Fousheé “Still Around”

Here’s a song with an usual set of tensions – busy percussion, an even busier bass line taking up most of the space, minimal keyboard accents, and a relatively mellow acoustic guitar groove by Steve Lacy that’s so Steve Lacy it made me go “is this Steve Lacy?” the first time I heard it. The mood is fairly placid and meditative, but that aggressive and chunky bass line puts the whole track on edge. It’s almost like transplanting a post-punk bass part into a fairly chill Marvin Gaye song. Fousheé’s vocals stay on the more relaxed side of the composition, emotive in her R&B inflections but still a little reserved. The lyrics suggest a situation where she’s reaching out to someone she loves but is unclear where they stand with her, and whether or not they want to stay in her life. She sounds optimistic and open-hearted, but once you key into the words it’s hard not to hear that bass rumble as her barely concealed angst.

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Maren Morris “Push Me Over”

I didn’t realize this until I looked at the credits, but this is basically a Muna song with Maren Morris on vocals. They wrote it, they’re the musicians on the track, but the lyrics are specific to Morris’ recent experience of getting divorced and coming out as bisexual. Were it not for the last bit, I’d question why they’d give away a pop song as strong as this. Morris sounds flirty, charming, and confident on the track, but in the context of the lyrics it’s kind of a fake-it-til-you-make it thing. She’s singing about trying to figure out how to seduce a woman she’s into, but is unsure of how to make it happen – she’s out of her comfort zone, she feels like she has no map for this. But this isn’t a song about frustration, it’s about the excitement of doing something new. The lyrics get overtly sexual; the choruses feel a little triumphant. It’s a bright and positive song verging on a wholesome energy – Muna always seem to err on the side of late 90s/early 00s VH1 vibes – but not so much that it makes the sexy parts feel corny.

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Jhené Aiko “Guidance”

This is a real “happy ending” sort of break-up song, one in which the singer is relieved to get out of a bad relationship but seems to have minimal lingering anger about it. Which is not to say there’s no trace of negative feeling – she gives you some concrete examples of why this person was wrong for her and one verse ends on the evocative line “you were the match that lit up my path to show me what bridge to burn.” But the emotional focus is on feeling grateful and literally blessed by God, and you can sense Jhené Aiko nudging herself away from her darker feelings as she deliberately pushes herself towards the light.

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Caribou “Volume”

I remember hearing M|A|R|R|S’ “Pump Up the Volume” as a kid, usually in passing on the radio or on television. I had very little context for it but understood that it was extremely cool and futuristic, and everything about it was strange and magical and mysterious that stood apart from anything else I knew up to that point in the late 80s. It was like turning the dial on the radio and receiving a musical message from another world.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is about the same age as me, and had the same experience. He says it was his first experience with electronic music, and I suppose that’s probably true for me as well, depending on how you’d define “electronic music” in an era when almost everything on the radio had was built around drum machines and synthesizers. “Pump Up the Volume” was essentially a dense collage of samples, rooted in the more ambitious end of hip-hop production in that era but with a different vibe altogether. Hip-hop was unmistakably connected to Black urban life in America, but “Pump Up the Volume” was less specific – it sounded like everywhere on the planet all at once, or like a scramble of radio signals from Earth getting mixed in deep space.

Snaith’s rework of “Pump Up the Volume” focuses on one of the song’s most memorable parts, which I can’t confidently identify – a loop of a marimba, or a keyboard on a marimba setting? It’s the part in the song that establishes you’ve entered the song’s odd atmosphere, and after establishing the base tone Snaith immediately starts warping it to create his own little alien world. He retains the “pump up the volume” vocal sample, so it basically comes across as a remix up until around 90 seconds in when a female vocal part enters the mix and it starts to sound like a dance pop song transposed with the M|A|R|R|S composition. I’m not sure whether that pop song is Snaith’s own original material or not, but it doesn’t really matter – the thing that matters is that it’s building on the sense that “Pump Up the Volume” is built to absorb sounds, and Snaith understood that he couldn’t just stop at altering the music. He had to make an offering, something to keep the song’s fire burning.

