Militarie Gun’s new album, God Save The Gun, starts with a confession. “I’ve been slipping up” frontman Ian Shelton roars on the opening cut “B A D I D E A.” It’s real vulnerability tucked amongst distorted bass and blown-out drums, and the perfect introduction to one of the most exciting records of the year. This isn’t just a sonically daring, massive swing of a rock album, it’s also a very human document of being at your worst when you should be on top of the world – an absurdist guide to the intersection of self-destruction and self-belief.
“I’m well aware that being this vulnerable turns my personal trauma into a marketing hook for this album,” Shelton says. “But I’m fine with it, if not provoking it. Over the past couple years, as I spoke about addiction from the perspective of someone affected by it, I became the one struggling with it. There’s a farcical logic to entering a situation, fully knowing the consequences, and doing it anyway–but that’s where my head was when I started leaning on drinking.” Militarie Gun’s 2023 debut album, Life Under The Gun was centered around lifelong cycles of hurt, with the singer looking back at growing up with family members struggling with addiction, and while God Save The Gun is still tethered to that history, this time, he’s not the witness—he’s the protagonist. It wasn’t until the band was scheduled to enter the studio in early 2025 that Shelton realized he was the one who needed to hear God Save The Gun’s message. “I thought I was playing a character, but it was becoming my reality,” he explains. “Right before recording, it hit me that I was really losing control and needed to do something about it. I looked at the record as a whole and could see that it was a note to myself – when I read back those lyrics, I could clearly see they’re saying ‘yeah man, you’re fucking up.’”
Despite all of the inner turmoil leading to God Save The Gun, Shelton and his bandmates – guitarists William Acuña and Kevin Kiley, bassist Waylon Trim, and drummer David Stalsworth – more than rose to the challenge of following up Militarie Gun’s acclaimed debut. Stalsworth, Trim, and Kiley all joined during Life Under The Gun’s extensive touring cycle after a series of member shakeups that would hobble most bands, but only made Militarie Gun stronger. “It took us a long time to find the right people to be in this band but it feels like all the pieces have finally fallen into place,” Shelton says. “It’s like we’ve had a fast car for a while but we just now figured out how to drive it. We wrote for three years consistently because our intention was to make a classic record—full stop. The songs need to be as emotional as possible but the music needs to fully hit too. Big ideas need big songs.”
God Save The Gun certainly lives up to that credo, and to do it, the band recruited a village of new and old collaborators. Shelton continued his creative relationship with songsmith Phillip Odom, co-wrote with longtime conspirator and frequent harmonizer James Goodson of Dazy, and newly tapped Nick Panella of MSPAINT, among others. “Phil really taught me how to sing, he knows my voice better than anyone,” says Shelton. “Or sometimes it’s about bringing in a fresh perspective – I call someone like James or Nick because those guys write songs in a totally different way than I do.” That outside view also came from producer / engineer Riley MacIntyre (Adele, Arlo Parks, The Kills), who was chosen not only to make the songs sound huge, but also to access the sentiments behind them. “We went with Riley because he’s the emotional producer,” Shelton says. “We wanted someone who locked in with what the songs were about, not just how they sounded. And he was so dedicated – we would do 14-hour days and Riley would be there an hour before me and an hour after I left.” God Save The Gun does indeed feel massive, but it’s the sound of real people working together to make something bigger than themselves–not computer-replaced perfectionism. And its musical scope is matched by its lyrical depths.
The album’s cover art depicts Shelton as a cult leader, subverting the idea of a charismatic rock n’ roll messiah: the vocalist is selling salvation when he’s the one in need, a sly jab at the commodification of art and self-help. “The album has a pretty defined arc,” Shelton explains. “Sometimes I think people like me more when I’m at my worst and the first few songs are about seeking external validation – needing people or drugs or alcohol to provide your value, anything but yourself. Then it’s songs that reflect on what I went through when I was younger and coming away with the wrong conclusions. It’s kind of ridiculous, me thinking ‘I saw my mom attempt homicide, so it’s ok for me to get out of control as long as it’s less than that.’ After that the album gets manic. Then it’s the hard comedown after the episode, where the stakes get very real.”
God Save The Gun’s begins with “Pt II,” a spoken word intro where Shelton sets the tone, admitting “things have not been great…” before kicking into the pissed-off pogo of “B A D I D E A.” The record then surges forward with “Fill Me With Paint” and “Throw Me Away,” two gigantic alt-rock barnburners that sound more confident than ever despite lyrics of biting self-doubt and paranoia. It’s a magic trick that Militarie Gun performs throughout the record: hyper-energetic songwriting that makes the heavy lyrical content hit even harder. “God Owes Me Money” follows, a defiant synth-flecked rocker that just might be the jewel of the record and ties Shelton’s past to his present. “The idea of god or the universe owing you something because of the bad hand you’ve been dealt is just a brash idea that I really connect to,” he says. “It’s my right to redefine my pain and make it pay me.” Next on the hazy acoustic ballad “Daydream” Shelton begins to subconsciously realize he might have a problem, but things get messier and more complicated from there as the narrative and the music jackknife through turbulence. “I was trying to make an album with so much chaos in my life and in my head,” Shelton says. “A break-up, crazy touring, family trouble from the past, family trouble from now… It’s hard for me not to just lean into the absurdity of it all sometimes, like if you’re not laughing you’re crying.” God Save The Gun swings from the punk stomp of “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down,” to the Killing Joke sampling rave up of “Kick,” to the chiming jangle pop of “Laugh At Me,” tackling nihilistic abandon, anger, and love–all that mania channels into the record’s harrowing next chapter.
“I’m a depressed person and so much of this has really just been about trying to find a distraction from that,” Shelton says plainly. “At the end of the day it’s not appropriate for me to talk about a lot of the things I see in my brain – it would bum people out – so the only place I have for this stuff is in these songs.” Shelton puts that idea to the test with “I Won’t Murder Your Friend,” an agonizing portrayal of suicidal ideation that’s very intentionally drained of any possible romanticization. “I grew up hearing songs that glorified suicide and I wanted to write a song that de-glorified it,” he explains. “I heard David Choe talking about Anthony Bourdain with that perspective – that suicide doesn’t make you the glorious martyr, you’re the selfish murderer and your own life isn’t the only casualty – it really stuck with me and he let us put that audio into the track.” Thankfully God Save The Gun stops short of the abyss, with Shelton finding hope by looking outside himself. “The album gets more empathetic,” Shelton says. “It becomes about realizing you’ve been missing that other people are struggling because you’re so wrapped up in your own problems.”
That glimmer of hope carries into God Save The Gun‘s climactic title track, a song that tries to reject the cycle of bad choices and bad results. If reveling in self-destruction didn’t work then maybe only the hardest option is left: change. “Your people love you, they don’t let it show / and I know you’re out of control,” Shelton howls over top of churning bass and tremolo guitars, singing each verse to the various characters that populate the song’s unhinged existential party-gone-wrong. Suzy, Martin, Blaine, Lucy, Liam – Shelton rattles off the names with increasing desperation, as if he’s trying to direct the lines to anyone but himself. “It’s me speaking to other people, but I was the person who needed to hear what I was saying the most,” he admits. “You shouldn’t have to wait until your life is completely destroyed to try to improve it, and I don’t want to lose what I’ve worked for because I have a drinking problem.” The song’s twisting structure hurls the listener through exhilarating dynamic shifts before abruptly cutting to just bass and vocals for its final lines: “If you want to keep your life, you gotta let it go,” Shelton sings, his voice resolute. God can’t save The Gun but he can do it himself.
Nearly a decade ago, Margo Price turned Nashville on its head with her breakthrough, beloved debut solo album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. Released in the throes of bro-country and before pop stars were crossing over into the genre left and right, it showcased an artist completely unafraid to double down not only on herself, but what she’d always loved: classic country songs written from the intellect and the gut, hell-bent on truth-telling and both timeless and urgent all at once. Respected by her peers, praised by critics and beloved by her fans, Price created a lane where independent-minded, insurgent country music can exist and thrive alongside the mainstream, and became an ardent fighter for her beliefs in a genre where the norm is to shut up and sing. A trailblazer and a champion for the craft, Price redefined what it meant to be a modern country artist.
And now she’s back with an exquisite, truly timeless album that reconnects with her roots and pays tribute to the art of the country song, inspired in part by the legends whom she now calls colleagues and friends. Hard Headed Woman is both a look forward and a look back: a way to march forward while staying true to yourself when the path of less resistance is right there in front of us, and short cuts are around every corner. And a way to look back when we need to trim what is no longer working, and to stay connected with where we’re from. It is a promise and a manifesto, a love song to both a city and a genre, and a defiant cry for individuality.
In creating Hard Headed Woman, Price brought all of her power as one of our most beloved and respected songwriters to craft a deep exploration of love and America in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Featuring appearances from Tyler Childers, co-writes with Rodney Crowell and a Waylon Jennings song that his widow, Jessi Colter, urged her to sing, it is country music as only Price can make it: free of rules, cherishing tradition, hard headed to the core but with a delicate, beating heart.
Since releasing Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, Price has barely slowed down. She’s made four records, played Saturday Night Live, been nominated for a Grammy, toured the world alongside artists like Chris Stapleton and Willie Nelson, released a lauded memoir (Maybe We’ll Make It, due on paperback September 2nd), became an in-demand producer and was appointed as the first female board member of Nelson’s Farm Aid. And she’s been fearless when it came to genre, venturing into psychedelic rock on her most recent, Jonathan Wilson-produced record, Strays. It would have been easiest to just stay that course, and keep running. But Price doesn’t follow success or comfort. She follows the art.
It took a whole lot of hard work and honesty with herself and others to get there, but that’s never stopped Price before. “I made the decision that I had to rebuild everything from the ground up,” Price says. “There’s all this pressure to be pumping out content, and I felt the opposite in the way I wanted to approach this record and my life in general.”
Price had also established herself as one of the most passionate, vocal artists in country music and beyond when it came to standing up for political and personal causes, from the presidential election, to abortion to gun control: happily hard headed when it came to the fight for equality and justice, especially for the working class and underserved in our society. Price has always brilliantly woven her activism into her songs, but her role as a spokesperson had started to overtake, on occasion, her role as a songwriter. She wanted to focus on using her written word to deliver the most potent punch of all.
“I always hope to do like Johnny Cash did,” Price says, “which is speak up for the common man and woman. But there have been so many threats and anger and vitriol over the years, when I am only coming from a place of love.”
Price realized she just needed a break from everything outside of the bubble of family life and her art. She started spending more time at home, writing songs alone and with her husband, Jeremey Ivey. She started popping up in the dive bars and tiny venues around Nashville where she got her start, sometimes just to play a country cover or two or dance with the crowd. She refused guidance to write for pop stars or compromise her values for a quick buck. Most of all, she turned the emphasis in her music back to songwriting, exactly where she began.
“So much of Strays was leaning into this psychedelic, textural territory,” says Price. The music lent itself to vibrant, heavy stage jams, with Price often hopping behind the drumkit and bruising her thigh from a tambourine beat. She found herself longing for the days when it was just her and her guitar, playing at an East Nashville dive bar. “I always knew,” she adds, “I would come back to this more rooted sound.”
Hard Headed Woman is rooted to its core. Rooted in Price’s history and struggle to make it as a musician for so many years in a town that prizes uniformity and the bottom line, rooted in the country and folk sounds that have become her signature, rooted in the simplicity of a few key collaborators instead of songs-by-committee. At the heart of Price’s work is her creative partnership with Ivey, with whom she describes as having a “soul connection.” “I’m a songwriter,” Price says. “I’m not somebody who goes out and needs five people to craft a song, and then tack my name on it. That’s never been my style. I have something to say.”
