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Contemporary Music Spring highlights ... Damon Albarn Vashti Bunyan Richard Dawson Deep Throat Choir Efterklang Arthur Jeffes Park Jiha King Creosote Daniel Pioro Karine Polwart Max Richter Ride These New Puritans Patrick Watson Andrew Weatherall Wacław Zimpel
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Contents
Giant Swan: Sudan Archives 30
Shanti Celeste 36
crackmagazine.net
22
What Just Happened? 53
42
Editor's Letter – p.17
Recommended – p.18
The Click: Clams Casino – p.71
Reviews – p.73
Downtime: Battles – p.96
Rising: Hiro Kone - p.21
Retrospective: Hard Core – p.79
20 Questions: Danny Brown – p.97
CONTENTS
Aesthetic:
LEEDS
26.03
BELGRAVE MUSIC HALL
GLASGOW
27.03
SWG3 WAREHOUSE
BIRMINGHAM O2 INSTITUTE2
28.03
MANCHESTER GORILLA
31.03
BRISTOL 1.04 THEKLA
LONDON
2.04
+ THE CASHMERE EXPERIENCE
ROUNDHOUSE
METROPOLISMUSIC.COM / TICKETMASTER.CO.UK / GIGSINSCOTLAND.COM A METROPOLIS MUSIC & DF CONCERTS PRODUCTION BY ARRANGEMENT WITH CAA A UK TOUR, A SYMPHONY OF SILK AND AN AMALGAMATION OF CASHMERE BY KOJEY RADICAL
November 2019
Crack Magazine Was Made Using
In the dying light of 2009, I attended a gig in a church in Shoreditch. It had a strapline, which I thought quite wry at the time: difficult music for difficult times. Difficult? We had no idea what was to come.
TNGHT Serpent Heavy Lungs Self Worth Kanye West On God Baby Keem Honest Guaynaa Rebota Eartheater Supersoaker Young M.A Kold World Ty Segall Ice Plant Shanti Celeste Aquablock Knwgd Lemon (feat. UKNWN) Caroline Polachek Look At Me Now Daughters The Virgin Adina Howard Freak Like Me
To be honest, I’m not sure that nostalgia is the right word for the feeling that arises from looking back at the decade just gone. A prismatic, janus-faced decade where antipathy (remember that?) dissolved into righteous political consciousness, but where nuance became as outmoded as the CD drive. The 2010s brought us reckonings and distractions, huge steps forward and equal and opposing backlashes, #blacklivesmatter and #notallmen, vaporwave and Spotifycore. We try to make sense of the last ten years in our end of decade special. We must be crazy. But we didn’t want to spend too long raking over the near past. Giant Swan, this month’s cover stars, are one of the most righteous and exciting acts of the white-hot now. Their visceral sound – which draws from noise, techno and punk – rejects accepted conflations of extreme music and nihilism. As they say in their first ever cover interview, “we're not trying to do the classic thing of destroying without rebuilding.” Riotous, positive and powerful, we couldn’t think of a more fitting act with which to look to the future. Another ten years, anyone?
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Issue 106
Giant Swan shot exclusively for Crack Magazine by Tom Andrew in Bristol, October 2019
EDITORIAL
Louise Brailey, Editor
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Recommended O ur g ui d e to wh at's goi n g on i n y ou r c i ty
Giant Swan Electrowerkz 14 November Giant Swan, who, you may have noticed, grace this month’s cover, are one of the most exhilarating acts to come through in recent years. Urgent and refreshingly irreverent, Robin Stewart and Harry Wright have built a reputation off their intense live gigs – arguably the most immediate showcase for their take on skewed, whiteknuckle techno that takes cues from hardcore punk and noise. This month sees the duo unleash their debut album on the world, so you know the atmosphere is going to special at this show.
Oshun Studio 9294 9 November Carla dal Forno Electrowerkz 11 November
Maxo Kream XOYO 6 December
Prepare to get positively spooked by one of the standout artists to emerge from the proudly bleak Blackest Ever Black label. Carla dal Forno set out her stall with a set of releases for BEB featuring clouds of elegant, moody production carried by the bleak romanticism of dal Forno’s voice. With more softly-lit nocturnes that let the outside world creep in, the Melbourne experimentalist’s new album, Look Up Sharp sees her inaugurate her new label, Kallista. The record traces a period of time which includes her move to London, where she’s a fixture of Hackney’s Low Company record store, run by BEB founder Kiran Sande, and where she presides over a monthly residency on NTS which winds through stylish psychedelia, post-punk and art rock. Let yourself drift.
