chorus: “You said, turn another page/ Baby, take the stage/ You know the stars are coming out for you.” The closing repeated mantra of “you’re part of my story” suggests she’s talking directly to her loyal fanbase; a stable presence during times of turbulence.
In this view, Tension is quintessential Kylie. As deep or surface-level as you need it to be, it offers both a carefree escape from reality while also remaining emotionally available. It’s an album packed full of gleaming choruses, gold-plated melodies and Kylie’s uncanny ability to make love and loss shimmer with possibilities.
Blessed with a meme-generating glitter bomb of a lead single, expectations are high for Kylie Minogue’s 16th album. The verdict? A shimmerin
Seventh album from the New York-based Japanese/American synth-pop singer songwriter produced by Patrick Hyland
11/13
Back in September of 2019, Mitski had finally had enough. She left fans stunned and concerned when she announced that her Central Park performance, scheduled on the 9th of that month, would be her “last show indefinitely.” People took to online forums, trying desperately to decipher Mitski’s cryptic use of ‘indefinitely’, and speculating about the potential causes of this bemusing decision, and more importantly, the potential effects.
Thankfully, Mitski would clarify soon after, to a collective sigh of relief, that her departure from the music scene would not be a permanent one. She initially reasoned that her five years of non-stop touring had left her exhausted and entirely untethered from any semblance of a real home. She would later clarify in a tweet that her efforts to thrive in the music industry had made her both disillusioned by and numbed to the experience. “I sense that if I don’t step away soon, my self-worth/identity will start depending on staying in the game, in the constant churn,” she said.
That Mitski had become numb bears repeating. She herself pointed out that by becoming devoid of emotion, she was missing the key ingredient of all her music: her feelings. And so, despite all of the recent accolades she’d received for her stunning and dripping-with-feeling fifth album, Be the Cowboy, and her attendant rise to the fame and ever-growing fanbase, Mitski would make good on her words and dip into a self-imposed dormancy. For her, the accolades were a curse. Her ascendency to the throne only added pressure for her to maintain her successes, and this quickly cast a shadow of self-doubt over every project she attempted to make.
Fans would just have to wait.
At some point during her hiatus, Mitski realized that she was still contractually bound to release another album for her label, Dead Oceans. And, long story short, she would finally re-emerge in late 2021, three years the wiser, with the shocking announcement of a new full-length, Laurel Hell. The album title itself referred to the large thickets of laurel bushes spread across the Southern Appalachians, where people have become stuck in their massive tangles and never made it out alive. More tellingingly, however, is that ‘laurel’ also means recognition of an award or achievement, and, given its pairing with ‘hell’, it provided a clear-cut indicator of her mindset at that point. The music reflected this idea as well, and while it was warmly received—the album even spent a week atop the Billboard charts—you could tell that it was the product of a different, more nuanced Mitski who was at least trying to care less about the reception it got.
And this brings us to Mitski’s new release, the compellingly titled, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We. True to the name, the album is dark and brooding; a rumination on lonely love and the havoc and agony it can generate. Mitski faces the love in her life head on, highlighting both its redemptive and destructive qualities. To augment the desolate longing of her poetic, otherworldly laments, Mitski has fashioned a striking sonic evolution from the edgy synth-pop that’s preceded it. This is Mitski as a forlorn country troubadour, conjuring the analog soundscapes of 70-era Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, as well as the later releases of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. A more recent spiritual touchstone is the moody, dreamy Neko Case classic Blacklisted.
Mitski spoke recently in an interview with BBC Radio 1, and she indicated that she worked on the album with orchestrator Drew Erickson, who conducted its arrangements by gathering a team of top guns (some of whom have played on actual Disney soundtracks) in Los Angeles and laid down the orchestral parts there. Mitski set out all of the choir parts herself, with a total of 17 voices utilized; 12 in Los Angeles and five in Nashville. In the latter city she stayed and recorded her parts with a proper ‘Nashville’ band and studio. The confluence between the high and lonesome and the cinematic creates a brilliant, beautiful, and heady aesthetic, and Mitski stands in front of it all, displaying a fervor that (re)establishes her as the preeminent singer-songwriter of her generation.
The Land is Inhospitable and So Are begins with “Bug Like an Angel”, which is also the first single released from the record. It’s a bold and deeply moving dirge, which begins with her plaintive acoustic strums and reverbed vocals almost recalling Guyville-era Liz Phair at her softest. Mitski coos, “There’s a bug like an angel stuck to the bottom of my glass / with a little bit left / When I was older I learned I’m a drinker / sometimes a drink feels like family.” This is followed immediately by an explosive and surprising choir echoing, “Faaamilyyyyyy!” which then recedes, allowing Mitski to ask, “Did you go and make promises you can’t keep?” The choir then rejoins her as she alluded to those broken promises: “They break you right back / Break you right back.” And this, if you’re wired a certain way, will send literal shivers down your spine. Mitski’s performance here is both daring and confident, affecting and devastating, and she invokes a graceful empathy in her haunting delivery.
Second single “Heaven” immediately establishes the ‘Nashville’ in her Nashville band, as a slow drum shuffle is met with soft acoustic guitar strums and the lonesome wail of steel guitar. During the BBC 1 interview, Mitski described “Heaven” as a “classically romantic song… seeking to cherish the small amount of time you have with the one you love.” The song depicts Heaven as, ‘Well, let’s leave the world outside of our room for now, and enjoy this beautiful love we have’.
“Heaven”‘s lyrics are paired perfectly with song’s countrified lilt, which is steadily encroached upon by surging strings that build to majestic proportions by the song’s dramatic finale. The orchestration is never pandering or gratuitous, and is there to manifest a certain emotional gravitas before swiftly receding, never a second too late. It’s just as it was with her considered inclusion of the choir in “Bug Like an Angel”; in both cases, her relative restraint ensures that these crescendos never outstay their welcome, and after multiple listens, the emotional impact does not diminish. The shivers still come.
