Que extraño…. how odd, indeed. Here we are barreling toward the spring, on the verge of world war, declaring victory over a pandemic that’s lasted ~3 years in a way that still somehow seems premature. These and other factors have contributed to an incredibly exhausting month and a painful playlist cycle, which is also thanks to the sheer volume of new notable music to sift through; a glut of sonic cholesterol purpose-built to clog the narrowing artery of an industrial machine that demands perpetual content. Apart from the EPs and singles I consumed in its making, here’s a sampling of full length records I combed through in the last month:
- DS4 (Gunna), Caprisongs (FKA Twigs), Laurel Hell (Mitski), Dawn FM (The Weeknd), Motordrome (MØ), Lucifer On The Sofa (Spoon), Me Vs. Me (NLE Choppa), Slut Pop (Kim Petras), Heaux Tales Mo’ Tales (Jazmine Sullivan), Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (Big Thief), Sick! (Earl Sweatshirt), BODR (Snoop Dogg), Time Skiffs (Animal Collective), 2 Alive (Yeat), Once Twice Melody (Beach House), GHETTO GODS (EARTHGANG)
Ughh!
Thankfully Big Thief’s sprawling-yet-meticulous double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (whose tracklist is as enthusiastically overstuffed as its title) is so good that it nearly single handedly revived my flagging interest in even composing a playlist, so this mix is a Big Thief sandwich. Simulation Swarm eases us into things, a gorgeous and jangly ballad first revealed in an intense solo session on singer / writer Adrianne Lenker’s instagram page. The intensity has been scaled back a bit on the full band recording, but it’s no less poignant, as Adrianne touches on topics of technol paranoia (“machinery of constant sight”) and estranged love (“you are the river of light / who I love / that I sing to / in the belly of the empty night”) with a poetic verbiage only she could unfurl.
Brooklyn Love, from French-Algerian-American singer Lolo Zouaï eases us into the mix proper, with a vibey, laid back nu-R&B track extolling the virtues of young adult poverty. I suspect she is being tongue in cheek here, but in her world, the pinnacle of romance is not fancy dinners nor proper dates, but rather Shark Tank marathons late night walks to the convenience store for peanut M&Ms. The bass hits and repetitive vocal sample on the chorus inject some energy as Lolo quips “ooh la la / je suis chaud pour toi (I’m hot for you)”. In short, it’s a song that very much “takes you there”.
Jazmine Sullivan’s Bodies plays next, the intro track from her most recent album / opus; it’s a relatable tale of making the same drunken bad decisions over and over and over again, setting the stage perfectly for the Heaux Tales to follow. After that, Coi Leray floats overtop an incredible, pulsing beat on Anxiety, exhibiting varied flows and violent paranoia (“keep that thing on me / Draco .223”) against which drugs and guns are the only formidable weapons. Juice WRLD’s Relocate exists in a similarly murky vein, though his mind in that moment is more on spending the money he himself seems shocked to have at his disposal. Bonus points for managing to work the word “omniscient” into the rhyme scheme on a particular dense and fast paced verse.
Next up is Freaky Deaky, a song I really didn’t even want to like; like why in the hell is Doja Cat, one of the biggest stars on earth, collaborating again with Tyga, one of the worst and least relevant rappers around. Well, she’s always had bad sensibilities, but I can’t lie, she’s absolutely killing it on this chorus here — it might be the best that her singing voice has ever sounded. This track is only weeks away from getting massively overplayed on mainstream radio, but for now let us enjoy it as a silly and sexy distraction during dark times.
Lil Tecca’s Fallin has similarly understated ambitions, content to be a bite sized piece of rap candy with a bouncy beat and spirited verses, acting like a musical palate cleanser between the ruminative first passage of this mix and the high energy raps of the next. That portion starts with Getcho Mans, on which Indonesian rhymers Rich Brian and Warren Hue are rapping their asses off at blistering speeds as if they have something to prove for their country and the entire Southeast region of Asia. Whatever point they sought out to prove, they’ve made it here with an eye watering display of technical proficiency. Weak is a thick, deep fried serving of old skool southern rap, replete with a trunk shaking Juicy J beat, an addictive call-and-response (“when I say weak ass / you say bitch”) reprise, and bragadocious verses from J, Wiz Khalifa and Big30.