FKA twigs O2 Academy Brixton 25 November
Metronomy Roundhouse 8 November
Maxo Kream’s been doing it right since 2012, when he dropped his Retro Card mixtape on the world. Since then he’s been constantly on the rise, peaking with last year’s Punken, an album that garnered critical acclaim all over the shop. He stepped up again this year with Brandon Banks, his first major label release. It’s this that has sent him across the pond and into the arms of XOYO for his first UK show. Best catch him now before he blows up any more.
Jay Som The Garage 20 November
Giggs Wembley Arena 6 December There really isn’t anyone like Giggs. How does the Peckham rapper sound like he’s constantly running out of air in his lungs and yet delivers bars with such menace and intensity? However he does it, it’s working. His latest album, 2019’s Big Bad, debuted at No. 6 in the UK charts, and he’s even featured on a couple of jams by a very low-key artist called Drake. Come revel in the presence of a rapper at the very top of his game.
AJ Tracey Alexandra Palace 8 November
With her acclaimed 2017 debut, Everybody Works, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte found herself hailed as a much-loved symbol of bedroom indie rock. On her anticipated follow-up Anak Ko, Duterte became fully realised. Her music positively leaks with the dreamy, sunsoaked West Coast vibes inspired by her hometown, and her live shows have become something of a meditation space for her fans. Expect blissed out vibes at The Garage. Polaris Festival Bambounou, Carista, Floating Points Verbier, Switzerland 29 November-1 December
EVENTS
A ski resort in the Swiss Alps isn’t usually home to a fully stacked electronic bill, but Polaris Festival proves that unlikely pairings can be the most charming. Touching down in Verbier’s Les Essers, this year’s shakedown will be headed up by some heavyweight acts. Sets from the likes of French techno experimentalist Bambounou, Detroit royalty Omar-S and disco queens Honey Dijon and Jayda G will be the perfect focal point to your snow-capped antics. Perel Corsica Studios 8 November
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Willow Five Miles 16 November
Vampire Weekend Alexandra Palace 13 November
Hessle Audio fabric 10 November
Rich Brian O2 Forum Kentish Town 25 November
EFG London Jazz Fest The Ex, Donna Leake, DJ Spinna Various venues, London 15-24 November EFG London Jazz Fest has become a stalwart in the capital’s jazz circuit, expanding and evolving with each edition. Celebrating 25 years in the game this year, the festival invites the most compelling artists operating within the realm of jazz, soul and electronic music for an extended party. Over in the smoky confines of Cafe Oto, Dutch punk royalty The Ex are commemorating their 40th anniversary with a three-day residency, while collectives like Tomorrow’s Warrior, London Jazz Orchestra and Patchwork Orchestra sit at the heart of the festival. Elsewhere, count on Donna Leake and DJ Spinna’s jazz-adjacent club sounds to take you deep into the night.
Lightning Bolt The Underworld 11 November
Lindstrøm Oval Space 30 November
Christina Aguilera SSE Arena 9 November
Headie One O2 Academy Brixton 10 November
Efdemin + Deena Abdelwahed Corsica Studios 9 November
Kedr Livanskiy Bloc 21 November Kedr Livanskiy might well be a new name for many, but she’s been doing her own unique brand of dancefloor-leaning dream-pop for a minute now. Part of Russia’s increasingly fertile underground scene, her wistful music sounds as if Carla dal Forno swapped dub for the club while on an exchange programme to Moscow. Produced by Flaty, affiliate of the white-hot St. Petersburg label GOST ZVUK, her 2019 album Your Need freewheels through myriad styles and genres while her voice drifts gently above. Expect head and body to be pulling in different directions when she touches down at Bloc for this headline show.
Growing up on a hearty diet of folk, country and gospel on the outskirts of a Norweigan oil town, Lindstrøm has had a unique spectrum of influences to draw upon for his own productions. The DJ, producer and multi-instrumentalist has had an equally colourful career so far. Founding his own Feedelity imprint in 2002, his upbeat, analogue disco has garnered him a loyal fan base around the world (and several Norwegian Grammy wins). In honour of his latest album On A Clear Day I Can See You Forever, he’s touching down in Hackney’s Oval Space for an uplifting shakedown.