“Star” places the orchestration front and center as strings swirl and multiply, steadily building to a dazzling frenzy. This is Mitski reaching for the firmament. For her, love is like a star in that, despite it no longer being there, still shines on when you look up at it. “I’ll keep a leftover light burning / so you can keep looking up,” she emotes. “Isn’t that worth holding on?” Mitski’s dense metaphorical prowess is on full display here, and one of the many ways she likens love to a greater outside force throughout the album’s slim 32 minutes.
Some might recognize the influence of Mazzy Star on mid-album track, “The Deal”. The band shuffles along on a “Fade Into You” sway, while Mitski sings, “There’s a deal you can make on a midnight walk alone / Look around, listen close, hear it call from above / It will ask you what you’d give and what you’d take for it in return.” She is ready to give away her soul, “just to give it,” and will face the consequences. As the urgency in Mitski’s voice continues to rise, a maelstrom of drums comes crashing in, leading to a menacing climax as Mitski repeats, “I’ve made a deal.”
On “The Frost” a warbling church organ and mandolin are added to the mix, and the song advances, sans the orchestral accoutrements, as a gorgeous meditation on loneliness. Mitski observes, “The frost, it looks like dust settles in the world / after everyone’s long been gone / But me, I was hiding or forgotten / the only one left, now the world is mine alone.”
The stunning “I’m Your Man” unfolds quietly, just Mitski and her guitar. “One day you’ll figure me out / I’ll meet judgment by the hounds / People always gave me love / others were never to blame, after all / You believed me like a God / I betray you like a man.” As the song comes to a close, she is surrounded by barking dogs, croaking peepers, and a multi-part choir singing into the night.
With The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitski seems to have regained her footing and created a laser-focused album, filled with sadness and hope and defeat, all with the brilliant backdrop of organic Americana and bombastic orchestral passages. The album’s brevity only adds to the allure, as it is stripped of any excess, and devoid of a single misstep. It is a distinct departure, but ultimately unsurprising in its flawless execution. As long as Mitski is at the helm, fully rejuvenated from her hibernation, we can only expect the best from her from here on out.
Second album from the American singer and actress produced by Dan Nigro
9/13
There was a moment, in the first half of 2021, where adults felt a pressing need to announce to the world why they liked Olivia Rodrigo. The young, bright-eyed Disney Channel actress and songwriter had just gone through her first teenage heartbreak, and had poured her emotions into a “drivers license” (her devastating first single that topped the charts), and then again on her debut album, SOUR—which also topped the charts, won a few Grammys and catapulted the 17-year-old into global pop stardom.
Socially starved, we relished living through her innocence and naivety as she navigated her deep pain. We cried remembering high school heartbreaks that may or may not have happened (though, shockingly, first heartbreaks can actually happen at any age). We used the words “nostalgic” and “geriatric” and “millennial” a lot. What does all that outsized attention do to a teenager with no chance to hone her craft on a smaller stage, whose debut was already hailed as a classic, generation defining voice? In a 2021 piece for The Ringer, Julia Gray noted of our fascination with Rodrigo’s age and SOUR’s ‘00s-era musical influences as a “fixation with dated pop culture relics…We don’t see Olivia Rodrigo for who she is as an artist, but who she is when we project ourselves onto her.”
It’s fitting then, that Rodrigo’s second album, GUTS, begins with “all-american bitch,” an ironic gem that arrives as a gentle, folksy ballad before making a heel turn into a pop punk kiss-off to her idolizers: “I am built like a mother and a total machine,” she sings angelically over a light, fairytale-like guitar plucking. When the full band kicks in and rocks out in the chorus, it’s apparent just how much the now-20-year-old has been holding in all these years: “I don’t get angry when I’m pissed / I’m the eternal optimist / I scream inside to deal with it,” she chants, tauntingly, before actually screaming her guts out. This is about more than just adulthood: GUTS is a brash, sobering look at the totality of fame on a young woman—how it consumes, abuses and isolates.
On SOUR, Rodrigo wore her sadness and rage as armor; her emotions were intense but predictable; and the music hinted at a brighter sky beyond the stormy weather. Not so on GUTS, where bad decisions are encouraged, death is preferable over socializing and every playboy can be fixed. On the dizzy, jangly-rock “bad idea right?,” she willingly ignores her mind’s rational pleas to have one more tryst with an ex, while on the soaring ballad “logical,” she attempts to reason with her own lovesick feelings by believing the impossible: “‘Cause if rain don’t pour and sun don’t shine / Then changing you is possible / I guess love is never logical.” The stakes are higher in these new loves built on power and age differentials—and the consequences cut a lot deeper. “I know I’m half-responsible / And that makes me feel horrible,” she repeatedly sings near the song’s end, soft and fragile, embedded in a wilting layer of synths.
There’s so much self-deprecation and internalized blaming here, which could be viewed as a depressing cry for help if it wasn’t so much fun to listen to. Rodrigo, along with her songwriting and producing partner Dan Nigro, plays with abrupt changes in voice and structure in these otherwise heady tracks, as if to signal that she knows just how absurd she’s being. “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” a rollicking, bratty emo highlight, has her crying out in embarrassment over the most minuscule social faux-pas in a breathless chorus: “I broke a glass, I tripped and fell / I told secrets I shouldn’t tell / I stumped over all my words / I made it weird, I made it worse.” Soaring into a dispiriting line that sounds euphoric—“Each time I step outside / It’s social suicide”—Rodrigo quickly dips into a nonchalant chorus of “ahs,” dismissing her anxious headspace with a shrug.
Meanwhile, the raucous “get him back!” almost positions her as drunk and pleading to a friend at a party, as she raps in a muffled tone trying to make the case for her cheating ex: “But he was so much fun and he had such weird friends / And he would take us out to parties and the night would never end.” A sing-songy chorus drives the point home, as she flutters between what she really wants (“I want sweet revenge and I want him again”)—but it’s the track’s bridge where Rodrigo lets her rage boil up. “I wanna key his car / I wanna make him lunch,” she quietly sneers amid backing chants and a choppy guitar, ramping up the viciousness of her anger and letting it out in a gleeful squeal.
