Car Seat Headrest’s The Scholars is a dense concept album with several very long songs on it, and it’s sung from various characters’ point of view, but mostly by Will Toledo. That is very confusing, and I haven’t had enough time with the record to form any sort of opinion on the rock opera of it all. That could take weeks, months, years. But “True/False Lover,” the brief up-tempo rocker at the end of the record? I can tell you right now that this one rips. When that synth riff hits after the first verse, sounding like a burst of neon pink against a grey backdrop? When the beat gallops forward while Toledo sings about getting out of court custody and being excited to see someone again? That’s the stuff. I don’t need to know the whole story to understand the stakes of this music, and while it feels like sprinting towards freedom. It’s all right there in the song.
The big question in this song is basically, do you know yourself well enough to predict exactly what will happen when you deliberately make a huge change in your life? In this case, the change is going on testosterone and transitioning, and worrying about how that might impact a new relationship. The song is under two minutes but there’s some big time jumps – starting the transition without knowing how drastically they’d change, cutting to six months later when they feel like the same person but stronger and sexier, and then to some other point when it’s clear the guilt and anxiety was largely coming from their partner. It ends on a very bitter note in lyrical terms, but with the music, it’s cathartic and freeing.
I’m trying to get as much mileage out of this song as possible right now before it inevitably gets licensed to death. It’s at a very widely accessible intersection of soulful, funky, and rocking, and the chorus feels like a burst of sunshine with simple, direct lyrics: “You’ll find that joy joy in your soul.” Do you get what I’m saying here? This is going to be in ads and trailers and everything, sooner than later. It’s a ticking timebomb of commercial potential, and I recommend getting in now before it explodes and runs the risk of being more annoying than joyous. Because it really, truly is joyous.
This is kind of a “Outdoor Miner” situation, if you know what I mean. The “89 second rewrite” version of “The Artist Is Absent” is a minute longer than the proper version, which is basically the same but more terse and a little less emphatic. In the context of the lyrics, which list a series of artistic notions that are left incomplete, I get why Jenny Hval would favor the brief version on her album. She wants to make you feel the parts that are missing like a ghost limb. I appreciate the concept, but I simply prefer the version that gives the music space to spread out and resolve a bit.
“Flash Y Pose” is a sexy and unhinged banger about being sexy and unhinged, rapped mostly in Spanish over a frantic beat and grinding electronic noise. Emjay switches to English briefly midway through the song to introduce a list of “3 very important lessons to become what you’ve always wanted to become – the bitchiest bitch ever.” She switches back to Spanish for the list, but it includes “if my nails are longer than your dick, I’ll cut it off.” Yeah, pretty bitchy! But incredibly charming, and essentially the Spanish language equivalent to Yelle’s classic “Je Veux Te Voir.”
I enjoyed listening to this song several times over and decided to write about it before ever learning a major biographical detail about Lexi Jones: she’s the daughter of David Bowie and Iman. I suppose this is the dream scenario for the “nepo baby” – to be heard entirely on their own terms as an anonymous artist; to be approached without resentment or comparison to their artistic family members. I know I’ve ruined that for you if you haven’t heard this yet, but trust me, “Along the Road” is a song that succeeds on its merits, and there’s no more Bowie-ness in this than any other sort of arty rock song that’s been released in the past 50 years. If anything, this sounds more plausibly like the offspring of Electrelane or Cass McCombs.
“Along the Road” is built around a relatively simple descending piano figure that seems to roll like a wheel while the rest of the arrangement either glides along with it, or passes by like scenery. A string arrangement and Jones’ somewhat androgynous voice carry the drama, but even that’s low-key. There’s no big feeling or revelation here, it’s more about accruing little bits of wisdom and minor epiphanies on the path to some unknown destination.
If you’re only paying attention to the chorus of “R.L.” – and it’s plausible that you would, given how much it’s repeated through the song – you’d definitely get the impression that it’s an unambiguous love song: “Nothing beats your love / no, nothing can come close to you / real love, real love, real love.” It’s sung very sweetly, and the track is so smooth and funky. It sounds like real love, real love, real love. But go a little deeper into the song and it’s more complicated. The lyrics in the verses seem more like a negotiation, like she’s talking this other person into letting their guard down and accepting this real love. And the grooviness of the music is offset by a tightness in the arrangement, where the minimalism of the track comes across like holding back bigger, warmer feelings.