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Father John Misty “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”

I saw Father John Misty perform an early version of “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” back in 2019 so I know it wasn’t written with the purpose of appearing on his greatest hits album. But regardless, it’s very appropriate for that utility. I mean, even setting aside the joke in the 8th verse about “doing my greatest hits” in Las Vegas, it comes across as a commentary on his career to date. And this being Father John Misty that commentary goes heavy on weary cynicism and bitter irony, and the best jokes are all at his expense. The sound of the track is full-on 70s show biz razzle dazzle – a little disco, a little country, a little Rolling Thunder Revue – and while it’s delivered with a fairly aggressive wink, he didn’t half-ass anything about the arrangement. He’s so totally committed to the bit that it stops being a bit at all. He can’t help but make jokes and be clever, but he’s dead serious about the despair at the heart of this song and so many others he’s written through the years.

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Artemas “You’ve Been A Bad Girl”

“You’ve Been A Bad Girl” sounds like the Venn diagram overlap of The Weeknd and Tame Impala’s aesthetics, which makes a lot of sense since I imagine a lot of young guys today grew up steeped in both artists’ catalogs. The vibe merger sacrifices some of Tame’s chillness and tamps down The Weeknd’s malevolent sex vampire energy, but results in a dynamic pop song that evades easy categorization. Artemas’ lyrics hit a lot of the same buttons as The Weeknd’s – straight guy bedeviled by a hot woman he’s obsessed with – but it’s a little more down to earth. He’s portraying himself as a victim here – “you’ve been a bad girl, I’ve been in therapy picking up the pieces of all the things you said to me” – but only so much, since he’s comparing her to drugs and begging her to “meet me in the bathroom, come get high with me” on the bridge.

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Vampire Weekend “Mary Boone”

If you go on how people talk about music now, you’d get the impression that most listeners aren’t even interested in songs that they can’t relate to, often in very literal 1:1 ways. While it’s always nice to feel like the lyrics of a song are either speaking to you or speaking for you, this has rarely been central to how I engage with music. I tend to prefer lyrics that give me insight into other people’s lives one way or another, and to be honest, I don’t find all that many songs that I can hear and go “yes, that’s me.” But maybe that’s only because I’m rarely looking for myself in other people’s art to begin with.

Case in point, I was listening to “Mary Boone” almost every day for nearly two months before it occurred to me that this song had a powerful emotional resonance with me in part because I have so much in common with the protagonist of the lyrics. It’s probably the only piece of art I’ve encountered that feels like it truly reflects anything about my life as it is right now in 2024.

The guy in “Mary Boone” is an artist in the 1980s or maybe early 90s who feels like he’s on the outside of everything but is desperately yearning to become part of something and contribute to the art world. He feels like he needs external validation – like, say, catching the eye of the hottest art dealer in Manhattan – before he can move forward with anything in his life. So he feels stuck and isolated, and even if he loves making his art he knows it needs to be completed by an audience somehow or else he’s not communicating or participating in the culture.

He’s observing the art world and he feels a parasocial connection to the artists in the scene and especially with Boone herself. He often sounds like he’s in love with her – “well I hope you feel like loving someone soon” – and maybe that’s an intentional ambiguity, like he’ll take any version of getting on the inside that’s available to him. Maybe it’s just as valid and realistic a fantasy as getting on the walls of her gallery. It’s possibly a Stockholm Syndrome sort of thing, feeling some affection for a gatekeeper. Or perhaps it’s just a symptom the parasocial thing, feeling a false closeness to someone who doesn’t even know he exists.