Erol Alkan Printworks 16 November
Andrew Weatherall Phonox 15 November
Björk The O2 19 November
KOFFEE O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire 9 November
Helena Hauff XOYO 15 November
Nabihah Iqbal Cafe Oto 13 November
9000 Dreams Corsica Studios & The Colombian 22 November Avalon Emerson’s roving club experience touches down once more at Corsica Studios, with a line-up heavy on the, well, heaviness and pulling absolutely zero punches. Capping off a breakout year will be LSDXOXO, whose unique brand of rave trax have torn up dances worldwide. JASSS, meanwhile, brings the rave from the other side of the tracks with her industrial-leaning techno stompers, while Roi Perez transplants the best bits of his envelope-pushing Panorama Bar sets. Returning is the trippy party-minimal of Elissa Suckdog, and debuting is Hunter Lombard’s dreamy jack-attack. A surefire stomper.
EVENTS
Boy Harsher Scala 12 November
Björk’s theatrical multimedia live show Cornucopia puts forward her vision for a new world. The experience is as buoyant and fantastical as you’d expect from the Icelandic auteur, who has described it as a ‘dream you can watch from afar’ and ‘sci-fi camping trip’ for a disillusioned population. Debuting last year with an eight-night residency at New York City’s The Shed, Cornucopia comes to the UK for a run of shows that are sure to lean into immersive extravagance and plenty of whimsical flute action.
020
EVENTS
021
Hiro Kone
Sounds like: Cerebral big room techno Soundtrack for: Philosophical breakthroughs on the dancefloor File next to: Carter Tutti Void, Samuel Kerridge Our favourite song: Feed My Ancestors
“In my day to day life, I'm very much in my head,” admits New York-based producer Hiro Kone. “And I think when I make music, I get an opportunity to not be so in my head.”
Where to find her: soundcloud.com/ hirokone
After a childhood of playing classical violin, teenage years spent in the Bay Area's punk scene, and her early 20s consumed by an MPC 500, Kone has finally found her home in electronic music. It’s a genre flexible enough to embrace the many different worlds she's inhabited. “I think [electronic music] allows for a lot of space and actual diversity of ideas,” she explains. “I can take my violin and process it into my modular and then take that back into a sampler and cut that up more. Everything kind of becomes this single membrane. So all these experiences, my history, everything can be wrapped up in this one thing.”
While the sounds used may be abstract, the histories Kone is trying to recount still manage to shine through. Recently a friend emailed her after hearing Feed My Ancestors and said the drones, tones and percussion reminded them of Peking Opera and their Buddhist practice. “This was quite remarkable to me,” she says. “To be able to invoke [those images] without being literal about it. I think this may be the nature of being a hybrid.” A Fossil Begins To Bray is out now via Dais Records
MUSIC
“[A Fossil Begins to Bray] is somewhat an amalgamation of many threads of ideas I've been trying to process and look at through all of these records,” she says. “So I see them all as connected in that way, and very personal.” This release, in fact, might be Kone's most personal yet, tying in familial history and examining her ancestral roots. Growing up, Kone spent a lot of time travelling between Hong Kong and San Francisco to see her parents, and floating between these two worlds could be isolating at times. “When you're younger, you just feel like, ‘Oh my god, all these things are wrong’. But as you get older, you realise the things that are wrong are actually the things that are so right about you.” This realisation, that your lack is actually one of your strongest attributes, is at the core of A Fossil Begins to Bray.
Words: Maya-Roisin Slater
Having fine-tuned her signature blend of experimental electronics and techno for almost a decade, hearing Kone describe her music as a cerebral release is unexpected. Most of her work relies on a heavy contextual framework, with album descriptions that read like excerpts from a limited run philosophy text that you might find in your local anarchist bookstore. Her 2018 record Pure Expenditure, for instance, explored releases of energy, pulling from writings on capitalism by French philosopher Georges Bataille for inspiration. Where Pure Expenditure studied the idea of release, her latest LP A Fossil Begins to Bray explores what lives in its absence, a homage to the importance of negative space.
The Shape of
Noise to Come Giant Swan want to question everything you know about extreme music
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Words: Gabriel Szatan Photography: Tom Andrew
Robin Stewart and Harry Wright are a confirmation of every bias you ever held about music geeks. They render their life in cultural terms: who they rate and who they don’t, and how that informs their social outlook. In conversation, they zoom around a grid of references, slowing down on occasion to parallel park into an analogy, making sure the fit is just right, before haring off into the distance again. They have been best mates for 16 years. They also happen to be Giant Swan, one of the most righteous live acts on the planet.