I can’t move on from the topic of the previous track, Weak, though, without addressing a passage from Big30’s verse:
“Thirty shots come out the ceiling / we disguise in dresses and wigs
You think this car full of bitches / ’til we pop out, get to hittin’”
If I’m hearing this right, Big30 is describing a sort of Bugs Bunny cross dressing scenario in which, in order to get the jump on some opps, he and his shooters get into the car dressed in full drag. Their targets, presuming it to be a car full of women, will then let 30 and his friends get close enough for a successful drive by shooting. This mental image is even weirder when you realize that Big30 is a truly enormous man.
NLE Choppa and Young Thug find an unexpected chemistry on straightforward banger Push It. Ominous horns and huge 808 drums add to the menace of NLE’s typically aggressive flow, while somehow naturally giving way to Young Thug’s quirkier guest verse, which includes delightfully ridiculous lyrics like “she put baguette (diamonds) on her pussy / she ain’t gotta douche it”. MØ’s Cool To Cry puts us in an EDM way – it’s perhaps the best showcase for her smoky vocals on her newest slick-yet-slight album Motordrome. I particularly love the way that sticky, metal-esque guitar lick accompanies the bass drop on the song’s bridge.
Beg For You is the first collaboration between Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama, two vanguards of the new pop movement which transitioned radio-friendly pop music away from your Katies Perry and toward the hyperactive stylings of your Duas Lipa. Despite Charli and Rina’s explosive convergence, the real star here is the darkly chipper electronic production. Immediate fan reception seems to indicate that the track isn’t as explosive a result as they expected from the coming together of these two superstars; what I think they mean is that it’s not as experimental and innovative as either’s most recent album, both of which ushered “hyper pop” (or, as it was known for a few years, Pop 2) into the most dominant form of mainstream music. Charli herself hedged bets by alluding to the fact that she is making music that is intentionally mainstream and not-abstract in some sort of gamesmanship with her label. But ya know what. I love it. The breathless drama, the longing and the 90s house beat make it indelible for me, reminding me of what Madonna did with Ray of Light.
Mitski takes the drama up a level further with massive, 80s style synth keys on Love Me More, a truly bombastic record compared to everything else on her new Laurel Hell album. It’s simply made for awkward at-home dance alongs, the kind Mitski has with herself on the somewhat avant garde music video. Content-wise she is not beating around the bush, begging her S.O. to love her more, in a way so all encompassing that it can out compete her racing and intrusive thoughts. By contrast, PinkPantheress buries her feelings in several layers of ironic teenage detachment (“did you ever want me? / no worries if not”) on All My Friends Know. The version included here is a reinterpretation by ANZ from Pantehress’ new remixes album; the groove here is truly next level stuff, and I find the song playing itself in my head at least a few times a day.
The energy winds down now for a smoother section of the mix. EARTHGANG borrows the name of the classic Tupac album / track All Eyes On Me (here, they use an ’s’ rather than a ‘z’) to deliver a low key trap track about the way black people continue to shine in the face of constant scrutiny and surveillance. PawPaw Rod’s HIT EM WHERE IT HURTS is a much more personal tale of heartbreak over an incredibly funky bassline with cleverly referential bars like “I’m on a quest, love / learn my roots / think that black thought / this my truth”. Cautious Clay’s 25/8 is a downbeat but occasionally soaring R&B track which employs that big, booming Wall Of Sound style recording technique that makes it sound like you’re in the studio with him.
Hurt Me So Good hails from the Jazmine Sullivan’s new deluxe version of her Heaux Tales album; it’s a stunning showcase for her megawatt voice, belted at full power here, and it’s quite frankly overwhelming, even were it not for the gospel flourishes. Jamaican artist Shenseea’s R U That is a raunchy banger about the eternal search for Mr. Right. It features a strong feature from 21 Savage, in his pocket as the ‘hood romantic’, who can believably sell the idea that all he needs from his partner are attainable benchmarks like “home cooked meals / making sure that I eat”.
After its 1998 inclusion in Fight Club, The Pixie’s classic Where Is My Mind? has received literally dozens of covers, and has almost literally been done to death. Imagine my surprise at how much I enjoy Tkay Maidza’s spin on the material, which remixes the rock aspects of the song with a hard hitting EDM instrumental. Speaking of rock, Doja Cat’s beat-for-beat ‘cover’ (it’s just a clone!) of Hole’s 1998 classic Celebrity Skin caused me to put the original back in heavy rotation, because its just fuckin fun. The power of the track came largely from Courtney Love’s acidic take on celebrity culture — ya know, the thing that killed her husband Kurt Cobain four years prior — as well as the power of seeing the female band members of Hole shred huge guitar riffs in the song’s music video, a bit of a rarity in mainstream 90s music. Courtney Love’s classical studies references are appreciated as well, from quoting 19th century Dante Rossetti poems to Shakespear’s Merchant Of Venice (“pound of flesh”). These are things Doja Cat can’t recreate, and I don’t really know why she would try.