And yet, even with all of Rodrigo’s Kathleen Hanna yelps and fiery screams, I almost wish GUTS was a little more punk than it is rock: Its production seems too clean at times, its fadeouts too exact, and its structural changes too accurate. But the honesty of her rage is still refreshing and, at times, comes across as more earnest than the debut single that turned her into a superstar. Beneath the cannonball of her voice and the album’s thunderous sounds, there is a soft fragility waiting to be absorbed. Anger comes from having no total grasp of the unknown, from the realization that growth is a never ending process.
On SOUR’s opening track, Rodrigo wished for her own “teenage dream;” now that phrase titles GUTS album closer—a reflective lament on the pressures of fame and the fear of not living up to the world’s expectations: “They all say that it gets better / It gets better the more you grow,” she lightly sighs, “They all say that it gets better / It gets better, but what if I don’t?” Raising her voice from that fluttering falsetto to a stronger, yet panicked belt, Rodrigo brings her deepest fears to the surface. These are emotions you don’t need to reminisce on, as long as you let them float within you—as long as you know when to let them go.
Beneath the cannonball of Olivia Rodrigo's voice and thunderous rock arrangements, there is a soft fragility waiting to be absorbed on GUTS.
Fifth album and first for seven years from the dream pop / shoegaze band who reformed in 2014
8/13
everything is alive is another Slowdive release that does little to alter their position as stalwarts of the nebulous shoegaze scene. Emotional textures are evoked through gauzy vocals and guitar reverb, with just a few tweaks to the formula here and there, but they're still one of the best to do it.
The most immediately striking feature is the John Carpenter-esque synths that appear on opening track 'shanty' – ironically it's the most 80s the group have ever sounded, despite that being when they formed. There's also a hint of the neofolk twang that their offshoot band Mojave 3 used more prominently. But elsewhere it's mostly wonderful business as usual: 'alife', 'kisses' and 'the slab' are propulsive with more dominant drums and guitar, Neil Halstead singing with clarity and Rachel Goswell shrouded in haze.
'andalucia plays' is a slow, gorgeous slice of John Cale-inspired nostalgia, with contemplative acoustic guitar matching the peaceful mood; 'chained to a cloud' is one of the best metaphors to describe the power vs ephemerality dynamic of the band (and shoegaze at large), though the song itself actually hews closer to their electronic interests.
There's a comfort felt through these 40-odd minutes, both from the band and as a listener. Slowdive are scene vets that have seemingly perfected their sound, but still have enough drive to keep nudging it forward, one shimmering soundscape at a time.
Slowdive's second post-reunion album mines familiar territory, with familiarly beautiful results.
Sixth studio album and first in eleven years from the Swedish garage rockers
8/13
If you’ve been angry at the existence of terrible sleaze-rock bands like Greta Van Fleet and Måneskin, the one band you have to blame is The Hives. Where once their brand of hard-rockin’ cartoonishness kept the pale imitators at bay, an 11-year absence followed their last album, Lex Hives. This opened the door for bands that might not have been trying to copy The Hives, but they certainly occupied a space that they might have dominated, had the Swedish garage-rockers been around to do that domination themselves. Where did The Hives go? It’s hard to say — maybe it’s because their brand of rock has fallen to the wayside in popularity. If you ask frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, though, they didn’t stop rockin’ because it was uncool to do so, but the other way around: “I’m just saying that The Hives don’t release a record for 10 years, [and] rock becomes completely unpopular. Coincidence? We think not.”
Maybe, though, it’s because the world has just gotten less fun to be in. Rockin’ in the free world doesn’t pack quite the punch when the world feels less “free,” and feels more “permanently dystopian.” It’s as though Almqvist and the Hives knew that the only antidote they could formulate was a stronger version of the one they began perfecting 30 years ago — which is why it was time for Randy Fitzsimmons to die, giving fresh purpose to a dormant hellbeast of a band. Longtime followers of Hives lore know that their new album, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, refers to the man who got the band together in the first place and wrote all of their lyrics. Following his death, a mystery spurned on by the poem that served as Fitzsimmons’ death announcement led the band to exhume his fresh grave — only to find “not a body but instead several tapes, suits, and of paper bearing the words ‘The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons’ typed up as if a title. An instruction to make more music without him, but it’s also a dick move. It’s kind of an asshole thing to do, to keep us in the dark if he’s actually alive.”
If you’re new to The Hives, reading the above paragraph may have your head spinning a little bit — what kind of band creates a character, kills him, announces that his death was actually maybe faked, and labels that character as a dickhead for doing it? — but if you’ve kept an eye on the band in any capacity since “Walk Idiot Walk” blazed into the airwaves 20 years ago, this kind of goofiness shouldn’t be surprising. Excellently-named opener “Bogus Operandi” should tell you everything you need to know about the first Hives album in 11 years: towering riffs that shred effortlessly, all culminating in Almqvist’s first line: “SHIT! Damn! I overslept!” The following 30 minutes is a wild ride that rarely lets up, and the fact that track two, “Trapdoor Solution,” is even more of a fast-paced ripper feels like the band’s way of saying, “strap the fuck in.” Every song that follows knows exactly what it wants to do, and it accomplishes it as quickly as possible — even if it results in short, killer numbers like “Rigor Mortis Radio” and “The Bomb.” None of these songs leave you wanting for more — “Trapdoor Solution” is 63 seconds long — but they’re all seriously satisfying.
Much like fellow Swedish sleaze-maestros Viagra Boys, who took the great work The Hives did and ran as far as they could with it, this is a band that is at their best when they’re making boneheaded music that comes served with a wink to the camera. You can’t make this kind of music unless you throw yourself into it, like a wrestler’s kayfabe, except the magic continues even though we know damn well that guitarist’s given name isn’t Vigilante Carlstroem. This allows them to write nihilistic stompers like “Stick Up,” in which Almqvist reckons with the brutal cruelty of life itself, and then, one song later, delivers a shockingly uplifting shout-along chorus like “In the morning, they’ll be dead and gone/ Lift your chin and soldier on/ It’s just smoke and mirrors, baby, knockin’ on your beat-up brain.” A band like Måneskin could have written a song that sounds like “Crash Into the Weekend,” but only The Hives could have made it feel somehow fresh and exciting with its huge guitars and clapping rhythms, its repetitive lyrics infecting you with every fresh listen. None of these songs are revelatory — they’re all big dumb rock songs, so dumb that “Two Kinds of Trouble” comes right out and states that its central thesis came to Almqvist when he was six years old, and it doesn’t even sound out of place — but each of them is a precision weapon that was meant to elicit the biggest reaction when they get the chance to play them in front of people.