A lot of the reason I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics of “Mary Boone” is that Ezra Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid’s arrangement dazzled me from the start. Specifically, it’s the parts of the song that drop in a sample of the drum programming from Soul II Soul’s 1989 classic “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me).” I can’t remember the last time I was so genuinely surprised and delighted by a musical choice, and that delight has hardly faded after hearing it many times over. The arrival of the beat shifts the atmosphere of the song, broadens its implied scale, and adds a lot of emotional depth to the piece.

In the context of the lyrics, the “Back to Life” break makes me think of how this guy feels as he enters Manhattan, heading in from New Jersey or Queens. The drum part is gritty but also signals a specifically urban notion of sophistication – if we think of this song taking place around 1989 or 1990, this would be the cutting edge of popular music.

The first time we hear the break, it’s paired with a melancholic string part that makes me imagine him walking through Soho or Chelsea feeling hopeless and pessimistic. I wish I could explain it, maybe it’s the juxtaposition of loving a place but feeling humbled by it, but this part has had me on the verge of tears a few times over. When the break returns later, it’s contrasted with a bright piano part that feels like a burst of optimism – maybe it really can happen! The third time, most of the elements of the song return and converge for an emotionally ambiguous climax.

There’s also a choir on this song! I like how it lends the song a holy feeling, and makes this guy’s quest to find an audience for his art feel like a spiritual pursuit. At the end of the bridge he tells Boone that she’s the “author of everything, use this voice and let it sing” before the choir takes over from Koenig on the final chorus. He’s not asking to be a star; he just wants to belong, and be heard.

Some notes:

• I think “oh my love, was it all in vain / we always wanted money, now the money’s not the same” would sting in any era, but I think this is a very recognizable sentiment for most anyone working in any creative field in 2024. Koenig delivers the line so that you can register the character’s disappointment in practical terms, but also get that money truly isn’t really what he’s after.

• “In a quiet moment at the theater, I could hear the train” is a real IYKYK line for New Yorkers. Koenig is almost certainly referring to seeing a movie at the Angelika on West Houston. It opened in September 1989, which lines up perfectly with the timeline suggested by the Soul II Soul sample.

• “I’m on the dark side of your room” is such a great image. I love how the turn of phrase playfully deflates the romantic grandeur implied by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the actual moon itself, and makes me picture this guy attending a Mary Boone Gallery opening and being off in some far corner, so close yet so far away.

• I like the somewhat chaotic use of vocal ad libs in the “Back to Life” breaks, but most especially the part near the end where you hear a snippet of the first word of the song – “painted” – but it cuts off. It sounds like it might have been a happy accident, like a file dragged and dropped to the wrong part of the grid. It has a great effect in context – a fake-out for another verse, hearing the protagonist one more time in a way that suggests he’s back at square one, an artful bit of messiness that gives some extra spark of life to a very considered composition.

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Fcukers “Homie Don’t Shake”

“Homie Don’t Shake” pulls together a lot of musical signifiers from the “indie sleaze” and “blog house” era – DFA aesthetics, Yeah Yeah Yeahs brattiness and noise, dynamics that would get an army of 20somethings in American Apparel get ready for the floor – but really, anyone can just throw reference points together. The miracle of “Homie Don’t Shake” is that it’s so well built and executed that it’s as good or much better than its inspirations. This is an absolutely ruthless and relentless dance track, brutal and funky and flirty and dirty and weird. I’m curious if Fcukers can do better than this – I suspect they probably can, since I’m picking up a Basement Jaxx level of craft here.

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Lynks “New Boyfriend”

“New Boyfriend” effectively sounds like a queer version of LCD Soundsystem, or maybe more generally the classic 00s DFA aesthetic. Much in the same way The Dare’s “Girls” was a revelation for just sounding like “what if LCD was really horny?,” this shift in perspective is enough to make the style sound fresh again. James Murphy’s music may be physical and sensual but it’s never particularly sexual in tone, since his lyrics are almost exclusively focused on exploring his neuroses. Lynks goes light on anxiety but heavy on humor as he tears into a guy who won’t leave him alone. At first it seems more like a general “I’m not interested, fuck off” sentiment, but the plot thickens in the third verse: “I don’t want stay on your sofa because then I’ll stay in your bed and if I stay in your bed we’re definitely gonna have sex…and I don’t want that.” Ah, so there’s the stakes!