Something to say, nothing to prove. The first song they wrote for the album that would become Hard Headed Woman was “Close to You,” a simple, pining call for a lover that is infused with the sounds of the desert. It’s unfettered and truth-telling, accented by some flamenco guitar and Price’s gorgeous, urgent vocals. “We played the jukebox while democracy fell,” Price sings, never letting her songs fall out of the context in which they exist. It’s the kind of thing that only she could write, carrying both love and fear in one single line.
As more songs started to form, an early boost of confidence came from her friends Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris, who heard some of the work at a political fundraiser and encouraged Price to keep going. “I have both of them to thank for building me up and making me believe in the songs I am writing in this season of my life,” Price says. Crowell remained not only an inspiration and supporter of the album but a contributor: he co-wrote two songs with Price and Ivey.
The album that unfolded from there is drenched in Price’s unique story and unshakeable instincts: while Midwest Farmer’s Daughter was about her journey from childhood to Nashville, Hard Headed Woman is very much her battle since from dive bars to tour buses, through parenthood and marriage, through scrutiny and sacrifice all while fighting constantly for what she believes in, and the music she loves. It begins with a proclamation on the prelude, which serves as the album’s mission statement: or, Price puts it, “a disclaimer and reminder that I don’t owe you fucking shit.”
Songs like the album’s lead single, “Don’t Let the Bastards Get you Down,” speak for the downtrodden and the forgotten, an “anthem for people who are being overlooked in society and need to be lifted up,” Price says, “because we are up against so much right now.” As so many of Price’s songs do, it speaks both for the personal and the political all at once. Price was inspired by the message Kris Kristofferson whispered to Sinead O’Connor when she was booed on stage at a Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary show, and even got Kristofferson’s widow’s blessing to include his name on the credits. “I always admired Kris for how he stood by her in that moment, instead of pulling her off the stage like they told him,” Price says. It serves as a reminder to anyone who encounters resistance in the face of fighting for justice to keep going, especially when it would be so much easier to capitulate and cower.
“The song was originally written for a movie that never happened, but it feels so timely with everything that’s going on in the world,” Price explains. “The phrase, ‘Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down’ originates from Margaret Atwood’s brilliant 1985 piece of literature, The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s referred to in Latin and used as a rallying cry for resistance against the oppressive regime that symbolizes resilience and hope in the face of adversity. Nolite te Bastardes Caborundorum.”
That spirit resonates all across the songs of Hard Headed Woman. The blistering “Don’t Wake Me Up” was based around some writings that Ivey stumbled upon in one of Price’s notebooks, inspired in part by her deep readings of Frank Stanford, one of her favorite poets due to his freewheeling work free of boundaries. They spun it all into song in minutes that chugs with the essence of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “The way this world is going, ain’t where I’m at,” Price howls in her powerful, unmistakable voice. “Nowhere is Where,” turns slow and contemplative, road-worn but never broken, the call of someone who has been to the mountain but never forgets the prairie below. And “Losing Streak” whirls in with an organ and out with a weary, world-worn defiance: our worst times don’t define us, but they’re always part of who we are.
There are songs that go back to the beginning of Price’s early grind, like the western-tinged “Wild at Heart,” reflecting on how much her life and the city of Nashville has changed over the years – and how important it is to stay true to exactly who you are despite it all. Another, called “Red Eye Flight,” is about both leaving a lover and also leaving her longtime band the Pricetags. “I’ve been with those players for ten, thirteen years,” she says. “But I could feel that I needed to make a change, and to change texturally what’s going on with the band. But it’s a familial bond, different than a friendship.”
There are a few choice covers and cuts, too: “Love Me Like You Used To Do” is by Price’s friend Steven Knudson, an unsung Nashville writer on whom she hopes to shine a spotlight (helping to elevate the town’s incredibly talented but buried voices is one of Price’s favorite pastimes). Friend Tyler Childers joins Price on that waltzing country ballad, while “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” is Price’s “Jolene goes to Memphis” take on the Jimmy Peppers and George Jones classic. And showcasing how Price has been trusted by the greats to lead the next generation of country music renegades, “Kissin You Goodbye” was given to Price by Jessi Colter, Waylon Jennings’ widow, when Price was producing her record. They’re songs chosen to appreciate the past and the present as she sees it – not as Music Row or the algorithm might dictate – and place Price squarely amongst her heroes as a living and breathing part of the new country tradition.
When it came time to record Hard Headed Woman, it was important for Price to keep that ethos alive, decamping to Nashville’s RCA Studio A and reuniting with producer Matt Ross-Spang, with whom she made her first two solo albums. Though she has worked with everyone from Sturgill Simpson to Jonathan Wilson since, it was Spang’s vocal rebuke of easy studio shortcuts that made her eager to reunite again. “He’s so unpretentious,” Price says. “He fully believes in me, he fully believes in my songs. He got us back to feeling it in your gut and not needing everything to be so perfect.”
It felt truly significant for Price to make the album in Nashville, a city where she’s lived for over two decades and played a seminal role in its transformation, yet somehow never recorded an album in the place she’s called home. The historic RCA Studio A helped connect Price even closer to the legacy of songwriting she holds so dear, a place where everyone from Dolly Parton to John Prine to Loretta Lynn have made albums. “It felt like there were ghosts and spirits just hanging out,” Price says. In perfect kismet, she also launched her own signature Gibson J-45 guitar, inspired by her 1960’s Gibson she’s had by her side for years as her career took off. It’s all part of the continuity that she wishes to create with her art, not just with timeless songs but inspiring future generations of women, mothers and artists in general who don’t want to sacrifice their vision, moral compass or family life in favor of mainstream success.
At its core, Hard Headed Woman is about that furious instinct to never waver, especially when ourselves, our values and our future is so clearly on the line. As she sings on the title track, “I ain’t ashamed, I just am what I am.”
“I hope this album inspires people to be fearless and take chances and just be unabashedly themselves,” Price says, “in a culture that tries as hard as it can to beat us into all being the same.”
words by Jeff Weiss.
The lies are inescapable. On every screen, the merchants of disinformation exert their cruel dominion. There is the queasy sense that we’re drowning in a slipstream of screeching noise and mindless ephemera. The water is rising. The ground is shaking. The shadows are long and the lights are low. It’s the perfect time for a new album from Rise Against.
Few bands have ever been as accurately named as the Chicago punk quartet. While fleeting styles and fashionable imitations have entered and exited vogue, Rise Against have remained a north star of artful resistance. While continuously updating their formula, they’ve sustained their original spirit of rebellion over a quarter century – amassing a body of work that doubles as a chronicle of our collective unraveling. Melodic hardcore detonations co-exist in perfect tension with dire warnings about the looming dystopia. And on their latest Loma Vista release, Ricochet, they’ve made what might be their most visceral, urgent, and high-stakes song cycle.
In the four years since Rise Against’s last opus, the world has continued to be torn asunder by shameless falsehoods, brazen greed, and episodes of shocking cruelty. This devolution has not gone unnoticed by the band. Ricochet takes these crises under the scope and dissects them with lucid clarity, raw emotion, and global perspective. Amidst a period of nationalist aggression and isolationism, the album reflects on our own interconnectivity. A form of chaos theory in which our unruly actions and anger wreak havoc in ways that aren’t always easily understood.
“We rely on each other, whether we like it or not,” Rise Against lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and lyricist, Tim McIlrath says. “Everything that you do will affect somebody. We’re connected to other countries and other economies; we’re connected to undocumented immigrants. We’re connected to every decision that our leaders make. We are not as isolated as we think. What we do, good or bad, creates one big ricochet effect.”
The album’s gestation started after the marathon tours for 2021’s Nowhere Generation. In their trademark fashion, McIlrath and the band’s other songwriter, bassist Joe Principe, reconvened to gather and compare notes. When the ideas began cohering, they entered the studio with lead guitarist Zach Blair and drummer Brandon Barnes, with the stated goal of relinquishing the notion of what a Rise Against song needed to sound like. Enlisting producer Catherine Marks (Boygenius, St. Vincent), they trusted her vision to expand upon their naturally colossal rippers. While mixing engineer Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, Paramore, The Killers) added a sophisticated and atmospheric touch to the finished product.
You can hear the subtle shift most acutely on “I Want It All” and the album’s title track. The former is an infectious headbang-ready riff that almost sounds like a long-lost ‘70s FM radio classic from the Kinks (if the Davies brothers had somehow been raised on Fugazi). While “Ricochet” opens with slinky drum machine claps that feint towards electro-clash before swiftly ascending into a sky-rattling Kevlar anthem that should make arenas consider paying a higher premium of roof insurance before booking the band.
On “Nod,” the album’s first single, Rise Against capture the emotional turbulence shrouding the current zeitgeist (“the line…drawn between dreams and nightmares is thin like a razor”). Rolling Stone rhapsodized that it’s a “particularly potent rallying cry for the moment.” Vice raved that it was the “anthem that we need now” – one featuring Rise Against at their best – “passionate, confident, and encouraging.” The second salvo, “Prizefighter,” is a propulsive burner that invokes a boxing metaphor to explore the connection between an artist and their fanbase. Balancing introspection with the incendiary, the song builds on the characteristic duality of the band’s previous Platinum and Gold-certified classics.
It’s this three-dimensional nuance that has allowed Rise Against to write some of the most important rock songs of their generation. On Ricochet, McIlrath’s lyrics navigate many of the most pressing crises of the moment, offering unerring righteousness without sanctimony, and empathy without letting malefactors off the hook. They cover apocalyptic scenarios (“Black Crown”) and false promises sold to the youth (“Gold Long Gone”), the necessity of resisting blind allegiance (“Soldier”), mental health (“Sink Like a Stone”), and the sensationalism of the algorithmic entertainment-industrial complex (“State of Emergency). Throughout it all, there is a cautious optimism for real lasting change.
“The fight for a better world almost always starts with an unpopular opinion or a minority of voices,” McIlrath says. “When you feel overwhelmed, when it feels like it’s you against the world, it’s important to remember that every resistance movement started as a small and passionate group. Our songs may take you to a dark place, but there’s always breadcrumbs of hope to help get you out of there.”
Like the band’s literary hero, George Orwell, they have absorbed the maxim that “in a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Ricochet is a success at simplest level: a collection of indelible rock and roll songs with infectious hooks that sound best played at eardrum-shattering volume. But it also functions as something more profound: a document of artists capturing the chaos of the moment, articulating complex truths with seismic power, and an awareness of the consequences that may befall us. This is an album built to be a part of the solution.
There are moments standing on a high ledge where wild space beckons. In that moment, instinct stirs: “What if I just jumped?” It’s been described as “the call of the void,” an experience somehow more primal than even feeling or urge. On her new album, Precipice (due July 25th via Loma Vista), Indigo De Souza looks over the creative and spiritual cliff and just leaps. The North Carolina native is a prolific, poetic singer-songwriter who already has three albums and four EPs in just seven years, with her most recent full-length (2023’s All of This Wild End) earning rave reviews for her daring vocals and thrilling songwriting. But on her latest, De Souza hears the void calling and calls back, taking control of difficult memories and charged emotions via pop bombast and diaristic clarity, and finding a stronger self. “Life feels like always being on the edge of something without knowing what that something is,” the singer-songwriter says. “Music gives me ways to harness that feeling. Ways to push forward in new directions.”