For as much as they put into the high-concept tomfoolery within the background of the album, it’s inessential to your listening experience — all you need to know is that they invented a narrative reason for the band to roar back into life, and that the end result is a high-octane return-to-form for a band that turned their hard-rock-sleaze kayfabe into something just as glorious as what they managed to conjure up in their heyday. The world has changed considerably since Lex Hives, to the point where the mere announcement of Randy Fitzsimmons felt like a blast from the past, forcing us to reckon with a simple question: “do we even need a new Hives album?” If The Hives asked themselves this question, we should be nothing but grateful that they came to a simpler answer: “fuck yeah, we absolutely do!”
All you need to know is that the Hives invented a narrative reason for the band to roar back into life, and that the end result is a high-oc
Ninth album and first for eight years from the legendary Britpop quartet produced by James Ford
10/13
Though they haven’t released new music since 2015’s The Magic Whip, Blur continue to prove their relevance in British pop culture. Their records not only carved out the revolutionary sound of britpop, but soundtracked the social and political change of the 90s. In the decades since, their legacy lives on – many still champion Oasis as their preferred act and “Song 2” will live out its fate of being overplayed in indie bars until the end of time.
But as Albarn croons, “Every generation has its gilded poseurs” and The Ballad of Darren prove that Blur are some of the best ever to do it. Indeed, the ghost of generation’s past is eerily present throughout, even sonically in the recreation of Parklife’s iconic opening “Oi!” in the rumblings of "St Charles Square". In fact, Albarn’s narration hasn’t aged a day, still tinged with misanthropy and eager to rewrite his wrongs. “I fucked up”, he starts on the very same song, driven by not only the need for redemption but to escape the hauntings of bad habits that have “grabbed me by the neck with its long and slender claws”.
After a rocky breakup, it’s a miracle the band has come together so perfectly on this record. As drummer Dave Rowntree, in a recent interview said; “We love each other and we cannot stand each other, simultaneously, in the way that only a family can.” And in an effort to put old squabbles aside, The Ballad is imbued with a brand-new sense of aged wisdom and more importantly, an overwhelming desire to change.
Though our musicians may appear changed for the better, they make a point to keep the world around them trapped by stasis. Emblematic of an England stuck in its ways, the settings of The Ballad are nightmarish portraits of mundanity, a witty take on the Anglophiliac appeal of their earlier music. Swapping “A very big house in the country” for a “Basement flat / with window bars” as the “Grey painted aeroplanes fly over”, Albarn recreates the album cover’s poignant image of a dull horizon, with little hope of progress.
However, the album’s production refuses to wallow accordingly, full of large orchestral arrangements like the big brass-band outfit on "Avalon" that’s particularly arresting against a sprawling glam rock guitar solo. Continuing on closer "The Heights", they are determined to go out with a bang – its string parts intertwining effortlessly with the band’s lyrical adoration for the listener themselves; “Standing in the back row / this one’s for you”. In its final moments, the composition ultimately succumbs to an all-consuming static, perhaps suggestive of the ominous storm approaching just around the corner, but as Albarn reassures, irrelevant of age or status, it’s “Just something that comes for us all.”
Emblematic of an England stuck in its ways, the settings of The Ballad are nightmarish portraits of mundanity, a witty take on the Anglophil
Third album and first for six years from the New York-based singer-songwriter
7/13
A while back, I was fortunate enough to finally get a chance to see Grouper live. It was during her tour for her last LP, Shade, and although it featured very few recognizable Grouper songs, it was beautiful and transportive all the same. Opening for her, though, was ambient composer Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. While he played one continuous, enveloping drone piece, a female singer sang — mostly wordlessly, I think — at his side. It was the perfect accompaniment to his eerie but placid piece, her voice weaving in and out and around it like water.
I didn’t know until after the show that it was Julie Byrne sitting on that stool, half-shrouded in moonlight-like stage lights and shadows. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t pinned her voice: a signature smoky smooth instrument, unfurling like a silken quilt. It made such perfect sense with Cantu-Ledesma’s work that I must have not been able to transpose the voice I had listened to so many times singing over the delicate acoustic watercolors of her sophomore LP, Not Even Happiness, into this synthetic and droning atmosphere. But it was a harmonious marriage, and, in retrospect, reified everything I already believed and loved about Byrne and her ability to relocate you elsewhere when she sings, whether that’s a glade beneath a cerulean blue sky, or a dark and humid wetland.
On her third record, The Greater Wings, she mostly returns to her own personal milieu — that of the ground and sky, of guitars and harp and strings. Coming after a long six year gap that saw Byrne engage with rigorous touring, collaborations with other artists, and the tragic loss of close collaborator Eric Littman in 2021 — who produced part of this record before his death with Byrne, who then enlisted Alex Somers to finish the project with her — The Greater Wings is a document of love, loss, connection, and the natural world. Although elements of grief and sadness are stitched into these songs, much of it was written before Littman’s passing, lending the album an eternal, cyclical feeling. As she said in a recent Guardian interview, there is so much longing and yearning in grief, in addition to the sadness. That longing is rife on The Greater Wings — a longing for learning, for renewal, for people, for life itself.
If you were a fan of Not Even Happiness, the odds are high you’ll find much to enjoy here. It might not be a huge reinvention, but it does cement Byrne’s status as a forerunner in her field. The opening title track is classic Byrne: thick guitar fingerpicking, pleasant strings, a healthy dose of reverb, and a gently ascending melody sung in her velveteen voice. It feels a little clearer and sharper than her past work, with finer and more robust production giving her songs more breathing room. The song finds Byrne in a moment of reflection, taking in everything around her and looking outward for more and for welcome, but there’s also an undeniable linkage to her sense of loss, as when she sings the lovely and heartbreaking “You’re always in the band / Forever underground / Name my grief to let it sing”. In creating music out of this emotional excavation and unnaturally hard times, Byrne has found a pinhole up to the sun.