It’s funny how it now feels more transgressive for Addison Rae to sing “I need a cigarette to make me feel better” than to hear Charli XCX sing about cocaine or any number of rappers mumbling about gobbling pills. Rae is basic, but in a high concept way. She’s not necessarily an ordinary girl now, but she would’ve been when I was in my late teens/early 20s and skinny diet soda-sipping, chain smoking white girls were arguably at a cultural apex. “Headphones On” sounds like that Y2K era too – the more introspective end of TRL pop, but with a touch of St Etienne/Pizzicato 5 sophistication spilling over from the mid 90s. I suppose I could have some vain anxiety about my actual youth being a far away romanticized era for young people now, but I mostly just feel happy to have certain sounds come back in style. This is simply an ideal palette for a song about trying to stifle sadness and wishing your parents were (still? ever?) in love.
You may not know David Barbarossa by name, but if you’ve ever heard the classics by Bow Wow Wow or Adam and the Ants, you’d immediately recognize his drumming style right away on “Kiss Her or Be Her.” It’s a very distinctive feel – boppy but busy with fills, both tribal and urban, tumbling yet graceful. The chaotic and up tempo sound fits perfectly with the gnarly, tightly wound guitar parts by Osees’ leader John Dwyer and H.L. Nelly’s manic vocal. She’s singing about a confusing crush that’s both exasperating and exciting – is this actual lust, or just fascination? What is she supposed to do with this feeling? It all clicks together to sound a lot like The Slits, and you can sorta feel the ghost of Ari Up looking down from the heavens like “just go kiss her already!”
“Mysterious Girl” has a wonderful weightlessness to it, as though all the trebly elements are floating in discrete layers high above the bass line. It evokes the lightheaded sensation of getting too high, the butterflies feeling of having a new crush, the loose physicality of being utterly carefree and in the moment. The lyrics are basically another “kiss her or be her?” scenario, with Lindsey French getting lost in a reverie after spotting a beautiful and stylish woman on the street. She fills in some of the blanks of her existence, but only in the most romanticized ways – she smells like lilac, she sees through you, she’s only going to break your heart. You get the sense that it would be better for this girl to remain mysterious, unknowable, and untouchably perfect in her mind. She’s turned her into a piece of art.
The bass in “Assis” feels firm and strong, but still has a bit of slink to it. Pretty much everything surrounding it feels soft or loose – a vocal sung in French in a near-whisper, a keyboard part that seems largely improvised and mixed so the higher notes tickle like a tongue in your ear. It’s an extremely sexy composition that’s clearly recorded to feel as sensual and intimate as possible. As near as I can tell, the lyrics describe a scene between two lovers that’s sexy but a bit sad, as it’s from the POV of someone who’s in love with someone who seems to be losing interest in her. The lust comes through in the instruments, the longing is obvious in her voice whether you understand French or not.
There’s a few lines scattered throughout “Back to Me” that nudge you towards interpreting the character in the song as delusional or stalker-ish in a lightly humorous way. I’ll be real with you – I think that’s just hedging, or a shake of salt and pepper to cut through the overwhelming sweetness of the music. They can dial back the earnestness a little bit, but it’s still an extremely earnest song about being jealous of your ex’s new partner and pleading with them to take you back. And crucially, it’s not about that in some dark or creepy way. It’s all genuinely achingly romantic, and there’s a touch of innocence to how María Zardoya sings it that I’d compare to how Susanna Hoffs sang The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.” The lyrics don’t give you any reason to believe she’ll be successful in wooing them back, but there’s hope and real love in her heart.
We’ve been trained as consumers of culture to expect novelty in art and fashion, and to conflate newness with quality. And while it’s always exciting to experience innovations in art and design in the moment – almost always enabled by shifts in technology – the consumer’s pursuit of novelty is more about marketing, packaging, and commerce than it is about appreciating artistic expression. The flip side of this is the knee-jerk dismissal of “retro,” eye-rolling at either the seeming return of older aesthetics or the continued success of popular styles. I can sympathize with being sick of old styles, and feeling bored by predictable cycles of aesthetics going in and out of fashion. You can get jaded easily by this, but a lot of the time that’s just congratulating yourself for noticing a pattern.