On the album’s title track, De Souza faces down the potential darkness of change, and finds hope in surrendering: “Coming to a precipice/ Holding on for dear life/ Looking out into the world/ Everything has gone dark.” That sort of emotional daredevilry is definitively not new for De Souza. Her catalog brims with unwavering honesty and unflinchingly personal songwriting, including most recently the familial excavation on the pained and mighty All of This Will End. “I feel constantly on the precipice, of something horrible, or something beautiful–something that will change my life for better or for worse,” De Souza muses. To that end, Precipice cracks De Souza’s world open. As a new challenge, the songwriter took on blind studio sessions in Los Angeles, reveling in the expanded pool of collaborators and ability to focus on music. “I’d been wanting to work on more pop-leaning music for a while, so when I came out to LA I made sure to meet with people that could help bring that to life,” she says. “I wanted to make music that could fill your heart with euphoria while you dance along.”
In those sessions, she made a quick and deep connection with producer Elliott Kozel—a musician who has produced and collaborated with the likes of SZA and Yves Tumor, not to mention scoring TV with FINNEAS. The two quickly got to work on album highlight “Not Afraid”, the track setting the tone for the album’s bold defiance of the unknown. “What, what does it look like, when you are free?/ When you are being true?/ When you let go, the people you love are free when they’re with you too,” she sings. The track also signaled the start of a long and important collaboration. “Elliott is really good at allowing space for songs to reveal themselves, and I felt very seen and respected both musically and personally,” De Souza adds. “That song became a compass for what I wanted the album to be: pop songs with meaning and feeling, pop songs with lyrics that tap into raw humanity.”
Lead single “Heartthrob” exemplifies the ecstatic duality the pair found, a way to both bring immediate energy and thoughtful depth. The track is a fanged rebuke of those who exploit and prey on young people, delivered in panoramic indie rock glow. Multi-instrumentalist Jesse Schuster’s chugging guitar riff pushes De Souza’s delivery into a headrush, her voice wavering somewhere between pain and fury. “God, when I’m a grown up/I wanna have a full cup/A true heartthrob,” she shakes, a satirical jab at the false safety that some adults can exude and an honest cry to inspire light and freedom in the people she loves. “I’ve lived through harmful experiences in my past that are helpful to process through music.” De Souza says. “A way to remind myself that I am still a full human being.”
As with so much great pop, Precipice transcends the giddy highs of new attraction and the haunted lows of a broken heart. But true to her idiosyncratic approach, De Souza somehow manages to invert and subvert both, finding their points of connection rather than their differences. The thrumming synthpop of “Crying Over Nothing” exemplifies those new, glistening heights musically, even as the lyrics digest unimaginable heartbreak. De Souza skips over the coyly shuffling rhythm, her voice cracking into the upper register with a warm glow akin to the ‘80s synths. “There’s some pain that follows no matter where you go or how much you try to lose it, pain that comes from memories you can’t erase and love you can’t unfeel,” she says. “This song is about the one that got away. That feeling of being haunted by loss.”
The Robyn-esque “Crush” follows, a sugar burst that subtly weaves its way across the dance floor. “Come up to get some air/ It’s like you’re playing solitaire/ So good to see your face/ I was missing you when you were down there,” she sways, the knowing grin practically beaming through the track. The embodiment of catching feelings, “Crush” rides a gritty snap-pop drum loop from percussionist Jonathan Smith and tingly synth prickles. “I remember thinking about how, in the same way that I sometimes have to talk new lovers through eating me out, I also have to help them understand how to care for me in ways that make me feel good and seen,” De Souza blushes.
But of course even the most hypercharged crushes can crumble—and the sighing “Heartbreaker” was written when the person she was falling for on “Crush” eventually broke her heart. While De Souza’s voice acrobatically flickers across the rest of the album, here she delivers this pained memory more simply, with her full throat: “When I wake up, still thinking that you’re there/ And it all comes flooding back to me, I’m living in a nightmare,” she cries, churning piano and ghostly guitar floating in the edges. “I was broken up with, and I flew out to LA as quickly as possible so I could get to the studio to make a song instead of being at home, sad and lashing out,” De Souza recalls. “My heart was fully soaked in poisonous pain, and I am deeply grateful for the creative space to process what I was feeling.”
On album highlight “Be Like the Water”, there are times where you can practically feel the tears dripping on the microphone. But rather than mourning, these are tears of awe, a song of amazement at the possibility of living truly and on your own path. “It’s about being brave and protecting your energy, following your gut,” De Souza says. “It’s a reminder that you can always follow your heart and your spirit, but you can also make boundaries and choose your own direction.” To achieve that spiritual depth, Kozel’s production bends between mantric ethereality and golden Americana. Spectral synth tones and finger chimes play like a yogic drone, while gleaming organ puts a direct frame on De Souza’s verses. “I won’t be sorry/ And I won’t be silent/ I’m temporary/ I am an island,” she sings, her ownership of herself overcoming the pains that pervade the album.
There are points in life where the precipice feels furthest from our control—something De Souza faced in late 2024, as Hurricane Helene ravaged the East Coast of the United States. Though her recently finished album showed the buoyant joy of change, De Souza’s flooded home and destroyed belongings represent its potential tragic side. When not in the thick of clearing the mess and helping her community recover, she continued to return to music as a comfort, already having written another album worth of breathtaking songs. Even when the void seems darkest, De Souza leaps boldly—and on Precipice she soars through wild, uncharted territory with open eyes, a full heart, and gritted teeth, finding new beauty even further beyond.
“Child, Take Your Dark Memories
Like Seeds, And Plant Them Far From Here”
It’s virtually impossible to overstate how far GHOST has come since manifesting from the imagination of Tobias Forge in the early 21st century. Over the course of the nearly 20 years since its inception in Linköping, Sweden, GHOST has become so much more than Scandinavia’s foremost theatrical rock export. The achievements and accolades amassed by the GHOST discography include nearly 10 billion streams, five GRAMMY nominations (including a 2016 Best Metal Performance win for “Cirice”), an RIAA-certified platinum single (“Mary on a Cross”), an American Music Award and an iHeart Radio Music Award (both Rock Album wins for 2022’s international #1 charting IMPERA). GHOST’s ambitions have only risen with the exponential growth of its profile, recently resulting in the highest grossing hard rock cinema event in North American history (the band’s feature film debut RITE HERE RITE NOW). As GHOST continues to strengthen its bond with the world-spanning legion of kindred souls that commune with the band and each other at its vaunted live rituals, it’s no exaggeration to describe GHOST — and the uniquely intense connection formed with the faithful who find refuge in the personae, lore and world Forge has created — as a singular global phenomenon.
“There Is Something Inside Me
And They Don’t Know If There Is A Cure”
Having spent the better part of the last few years enrapturing GHOST’s passionately devoted and ever-growing following throughout multiple legs of touring—a stretch of time spanning from before IMPERA’s March 2022 release through the U.S. finale that took place September 11-12, 2023 at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum (as documented in the aforementioned box office smash RITE HERE RITE NOW)—the next uncharted creative direction would prove to be an inward journey. This deeply introspective turn in Forge’s creative process would ultimately result in SKELETÁ: a collection of 10 new songs originating from and cutting as close to the bone as (in)humanly possible.
“And The Road That
Leads To Nowhere Is Long”
Produced by Gene Walker and mixed by Andy Wallace and Dan Malsch, GHOST’s sixth psalm, SKELETÁ, is its most unflinchingly introspective work to date. Where previous GHOST albums dealt largely with chronicling and/or observing outward facing subject matter—such as IMPERA’s meditations on the rise and fall of empires and its predecessor Prequelle’s evocations of the ravages of era-defining plagues—SKELETÁ’s lyrics render the distinct individual emotional vistas of each of its 10 songs in one-on-one fashion, at times as if in a dialogue with oneself in a mirror. The end result is a singular collection of timeless, universal sentiments, all filtered through a prism of a uniquely personal point of view. However, SKELETÁ is so much more than the sum of its tracklist. Its songs form a thematic arc that begins with the ascendant and anthemic “Peacefield,” then delves into progressively darker spiritual territory by way of the bittersweet melodies of “Lachryma,” demonically hooky first single “Satanized” and soul-searching epic ballad “Guiding Lights.”
“Where Ever I Go
You’re Always There
Riding Next To Me”
SKELETÁ’s second half charts a trajectory through this darkness, back to the unbridled optimism of its opening salvo. Beacons along the way include “Cenotaph” with its notion of existence transcending the physical grave, while the ominous portents of “Marks Of The Evil One” are hailed with a deceptively joyous “There! There!” refrain, and “Umbra” takes a decidedly carnal turn. “Excelsis” concludes the journey in divine fashion, its deceptively mournful intonations actually conveying a promise of eternal life—cementing the song cycle’s overarching theme of reassurance that all dark ages, mourning periods and the like eventually come to an end.
“Come With Me
To The Rainbow’s End”
SKELETÁ will be brought to life over the course of GHOST’s impending SKELETOUR WORLD TOUR 2025. The most ambitious incarnation of the GHOST live ritual to date, the tour recently revealed a first wave of more than 55 dates—including a historic first-ever headlining show at New York’s hallowed Madison Square Garden—with more to be announced. With tickets already selling at a brisk pace, the SKELETOUR WORLD TOUR 2025 live ritual experience promises to expand the GHOST community to attract its largest and most diverse audiences to date. From lifelong disciples to the curious uninitiated first-timers to the outcasts and others who find solace in the ritual, all are welcome to escape the travails of daily life and to become one with the phantasmagoric spectacle that moved THE LOS ANGELES TIMES to rave “As far as live acts go, they’re one of the best in the business” and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL to anoint the band as “the next generation of arena stars.”
Continuing to feed their reputation as one of the hardest-working bands in indie rock, fuzzed-out post-punk trio Vundabar have announced a new record, Surgery and Pleasure, out March 7 via Loma Vista Recordings. They’re sharing a new single “Spades” with a video today, and will kick off a spring 2025 tour with a hometown show in Boston on release day.
“Surgery And Pleasure is a more mature synthesis of all the stuff we’ve explored before,” Vundabar singer/guitarist Brandon Hagen says of the album’s fusion of old-school Vundabar energy with a newfound muscularity and slickness. “In a way it feels like a return. It’s grownup Vundabar.”
While Surgery And Pleasure was born from a difficult period of his life, Hagen didn’t want the record to wallow. “I was really ready to be done moaning,” he cracks. The music is rarely reflective or lachrymose. Instead, it’s one of Vundabar’s most visceral and urgent collections to date. Hagen sought an “extreme version of something very everyday and common.” He wrote many of the songs so that it could just as easily be about someone dying, the end of a relationship, or some unidentified something irrevocably breaking. All of it was interchangeable, leading to the same conclusion. “I was dealing with how to accept that change is inevitable,” Hagen explains. “These things can’t be fought. It’s about acceptance and empathy.”
New single ‘Spades’ explores these themes, “concerning the precarity of modern life,” Hagen says. “Something universally accepted as normal, a game of cards, takes on a more dire edge and becomes paranoia ridden as the stakes of the game become evident. We carry on playing in a state of semi denial as the air grows thinner. Reality becomes ever more tenuous and it’s unclear if a spade is a card or a shovel, unclear whether we should be dealing a hand or digging a hole.”
After years of self-releasing, Vundabar recently signed to esteemed label Loma Vista Recordings for their sixth full-length, joining the ranks of artists such as Soccer Mommy, Denzel Curry, Sleater Kinney, Manchester Orchestra, Killer Mike and Iggy Pop. They announced they would be joining the label last year with the release of their single and video ‘I Got Cracked’, followed by a second single and video, ‘Life Is a Movie’, both of which appear on Surgery and Pleasure.
Formed by Brandon Hagen (guitar, vocals) and Drew McDonald (drums), and later joined by Zack Abramo (bass), Vundabar have always been imbued with a fiercely independent spirit, their sound forged in mythical underground Brooklyn venues such as Silent Barn and Shea Stadium. Musically, they exist almost as a fever dream of many genres, melding arty post-punk, tangled math-rock, sun-dappled surf guitar, shimmering jangle-pop and grunge scuzz into sharp, compact songs that have netted them a wide fan base and a reputation for a killer live show.