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O. “176”

O. are an unusual sort of rock duo – a saxophonist and a drummer playing fairly aggressive mutant instrumental rock music. Sax player Joe Heywood utilizes effects pedals to allow for a wider tonal and textural palette, but even when he’s making his instrument sound more like a guitar or keyboard it’s still peculiar to hear a fuzz guitar sound with a blustery woodwind attack. “176,” the first proper song on their debut, has Heywood alternating between melodic parts that sound like drunk jazz and distorted blasts that emulate the pummeling force of macho alt 90s stuff like, say, Jesus Lizard or Unsane. Tash Keary’s drumming sounds very tight and controlled, at some points sounding more like a DJ cutting up beats than someone at a kit.

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Hiatus Kaiyote “Love Heart Cheat Code”

Hiatus Kaiyote approach R&B with a lot of curiosity, often seeming as though their goal is to break up the standard components of the music and put the parts back together in unusual ways just to see if they can arrive at a new sort of feeling. That description would lead you to imagine a very studied and stiff band, but the songs all have a heart-on-sleeve warmth and the performances feel guided by intuition. They’re also fairly silly? Nai Palm’s vocal performance on “Love Heart Cheat Code” is earnestly sensual, but her lyrics are very playful and often seem like references to little romantic in-jokes. It’s a song about the value of leading with love in life broadly, but you really hear undiluted affection come through in her voice on those goofier lines, like “in there like swimwear” or the repeated refrain of “keep it handsome.”

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Omar Apollo “Drifting”

If you listen to “Drifting” closely you’ll hear a church organ. It’s very quiet in the mix, dialed down so low that you pick up the vibe and sense the chord changes, but without actively noticing it. It’s this ghost of a song hovering the background while a brighter, more circular keyboard part, the jog-in-place drums, and a few layers of vocals take up all the foreground. Omar Apollo’s vocal is the center of attention here – a very soft and sensitive masculinity, hot with emotion but cool and composed in his delivery. Teo Halm, the song’s producer and co-writer, also sings a harmony vocal – a little more uptight and “indie” in its intonation, but still lovely in its contrast with Apollo’s more angelic and graceful performance.

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Pond “So Lo”

“So Lo” presents as a swaggering and groovy funk rock song. And it is, so long as you don’t pay too much attention to the lyrics, which undermine the slick guy attitude by making it clear this is a fake-it-til-you-make-it situation for a guy who must invent “endless tides of fiction” to rationalize feeling or looking like a cool dude. It’s played as cheeky comedy from the opening line – “white dreads get my blood pumping, these tummy tablets got me breaking in two” – but the song is so fun and well-constructed that it’s easy to take it at face value musically. And speaking of, I really wish I had the technical knowledge to figure out why this sounds so incredibly mid-00s to me. It’s something about the tone, the particular palette, the way it’s mixed? Still getting used to hearing stuff that sounds retro 00s, but that’s just how it goes.

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Suki Waterhouse “Supersad”

I was a little wary of the title “Supersad” because I’m exhausted by young musicians fetishizing depression or making it sort of cutesy, but as it turns out Suki Waterhouse is sprinting in the opposite direction in this song. She’s basically talking herself out of panic and catastrophic thinking, pushing herself to gain perspective, and declaring in the chorus “there’s no point in being supersad.” It’s mental health pop, sure, but it doesn’t have the stink of someone trying to be relatable. It’s more about catharsis, and probably on Waterhouse’s end of things, realizing that if she sings these words enough times over a driving New Order type beat, she might fully internalize the sentiment.