Anyway, this transitions us nicely, I think, into anthems, one of Charli XCX’s hardest hitting tracks ever, which is genuinely saying something. Wheelspin is another high point from MØ’s new record and the one that most directly invokes the concept of the motordrome, which typically conjures in the mind images of Mad Max or The Place Beyond The Pines. MØ details her regret at abandoning a lover in the interest of making some sort of change, signing off with a sassy “heh” as finger picked guitar strums play the song out.
SOFI TUKKER has dropped off new single Original Sin, a smooth and sexy club track that gives a big middle finger to the idea of original sin; that is, the Christian doctrine which holds humans come into the world in a sinful condition as a consequence of Eve’s eating the apple from the tree of knowledge. Caroline Polachek and producer Danny L. Harle have captured lightning in a bottle yet again with Billions, having most recently collaborated on the excellent Bunny Is A Rider (featured on the previous mix). Billions is an ice-cold piece of trip hop with a borderline psychedelic edge as Caroline conjures images of “headless angels / body upgraded” and makes “cornucopeiac” sound like three separate words. Before you go say some shit like “oooh this is just another weirdo Anthony indie song” consider the fact that Polachek is currently on tour opening for DUA FRIGGIN LIPA, aka one of the biggest acts in the entire world! Ha! Eat that, person whom I just imagined.
Spanish superstar Rosalia has delivered the wild ass single SAOKO, which samples from the reggae ton megabit Saoco before it. Rosalia details the way she can use music, sex, make up, and drag to change depending on how she’s feeling that day. It hails from her forthcoming Motomami album, a persona shift that is well underway in the fucking sick music video.
Baby Tate flips the script and turns her man out on freak nasty anthem Slut Him Out, making him do things like swallow his own, er, ‘kids’, and ride his face til she climaxes in the double digits. It’s shocking and hilarious and puts even the raunchiest of our modern rappers on notice. NLE Choppa is comparatively tame on Lick Me Baby, a horny highlight of his new album and honestly his entire discography, where he manages to make spelling out the words “L-I-C-K M-E B-A-B-Y” fit his flow’s rhyme scheme. It’s still quite perverted, of course, as Choppa raps an ode to a woman who lets him “paint her face like Pica-ssi-o”.
Whew! Things were getting a little hot there, so let Fivio Foreign’s City of Gods dump a cold bucket of water on our collective heads. This is a big, big song, and feels like a coronation for Fivio as the new King Of New York following his outstanding guest verse on Kanye West’s Off The Grid, which was actually the best part of the entire DONDA album. Alicia Keys provides the song’s hook, belting once again about New York, which of course she addressed on her mega hit Empire State of Mind(“concrete jungle wet dream tomaaaatooo!”). Public spouse harasser Kanye West returns the favor by guesting on this song with a lengthy feature in a direct attempt to outdo Off The Grid (“hey Fivi / I’m sorry / but this the feature of the year”). I’m not sure he succeeds but the effort has clearly inspired him to push well beyond the half ass raps he’s been delivering lately, with several different flows and the requisite physical threat to Pete Davidson. The striking music video also utilizes the Sin City visual style better than the the entirety of the second movie in that series.
Saba does an impressive Kendrick Lamar impression on Survivor’s Guilt, a gritty and aggressive trap banger which details his miraculous escape from the violent streets of Chicago urban projects. You can hear it in their rapid fire flows – Saba and G. Herbo are pissed off at the conditions they and millions of other black families in the Chicagoland are forced to come up in (“what’s eating / when you in a food desert?”). As we wind the playlist to a close, The Kid LAROI and Juice WRLD use drugs and alcohol to cope with emotional isolation on Lonely & Fucked Up and Cigarettes, respectively. It’s the influenced and the influencer, as LAROI is often referred to as Juice’s protege, a comparison which is obvious in this juxtaposition, but is getting less apt with time. Cavetown’s Fall In Love With A Girl is more down tempo than most songs which feature beabadoobee, but it’s still very much in the bedroom pop pocket she helped pioneer. The song is perfectly adorable beneath the melancholy instrumentation, as Cavetown and bea urge an unknown woman to leave her mentally vacant boyfriend (“the lights are on / but no one’s home”), and fall in love with another girl; in bea’s case, she means herself.