Nature has been a massive inspiration to Byrne’s past work, and that’s unchanged here. Natural imagery is conjured again and again throughout these songs — in the lyrics and even in many of the song titles — imbuing the world around us with a sensitive, divine weight. “Moonless” gives us a sky with no moon above a dark ocean. “Summer Glass” shows us our singer at the water’s edge, contemplating the nature of desire, as the sun comes up on her own piece of the shoreline. The sun rises on her again on “Flare”, further deepening her solar and lunar symbolism. But in between all this imagery, which might feel slightly familiar to longtime fans, are enough variations on her usual mode to keep it feeling fresh.
After the first two rather expected cuts, “Moonless” gives us a slowly crawling piano ballad, a deeply moving ode to discovering love (“I found it there in the room with you / Whatever eternity is”) that feels as timeless as an old painting. Harp trickles in, covering her voice in dewy crystal drops. Closer “Death is the Diamond” is another piano ballad, and while it may not have quite the magnetic pull of “Moonless”, it does have one of the album’s most emotive, plaintive melodies, as she sings lines like “You make me feel like the prom queen I never was.” “Hope’s Return” (a rework of a collaborative piece she did with Cantu-Ledesma a couple years back) finds Byrne strumming with a slightly unusual vigor, almost like a The Man Who Died In His Boat-era Grouper song, and then the strings and percussion joins in, alongside ghostly backing vocals, and the song is ushered into a higher stratosphere than a Byrne song usually shoots for.
Perhaps most unexpected is early single “Summer Glass”, which rests almost entirely upon Littman’s fluttering, arpeggiated synth. It’s not the first time Byrne has sung over electronic flourishes — for one, her last album ended with “I Live Now As a Singer”, which also hinged on a Littman-produced bed of synths — but it feels nearly out of character for her to be singing over such a flashy, nimble instrumental. And yet, it’s perfect: a memory piece about human connection and a moment of intimacy, supported with a blooming synth texture, harp, and heavenly strings and bass. It’s a short story unto itself, sung by an artist with a very firm grasp on her strengths.
Releasing a record after such an extended wait, and having that wait be suffused with grief and loss, is a tough gig. Many will rush to find hints of Byrne’s grieving process within the lyrics, even though it was largely written prior to it, and yet you can’t really outrun it either. Even songs that are so much about joy and love and excitement and vitality become engraved with melancholy when released in the wake of something like that. But The Greater Wings, for all its inevitable connotations, is not a downer. It’s a beautiful testament to life and to the people we love and that keep us going, physically and spiritually. It’s also a testament to moving forward with grace and strength, and rediscovering that longing to live. As Byrne sings at the end of “Summer Glass”: “I want to be whole enough to risk again.” It sounds like she’s made it there, or like she’s at least firmly toeing the warm waters of that renewal. Like she’s ready.
Second solo album of soulful electronica and first in seven years from the former singer of Antony and the Johnsons
9/13
The music of ANOHNI — with or without her band, The Johnsons, who she hasn’t recorded with since 2010’s Swanlights — has always straddled the lines between “easy to listen to” and “challenging” with a refreshing amount of confidence. Lyrically, her music is seldom easy; never one to push away the darkness of this world, she routinely engages with HIV/AIDS, climate apocalypse, ecocide, political violence, and a thousand other things that plague us all. This was always part of the DNA of ANOHNI and the Johnsons — even their name is a reference to one of the most famous trans women to give their body and existence over to trans liberation, at the cost of her own life. That the cover of My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross — not just the first album with the Johnsons in 13 years, but the first ANOHNI album of any sort since 2016’s lush, intense Hopelessness — is a photo of Marsha P. Johnson feels right for this moment, especially when combined with its title.
As the story goes, ANOHNI briefly met Johnson when she first moved to New York City — but within a week, Johnson was found dead in the Hudson River. The influence of Johnson still looms large in the LGBTQIA+ community, not just as an activist or as one of the first people to pitch bricks to defend her community at Stonewall, but as a visibly queer person who refused, constantly, to bow to the oppressive forces of this world. The music of ANOHNI, with or without the rest of the Johnsons, feels like a permanent reaction to that life — she makes beautiful music to engage with truly ugly things, but even as she confronts the dying of the world and the violence perpetrated against her community, she’s able to rend aching (or, sometimes, joyous) beauty from it.
In a way, My Back Was a Bridge is its own reaction to that legacy. One might call the record “accessible,” and that assessment might just be correct; ANOHNI’s music has always been difficult to the wrong ears. Her voice, though technically incredible, is an acquired taste, and everything around her can be pretty tough to crack for the wrong ears. My Body, though, is ANOHNI’s way of creating a strange oasis that recognizes and acknowledges the grief of the world, but tries to provide a sonic salve for it. At times, like on the almost too on-the-nose “It’s My Fault,” she recognizes herself as the architect of her own grief, one song after cartoonishly singing a showstopper from the perspective the TERFs and fascists that plague us (and work to destroy trans people). It’s a complicated record, but it’s refreshingly clear how she feels in every single song.
Compared to previous ANOHNI albums, this one is downright breezy from start to finish, with the fractured influence of old Marvin Gaye records and blue-eyed soul creating a comfortingly strange environment that feels not unlike the lush, unpolished environments of Radiohead’s In Rainbows. While the rest of the Johnsons (made up of excellent session players) and other guests (William Basinski!) are nothing to sniffle at, they’re somewhat underutilized, existing as a very intentional flavor. ANOHNI’s real co-star is the guitar work of producer Jimmy Hogarth (who spent time working with other vocal powerhouses like Amy Winehouse, Sia, Estelle, Tina Turner, Suzanne Vega and a boatload of others) adds to that; his largely clean fretwork a constant on every song, which keeps the album feeling shockingly light, despite every feeling ANOHNI explores. Her ever-powerful voice perfectly complements the relative minimalism of the record — though, should this be a surprise? Have you heard her sing “Nessun Dorma”? This time around, she seems unrestrained, even loose, with some of these songs being released with the first take she recorded. In a way, it feels like a deeper layer of one of the album’s recurring themes of hopeful acceptance of doom.
