MUSIC

of death. Her arch delivery bridges her scattered ideas, and her incisive wordplay demonstrates that some of them were interconnected all along. Even on “Break Bread,” where Harris excoriates powerful pop-culture figures who give nothing but lip service to righteous Black causes, you can still feel how much she enjoyed finding the best way to make her verses swing and blossom within the beat. The First People is a brief album, but Harris nonetheless finds enough room to foreground many of the complications of pandemic life. —LEOR

GALIL

Katatonia, Dead Air Peaceville peaceville.bandcamp.com/album/deadair

Katatonia were fresh off a hiatus when they dropped their 11th studio album, City Burials, in April, but the pandemic meant they couldn’t stage the triumphant return tour it merited. In May, the nearly 30-year-old Swedish metal outfit appeased their fans and assuaged their own frustration with a livestreamed concert. More than six months later—with the live-music circuit in Europe and the Americas still on hold—they’ve released Dead Air, a beautiful, melancholy, tight, and almost seamless document of that online performance. The recording raises the question of what a “live album” means when there’s no live audience—surely this is somewhere between a studio effort and a traditional live album. The band had invited their fans to vote for the songs they’d play, so Dead Air is literally a collection of crowd favorites recast in Katatonia’s current intricate, streamlined style. Three tracks from

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