THE AUDITORIUM VOL. 1
words by Dan Charnas
An artist’s creative peak isn’t always located in the heat of their first years. Most true masters’ skills and vision actually strengthen with time. But hip-hop doesn’t often get a chance to witness this evolution, in part because established artists don’t always get support in a genre obsessed with the new, and sadly because too many don’t live long enough to even have a chance to receive it. Then there are the few, joyous cases where we get to see our heroes grow into their full superhero powers. That is the experience of listening to Common and Pete Rock—the legendary MC and pioneering producer—on their first full-length collaboration, The Auditorium, Vol. 1 (Loma Vista Recordings).
Check the stats: Pete Rock’s production has propelled million-selling, chart-topping, award-winning hits from Nas, Public Enemy, The Notorious B.I.G., and Kanye West to Mick Jagger, Mary J. Blige, Madonna, and Lady Gaga; and his signature style—collage compositions imbued with complex harmony and melody—makes him one of the most influential and innovative figures in the history of popular music. Multi-hyphenate rapper-actor-producer-author-activist Common has created an unparalleled body of work: 15 landmark albums, standout performances in films from “American Gangster” and “Just Wright” to “Selma” and “The Hate U Give,” and most recently on Broadway performing in “Between Riverside and Crazy” and coproducing the revival of “The Wiz.” His Primetime Emmy, three Grammys, and Oscar for Best Original Song mean that Common has now transcended his EGO and is already shopping for a T that fits.
Yet this producer and MC, though they traveled in the same creative circles and soul group for three decades, collaborated only two times—on a notable song they made together in 1994 and another in 1998. Given their independent, interstellar trajectories, there was no reason their paths should cross, until Common’s course was altered by the gravity of a big event: the Hip-Hop 50th Anniversary concert at Yankee Stadium in August 2023. Common was a featured performer, but his epiphany came as a fan: “I stood out in that crowd and watched for five-and-a-half hours. I’ve never done that in my life. Just to see EPMD, to see Lil Kim, to see Mobb Deep, Snoop, Ice Cube, Run DMC, Nas, Lauryn Hill, and Fat Joe. It just made me realize how much I love the art form. It made me want to rap.”
The next month, Common found himself in Pete Rock’s studio north of New York City. “We caught up with each other and I just started playing music,” says Pete. In those first moments, the two highly-favored sons of hip-hop realized they were coming from a similar place of gratitude and enthusiasm for the genre. Common recalls thinking: “We don’t have to reach to make it sound like a throwback. We don’t have to reach to try to make it sound like it’s new and young. We’ve just got to be who we are and do what we love.” Then came Common’s second, more urgent realization: “I can’t wait to leave here and go write.”
“We just became glued to each other,” Pete says. “The recording process wasn’t long at all. It took about a couple of weeks to get the first five songs done. And the way we finished it was heroic.” And though Pete experienced the pace of their work as brisk, Common remembers the time as one of intense deliberation. “It took time for Pete to dig into these records and find the right sample,” Common says. “Sometimes he would hook it up right then and there, but sometimes he waited ‘till he felt it was the right time and the right expression. And it’s that time, that care, that diligence that comes through in the music that we make.” Common wrote steadily, recording his vocals in the familiar sanctum of Electric Lady Studios. Several more visits, a back and forth of ideas over text and phone, and the 15 tracks of The Auditorium, Vol. 1 coalesced. “I was reaching for the euphoria of what we did in the 90s, but updated,” Pete says. “The feel of the album is 90s, but it’s not 90s at all. It’s new music.”
Cratedigging, making beats, writing verses—these rituals of youth were exercised with an adult’s patience and control. As they worked, Pete and Common recognized the things they do better now. Pete has become less judgmental of his own work in a way that allows him to try different sounds and structures: “Some things you may have to just get used to the more you hear it.” For Common, it’s simple: “I’m better at figuring out, ‘Okay, what will make this song a song?’ I’m better at songwriting now because I’m a better musician. And because music is not my only outlet for creating art and making a living, I’m more free and more confident. Then I can enjoy the music I’m making and do it with love.”
Love is the message, from the opening fanfare of “Dreamin’” to the sunset of “Now and Then.” Pete repeats sonic feats, beat after beat: launching Curtis Mayfield’s languid, live rendition of “We’ve Only Just Begun” into a rollicking groove in “We’re On Our Way”; turning bits and bytes of Brazilian funk into jams like “Fortunate”; chopping baroque harpsichord and jazz piano into night-and-day music beds for “Stellar” and “When The Sun Shines”; casting down the words of Shan and Rakim like lightning bolts from vengeful Gods over skull-cracking drums in “Wise Up” and “All Kind of Ideas.” In an album with no skips, you can hear the vinyl crackle, but the master manipulator of music and puzzle-solver of sampling is mos def hi-def, not “lo-fi,” whatever that is.
The great joy of listening to Common rhyme has always been that you get to watch his mind work, while he makes that work look like play. His lyrical leaps and complex connections could yield flowcharts and Venn diagrams. Listen for the opening lines of “Chi Town Do It,” a chance meeting that becomes a nest of nested references. Listen to how Common cruises through the alphabet in the second verse of “This Man’s Arms” (“E’ase up, I don’t F with em cause it’s G’s up”), and then in the third recounts a performance early in his career, downloading “hard Drives on Lakeshore” for a grateful audience while he struggles to “to pay for the rent and the parking tickets/while they pay for tickets.” Listen for his description of the three wise men in “Wise Up” a few lines before he calls himself the “Solomon of Common men.” Pay attention to the sequence of double meaning in “Stellar” (meteor and planet, planet and rock, rock and Gibraltar) and the triple entendre of “pipes” in “When The Sun Shines Again.” This man—who is at this point “fucking with three decades” in his career “like an orgy”—is not playing with you. Only someone who’s read a million movie scripts could open a song with “Rack focus to the Black Moses.” His own favorite moment in an album of favored moments is the first verse of “Now and Then,” wherein he speaks of Gods and Resurrections, and of “learning like Sha’Carri/Long nails in our bodies, they try to crucify us/Don’t know if Lake Michigan can purify us.” Common adds: “It’s fun, but it’s spiritual. It’s got layers to it.”
Common is not only the prodigious free-association poet, but consistently the intrepid explorer of his own emotional world. On that note, Common delivers a piece of work nothing short of a startling with “Lonesome,” which begins with some self-reflection that’s better than tea from any tabloid or TMZ (“Every love I’m in/My endless love always comes to an end”) but ends as a conversation with his adult daughter, Omoye, now a lawyer, about encountering her own challenges as she moves through life. “I wanted to talk to her as a young woman who needs to know that her father is there for her.” There has never been anything like it in hip-hop.
The Auditorium, Vol. 1 is the product of one producer and one MC, another rarity in today’s music marketplace where high-profile projects are usually occasion for a cavalcade of stars. Here, the few featured guests are chosen with requisite mindfulness. “I’m only going to work with people who are going to elevate the song,” says Common. To that end, superstar and fellow Chicagoan Jennifer Hudson lifts a refrain to the heavens in “There is a God”; and the chorus for “Everything Is So Grand” was written and sung by PJ, whom Common calls “one of the greatest writers I’ve ever been around.” Then there is the stealthy omnipresence of Common’s longtime collaborator Bilal, whose sonic shapeshifting powers approach the supernatural. “Bilal is one of those vocalists who can make his voice do all these different things. In ‘So Many People,’ you’d think he’s the sample.” De La Soul’s Posdnuos laid a dozen bars of gold on “When The Sun Shines Again.” And then there’s Pete’s turn on the mic in “All Kind of Ideas,” which is not so much a verse as it is a murder. After the recording, another longtime comrade came through: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, offering helpful advice on the album sequence.
But the most important working relationship on the album was the one Common and Pete Rock forged, not a foregone conclusion for two famous figures used to calling the musical shots. “There were a couple of times when me and Common bumped heads like, ‘Yo, man, I don’t know about that one.’” They were usually small things — the timing of a particular lyric, for example. “I had to sit and live with his idea, and he had to sit and live with my idea. And then we just said, ‘You know what? We’re going to work through this because what we’re doing is nothing less than great. If we disagree with each other, we’ll find a common ground.’ And I enjoyed that a lot.” Common echoes the sentiment: “It taught me a lot about being in a group in many ways because all the decisions are not just mine. I love teammates, but I had to get used to it on a musical level. Most producers that I worked with would just create the music, but it wasn’t a collaboration where it was like, ‘Okay, the we both need to like the title or the album cover.’ But Pete cares about his music a whole lot. He is strong-willed because the work needs to be at the level that he feels is right. And I’m like, I’m with that.” It is a mutual admiration, says Pete: “Lemme tell you how sharp that dude is when it come to the music and the hip-hop. He remembers lyrics, he remembers hooks, he remembers everything.”
Pete continues: “The understanding we had as two grown men that’s been doing this for so long was, ‘Here’s the goal where we’re trying to reach. Do you think we can reach that?’ And I’m like, ‘Of course we could do that, with your history mind and my history. That’s the least that can be accomplished.’”
A victory for the art of MCing and the mad science of sampled music, The Auditorium, Vol. 1 succeeds because it accomplishes what its makers hoped for. Says Common: “I want this to be taken as a complete piece of work, a complete piece of art, and for it to exist in different time periods.”
The Auditorium, Vol. 1 is the past, present, and future happening all at once. In any decade, an absolute banger. Separate or together, they are in top form. And they’re already working on Vol. 2.
Meet HiTech, the dynamic trio recently signed to Loma Vista Recordings (Denzel Curry, Killer Mike). A mix of Ghettotech, house, Rap & Miami base, HiTech are a mission to destroy stereotypical “bottle service” club culture by bringing raw energy, humour, dancing and moshpits back to electronic music. In the process, they’ve become one of the most talked about live acts since their debut last summer. Comprised of MCs/producers King Milo, Milf Melly and DJ 47Chops, HiTech released their albums HiTech & Detwat last year on FXHE label, hitting The Fader’s Top 10 and Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2023 lists, racking up fans including Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, Pink Siifu, Show Me The Body & Crystalmess and playing much lauded shows everywhere including Berghain, The Lot, Rinse, The Face’s Rated and across PFW. Hilarious and raunchy, HiTech are also outspoken and principled. With a summer full of festivals and news that HiTech and Detwat are being re-released on streaming services this summer, HiTech are bringing Detroit back to the global stage.
Sophie Allison has always written candidly about her life, making Soccer Mommy one of indie rock’s most interesting and beloved artists of the last decade. Allison has used Soccer Mommy’s songs as a vehicle to sort through the thoughts and encounters that inevitably come with the reality of growing up. After all, Soccer Mommy began as a bedroom-to-Bandcamp exercise with teenage Allison posting her plaintive songs as demos. Over the years, though, she has often enhanced that sound, using the endless production possibilities, newly at her fingertips, to outstrip singer-songwriter stereotypes. The records would start with songwriting’s kernels of truth, and she would then imagine all the unexpected shapes they could take. Every Soccer Mommy record has felt like a surprise.
On Soccer Mommy’s fourth album, the tender but resolute Evergreen, Allison is again writing about her life. But that life’s different these days: Since making her previous album, 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, Allison experienced a profound and also very personal loss. New songs emerged from that change, unflinching and sometimes even funny reflections on what she was feeling. (Speaking of funny, this is a Soccer Mommy album, so there’s an ode to Allison’s purple-haired wife in the game Stardew Valley, too.) These songs were, once again, Allison’s way to sort through life, to ground herself. She wanted them to sound that way, too, to feel as true to the demos—raw and relatable, unvarnished and honest—as possible. The songwriting would again lead where the production would follow. Nothing overindulgent, everything real.