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Roddy Ricch “Survivor’s Remorse”

Sometimes you can find very interesting things in the credits of modern music. Like, for example – the choir sample that lends so much pathos and drama to this Roddy Ricch song? The element of the track that roots Ricch’s lyrics about a personal struggle in something much older and much bigger than himself? It’s not from an old gospel record; it’s from a Kelly Clarkson song that came out last year. That fact doesn’t change anything about the record, but it does suggest the song’s producer Turbo has an excellent ear for samples from unexpected sources.

Ricch’s vocal delivery is casual and conversational as he tries to explain his absence to his fans, but you don’t really need to know much about that to be moved by the song. His frustration and pain is apparent in the nuances, and his humor and charisma comes through in his more flamboyant phrasing. I particularly love the way he half-sings the phrase “I’d be a billionaire” on the second verse – you can hear the grin on his face.

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Jamie xx featuring Robyn “Life”

As far as features and collabs go, this is a remarkably even merger of aesthetics that really goes give you the very best of Jamie xx in DJ mode and Robyn in euro diva mode. It’s a real best case scenario for a team up that makes me hope they do some more music together, as I think this is most definitely the best thing Robyn in particular has done in something like 14 years. This isn’t to say I think she’s sucked in the time between but when I think of what made me fall for her music in the mid 2000s, this is basically it – a lot of sass and unguarded emotion, a playful spirit and a low key soulfulness, a boldness that tastefully avoids cheap bombast. But there is plenty of bombast on this track, mainly in the blaring horn fanfare riff that’s a perfect tonal contrast with the timbre of Robyn’s voice.

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Salute featuring Piri “Luv Stuck”

Piri has worked with enough producers at this point that it’s clear that the through line in her body of work is a natural gift for writing lovely and unfussy topline melodies. Melody is probably my favorite aspect of music, but it’s not easy to write about it – it often feels like trying to explain why one curved line in more beautiful than another, or why some faces are more beautiful to you than others. And of course, a lot of us just like different versions of the same over and over, and I think that’s the case with a song like “Luv Stuck.” It’s not as though Piri is reinventing the wheel here, it’s just that she’s tapping into melodic turns that I’m always going to find beautiful. Especially when the song makes its way around the curve in the “something almost finds me in the nighttime, oh baby, stop hiding from me” line, and she sounds a little bit sad before resolving in the more joyful sentiment of the chorus.

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King Krule “It’s All Soup Now”

Your interpretation of this song probably depends on your feelings about soup in general. If you love soup – if you’re truly passionate about soup – you might wonder why this guy sounds so sad about it all being soup now. Like, slow jazzy guitar chords and plaintive sax out of a noir soundtrack sad? Murmurs and whispers, howls of pain? This must be a very bad bisque, a cruel chowder, a broth of despair.

Kidding aside, I think this might be the first really good song I’ve heard about COVID. And that feels right given that I think King Krule made the best song about the initial lockdown era before it happened, but released it at the exact right moment.

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Dora Jar “She Loves Me”

The arrangement of “She Loves Me” is mostly just a melodic baseline, vocals, and percussion – minimalist by any definition, but so generous with hooks, atmosphere, and dynamics that it doesn’t quite come off as minimalism. The song is always moving, which suits a song that’s essentially about the shifting nature of the self. Dora Jar is singing about herself as though she’s observing herself at different points in the timeline, not always relating to herself or even liking what she sees, but finding some thread of affection for herself connecting all her selves.

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NxWorries “SheUsed”

I wonder if the original plan for “SheUsed” was for Anderson Paak’s voice to be presented normally in contrast with the sped-up soul sample, or if Knxwledge arrived at having Paak’s voice sped up midway through the recording process. In any case, I think it was a smart decision – it’s a nice contrast with the straight presentation of his voice throughout the Why Lawd? album, and it has a way of making lyrics like “once I bust my nut I feel so unattached” sound a lot more quaint and charming. There’s an elegance in the string arrangement of the source sample and a natural warmth in Paak’s voice that doesn’t quite undermine the caddishness of the lyrics in this song, but it does lend a touch of pathos to what he’s singing and implies a dignity he’s trying to project even when his actions aren’t very dignified.