It’s better to think of the accumulation of styles as the gradual creation of a canon, a pantheon, a palette for future creation. “Nostalgia” isn’t always the point, particularly when artists reach back to times before they were alive. Ideas will be rooted in cultural moments and become shorthand for those eras, but ultimately it’s the same as new phrases and vocabulary become part of a shared lexicon – useful tools for expression.
I bring this up because “Messy Hair” is a great example of a song that uses an old style to great effect without necessarily being a “retro” piece. Listen to the breakbeat drum part that enters the song around 30 seconds in – it’s a very late 90s sound, and I think on some level it’s meant to signify a bright, stylish, and upbeat future. A lot of late 90s/Y2K sounds have this effect now, particularly for listeners who were either children or came of age in that period. So it isn’t just “futuristic,” it’s a sound associated with youth and innocence, a “simpler time.” Hearing that breakbeat hit as Mica Tenenbaum from Magdalena Bay sings about realizing she’s in love gives the song a nice jolt of excitement and relative weightlessness. It’s like she’s hitting a stride, and feeling all her burdens disappear.
I had some vague worry that Wet Leg may be one of those bands who burn bright early on but taper off as they go along, but that concern has been dialed down quite a bit after they dropped this song earlier in the month. They’ve still got their spunky weirdo charm, but the mood is darker and the attitude is more spiky than silly. That main guitar riff reminds me of Brix-era The Fall, but the vocal hook and general vibe reminds me of Elastica’s second record. (High praise.) It’s a song about having a bad time confronting creeps at a club, but they make it sound like a very good time.
Stereolab has returned after 15 years without releasing new material. “Aerial Troubles” sounds exactly like Stereolab in all the ways I expect you to immediately understand, because actually describing their aesthetic feels a little like trying to describe a color. (You’ve seen yellow, right? It looks like things that are yellow.)
But it’s also very Stereolab in the sense that they’ve always taken the “lab” part of their name seriously. They’re always tweaking the formula, absorbing different styles, and figuring out new ways to sound like themselves. In this case, it’s a very different approach to three-part harmony. (I think they’re pulling from Eastern European tradition here, but this beyond my expertise.) There’s also a cool melodic riff towards the end that strikes me as very un-Stereolab, but its fits seamlessly into this composition so it ends up being one more vibe assimilated by the groop.
The lyrics are Stereolab to the nth degree. Laetitia Sadier is singing about “dying modernity” and consumerism no longer serving as an effective numbing agent, but as always, she has some optimism about the possibilities of life on the other side of capitalism and imperialism. She’s using a lot of clunky academic language – “the juncture invites us to provide care while offering antenatal care for the inception of the new yet-undefined future” – but somehow she makes it sound so smooth and elegant in her melodies.
I don’t know if it was intentional but I love that the lead single from the first Pulp album in 24 years feels so 80s new wave. It’s important to keep in mind that while the band’s creative and commercial success was in the 90s, they’re actually a band from the 1980s. Their original contemporaries – if not necessarily peers – were the likes of Duran Duran, Human League, Talk Talk, OMD, and Ultravox. “Spike Island” calls back to that 80s sensibility: enormous implied scale, lightly funky, unapologetically corny synth tones and hand claps, vaguely optimistic in tone. It’s bold and bright and gives a lot of space for Jarvis Cocker to do his thing. You can’t put a small frame around a persona that big.
Among other things, “Spike Island” is a song about reconnecting with something in yourself, or maybe it’s more like finding peace with who you’ve always been after trying to expand your sense of self. “I was born to perform, it’s a calling,” Cocker sings, “I exist to do this.” A young man sings something like that and it sounds like bragging; a man in his early 60s sings it and comes across more like relief and self-awareness.