Evergreen is the absorbing result, an 11-track seesaw of articulate feeling that suggests Allison is driving you through the streets of her native Nashville, the Tennessee sun bright as she plays you a tape of songs she cut to document those very dark days. Eschewing the experimental production of Sometimes, Forever, Evergreen mirrors that earlier self-made work, but recasts it with a sense of cinematic scale. There’s the beautiful acoustic billow of opener “Lost,” a tormented thesis that still manages to break through the most oppressive clouds. There’s the haze and sway of “Some Sunny Day,” where the promise of reunion is the only palliative for the vertigo of loss. And above the muted jangle of “Dreaming of Falling,” she summons momentary glimpses of madness—waking terrors, sunlight burning the skin, everyday experiences that begin to frame the black hole of forever. “Half of my life is behind me,” she sings, chords wafting like low clouds, “and the other has changed somehow.”
Allison began writing Evergreen without really knowing it. At home between sessions for Sometimes, Forever, she penned “Changes,” an acoustic ballad about what we lose with time, about how even our most familiar and important lodestars will warp, fade, disappear. She set it aside, knowing little about its fate other than it didn’t need the complex electronic textures of what she was then making. But as those sessions ended and she began to write her way through loss, “Changes” seemed like the skeleton key, its mantra of inescapable impermanence putting the rest of the songs into context. Allison most often wrote quickly, verses and choruses piling up after months of contemplating all that had gone missing. A frank glimpse into nostalgia and the troubles it can bring, “Thinking of You” came together in 10 minutes. “How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” she asks. “Lost,” like many of the songs that follow, didn’t take much more. The goal was always to make snapshots of a moment’s feelings, to portray the sadness or beauty, survival or hope that bobs there in the wake of loss.
This became the working directive for capturing Evergreen, too—serving those moments, framing them without obfuscating the emotional burdens or gifts that anchored them, to let the lyrics and moods speak for themselves. Allison rendezvoused in Atlanta with producer Ben H. Allen III (Deerhunter, Animal
Collective, Youth Lagoon, Belle and Sebastian) and told him she wanted to elide synthesizers and digital flourishes this time, favoring acoustic guitars, rich drums, and interweaving flutes. They built basic tracks for half the album as a pair in Allen’s Maze Studios before ushering in her touring band to add more. There were real flutes and real strings, just as Allison had imagined. As the layers and ideas mounted, Allen and Allison focused on peeling them back, on leaving subtle touches that never crowded the sentiments. The songs retain the spirit of the demos, candid and direct.
Evergreen animates Allison’s reckonings with loss through sounds that can conjure a sad-eyed daydream or an ecstatic weekend escape. Allison sings to shadows and ghosts during “M,” the band shuffling and swaying as she communes with open air. She recognizes that staying so devoted to something that’s gone could be a problem, but for right now, it’s the best she’s got. The delightfully crunchy “Driver” is a testament to Allison’s spaciness and indecision; it’s a cheeky song about someone who is willing to deal with those flaws, to love you in spite of them. The Janus-faced “Salt in Wound” functions as the record’s thematic and musical nexus—graceful but gnarled as it balances dual needs to be honest about what hurts and press on, anyway. Indeed, despite Allison’s aim to render instants in full, repeated phrases and concepts bubble up throughout Evergreen, the songs questioning and answering one another in the tussles of past becoming present becoming future.
Allison assembled Evergreen as she crept into her late 20s, that tenuous time where the travails of adulthood suddenly look much closer than the playground of childhood. And during the three-year span since finishing Sometimes, Forever and beginning Evergreen, Allison learned loss is not a monolith. Some days are brutal and others are beautiful, as you take what you have gained from someone who is no longer here and try to carry it ahead, a talisman for whatever may come. “She cannot fade/She is so evergreen,”Allison sings in the devastating but strangely affirming title finale, strings sighing beneath the brush of her acoustic guitar. It feels like a lucid note to self. And that, after all, is where these songs started—Allison, writing songs for herself that documented what it was she was going through, just as she’s always done.
DENZEL CURRY’S FORTHCOMING KING OF THE MISCHIEVOUS SOUTH VOLUME 2 FINDS HIM PRESENTING A SEQUEL TO THE PROJECT, AND BRINGING BACK THE SOUND, THAT HELPED LAUNCH HIS CAREER. WHILE THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF KING OF THE MISCHIEVOUS SOUTH WAS PERFORMED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HIS RAVEN MIYAGI PERSONA, A NAME BESTOWED UPON HIM BY RAIDER KLAN FOUNDER SPACEGHOSTPURRP, VOLUME 2 FINDS CURRY OPERATING UNDER HIS BIG ULTRA PERSONA — AN ELEVATED VERSION OF RAVEN MIYAGI THAT IS BRAGADOCIOUS AND REVELS IN THE SUCCESS THAT CURRY HAS SEEN OVER THE LAST DECADE OF HIS CAREER. CREATING KING OF THE MISCHIEVOUS SOUTH VOLUME 2 HAS BEEN A GOAL OF CURRY’S FOR SOME TIME, THOUGH HIS EARLIEST ATTEMPTS TO DO SO ULTIMATELY MORPHED INTO OTHER PROJECTS, NAMELY HIS 2016 ALBUM IMPERIAL AND 2020’S 13LOOD 1N + 13LOOD OUT. IT WASN’T UNTIL HE STOPPED OVERLY ATTEMPTING TO CREATE VOLUME 2 THAT ITS SONGS STARTED TO EMERGE NATURALLY.
GIVEN THE PROJECT’S SOUND, WHICH PAYS HOMAGE TO THE GREAT MUSICAL HERITAGES OF THE SOUTH — FROM MEMPHIS TO HOUSTON AND CURRY’S OWN SOUTH FLORIDA — ITS FEATURES INCLUDE THE REGION’S GREATS, BOTH OLD AND NEW, AS WELL AS OTHERS WHOSE STYLE IS INDEBTED TO THE SOUTH’S MUSICAL LEGACY. FEATURES INCLUDE FELLOW FORMER RAIDER KLAN MEMBER KEY NYATA, MEMPHIS STALWARTS JUICY J AND PROJECT PAT, TEXAS’ MAXO KREAM, THAT MEXICAN OT AND MIKE DIMES, NORTH CAROLINA’S TIACORINE, ATLANTA’S 2 CHAINZ AND KENNY MASON AND SOUTH FLORIDA’S SKI MASK THE SLUMP GOD AND PLAYTHATBOIZAY, AS WELL AS ASAP FERG AND ASAP ROCKY, AMONG OTHERS. THE PROJECT MORE BROADLY AND THE INTENTIONAL INCLUSION OF ROCKY AND FERG IS CURRY’S ATTEMPT TO SHOW WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN HAD RELATIONSHIPS NOT SOURED WITH SPACEGHOSTPURRP, FULFILLING THE PROMISE THAT EXISTED AT THE RISE OF THEIR RESPECTIVE CAREERS IN THE EARLY 2010S.
WITH ALL OF THE OTHERWORLDLY ADVENTURES DENZEL HAS TAKEN LISTENERS ON OVER THE COURSE OF HIS LAST FEW CONCEPTUALLY-DRIVEN ALBUMS, THIS PROJECT SERVES AS A SHOWCASE FOR THE FUN, SPONTANEITY AND TECHNICAL MASTERY THAT HAS MADE HIM ONE OF RAP’S MOST IN-DEMAND TALENTS OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST DECADE.
Pacific Highway Music, the new album from Skegss, reintroduces the Australian band as the duo of Ben Reed (vocals, guitar) and Jonny Lani (drums) presenting their most masterful and fully realized work to date. The Byron Bay-bred band’s third full-length—the follow-up to their acclaimed sophomore album Rehearsal, which debuted at #1 on their homeland Australia ARIA Albums Chart and led to their first-ever Coachella appearance and a sold-out U.S. tour—brings a newly heightened creative energy to every aspect of their explosive yet introspective form of rock. Centered on Reed’s frenetic and playful lyricism, Pacific Highway Music ultimately finds Skegss exploring the more complicated elements of the human experience with sincerity, soul, and unabashed joie de vivre.
Skegss’ second full-length for U.S.-based label Loma Vista Recordings, Pacific Highway Music was created following the departure of co-founder Toby Cregan in 2023, and with producer Paul Butler (Devendra Banhart, Michael Kiwanuka, St. Paul & the Broken Bones). The album expands on the combustible riffs and euphoric rhythms of Rehearsal (an LP whose triumphs also include a Rolling Stone Australia Awards nomination for Best Record), but also finds Reed and Lani embracing a more experimental and free-flowing approach to its sonic architecture. “In the past I’d deprived myself of using things like synthesizers, not realizing how much texture and atmosphere they can add to the music,” says Reed. “Working with Paul felt like letting our guard down and completely opening up in terms of what these songs could be.”
Recorded at two iconic L.A. studios (The Village and Topanga Canyon’s Fivestar Studios), Pacific Highway Music partly owes its wildly unpredictable sound to the period of time Skegss spent cutting demos at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree with studio owner Dave Catching (a musician/engineer known for his work with Queens of the Stone Age, Mark Lanegan, and more). “Sometimes it’s hard to explain what you hear in your imagination, but Dave was incredible at deciphering my rambling and finding exactly the right guitar to get the sound I wanted,” says Reed. “We were in the desert during a meteor shower so we’d jam all day and watch the sky at night, and the whole experience felt like magic as far as discovering new sounds for the album.”
Lead single “Spaceman” is a potent introduction to Pacific Highway Music, providing an immediate conduit to the expansive state of mind that sparked the album’s creation. Slow-building and strangely majestic, the gorgeously fuzzed-out track channels both weariness and wonder as Reed contemplates infinity and the relative inconsequence of our existence. “I don’t think we even have the capacity to comprehend the fact that the universe goes on forever, but there’s something beautiful about that,” says Reed. “It’s fun to go out walking at night and go on a little adventure in your mind, asking yourself those questions about what we’re all doing here.”
Pacific Highway Music sustains an unstoppable velocity even as the band confronts what Reed refers to as “the rollercoaster of emotions that come with being human.” On “High Beaming,” bouncy grooves and exuberant gang vocals merge in a tender tribute to the ones who keep us going when the world gets overwhelming. “I wrote that song as a thank-you to my girlfriend for how she helps me see things in a new way whenever I’m in a negative headspace,” says Reed. “Stuck In Cheyenne,” written after a mid-tour blizzard left Skegss stranded for days at a Wyoming truck stop, arrives as a gloriously punchy meditation on psychic inertia. And on “Out Of My Head,” Reed brings his gravelly vocals to a heavy-hearted track spotlighting his gift for spinning nature imagery into lyrics with a visceral impact (e.g., “Like a warm wind from the west/Smoothing out the ocean/I need one to blow into my head/And smooth out my emotions”). “Sometimes when you can’t stop dwelling on things from the past that you regret, the best you can do is let that door close instead of continuing to guilt-trip yourself,” says Reed. “It’s a song about making the decision to move forward, and recognizing that those battles can help you become stronger.”
Reed lists punk libertines like Iggy Pop and underground artists like Deepakalypse among his inspirations, and first immersed himself writing songs after taking guitar lessons from a neighbor at the age of 11. “I was always fascinated by music, but once I started playing I became obsessed with making up stuff of my own,” he says. As he broadened his musical palette with the help of surf-movie soundtracks, Reed began self-recording in his bedroom and creating entire comic books to accompany the collections of original songs he burned onto CDs to hand out at school. In 2013 he moved from his hometown of Forster to Byron Bay, where he reconnected with his childhood friend Lani and co-founded Skegss the following year. Although the band started out playing skate parks and dive bars, they quickly ascended through the scene and made their debut at Splendour in the Grass within a year, famously drawing a crowd of 20,000 for their opening-slot set. Skegss’ 2018 full-length debut My Own Mess climbed the charts in Australia, earned an ARIA Award nomination for Best Rock Album, and gained widespread recognition in the U.S.—a major accomplishment that soon found the band selling out such famed venues as The Roxy in L.A. and New York City’s Bowery Ballroom.