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Nilüfer Yanya “Method Actor”

I grew up in a time when post-Pixies loud/quiet/loud dynamics was a default for rock music, so that sort of shift typically feels more comfortable to me than jarring. I’m rarely surprised by this move, as you can usually feel the switch coming. This is not the case in “Method Actor,” a song I was fairly certain would linger in a moody groovy state because most modern music with this particular vibe tend to stay in that mode with only understated changes. Even having heard the song a few times over I’m still a little startled by the burst into distortion on the chorus, though I think it’s less about the abrasive texture and volume and more to do with how the guitar rhythm gets so violent and jagged relative to the tasteful and vaguely jazzy tone on the verses. In the context of the lyrics, I suppose it’s a musical manifestation of an actor snapping in and out of character, and drawing on their darkest memories in order to ground themselves in ugliness and pain.

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Kaytranada featuring PinkPantheress “Snap My Finger”

It took me a few listens to figure out why a bit of the verse melody in this song sounded so incredibly familiar to me, but then it hit me – there’s a melodic turn in the verse that’s just like one of the most memorable parts of Wham’s early 80s classic “Everything She Wants.” I suppose it’s just different enough to justify not giving George Michael a songwriting credit, though I think his estate could easily get it in a post-“Blurred Lines” legal landscape.

Not that I think Kaytranada and PinkPantheress should be giving that sort of credit, per se. “Snap My Finger” is a substantially different song with its own vibe, and I believe borrowing bits from previous songs is part of a tradition of songwriting going back centuries. I’m not even sure PinkPantheress intends to reference “Everything She Wants” here – there’s some shared words in the lyric, but I think this could easily be one of those things when you internalize a melody and then it emerges in something you make later without you consciously realizing it.

For a personal example, when I was 20 I wrote a song with a topline verse melody I realized a few years later was just a lightly modified (read: dumbed down) version of Stevie Wonder’s “Livin’ for the City.” It happens! And this is where taste comes in – I feel silly about not realizing I was lifting from a very famous song, but pleased that I had the sense to borrow from a genius of melody. And that’s the case for “Snap My Finger” – whether it’s intentional or accidental, it’s ultimately flattering to PinkPantheress’ taste that she ended up with snippet of melody as low-key sophisticated as George Michael at his very best.

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Charli XCX “Apple”

Broadly speaking, Charli XCX’s lyrics alternate between a sort of confrontational vapidity and a willingness to be transparent about very ugly feelings. I find a lot of her songs off-putting for this reason, but I respect what she’s doing because it’s such an unguarded approach to writing pop music. It’s a “fuck you, deal with me as I am” mindset that allows for declarations of her own greatness and cultural influence that can dare you to be like “well, actually…” and expressions of insecurity so raw and indulgent that it can be cringe-inducing. Her range as a singer and songwriter is very narrow, and this only underlines the point that you’re listening to a human, and we’re all defined as much by our limitations as our strengths. But not everyone is brave enough to lean into those limitations and flaws and unflattering characteristics. She’s basically a punk rocker working in a pop girl milieu.

I think the most lyrically interesting songs on Brat are the ones where she’s pushing through her own self-involvement to try to understand other people. I hear a lot of insecurity and anxiety in those songs, and a nagging fear that she can’t connect. “Apple,” the most melodically generous song on the record, looks to her parents as a source for her worst impulses. The intriguing thing here isn’t so much that she’s making this connection but in how the catchiest part of the song is when she’s shutting down after coming into conflict with them: “You don’t listen, I leave to the airport the airport the airport the airport.” I don’t think she’s going for this joke necessarily, but it’s very literally fight or flight.

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