The dichotomy between beauty and pain takes center stage throughout, manifesting in very interesting ways, such as the incendiary, shredding blues-rock powerhouse “Rest,” which feels like a rogue wave after an album’s worth of relatively gentle tracks (save for the angular, weird 90-second “Go Ahead”). Just look at opener/debut single “It Must Change” — it borders on sounding like a Clientele song, complete with some mumbly British spoken word buried in the track. “The truth is that our love will ricochet through eternity,” she sings, but in the line right before it, she’s declaring “Your God is failing you, things must change.” A few songs later, “Scapegoat” transforms from a stripped-back guitar-and-voice song to something downright majestic, with ANOHNI singing “It doesn’t matter what you’ve got to give/ Or why you want to live/ You’re my scapegoat/ It’s not personal” with all the intensity of a bona fide torch song. It might not be evident at first, but you can almost hear her winking at the camera as she sings “Scapegoat,” as though there’s some perverse joy blended in with the melodramatic catharsis of singing in the voice of her own cartoonishly-evil aggressors.
Let’s talk for a moment about the album’s title: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross. You can interpret it in a couple of different ways — as an accusation of harm or as an admission of the speaker’s importance as a throughline to the future. While the former certainly matches with much of the anger embedded within My Back Was a Bridge, the latter feels emblematic of the record’s own perspective. It reframes pain and sacrifice as an inevitable part of growth, even as it tacitly reminds us that progress is built atop the fallen bodies of our friends, our neighbors, our communities at large. The album wisely doesn’t attempt to give answers to how to achieve a better world that doesn’t involve our feet on the backs of those who came before us. If anything, it would feel disingenuous for her to try and provide song-sized solutions to existential, planet-sized problems.
ANOHNI makes beautiful music to engage with truly ugly things, but even as she confronts the dying of the world and the violence perpetrated
Tenth album and first in seven years from the alt.rock singer-songwriter produced by Flood and John Parish
10/13
“I was quite lost,” says Polly Harvey of the period that produced her new, 10th (and first for seven years) LP I Inside the Old Year Dying. “I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do: if I wanted to carry on writing albums and playing, or if it was time for a change in my life- ‘OK, I’ve done this for a long time. Do I want to carry on for the remainder of my life doing the same thing?’”
It probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise to hear that Harvey, burnt out by a gruelling year-long world tour in support of 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, found herself in a rut. There hadn’t been a single whisper of new studio recording since then – she had worked diligently on music for the stage and for film and TV soundtracks and, of course, had been working on the beautiful, strange Orlam, her poetry collection that published last spring.
Sprinkled in the middle of this period was a delicious reissue campaign of her entire back catalogue with accompanying demos albums – manna for the PJ Harvey fan. But you got the sense that there was something of a shift happening in real time for Harvey; the album-tour-album cycle had been resolutely broken and she was pursuing her artistic urges in oblique and sometimes obscure new directions.
It wasn’t the first time Harvey expressed doubts on her future in the music business – she told Q magazine in 2001 that she almost gave up music to retrain as a nurse in the low period between 1995’s To Bring You My Love and 1998’s Is This Desire? – but the move towards writing, particularly on such an all-encompassing work as Orlam, had an air of finality about it and the lengthening gap seemed to support a sense that Harvey might just be done in terms of recording new albums.
So seeing studio photos by Steve Gullick uploaded to her Instagram account in February 2022 was, certainly, an exciting and surprising change of pace. As it turns out, Harvey was in the thick of recording her new album at London’s Battery Studios with long-time collaborators John Parish and Flood. She describes how the songs “fell out of [her]” within three weeks, and indeed the music has both an immediacy and a haziness that suggests a conception that is far from studied and rehearsed.
What is a PJ Harvey album in 2023 going to sound like? Harvey has made a career on sharp turns, unexpected diversions, the persistent search for new ways of singing, writing, recording. Hope Six, for all its lively garage-rock swagger and vivid sketches, felt somewhat distant and cold and, following on from its counterpart Let England Shake, seemed to occupy a similar kind of space thematically and in terms of performance – Harvey’s voice high and reedy, the outside narrator observing the scene without opinion or emotion. The last time Harvey felt such an innate need for something new was on 2007’s White Chalk, where she ditched the guitar for the piano and traded the raw energy of her previous records for an album of strange, austere, gothic ballads of autumnal beauty. She sang in a new, plaintive voice – her “church voice” – and wrote songs that were somehow both thrillingly different and offbeat but made sense within the Harvey oeuvre.
I Inside the Old Year Dying, perhaps not coincidentally then, most closely resembles White Chalk in terms of its mood and style – perhaps incongruously released in July, it is certainly an autumnal listen; Harvey sings most of it in a higher register and there is an elegant, restrained intimacy that recalls some of White Chalk. But it does not share the same piano-centric DNA and, indeed, some of it also recalls the ramshackle folksiness of some of the deeper cuts on 2004’s Uh Huh Her. In fundamental terms, it trades Let England Shake and Hope Six’s looking-outwards philosophy to focus firmly on the interior. “I instinctively needed a change of scale,” Harvey has said. “There was a real yearning in me to change it back to something really small – so it comes down to one person, one wood, a village.”
The “one person, one wood, a village” refers to Ira-Abel Rawles, the central figure in Harvey’s poem Orlam, which forms the basis for the lyrics of I Inside the Old Year Dying. Ira is a young girl growing up in the fictional Dorset village of Underwhelem, surrounded by a peculiar crop of villagers and family. Orlam is a story of awakening, the tension between the natural world and physical reality, and the inevitability of the passing of the seasons, all of which are loosely evoked throughout the album.
The Harvey of 2023 is no longer an artistic compartmentaliser, which is why it might take some getting used to in understanding that the album occupies the same artistic terrain as the book. The filmmaker Steve McQueen told Harvey during the Hope Six era: “Polly, you have to stop thinking about music like it’s all albums of songs. You’ve got to think about what you love. You love words, you love images and you love music. And you’ve got to think, What can I do with those three things?”