There are two times in this song where Jarvis sings about making the choice to avoid self-destruction, and I’m not sure whether he’s talking about why he moved away from Pulp, or why he ended up coming back to it. Could be a little of both. But in either case, it feels so good to hear him sing “I took a breather and decided not to ruin my life.” It doesn’t need to be about his story to resonate. It’s helpful just to hear someone say with some authority that sometimes you need to do that.
John Peel’s line about The Fall was “they are always different, they are always the same,” and that notion also applies to Sleigh Bells. Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss have stayed true to the basic premise of their band for 15 years: hyper-masculine heavy rock riffs + ultra-feminine pop-as-genre aesthetics + super-charged production. The goal of the production is always the same – get the most hyped-up sound imaginable – but it’s typically the most variable aspect of the formula. Early on, it was mostly blown-out trap beats, but as they’ve moved along Miller has messed around with a lot of wild ideas including hyperactive spins on Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, hardcore punk breakbeats, and chaotic K-pop metal.
This time around on Bunky Becky Birthday Boy, Miller is emphasizing contrast, bouncing between super sugary pop sections and the distinctive dense peak Loudness War guitar tone of the 2000s. I don’t even like that kind of guitar sound in most cases, but he makes it work, especially on “Badly,” where he gets the most out of the style’s implied scope and velocity. He makes you feel like you’re speeding through a Y2K fantasy future in the chorus, and believe it when Krauss sings “the party is hotter than we could ever imagine.” The lyrics are perfectly Sleigh Bells too, acknowledging darkness and pain while striving for transcendental thrills. As with a lot of their songs, the message is clear: Life can be agony, but you’ve got to throw yourself into the best of it while you can.
I bought a copy of Tortoise’s TNT when I was a teenager in art school. It was highly acclaimed in the music magazines I read at the time, and very much the kind of CD you bought to be cool and smart in the late 1990s. I liked it well enough and it included at least two songs that I put on mix tapes for a while (partly so I could seem cool and smart), but it mostly went over my head. I had almost no context for jazz or fusion, though I think hearing TNT was crucial in getting started with those genres.
Jump ahead a few decades, and now I do have a lot of necessary context for Tortoise and appreciate their music far more than I did when I was young. “Oganesson,” the first track the group has released from a forthcoming new “larger body of work,” is a great example of what I like about them. It’s definitely jazz, but a type of jazz that’s heavily influenced by electronic music. It’s jazz that doesn’t swing, and I somehow mean that in a good way. You get some swing in Jeff Parker’s guitar, but the drums and percussion laid down by John Herndon and John McEntire feels very rigid and geometric. It’s hard to accurately describe this without seeming like I’m insulting them, but the beauty of this music is in the odd contrast and counter-intuitive moves. The uptight quality of the music throws the more emotive parts in relief; it sounds like a portrait of a person (a place, a feeling?) that’s more interesting because of their contradictions.
“Off to the Esso” feels twitchy and frantic, but it’s more like a meticulous replica of a manic state than anything truly random or chaotic. The lyrics come across like free-association scribblings in a note pad on a late night train – anxious and angry and paranoid – and Aya performs the vocal like they’re playing it off sheet music. I can clearly picture the handwriting by the vocal inflections and volume shifts. I can’t relate to any of the specifics here, but I know this agitated feeling. It feels very young to me, in that way where the stakes of everything feel impossibly high and everything seems incredibly serious.
Artemas seems like a cultural inevitability – of course someone growing up on The Weeknd and the more synth-heavy end of indie music would eventually merge the aesthetics and the result would go over well with a mainstream audience who were immersed in the same music. The last time I wrote about Artemas, the indie X factor was Tame Impala, and this time around it’s more like St Vincent in gnarly electronic rock mode. It’s a great combination, like dark chocolate and raspberries.
The other notable thing about Artemas’ music is that it’s extremely horny stuff, but in a way that strikes me as very porn-brained. The lyrics aren’t particularly demeaning or gross – I’d actually say they’re fairly respectful of the woman being addressed – but his desires seem like they’ve been largely shaped by porn. I’m not reaching here, by the way. He actually sings “just wanna fuck you all night like a porn star” at the end of a verse. There’s a few lines here that give me “Steve Carrell discussing the sand-bag texture of breasts,” but on the whole I don’t think the lyrical perspective is cringe or even unusual. It’s just anthropologically interesting to me, and I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot more songs in the years to come that are explicitly sexual but seem more rooted in PornHub bookmarks than personal experience.