In choosing a title, Skegss honor their roots by nodding to the Australian coastal road they’ve driven on countless of times (on tour and on frequent surf trips), while also reflecting the band’s deepened sense of purpose. “I’ve spent a lot of my life driving on the Pacific Highway, and most of the time it puts me in a bit of hypnotic state,” says Reed. “With this album I tried to be as honest as possible, but I also wanted to create the kind of songs that give you that same feeling—songs where you can shut your eyes, let your imagination take over, and drift off into another world that exists only in your mind.”
Andrew Bird presents his take on the Great American Songbook. The renowned artist, songwriter and virtuosic musician replaces saxophones with violin solos, and showcases his signature vocal prowess as he reimagines standards by Rodgers & Hart, Ellington, Cole Porter, Lerner & Loewe and more. It’s a record that Bird’s had in him for nearly 30 years, yet after earning GRAMMY nominations, becoming an icon of indie rock and folk, acting in a prestige drama, scoring a Judd Apatow film, and collaborating with everyone from Phoebe Bridgers and Fiona Apple to Esperanza Spalding and The Muppets, Sunday Morning Put-On is unlike anything he has done before. While his music has always served as a sharp, singular reflection of the present, the album sees Andrew Bird travel back in time to his formative 20s:
He was living in an old apartment hotel in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, surrounded by retired Jesuit priests and nuns from the nearby university. Most every Saturday, he would stay up listening to a local, late-night radio broadcast that played rare 78s of old blues, jazz and gospel, falling asleep then waking up to a morning show focused on the “Golden Era” of music’s 1930s and 40s. Those nights and mornings have inf luenced Bird’s work in ways both conscious and subliminal ever since, and now with the Andrew Bird Trio featuring Ted Poor on drums and Alan Hampton on bass, plus guitar from Jeff Parker and piano by Larry Goldings he transcends nostalgia, and pushes his limits as an improviser. Bird’s voice and strings together act like a reed instrument, captured completely live in southern California’s legendary Valentine Studios (Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, Beach Boys). The sound of longing and depth in his voice has never been heard so clearly, until now.
“Under the jazz banner we are blessed with some of the greatest moments in the history of music,” says Bird. “Once I had some distance between myself and this time when I was under its spell, I wanted to immerse myself in it again.” Think of this record as an homage to mid century, small group jazz, or just think of it as Andrew Bird plays music he likes.
The L.A. industrial-rock band HEALTH’s new album RAT WARS is the most violent yet vulnerable LP of their career. It is somehow fitting that such a brutal collection of songs is at the same time their most comprehensive artistic statement.
Meticulously aggressive production detail collides with painfully personal confessions and a strange savage grace is paired with icy gallows humor… surprisingly it’s still fun as hell.
RAT WARS joins the lineage of groundbreaking heavy acts like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, which re-drew the borders between metal, electronic and pop music. It also speaks directly to the band’s young, fervent online subculture.
It could be The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency.
Written during the most emotionally trying period of the band’s life, the album builds on their chaotic yet re-invigorating pandemic years. In that time, HEALTH cut dozens of tracks with heroes and inheritors like Nine Inch Nails, Lamb of God, 100 Gecs, Poppy, and Pertubator on DISCO4.
RAT WARS captures all the fury and ambition their LP’s have until now aspired to. It’s their boldest statement on the insanity and the insipidness of contemporary life.
The arena-rock grandeur of “DEMIGODS” segues into the jittery techno of “HATEFUL” (co-written with Spanish EBSM artist Sierra) and the merciless gabber-thrash of “CRACK METAL.” “CHILDREN OF SORROW” (with guitar from Lamb of God’s Willie Adler) and “SICKO” (which samples Godflesh’s “Like Rats”) slink with ‘90s goth menace. “ASHAMED” is corrupted R&B pop, while “DSM-V” is for peak time at the blood rave.
Born in the heady grime of downtown L.A.’s noise scene, singer-guitarist Jake Duzsik, bassist-producer John Famiglietti and drummer BJ Miller set out to be divisive as they sliced bare fragments of songs out of backfiring guitar pedals. But by 2009’s GET COLOR, everyone knew this band was something different.
They played major global festivals like Coachella and Primavera Sound, and after a brief detour to score the groundbreaking Rockstar games title Max Payne 3, they returned in 2015 with the long-awaited DEATH MAGIC.
That LP fully harnessed digital production tools, grafted into their shrieking noise and avant-garde soundscapes. The album became an entry point for a new generation of fans, finding an audience as easily in goth clubs as in bedroom production studios.
2019’s VOL.4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR won over heavy music fans with its thrash riffs dissolving into ambient melancholy and hip hop beats, while the lockdown era, two-part DISCO4 fully explored collaborative songwriting with peers from across metal, rap, electronic, and indie rock.
This long and willfully unconventional career arc has coalesced in RAT WARS. They are, at last, a band that is comfortable with their own uncomfortableness.
Killer Mike is celebrating his birthday by formally launching the countdown for his new solo album MICHAEL via the release of “DON’T LET THE DEVIL (feat EL-P & thankugoodsir).” MICHAEL marks the celebrated MCs first solo project since 2012’s critically lauded R.A.P. Music and serves as an introduction to the totality of Michael Render, a lifelong rap fiend whose consciousness is seeped in the sounds of community that raised him – multiple eras of southern rap flows, Sunday church service, and barbershop discourse. Speaking on his most autobiographical and independent album to date, Mike states “RTJ is the X-Men, this is my Logan.” For the new single Mike linked with his Run The Jewels partner in rhyme EL-P, trading verses over a lilting soul loop produced by No I.D., EL-P, & Little Shalimar. “My favorite group (US) with my favorite producers! It’s our 10 year anniversary and MICHAEL is an origin story so I wanted to start w/ El.”
“DON’T LET THE DEVIL” arrives in the wake of RTJ announcing a 10 year anniversary run this Fall, the release of their collaborative sneakers with Nike this week, and Mike’s recent appearance at SXSW, where he performed an intimate career-spanning show at Stubb’s flanked by a choir, and previewed several new songs that are expected to appear on the Atlanta MC’s new album (read more here). He further brought the album to life at a private listening event in NYC this past Monday, where a couple hundred attendees crowded into St. Ann's & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn to hear Mike present the album in his own words.
The single was preceded last year by “RUN (ft. Young Thug)” and “TALK’N THAT SHIT!,” his first batch of solo material since linking up with El-P to form Run The Jewels in 2013, who have gone on to create four fanatically received albums and achieved near cultural ubiquity. Mike has also frequently surfaced as a cultural commentator in high regard, from his own shows Love and Respect and Trigger Warning (Netflix), to regular appearances on Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Real Time with Bill Maher, to his stint as a campaign surrogate for Bernie Sanders, to viral moments addressing the public in the wake of the Ferguson verdict and the police killing of George Floyd. Last week he re-asserted his acting bonafides in a cameo on FX’s Dave, where the titular rapper agonizes over a perceived Twitter beef with Mike, adding to a growing acting CV that also included an appearance on the last season of Netflix’s Ozark.
EVERYWHERE FEBRUARY 9, 2024
Chelsea Wolfe’s latest album, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, is a rebirth in process. It’s about how such a moment connects to our past, our present, and our future. It’s a powerfully cathartic statement about cutting ties, as well as an important reminder that healing is cyclical and circular, and not a simple linear process. As Wolfe explains, “It’s a record about the past self reaching out to the present self reaching out to the future self to summon change, growth, and guidance. It’s a story of setting yourself free from situations and patterns that are holding you back, in order to become self-empowered. It’s an invitation to step into your authenticity.”
On She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She, there are references to shedding exoskeletons, to excommunication, and to permanent fissures. The liminal, the in-between, and the unseen are recurring characters. As Wolfe puts it, “like the dark moon, that void space can feel unpredictable and looming, but it also holds so much potential, mystery, and excitement.” Dense and minimal, raw and opulent, intimate and expansive, the production also breaks apart then rebuilds—samples of the band are cut and pasted back together, heavy guitars dissolve into trip-hop breaks; the vocal delivery is both hushed and soaring. As Wolfe sings in the blistering opener, “Whispers In The Echo Chamber,” she’s “twisting the old self into poetry.” (The same track finds her “bathing in the blood of who [she] used to be.”)
There’s an intimate, ASMR-like quality to the vocals on this album, delicate and detailed. Nothing feels straightforward, left to chance, or as expected. Wolfe said of She Reaches Out: “This album demanded to be lived.” Throughout, these vocals hold specific keys to meaning, and feel sculptural.
The initial songwriting was kept to a core of longtime collaborators, as Wolfe worked closely with multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm, along with drummer Jess Gowrie and guitarist Bryan Tulao. The songs were written and workshopped remotely from the spring of 2020 through the end of 2021 by Wolfe and these collaborators. In early 2022, she brought the work she had collected to producer and TV On The Radio co-founder Dave Sitek, who worked with the band to deconstruct the compositions, pushing the songs into uncharted waters where they were then transformed and reborn. The pieces found their final focus at the mixing console of Shawn Everett (Slowdive, SZA, Alvvays, the Killers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs); Everett and Wolfe worked to extract the fine details from the vocals, blending them into the lush sonic production world. Everett mixed in a sense of urgency and excitement, while still maintaining the delicate sections of its production.
This leap into the unknown shouldn’t be surprising: Wolfe has never been afraid to experiment, traverse genre, or invent her own hybrids. If you return to her 2010 debut, The Grime and the Glow, amongst the room-tone atmospherics, punk drums, dark melody, and Wolfe’s commanding voice you can already see the prototypical skeleton, a visionary scratchpad, for what would follow. An early approach to She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She’s pulsing electronics and break beats are there in 2013’s Pain Is Beauty. 2015’s Abyss established a space between folk and industrial and noise rock and metal. 2017’s Hiss Spun burrowed deeper into heaviness. Wolfe returned to her earlier, folkier beginnings on 2019’s Birth of Violence, which was recorded at home in Northern California, and links back to 2012’s acoustic collection of songs, Unknown Rooms.
Opener “Whispers in the Echo Chamber,” ties together a number of elements Wolfe has explored in the past, rolling in dynamic waves between minimal synth electronic and heavy, full-band moments, and refracted through a hall of mirrors. The explosive “House of Self-Undoing,” a song about Wolfe getting sober after the touring for her last album concluded, feels like electronica meets post-hardcore. Wolfe explains, “When you become sober after years of numbing out, you feel, deeply: the moments of joy are euphoric, and the moments of pain are more visceral. But it’s like a call to adventure, facing life fully present is exciting when you’ve spent half your life only half-present.” Wolfe describes the song as an underworld journey – this journey takes many forms.
The slow-burn “Everything Turns Blue” is an anthem about “finding yourself again after a long era of being part of something toxic,” she says. ”Making a split with someone after 10 years, 20 years, 30 years—there’s going to be some high highs and low lows as you begin to process it all.” The production here is deep, smoky, cavernous, and glitchy. Wolfe’s voice is raw, honest, and carries a weight with it, the feeling of burnout and also healing. “I’ve been living without you here/ and it’s alright/ I’d been looking for a way out a long time/ I’ve been living without you here and I can fight/ I’ve been living softly my whole life,” she sings. On this track, Wolfe asks another question central to She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She: “What do I have to do to heal you out of me?”