Our penultimate track, Wild, is a wild and wooly rock track from Spoon, a band I’ve loved since high school, who have shown an insane amount of consistency over their 20+ year career. It’s got a warmly fuzzy quality that just feels good; no surprise that it was co-produced by the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff, aka Bleachers. And lastly, as teased earlier, our final track comes from Big Thief as well, though not from their newest album, but rather the one right before it. Not is a blistering, angry, snarling, and deeply miserable which demonstrates beyond a doubt the soaring heights which this band can reach on the back of Adrianne Lenker’s harrowing lyrics and her bandmates’ impeccable accompaniment. The song absolutely rips crowds apart in live performances, as evidenced by a stunned Stephen Colbert on his talk show, or that time they completely overwhelmed an unprepared 7am audience on a CBS This Morning appearance. I dunno. If this song doesn’t move you even a little, I’ll probably question the presence of your mortal soul.
🧟♂️🧛♀️ Resurrections Corner 🧛♂️🧟♀️
- Charli XCX’s Anthems returns to the mix a little under two years after its original inclusion. Despite the hyphy beat, this is probably the most relatable track from her 2020 album how I’m feeling now, on which Charli explored the way that she’s been coping with the then-brand new pandemic outbreak. That album was the subject of the documentary Alone Together (available on Hulu), and is, sadly, exactly as relevant now as it was then.
- The DEMON remix of Toxic Avenger’s Romance & Cigarettes was included in a mix nearly 10 years back, and has since re-entered my heavy rotation. Apart from an obnoxious dub step drop about midway through the song, I just love the energy on this track, and the way that DEMON has mixed the vocals way up, extracting maximum drama from every word. I added and removed this song about a dozen times from this mix because I figured I’m already laying enough ‘experimental’ shit on my listeners, but in the end I fell back on the principle that this is MY mix. If you wanted a more perfectly manicured playlist full of Ed Sheeran and other music that couldn’t possibly offend (nor inspire) anyone, well, there are a million other places to get that.
🤔 😳 Questionable Lyrics Zone 🧐🤨
- “Black Lives Matter / yeah I said it ho / trap lives matter / gotta let ‘em know” – EARTHGANG (All Eyes On Me). May the next person who makes a pun about ‘x’ lives mattering, even well intentioned, be turned into pink mist by a random lightning strike
- “Can you lick me? Suck on me like a New York glizzy?” NLE Choppa (Lick Me). ‘Glizzy’ is nü-speak for hot dog, a food which you eat not by sucking, but by biting. Biting many times. Ouch.
- “Real estate is an investment” – Juice WRLD (Relocate). Yes it is, Mr. WRLD! One of the more common and consistently profitable forms of investment.
- Jazmine Sullivan’s Philly accent jumps out at about 2:06 on Hurt Me So Good, pronouncing the word “strength” like “strenf”
- “Raise the mortgage higher / I’ma stand my ground / like a fuckin squatter” Saba – Survivor’s Guilt. I know what he’s saying, it’s just worded kind of funny, because obviously standing and squatting are two different things.
- “It’s not the formless being / nor the cry in the air / nor the boy I’m seeing / with her long black hair” Big Thief – Not. In live performances, Adrianne Lenker sometimes substitutes “boy” for “girl”, but I just think it’s an interesting choice of words.
👨💻 Stray Observations 📝
- The artist behind the album art here also worked on the album art for Juice WRLD’s Fighting Demons
- The way that Rina Sawayama sings “Separated by a degree / hesitate and I lose you / so far out of reach” exactly on beat on Beg For You makes for three of the best seconds in recent pop music. I predict that her straight up perfect first album is not a fluke
- The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan wrote the guitar riff for Hole’s Celebrity Skin. Given that the man is an actual rock god, it helps explain why this song is so fuckin good.
- Kind of an interesting aside here: in the new Matrix film (2021), the villainous Analyst has the power to activate “swarm mode”, turning the Matrix-trapped inhabitants into human bombs. The Matrix itself being, of course, a simulation. So the fact that Big Thief named their track Simulation Swarm is a cool instance of parallel creative thought, as the song was demo’d in 2020, long before they could have possibly seen the movie
- Bonus track!!!! Kim Petras’ Treat Me Like A Slutis my favorite cut from her knowingly ridiculous Slut Pop album, with its driving dance beat and easily memorized lyrics. Thought it was just maybe a little too weird for inclusion here but check it out. Kim Petras is unrecognizable in the song’s visualizer, having Yassified her own self into oblivion
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