It’s impressive to make a rap song featuring Kendrick Lamar in 2025 where he’s maybe the third or fourth most interesting thing on the track. So what am I putting ahead of him? Well, there’s that sample loop. It’s a very Kanye sort of sped-up R&B vocal, and we’ve now got enough distance from his artistic prime that the chipmunk soul aesthetic is as nostalgic as the music that gets chopped up to make it. But I digress. The interesting thing is how BAD the loop sounds. It’s lo-fi, but not in the “4-track cassette” way, but a low bitrate mp3 with severe artifacts way. It’s fascinating to hear that sound get aestheticized, but as Brian Eno once said, “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” It was inevitable that this would be the thing for mp3s.
The other interesting element is Playboi Carti’s vocal, which I suppose isn’t tremendously different from a lot of his output, but comes across very well on this particular song. He’s a slippery presence, and he often sounds like he’s flirting with the beat. There’s rapping going on here – hashtag rapping, no less! – but he has a way of making it feel weightless or invisible. It’s all little bursts of enthusiasms and sensuality, sorta like if Lil Wayne stripped out all his technical prowess to focus entirely on his charming ad-libs.
When Haim shared “Relationships” a couple weeks ago they made a point of noting that “this one took us 7 years to crack.” Which is to say, they knew they had an amazing song on their hands and worked hard to fully realize it. I think you can hear all that work in the finished recording, but not in the sense that it feels overthought and overproduced, or that it’s got that stale chewing gum feel to it. It’s the best case scenario for this sort of thing, where if you’re paying attention you can hear all the little smart decisions that add up to a finished product that skillfully balances familiarity and eccentricity.
There’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen for this one – the three Haim sisters, producers Rostam Batmanglij and Buddy Ross, and collaborators Ariel Rechtshaid and Tobias Jesso Jr. I’m not entirely sure who did what, but whoever wrote that fluid, low-key funky bass line is the clear MVP of the song, and I can hear Batmanglij’s skill for building richly detailed yet spacious and airy tracks guiding the track. But all of this sound and structure is just a frame for Danielle Haim’s vocal performance, which is the melodic through line and soul of the piece. She’s singing about feeling ambivalent and frustrated about relationships in general and one that may or may not be falling apart in particular, but with a spark of romanticism that contradicts her most pessimistic lines. The lyrics essentially ask “ugh, why do I even bother with this?” in a dozen different ways, but everything in the music and Danielle’s voice is answering “you know why…because the trouble is worth it.”
Lady Gaga seems more impressive and iconic these days because we have enough pop music history on either side of her prime breakthrough years to fully appreciate exactly how great she’s always been. She’s a prestige pop star who has maintained a presence in the mainstream despite consistently making art that’s far more tasteful, intelligent, well-crafted, and challenging than the market requires. She may stumble from time to time but she’s always interesting, and her big swings often yield truly excellent songs and performances.
Gaga’s new album Mayhem doesn’t break much new ground for her stylistically, but that doesn’t have to be the goal every time. (As the late Scott Miller once told me, novelty isn’t inherently musical.) This is a record in which Lady Gaga is being Lady Gaga to the utmost extreme, and in doing so she highlights the musical quirks that set her apart from the pop girl pack. I hear it as a flex, a 38 year old veteran superstar throwing down and proving that she can still give us songs on the level of her early classics. The music is too vital to be credibly dismissed as nostalgia and mostly too weird to qualify as pandering, but like her charm offensive media blitz in support of the record, it does prompt you to go “damn, Lady Gaga is so cool, I love her.”
And you know what? Lady Gaga is sooooo cool. I love her.