Closer “Dusk,” which opens smoky and sensual and ends as a towering psychedelic guitar shredder, sees an empire burning and dissipating, and a dusk before a new dawn. It’s a sentiment echoed throughout She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. On “Tunnel Lights,” a song that has a late-nite Twin Peaks feel until it cracks open into a miasmic swirl of analog and electric waves, is about, as Wolfe describes, “actually living instead of just ‘getting by,’ about waking up to the fact that you’ve been languishing in the dark and it’s time to start taking steps towards the lights that’ll guide you out of the tunnel-cave.”
At its core, She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is realizing the way forward is through, contemplating what must be cut and left behind, while also figuring out what lies ahead and what there is to discover once you get there. Wolfe guides us on that quest, asking us these questions as she asks herself the same. As the title of the album hints, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She is a reminder to look within, to remember that all the power you need resides there. Reach out to the selves, reach out to one other. Reach to the ancient and to the end of all things, to remember that the only time we truly have is now.
There is about grief the necessary aftertaste of dreaming. In the wake of sudden loss – a moment, a person, a way of being brought violently to an end – the thing lost is gone but not its outline, a strange unstable place in which festers all manner of strange unstable thinking. The rules of reality temporarily subside, and mourning makes of the world a negative space.
Plunged without warning into that space, Sleater-Kinney returns with Little Rope, one of the finest, most delicately layered records in the band’s nearly 30-year career. To call the album flawless feels like an insult to its intent – it careens headfirst into flaw, into brokenness, a meditation on what living in a world of perpetual crisis has done to us, and what we do to the world in return. On the surface, the album’s ten songs veer from spare to anthemic, catchy to deliberately hard-turning. But beneath that are perhaps the most complex and subtle arrangements of any Sleater-Kinney record, and a lyrical and emotional compass pointed firmly in the direction of something both liberating and terrifying: the sense that only way to gain control is to let it go.
In the Autumn of 2022, Carrie Brownstein received a call from Corin Tucker, who herself had just received a call from the American embassy in Italy. Years earlier, Brownstein listed Tucker as her emergency contact on a passport form, and while she had since changed her phone number, Tucker had not. The embassy staff were desperately trying to reach Brownstein. When they finally did, they told her what happened: While vacationing in Italy, Brownstein’s mother and stepfather had been in a car accident. Both were killed.
In the months that followed, Brownstein took solace in an act that felt deeply familiar – playing guitar. “I don’t think I’ve played guitar that much since my teens or early twenties,” she says. “Literally moving my fingers across the fretboard for hours on end to remind myself I was still capable of basic motor skills, of movement, of existing.”
As Brownstein and Tucker moved through the early aftermath of the tragedy, elements of what was to become the emotional backbone of Little Rope began to form – how we navigate grief, who we navigate it with, and the ways in which it transforms us. Sometimes the process of putting the songs together involved Tucker and Brownstein alone in a room with nothing more than a couple of guitars and amplifiers – a process unchanged since the band started recording in the mid-90s. Sometimes songs that started out quiet slowly transformed into something triumphant. Sometimes the triumphant ones turned out to be quiet songs in disguise.
The result is a collision of certainty and uncertainty that’s evident from the first few spare seconds of the record’s opening track, “Hell,” where over an agoraphobic expanse of tone and a trickle of chords, Little Rope’s emotional thesis statement begins to take form:
Hell don’t have no worries
Hell don’t have no past
Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path
It’s a restrained, controlled prologue, but control is fleeting. A few seconds later, well, all hell breaks loose.
That interplay of lyrical and musical moods gives the record an immense depth. Even the catchiest hooks are hiding something. The album’s second track, “Needlessly Wild,” starts out delicious, the single-syllable “wild” bending like taffy. But then the lyrics betray something a little more malicious, a little more marked by pain, and soon “I’m needlessly wild” festers into “I’m needless and wild, needless and wild.”
Time and again – on second, third, tenth listen – the songs on Little Rope begin to upend their initial impressions. The jangly, upbeat “Don’t Feel Right” camouflages an unshakable loneliness, a longing for something that’s never coming back. In “Hunt You Down,” the opening riff sounds a warning that smashes against a chorus delivered with a hint of deceptive sweetness: “The thing you fear the most will hunt you down” – a line Brownstein heard in an interview with a funeral director, said to him by a father preparing to bury his child.
One of the album’s standout tracks, “Say It Like You Mean It,” is an amalgam of so much of what the band does best – an unforgettable, unadorned riff backing a raw examination of a relationship coming apart, and the damage done by an insincere goodbye. It’s an exposed nerve ending of a song.
Little Rope also marks the first time the band has worked with Grammy Award-winning producer John Congleton.
“We’ve actually wanted to work with John for a long time, but it wasn’t until this record that the stars aligned and we made it happen,” says Tucker. Congleton’s fingerprints are all over the album – he built a lot of the atmospherics in songs such as “Hell” or “Six Mistakes,” which both started out as much more spare tracks. It was also Congleton who heard the Tucker’s first run at the vocals for “Say It Like You Mean It” needed rework, a piece of advice that at first didn’t land too well.
“I was fuming inside, but I decided to take the song home that night and think about it,” Tucker says. “I woke up in the middle of the night and a new vocal melody popped into my head, which I sang very quietly into my phone at 3 in the morning. The next day I came back into the studio and sang the new version, and it turned out John was right – the song needed that reworking to get at the emotional peak.”
In many ways, Little Rope unleashes one of Sleater-Kinney’s most potent weapons: the shattering emotional range of Tucker’s vocals. In an album so centered on the vulnerability required to face the world as it is, Tucker manages to find her way from composure to its utter absence, and what she conjures is a series of visceral turns, a sharper, heavier manifestation of a rawness that’s always been there, most notably on the band’s early landmark record, Dig Me Out. Perhaps the most unforgettable of these moments comes near the very end of the album, in the brilliant closing track, “Untidy Creature” – a song that almost didn’t make it onto the record, but ends up being the perfect coda, at once the biggest-sounding track on the record and its most lyrically intimate:
But there’s too much here that’s unspoken
And there’s no tomorrow in sight
Could you love me if I was broken
There’s no going back tonight
Then the chorus gives way, and in its place a deep, desperate wail that closes one of the most honest and soul-bearing albums by one of modern rock’s most vital bands.
Following their acclaimed 2021 album The Million Masks of God, Manchester Orchestra is back with The Valley of Vision, a brand new project that takes on the weighty themes of adulthood, faith and redemption through a wealth of fresh new sounds and textures. But if The Million Masks of God served as a cry for help – exploring a man’s encounter with the angel of death, inspired by frontman and songwriter Andy Hull’s reflections on grief as well as the battle with cancer faced by guitarist Robert McDowell’s father – The Valley of Vision offers a collective, cathartic expression of gratitude. Throughout the 27-minute album, you can almost feel the band take a giant exhale and then put its arms around you.
Continuing to push themselves into fascinating and immersive creative realms with each release has always been the mantra for Manchester Orchestra, and The Valley of Vision finds the band reinvigorated once again. Across the six-song salvo and VR film out March 10th, the band conjures a story that is further illuminated through a cinematic experience by writer-director Isaac Deitz, created with 3D-computed radiography technology.
Hull started writing and recording The Valley of Vision in the summer of 2021, sparking a spontaneous and new approach to releasing his band's music. “Making this was an exciting idea of what the future could be for us in terms of how we create.”
Hull was inspired to begin writing the record while rummaging around in his suitcase looking for his lyric notebook and instead found The Valley of Vision, a 1975 book of old Puritan prayers his mom had given to him the previous Christmas. “I realized it should be our title too, because to me, it meant you can’t see the forest for the trees, but you’re recognizing you’re in the valley, and you can eventually get out,” he says.
Sonically, those energies evoke places Manchester Orchestra has visited on prior albums without ever really setting up a permanent home. In fact, there’s not much guitar at all on The Valley of Vision, and Andy Prince’s bass operates in sub-synth frequencies rarely utilized before. In other instances, drum parts by Tim Very were excised from one song and repurposed in other places they weren’t originally intended to go. The whole feeling is one of peacefulness, even zen — perhaps because recording sessions at a converted manor in Muscle Shoals, Ala., were “almost a complete abandonment of all the instruments we’re used to using,” Hull says.
“None of these songs were written with the band being in the same room in a live setting,” he continues. “They were really like science experiments that started from the bottom and were added to gradually over time, to catch the vibe of each one.”
Opener “Capital Karma” and “Quietly” are both songs Hull composed via his idiosyncratic self- taught methods on piano, which involve him physically writing notes on the keys to remind himself what he’s actually playing. “The Way” is a beautifully atmospheric, piano-and-beats-powered ballad, which Hull credits Million Masks producers Ethan Gruska and Catherine Marks with helping him shape after struggling for years with how to present it.
Elsewhere, the uplifting “Lose You Again” is the first Manchester Orchestra song in a long time that could be played with acoustic guitars around a campfire, while “Letting Go” threads wisps of emotive, effects-drenched vocals through gorgeous shimmers of sound.
“We decided, let’s live in that feeling,” Hull says. “When we tried to add anything that took us out of it, it started to feel contrived and forced. We try to listen to our instincts when it comes to that. As far as just going for some of the sounds, we’re intrigued by doing things the wrong way or attempting things we haven’t done before and getting inspired by them.”
Following her inaugural Coachella performances, Zambian-born Botswana-raised poet and rapper, Sampa The Great today ushers in a new era with the release of “Lane”, featuring Florida rapper and labelmate, Denzel Curry. “Lane” is the first single Sampa the Great is releasing with Loma Vista, and the first taste of her own new music since 2019’s ARIA Award and Australian Music Prize-winning debut album, The Return.
After relocating home to Zambia during the pandemic, Sampa reconnected with a different side of herself, one closer to the younger artistry that was nourished growing up in Africa. Now, in an age of authenticity, meet a 360 Sampa, a higher version of herself. No mask on, or role to play, “Lane” is Sampa The Great’s call out to create and explore her own lanes, and go beyond what’s prescribed without judgment. A vocoded voice leads the track, to the tune of jilted organs and choral harmonies. A trap beat with a rolling bass melody sets the pace for Sampa the rap in defiance of being shoved in a box, calling out for courage to try willingly and freely. Denzel Curry’s verse is a powerful statement of similar essence, further adding to the gravity of “Lane’s” message.
Accompanying the song is a video directed by Rochelle Rhembard and Imraan Christian. A long-form piece, book-ended and balanced with the spoken-word piece “Origin” is a fitting reintroduction. From the depths of an underground cave, we are first introduced to Eve: the persona and blueprint of Sampa’s highest version of self. From a juxtaposition of four-walled concrete rooms to Sampa’s younger self, to children in black suits running through nature with automatic weapons in hand, we follow the story of Sampa’s newest journey. Denzel Curry completes the narrative in a virtual reality headset, rapping in time to spell out a dynamic ending.
Sampa The Great says of “Lane”: “We’re not going to stay in one lane, we’re going to create multiple ones… My truest self encourages me to explore different lanes, and go beyond what I think I know of myself.”
Sampa The Great has spent much of the past two years writing and recording while home in Zambia during the pandemic. In 2020, Sampa The Great took home three ARIA Awards for her debut album The Return, including Best Independent Release, Best Female Artist and Best Hip Hop Release before executing a thrilling live performance filmed from a rooftop in Botswana. Later that same month, the Music Victoria Awards saw Sampa take home four wins, including Best Album, Best Solo Artist, Best Soul, Funk, Gospel or R&B Album and Best Song, to cap off a year that included becoming the first solo artist and female musician to win Best Live Act at the National Live Music Awards and BET Amplified’s first-ever global artist. As a highly applauded live performer, Sampa has entertained audiences across the globe with appearances at festivals like Glastonbury, Splendour in the Grass and Laneway, alongside virtual sets for AFROPUNK, Black August and the Roots Picnic, as well as support slots for artists including Kendrick Lamar and Ms Lauryn Hill. Last weekend, Sampa The Great performed for the first time at Coachella 2022 and gave fans a taste of what to expect during her US festival run this summer at Lollapalooza, Pickathon and Outside Lands this July and August.
