Some of the best-like on “Stay Flo,” “Almeda,” “Sound of Rain”-take elements from various touchpoints, from Stevie Wonder to Pharrell to Sun Ra, but are wholly original. Rote song structures are replaced by wandering repetitions clear-eyed slogans of empowerment are replaced by fragmented mantras.Īnd if you spend your time waiting for a drop, you’ll miss the fact that the gentle, sparse grooves are the ends in and of themselves. So many aspects of When I Get Home run counter to the conventions of modern pop and R&B. Somehow, they’ve found a way to fuse stressful lyrics with gorgeous melodies to achieve catharsis to cater to the vicious attention span of the digital era without sacrificing an inch of their meticulous attention to detail.
The band understands the captivating nature of liminal spaces, and also the fraught relationship between pain and creation: “The silkworm’s rage / Iridescent thread, beautiful and dead / Billions of worms were boiled to make the bed,” Lenker sings on “Strange.” But if the music itself was a labor of love, it didn’t wear the band out they immediately turned around and released another gorgeous album, Two Hands, five months later. Over rippling guitars, Lenker sings morbid lyrics with a startling optimism: “See my death become a trail / And the trail leads to a flower.” There are dead moths and pigeons, hospital waiting rooms and drownings singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker’s voice often comes out in a strangled whisper.īut the Brooklyn indie rock band Big Thief doesn’t wallow in mortality–instead, they find inspiration and strength in both the tactile rush of the present and the allure of the known. He then turns his attention back to the president: “His character boorish, bravado without the courage.” (Chow)ĭeath and disease pervade nearly every song of U.F.O.F. To analyze our moment, Woods scours the annals of history and culture, readily name-checking feminist Andrea Dworkin, Mozambican revolutionary Samora Machel, and J.D. As Segal lays down a bedrock of metallic guitars and piercing cymbals, Woods weaves tales of police brutality, hospital bills, war zones and pervasive depravity and complacency: “Anthropologists watch the negro sell dope / On huddled corners / Corner stores / Jot notes,” he raps on “Spider Hole.”īut while the album paints a bleak societal portrait, it’s also filled with plenty of gallows humor and inquisitive scholarship. Over 12 songs, the pair challenges the rosy image set forth by American myths and politicians, instead vividly narrating from the country’s crawl spaces and secret passageways. “This your land of plenty?” snarls the New York rapper Billy Woods on his collaborative album with the Los Angeles producer Kenny Segal. “If this is love, I want my money back,” she sighs, “’cause I could use the check to spend it on a better heart to wear upon my sleeve.” For an artist so young, she already sounds like an old soul. On the album closer “If You Think It’s Love,” for instance, she pares things back to just her voice, manipulated into an electronic echo, which lets her sharp writing shine.
Yet she’s not constricted by either genre or self-definition, instead finding moments to flirt with production styles and sounds that echo her willingness to break from tradition. Powerfully, Straus has openly embedded her sexuality in her music from the start, turning simple love songs into statements of queer identity and rallying cries for contemporary romance. But her music sounds and feels of an earlier era, its jazzy syncopations and her silky-smoky voice coming together on songs like early viral hits “1950” and “Talia” and welcome follow-ups “Useless Phrases” and “Hit the Back” to form an altogether new alt-pop sound. New York singer-songwriter King Princess, real name Mikaela Straus, is just 20.
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