It’s not necessary to know Orlam to be able to enjoy I Inside the Old Year Dying, but such is the esoteric nature of the work that, as song lyrics, they are far more oblique than we’re used to from Harvey. As a lyricist, and indeed as a musician, Harvey has always been pretty direct. The deceptive simplicity in her work, both lyrically and musically, has always been her superpower. I Inside the Old Year Dying marks a significant change in this regard – written in Dorset dialect and sung again with her natural accent (yes, recalling that “church voice” of White Chalk), the text is an allegory of childhood, adolescence, the natural world – it’s an evocation of the English countryside and rural magic realism.
There are thematic threads that weave in and out – the shadowy symbol of Wyman-Elvis, who is both a Christ-like mythical figure and a ghostly spectre (“are you Elvis? Are you God?” she sings on the fragile and folky “Lwonesome Tonight”), the dreaded feeling of starting school, and the haunting refrains of “Love Me Tender” that shift in and out of several songs. It’s not something that the listener is particularly able to pin down, and that appears to be the point – I Inside the Old Year Dying seems not to be an album that you are supposed to “understand,” but instead one that you feel. A lot of the songs are about memories and delving back into the past, and the music and production – which is not rough in the sense of Uh Huh Her but not polished like a Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea – perfectly captures the distance, both physical and mental, of memory and the passing of time.
The Dorset dialect lends the album its unique poetic sensibility and also contributes to its slippery feeling of unknowability; “Quaterevil takes a wife / chilver meets her Maker / as the grindstone turns the knife / o’er Eleven Acres,” scans “The Nether-Edge.” It’s beautiful and strange and not your usual PJ Harvey lyric. But, just as readily, she emerges with imagery as familiar as “Pepsi fizz / peanut and banana sandwiches.”
Some songs have a formative, Beefhearty vibe, from the rough-hewn guitar roll of “Seem an I” (translated as “Seems to Me”) to the ramshackle chaos of the delivery of “Autumn Term”, but anyone familiar with Harvey’s soundtrack work post-Hope Six – particularly All About Eve – will recognise the restrained elegance in some of the chord structures of songs like “Prayer at the Gate” and “Lwonesome Tonight”. I Inside the Old Year Dying is an album that seems to hinge on these kind of fault-lines – between the corporeal and the imagined, the poetic and the prosaic, the bridge between childhood and adulthood. Of “life and death all innertwined,” as she keens on “Prayer on the Gate”.
Musically, the deft fusion of the delicate and the hearty reflects Harvey’s thematic explorations; the production is full of strange quirks, whether found sounds or unusual effects that are sometimes inserted and not repeated. The effect is that the music feels both hazy and alive, evoking the Orlam world in its strange splendour.
Another key to the sound is the use of male vocals not just for contrast but for poetic resonance, and the way Harvey employs the voices of Parish and actors Ben Whishaw and Colin Morgan is haunting and rather beautiful. The interpolation of Whishaw singing a segment of “Love Me Tender” in the foggy magnificence that is “August” is nothing short of stunning, while Parish’s crazed singing with Harvey on “Autumn Term” has a bizarre, nightmarish vibe that captures that first-day-of-school dread – “I ascend three steps to hell / the school bus heaves up the hill.” Morgan, meanwhile, provides the folk-horror chant that “A Child’s Question, July,” is built around – all Wicker Man ritual, with its “twoad”-licking and rural dance around the phallic Ooser-Rod.
For an album that evokes childhood and adolescence so strongly, I Inside the Old Year Dying makes use of some of Harvey’s most girlish singing – the beginning of “Seem an I”, for instance, is sung as if she were a girl singing to herself at the bus stop. It then morphs into its Beefheart roll, and it also puts me in mind loosely of “Heaven”, one of Harvey’s earliest recordings, that later emerged as a b-side in the White Chalk era. There is that same innocence of sound, the simple and joyful guitar pattern (although slowed and rougher), and the murky merging of the past and the present. In some ways, it makes sense on such a record that Harvey might subconsciously revisit something from the past.
The Beefheart influence found in so much of Harvey’s work can also be detected, for me, on “Autumn Term”, which seems to heave and creak like the bus in the lyrics; it’s sung in a deranged yet contained A Woman A Man Walked By style. “The Nether-edge”, meanwhile, begins with a disembodied vocal effect; it has a strange, strident beat that recalls Pink Floyd’s menacing “One of These Days”, before becoming something altogether jauntier.
“I Inside the Old Year Dying” is a classic Harvey acoustic guitar D-minor stomp with beautiful, reverb-drenched piano piercing the fog; “All Souls” is a melancholy dirge, one that starts so purely and softly, with one of Harvey’s gentlest and loveliest vocals, before the arrangement builds into a heavy hymn. “A Child’s Question, August” is both a deceptive and appropriate trailer for the record – it’s probably one of the least interesting songs on the record, but successfully suggests its broad themes and style. Following on from “All Souls”, though, is a sequencing gamble that threatens to swamp the mid-section of the album in sloth.
The gorgeous “I Inside the Old I Dying”, though, is one of the album’s gems with its shuffling percussion, Parish’s gossamer guitar part, and Harvey’s graceful melody; the uncertain vocal delivery was a purposeful choice – “I was standing in the vocal room with the headphones on, and Flood said ‘No, no–you sound like PJ Harvey.’” Harvey ended up recording the vocal with her eyes closed, unaware of where the microphone was, which lends it its blurred, out-of-focus quality. “Flood would just experiment all the time like that, to find the thing he wanted,” says Harvey.
The same can be said of the magnificent opener “Prayer at the Gate”, which is sung, as a lot of the album is, in Harvey’s upper register – but there is a warmth and strength in the delivery that is so much more appealing than on Let England Shake or Hope Six. It’s a beautiful, emotional invocation that recalls some of her work on the All About Eve soundtrack and, at its climax, Harvey sings in an unabashed, radiant high vibrato that is somewhat new for her and possesses a real yearning and sad desperation. It’s a beauty.
At the opposite end of the record, “A Noiseless Noise”, seemingly from nowhere, brings out a heavy, propulsive rhythm not heard on a Harvey record in a while and she also unleashes a vocal that is pure Stories grit, power, and sheen. As much as one respects Harvey’s resolve in not wanting to repeat herself, it’s a joy to hear something a bit more unbridled again that, to her credit, hangs together well with the rest of the material.