My favorite of the Mayhem songs is “Killah,” a collaboration with the French electronic producer Gasaffelstein that makes the most of his gift for spiky and stylish neo-industrial grooves. It’s part of a long line of sexy, strutting glamourous pop songs but I mostly hear it as an inspired collision of David Bowie’s Young Americans with Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, with a dash of…hmm, is it Tina Turner or Grace Jones? Like most of my favorite Gaga songs, it’s mixing and merging familiar elements from the past in unexpected ways and scratches an itch I didn’t realize I had. It’s like she’s spent the past 15 years granting long-forgotten wishes I made when I was much younger, and my brain was being forged by the MTV of the late 80s through mid 90s.
Also, did you see Gaga performing “Killah” on Saturday Night Live? The staging, the blocking, the set design, the outfits, the attitude and audacity – it’s one of the very best music performances I’ve ever seen on television.
I’m sure plenty of people can and will take “Delulu” at face value, but it’s pretty clearly written as a parody of someone so utterly convinced their situationship with an indifferent guy is leading to something more profound, to the point that she’s frustrated her therapist to the point of being dropped as a client. Banks sounds like she’s having a good time with this song, hamming it up for the fun of it, but also to make it apparent she’s singing in character. But still, there’s enough potent emotion in how she sings “I only wanna be with you, I know we’re gonna see it through” that you could easily not clock the bitter irony of the next line in the chorus being “can’t wait for you to see it too.”
Panda Bear and his collaborators in Animal Collective are masters of taking a basically normal song and giving it a wild and flamboyant arrangement. They’ve done this a lot of different ways through the past 25 years, but this “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if it sounded like thing no one else would consider doing” impulse is the through line in their overall body of work.
In this context, Panda Bear’s new solo record Sinister Grift is among the most regular-sounding music anyone in AnCo has ever produced. But even in a straight forward mode, Panda’s palette is bright and bold and a little surreal. A lot of it sounds like a Margaritaville version of his old classics, or like he’s trying to make something that would feel right on a cruise ship.
I find this incredibly charming, particularly on “Just As Well,” a song so bouncey and bubbly that it’s easy to miss that the lyrics get fairly bleak. He’s mainly singing about feeling “stuck on the inside” and hoping to get out of a rut, and I suppose that eagerness to change is what makes it a Panda Bear song. There’s always some degree of optimism in his work, and a desire to improve as a person.
My impression of Tate McRae’s earlier music was along the lines of “hey, why shouldn’t there be a new pop artist who is to Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls what The Black Crowes were to The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin?” I don’t see why certain styles shouldn’t continue to exist as part of a larger musical tradition. It’s silly to treat this stuff like it should stay frozen in one cultural moment when so many other types of music are kinda always around.
This take shifted a bit upon spending some time with McRae’s recently released third album So Close to What. The aesthetics have moved up the timeline a bit, and now all the songs sound like a scrambled version of pop aesthetics from the mid to late 2010s. And this makes total sense: McRae is 21, and it’s logical that her taste and frame of reference for pop is basically stuff I heard in Ubers around 10 years ago.
Some of the songs on So Close to What pull from music I have only a vague passing familiarity with, leaving me with low-grade deja vu. Other songs are a little easier to map out – “Purple Lace Bra” pulls a hook directly out of Beyoncé’s “Drunk In Love,” folds it into another section that sounds a lot like Rihanna, and the chorus feels like Reputation-era Taylor Swift spiked with a little bit of Ariana Grande. There’s also a lyrical hook that rephases a memorable part from Olivia Rodrigo’s “Bad Idea Right?” I don’t think the way this song strings together these aesthetics should work, but it does. The “a little from column A and a little from column B” mix-and-match approach turns out to be coherent in this case.
McRae isn’t really known for being coherent. Her vocals are so “cursive” the words often blur together in a way that’s a little like unintentional shoegaze aesthetics. “Purple Lace Bra” isn’t one of her more extreme songs in that respect, and that’s fortunate given the lyrics get a little interesting. She’s singing about getting frustrated with a relationship with a man who pretty much exclusively values her for her body. There’s a lot of resentment in the lyrics – “I’m losing my mind ‘cause giving you head is the only time you think I’ve got depth” – but not enough that she seems like she’s about to dump him. The song takes place at a point on this relationship timeline where the grievance is there, and she’s in the negotation stage of dealing with it. There’s still some room here for the guy to take her seriously, but I’m less hopeful about it than she is.
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