In 2019, Sampa took home Best Hip Hop Release for “Final Form” at the 2019 ARIA Awards, alongside multiple other wins at the annual J Awards, including Video of the Year and Double J’s Artist of the Year, Best Hip Hop Act at the Music Victoria Music Awards and broke industry records by winning the prestigious Australian Music Prize twice in her career. The Return LP received praise from the likes of The Guardian, NPR, Pitchfork, The FADER, Billboard, OkayAfrica and countless others. Sampa then re-released The Return track, “Time’s Up” with new verses from New York rapper Junglepussy, collaborated with the likes of The Avalanches, Denzel Curry & Tricky, as well as featured on Michelle Obama’s esteemed playlist.
Today marks the arrival of Sampa The Great’s newest form and music ahead of a thrilling run of live performances in Australia for An Afro Future 2022 with a full band. Don’t miss absorbing the message of “Lane” to stick yourself in the present, and find your own highest version of self, before securing your ticket to witness the track live below.
Show Me The Body is a New York City based ecClesiastical hardcore trio consisting of Julian Cashwan Pratt (founder; banjo and vocals), Harlan Steed (founder; bass), and Jackie McDermott (current drummer). The band has organized non-traditional, intentional DIY spaces for NYC youth since 2015, and since expanded that work to a global capacity through their urgent, ceremonial live shows, subterranean punk and hip-hop mixed tours, and their CORPUS NYC platform. Trouble the Water is the culmination of nearly a decade of barrelling against New York City’s structural ambivalence and indifference; an invocation to a like-minded global community to consider the alchemy of family-building, and of turning water to blood.
Trouble the Water both references and pays homage to the physical city, and the New York Sound: not one particular genre, but the people and subcultures that encapsulate it’s true foundation, style, and spirit; while expanding upon and reckoning with the hyperlocal territory of 2019’s Dog Whistle. With Pratt’s most encantatory, interrogative poetry to date, and Steed expanding the glitchy, caustic arena of his electronic experimentation, the band is feeling more like themselves than ever. The founding duo, who have worked together since 2009, used Trouble The Water to methodically inhabit one another’s forms; Pratt experimented recklessly with production and synths, while Steed challenged his own focus to include melodies and riffs.
Although the title invokes the ancient alchemy Moses wielded to free and unite Israelite peoples, Trouble The Water refuses nostalgia, or mimicry. Instead, it considers the sublime power of the unifying physical practices that can be enacted daily, to invoke immeasurable spiritual and collective reactions. Buoyed by moments of stinging stillness and compulsive, almost optimistic, malfunctioning rhythms, the work is literally a conjuration to dance, and move. If we are really living through the end of the world, maybe every movement we make, no matter how slight, is actually boundless and radical. How do we find freedom through rejecting time altogether, and existing only in communion, in space, and in the constellations we form as we choose our “blood” families? Or, as Pratt demands on Demeanor, “What’s better than when we come together? Fighting, dancing, fucking together.” Trouble the Water is at once a homily for those left behind or displaced, and a searing investigation of what survival looks like from within the borders of an aggressively policed city and state, that postures those unignorable calls for rage and migration to a world at war.
Bandmate and long-time music inspiration Jackie McDermott (Sediment Club, Urochromes), joined Show Me the Body in 2020 as drummer, and is featured on the project. Trouble The Water was recorded entirely at the band’s CORPUS Studios in Long Island City, with veteran metal producer Arthur Rizk, and co-engineered by studio co-founder Aidan Bradley.
Dog Whistle (2019) was produced by Chris Coady, Show Me The Body and Gabriel Millman. The heavy, honest project was in direct conversation with the oppressive, claustrophobic psychology of the city, and their most critically-acclaimed work to date, described by NME as “a dedication to the community, friends and family at the heart of Show Me The Body” coupled with “the jarring noise and harsh sonics that made [SMTB] one of punk’s most idiosyncratic voices.” Dog Whistle followed Show Me The Body’s now historic, genre-defying debut album Body War (2016).
Since 2015, Show Me the Body have expanded their international music community into an independent label, recording studio, and community organizing platform. The band recently completed their Half-A-USA tour with support from Soul Glo and WiFiGawd, which included their inaugural In Broad Daylight festivals in New York and Los Angeles. Through the intentional cultivation of their local and global chosen families, and a decade-long dedication to sustaining the New York Sound, Show Me the Body has solidified a legacy of confronting and permanently shifting the rigid limitations of the hardcore genre.
Robert Glasper’s contribution to music and culture spans over two decades, forming an exceptional legacy that permeates throughout contemporary art and advocacy. 2022 not only marks the 10 year anniversary of the era-defining, Grammy-winning album Black Radio but also Glasper’s solo return with the upcoming release of Black Radio III.
Arriving alongside the announcement is new single, “Black Superhero” featuring Killer Mike + BJ The Chicago Kid + Big K.R.I.T. The official music video first premiered yesterday via broadcast channels BET Soul, BET Jams, MTVu, MTV Live, and Yo! MTV including social support across MTV, BET Soul, and BET Jams platforms. Shot in Los Angeles and directed by award-winning Director/Filmmaker, Charlie Buhler, the video takes viewers through a series of vignettes that highlight real-life Black heroes who live in and work for their communities.
On creating the music video, Buhler says “Black Superhero” is a visual love letter to the Black community. It’s an ode to our strength, vibrancy, and joy. We have struggled, and yet we are still here, and not only are we here, but we are so much more than the adversity heaped upon us. I am grateful to Robert and the team at Loma Vista for trusting me with such a powerful and important song, and everyone who came together to help bring the concept to life. It was a true labor of love.”
Like its predecessors, the new studio album celebrates Black joy, love and resilience and features Grammy-winning single “Better Than I Imagined” featuring H.E.R + Meshell Ndgeocello and “Shine” featuring D Smoke and Tiffany Gouché. Black Radio III’s guests also include Q-Tip, Jennifer Hudson, H.E.R. Yebba, Common, Ty Dolla $Ign, Esperanza Spalding, Ant Clemons, India.Arie and more.
Glasper reflects, sharing “I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Black Radio than by releasing Black Radio 3. To debut a live performance of “Black Superhero” on The Tonight Show with some of my own heroes is really special to me. Hopefully, it inspires more to come.”
The 4x Grammy and Emmy winning artist, composer and producer made history with Black Radio as the first album to debut in the top 10 of 4 different genre charts simultaneously: Hip Hop, R&B, Urban Contemporary, Jazz and Contemporary Jazz, as did the follow-up album Black Radio 2. The ongoing Black Radio brand has become synonymous with Black music culture and has placed Glasper alongside some of music’s most legendary- from early days with J Dilla, Bilal and Yasiin Bey to playing alongside Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Herbie Hancock, Erykah Badu, Snoop Dogg, Jill Scott, Brandy and more.
Glasper is nominated for two 2022 Grammys, including Best Progressive R&B Album for Dinner Party (Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder) and Best Traditional R&B Performance for “Born Again” with Leon Bridges.
Tune in live to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on January 17th for a special MLK Day performance from Robert Glasper, performing “Black Superhero” with Rapsody, BJ The Chicago Kid, Amir Sulaiman and DJ Jazzy Jeff, backed by The Roots.
Black Radio lll will be available on all formats (digital, CD, and 2xLP) worldwide on February 25th via Loma Vista Recordings – more to be announced soon.
Today, Korn announces their new studio album Requiem. In tandem with the album announcement, the band shares the lead single and video “Start The Healing.” The first offering from Requiem arrives with a video directed by Tim Saccenti (Flying Lotus, Run The Jewels, Depeche Mode) that is a live action and animated visual feast about death and re-birth amidst an array of preternatural creatures, humanoids and Korn’s electrifying live performance symbolizing the dawn of a new era for the band.
Director Saccenti’s words on the genesis of “Start The Healing” visuals:
“Our idea for this video was to mutate that aspect of the DNA of Korn, of what makes them so inspiring, their mix of raw power and transportive aesthetics and human emotion.
I wanted to take the viewer on an emotional journey, as the song does, a visceral, cathartic death and rebirth that will hopefully help transport the listener through whatever their personal struggles are.
Collaborating with 3-D artist Anthony Ciannamea we tapped into Korn’s mythology and explored their vast well of light and darkness to create a surreal, liminal-pace body-horror nightmare.”
Due to the effects of Covid and the inability to play live shows for the first time in the band’s illustrious career, Requiem was conceived out of very different circumstances than the majority of the band’s catalogue. It is an album born of time and the ability to create without pressure. Energized by a new creative process free of time constraints, the band was able to do things with Requiem that the past two decades haven’t always afforded them, such as taking additional time to experiment together or diligently recording to analog tape – processes which unearthed newfound sonic dimension and texture in their music. Requiem was produced by Chris Collier and Korn.
Fans have been anticipating new music after Korn previewed a snippet of “Start The Healing” within an augmented reality filter and billboards bearing the band’s iconic logo began appearing worldwide last week.
Watch “Start The Healing” and pre-order/save Requiem above, get more album details and information on the band below and stay tuned for more Korn coming soon.
About Korn:
Korn changed the world with the release of their self-titled debut album. It was a record that would pioneer a genre, while the band’s enduring success points to a larger cultural moment. The FADER notes, “There was an unexpected opening in the pop landscape and Korn articulated a generational coming-of-angst for a claustrophobic, self-surveilled consciousness. Korn became the soundtrack for a generation’s arrival as a snarling, thrashing, systemically-restrained freak show.”
Since forming, Korn has sold 40 million albums worldwide, collected two Grammys, toured the world countless times, and set many records in the process that will likely never be surpassed. Vocalist Jonathan Davis, guitarists James “Munky” Shaffer and Brian “Head” Welch, bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu, and drummer Ray Luzier, have continued to push the limits of the rock, alternative and metal genres, while remaining a pillar of influence for legions of fans and generations of artists around the globe.
The level of Korn’s reach transcends accolades and platinum certifications. They are “a genuine movement in a way bands cannot be now,” attests The Ringer. They represent a new archetype and radical innovation, their ability to transcend genre makes barriers seem irrelevant.
Out now on Loma Vista Recordings.
While the album follows the highest charting album of Iggy’s career, Free has virtually nothing in common sonically with its predecessor—or with any other Iggy Pop album.
On the process that led Iggy and principal players Leron Thomas and Noveller to create this uniquely somber and contemplative entry in the Iggy Pop canon, Iggy says:
“This is an album in which other artists speak for me, but I lend my voice…
By the end of the tours following Post Pop Depression, I felt sure that I had rid myself of the problem of chronic insecurity that had dogged my life and career for too long.
But I also felt drained. And I felt like I wanted to put on shades, turn my back, and walk away. I wanted to be free. I know that’s an illusion, and that freedom is only something you feel, but I have lived my life thus far in the belief that that feeling is all that is worth pursuing; all that you need – not happiness or love necessarily, but the feeling of being free.
So this album just kind of happened to me, and I let it happen.”
Full tracklisting for Free:
1. Free
2. Loves Missing
3. Sonali
4. James Bond
5. Dirty Sanchez
6. Glow In The Dark
7. Page
8. We Are The People
9. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
10. The Dawn
For further information, stay tuned to Iggy’s site and socials.