Although comparisons with earlier records might provide loose reference points, ultimately comparison is futile in trying to pin down the sound of an album that simply will not be pinned down – I Inside the Old Year Dying succeeds where all Harvey records do, in breaking new ground for her. Its plaintive beauty and major/minor contrasts recall some of her more intimate work and it exists within the same world as Harvey’s more apparently personal, “English” work, but there is a newness in the decision to include more found sounds and effects – birdsong, bells, schoolchildren, strange nocturnal noises – that make it sound alive, immediate, and particularly with Orlam as a base text, it’s definitely its own universe.
Somehow, though, it feels transitional. It doesn’t present as a bold step forward, nor Harvey’s most daring volte-face. This isn’t to say it is not an important artistic moment for Harvey – in many ways, it might be one of her most personally important records. Breaking new ground doesn’t need to mean something entirely leftfield. It feels like a gentle but decisive turn towards a new direction, the sound of Harvey making sense of where she is at artistically. It’s the sound of an artist who had obviously been uncertain where to go and how to go about it but has pulled the threads together into something meaningful for her creative future – Harvey speaks about being “broken-hearted” at fearing she had fallen out of love with music after 2017, and how she slowly found a way in again by playing her favourite songs by other artists on the piano or guitar – Nina Simone, The Stranglers, The Mamas and the Papas.
I Inside the Old Year Dying is probably most important because it represents Harvey’s vision clearing – the confusion about which direction to take, having become more comfortable with writing music as accompaniment to existing work and focusing on poetry, has crystallised into the realisation that there needn’t be a choice. At one point, Harvey thought I Inside the Old Year Dying might end up as a stage piece; instead, it’s its own world on record, the aural cousin of Orlam. Harvey describes it as a “resting space, a solace, a comfort.” That can be said for both its content and its result.
I Inside the Old Year Dying is a record that takes time to find its way in. There is more to uncover than might first appear – which is also one of the general themes of Orlam and the associated song lyrics. You’re never quite sure exactly where you are – Harvey’s voice is often mixed very much front and centre but is deliberately contrasted with the reverb in the instrumentation and the comparatively dry recording of the percussion to create an eccentric, ambiguous hinterland that moves in and out of focus.
“I’m somewhere I’ve not been before,” says Harvey. “What’s above, what’s below, what’s old, what’s new, what’s night, what’s day? It’s all the same really – and you can enter it and get lost. And that’s what I wanted to do with the record, with the songs, with the sound, with everything.” On this basis, Harvey has succeeded in her aims.
There is enough here that suggests both a looking back and a looking forwards – again, that bridge between new and old, the past and the future, the real and the fantastical. As ever, where she goes next is anyone’s guess.
Debut solo album from Fontaines D.C. frontman produced by Dan Carey
8/13
Fontaines DC seem to be racing through their career like a timelapse nature documentary. The Dublin rock band have gone from brash punk debut to sophisticated experimental third album in just three years, ascending from playing clubs to major London venues the Eventim Apollo and Alexandra Palace in the same short spell, and winning a Brit Award too.
Now we’re already at the point where the singer goes solo, thankfully leapfrogging the stage where drug-fuelled egos make everybody hate each other. It sounds like Grian Chatten is actually being a thoughtful bandmate by keeping these nine songs for himself. “The rest of the band are all creative and songwriters in their own right, too. I didn’t want to go to them and be like, ‘No, every single thing has to be like this,’” he has said.
For this is very much his vision, one so complete that he claims that the whole thing came to him on a night walk on a beach north of Dublin. He recorded it in just two weeks with Fontaines DC’s regular producer Dan Carey. The pace of creation and the lack of pressure to make songs that will rouse large crowds means that Chaos for the Fly sounds very different from past work. The closest relative is The Couple Across the Way, from last year’s Fontaines DC album Skinty Fia, which consisted simply of Chatten’s voice and a wheezing accordion.
That means that if you aren’t already a fan of his rounded vowels, his voice is more exposed here with no powerful electric guitars to cloak it, but his poet’s heart is more evident too. His sometimes strident tones soften on I Am So Far, and it sounds like he’s going for something like the gravelly gravitas of Leonard Cohen on The Score.
All of the People is especially bleak, with funereal piano chords sitting back from his voice while he sings: “People are scum… They just wanna get close enough to take the final shot.” But the occasional appearance of his fiancée Georgie Jesson on backing vocals brightens things, especially on the swinging Bob’s Casino.
There’s a restless folk energy to Salt Throwers Off a Truck and an electronic prettiness to East Coast Bed. It sounds like Chatten is trying on a range of interesting new outfits. This collection won’t launch him to new heights as a solo artist, but it should help his band to be even more versatile when he returns.
The Fontaines DC frontman recorded this solo record in just two weeks
Second full-length album from the Brighton post-punk band produced by Dan Carey
8/13
Like Squid’s debut, O Monolith begs for attentive listening. While 2021's Bright Green Field was by no means the serene country land of its title – in fact, it leant heavily on concrete – comparatively it is a pastoral stroll. O Monolith is a torn-up patchwork of terrain; scorching sands sutured violently into haunting forestry, sprawling ocean scapes tidally enveloping dense metropolitan high-rises.
The non-hierarchical ethic of the Brighton five-piece affects a wilding selection of contrasting musical ideas upon their output. For most bands, this tapestry of sounds would flounder and reject its connectivity, but Squid successfully stitch diverse concepts into one brooding work.
The ecstatic electro-terror of Swing (In A Dream) should (but does not) jar in its preceding of Devil’s Den, a woodwind-heavy number, harmonious and gentle in its infancy but characteristically explosive in its latter moments. The Blades is premised on a minimalist glitch-beat evocative of Syro-era Aphex Twin, and grows to a fuzzing swirl tangling with Ollie Judge’s wailing.
The final track of the project is the most worthy of being considered monolithic in its own right. If You Had Seen the Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away provides three distinct sonic variations in its first minute alone, and does not rest on its laurels from thereon out. It encapsulates O Monolith, and elevates it.