length hair pleasingly intact, though scrunched in a bun today. As soon as they are together, they feed off each other like plug and socket, bickering over whether it’s ethical to enjoy the music of Iggy Azalea. The pair first fell in together through skating and graffiti, before forming a group with two other mates, The Naturals, when they were 12. They would raid CD racks for anything sufficiently heavy and check out as many bands as possible in Bristol’s thicket of bars and venues. “We played drone at the beginning,” Robin says. “It was really naval gazey, getting stoned and plugging in the delay pedal. Then you come out of it all excited about that moment where it got really crunchy. And Harry would go, ‘Yeah man, that crunchy bit was sick!’” They followed the crunch from there, and out of that primordial stew emerged Giant Swan, their sheets of feedback coalescing into something more consistent to latch onto. “There was always an undercurrent of noise in our music,” Robin recalls, “but we couldn't control it, as we never quantised it.” It took an accident to find their current form. Harry broke his arm, so the duo jettisoned guitars from their set-up for good, prioritising atmosphere, vocals and a dose of faster action instead. “It’s different now,” Harry adds. “We’re both doing rhythm, so we can bring in dynamic shifts as we move through it.”
MUSIC
We meet on a bright Monday in Stokes Croft, Bristol at a vegan cafe. Robin arrives first, in a black denim jacket with large patches of Crass and Bokeh Versions stitched onto it. His hair, once huge, has been shorn. He chats in a rich brogue, half-Scottish, halfWest Country, with a friend behind the counter. Harry follows up, chest-
Transformative clubbing experiences piled up in the mid-2010s, and expeditions to dub gatherings in the city’s St Paul’s district sent them home reeling. “We got really into dub in a very personal way,” Robin explains. “Our experience of extremity in music came from My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth, and then it was like, ‘Holy shit, there are dub sound systems that can actually go louder.’” They became close with local likeminds: Young Echo’s Ossia and Vessel, and Timedance’s Batu; artists who absorbed the quality of dub as a communication medium, and a mode for independence and craftsmanship, then fashioned it into their own unique sound. A 2017 show at Krakow’s Unsound Festival – where they demolished the
art gallery they were booked to play – was a riotous success. It was followed by a 12” on Timedance, and another on the similarly buy-on-sight label Whities. Word got around that they were unmissable; a force of nature. They began notching up eyebrowraising bookings at Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Festival, Berlin’s Herrensauna and Birmingham’s House of God, as well as mini-tours as far afield as China and Australia. As people, Robin and Harry embody that strange sort of fandom where you both praise and kill your idols. They like to hear from both sides of an argument, but poke a finger in the eye of both. They are highly prone to taking the piss; a witty zinger always follows a moment of profundity, like night follows day. Early merch bore the strapline ‘Dev-ide and Conquer’, showing the three ages of Dev Hynes, tracing backward from Blood Orange through Lightspeed Champion to his fringe days in Test Icicles (the project you’d imagine they rank best). I have a sticker pack thrust into my hand early on, including one which extends the typography of no-nonsense label PAN by two letters, becoming PANTS. Bill Kouligas, apparently, was amused by it – a rare victory. We saunter down along Stokes Croft, from hardware hub Elevator Sound to stately emporium Mickleburgh Musical Instruments. We arrive at their bolthole of a studio to find two school kids punching the shit out of each other in the middle of the road. This kind of thing is apparently pretty common. “We've gone out and there have been police and ambulances and stuff before,” Robin tells me. “There's lots of heroin and lots of spice in that park, like a rolling carnival of souls. This area can be pretty gnarly sometimes.” Robin and Harry finish a smoke and head in, past bins stuffed with takeout pizza boxes and into a musty room with a cymbal-less drum kit. The wall is lined with etchings from one-time inhabitants IDLES, which Robin points out while adopting a mock-luvvie tone and imitating frontman Joe Talbot’s mannerisms: “This is where it all started for us…” Giant Swan are not just cut from a similar cloth to the studio’s former co-
026
Robin Stewart
MUSIC
“We get gold out of shit. That's the whole game”
027 trying to imitate a dub siren.” Meanwhile, Harry breaks loose to stomp around like a bassist in a nu metal band. Their affectations are cribbed from the spasmodic contortions of mid-00s grindcore and screamo outfits like The Locust and Blood Brothers, from whom they got their name. Short of driving a bulldozer through the wall, as a pre-Boredoms Yamantaka Eye once did, it’s hard to think how they could be more disruptive to clubland’s performative airs and graces.
You might not get a sense of these values when witnessing Giant Swan in the flesh. There is a disjunct between the conscientious, sweet boys in front of me, offering blueberries and picking the right Horace Andy record for the studio speakers to set the mood, and what happens when they’re on stage. Backed by walls of amps, they are apocalyptically loud. They stand across from one another, Robin perennially topless, separated by a table of step sequencers, effect boxes, pedals, drum machines and microphones. Everything is improvised. “We get gold out of shit,” muses Robin. “That's the whole game.” He then smirks and corrects himself. “Not even the whole game. Someone came up to us at De School as we were leaving. They went, ‘Thank you for the show. It was like watching you two have sex.’”
Importantly, though, the impetus is not on disruption, but liberation. The facelessness of Four Tet or Amon Tobin, where “all you can see is an Apple logo” or a silhouette backed by a light display, doesn’t do it for them. They want people to feel it and follow it. They point toward The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra as historical examples of performers that would court urgent, furious squalls, yet not “be an arbiter of violence.” The messages would manifest instead as a call to action. “Harry said it once to me,” Robin recalls, "‘if you can be the stupidest looking person in the room, you give everybody else agency to feel less self conscious about reacting to what you are doing.’” They hope for people to hang up their hang-ups and join in the chant, though they feel just as motivated when presented with a challenging crowd.
They are a kinetic whir, teetering on the edge of madness. Neither knows fully what the other is up to, so they rely on coded body language of stops and gos. They count in 1-2-3-4 like duellers drawing pistols. When it’s fully popping off, Robin picks up the mic to bellow to the heavens or “make little yelpy noises,
“We're lucky enough to have [a different] perspective, coming from a rock music background,” Harry reasons. “You learn gratitude when playing for £40 and four warm Red Stripes. When you’re at a rock gig, you’re not going to have a fag halfway through, then come back and fuck
MUSIC
owners, but pegged as the next great noisy thing outright, logical successors to a lineage of rough ‘n tumble music, from Black Dice and Fuck Buttons to Paula Temple and Surgeon. What marks the duo out as something worth championing is how they bring people in to ride the lightning, too. They wholeheartedly reject the doctrine of power and domination that pervades throughout experimental music. They preach inclusivity and see extreme sounds as something expressive that even the layperson can buy into. They bristle at comparisons to the ghouls of the power electronics circuit and have absolutely no time for dark techno lads swinging their balls and ego around, nor industrial imagery that fetishises cruelty and death. Though their tastes scatter across the map, the aim of their moral compass is true.
028 Harry Wright
around at the bar when the band are playing. You’ll be worming to the front, singing along to lyrics, partaking in the central event of where your money has gone. With dance music, half the people there don’t give a fuck about you, so there’s something more for us to prove.” He grits his teeth. “What I have a problem with is DJs that aren’t aware of any of that. They feel the audience owe them something, griping about someone in the crowd on their phone. You’re basically playing on a massive phone anyway. Behave yourself.” Their debut album, Giant Swan, is out this month on their own imprint Keck. It’ll stand out on a wall of records: the painted sleeve depicts someone smoking a cigarette the wrong way around, like an impressionist watercolour of an embarrassing Facebook upload. The record saw them sketch out tunes alone, before sending outlines to the other for polish and completion. Though the first two singles, 55 Year Old Daughter and
Pandaemonium gesture toward it, the LP is not wall-to-wall panel-beaters. “Some of the heaviest bits,” Robin reckons, “are where there's no kick, you know?” People might have got a sense from the nomenclature surrounding them, or glimpses of performance that telegraph a macho tone, that the album could be a straight slam-a-thon. Mentioning this is like a red rag to a bull. “This,” Harry says, jerking upright, “has been a terrible development for electronic music. We’re at a point where there's this trend of ‘harder, faster, more disorted equals better’ and it’s just like, fucking hell mate – no. It’s a stupid correlation, a totally un-nuanced direction.” Robin backs him up: “There’s already a place for that! Yes, Perc’s great, but we’ve got him already. The way that the sun dial started pointing in this really inexorable way towards the horror sound in techno is bullshit. There's nothing powerful about that.” What was powerful, they offer, was watching Nkisi play after them at that De School show. She throttled it at 170 BPM, initially alarming even the battle-worn duo, but reaching a zen point, Robin says, where it felt “like a dub rave. The constant frequency is the loudest, biggest thing in the room.” They left the club at breakfast, inspired. “It's important to not just use this aggressive music for shutting off,” Robin continues. “It's about staying eyes-open, addressing topics as opposed to trying to cover your ears. It's about being present and using your 'brutal kick drum' or 'abused electronics' or whatever to a good end.” This cuts to the core of Giant Swan’s appeal, and what propels them forward. “You have to be positive in what
you are trying to attract,” Harry says. “Sometimes we do dwell on the negative, but we're not trying to do the classic thing of destroying without rebuilding.” It’s a case of acceleration over accelerationism. The clenched fist, open heart and clear eyes of the harsh music they grew up on grounded them in understanding that you don’t need to be foregrounded in the fight. “We could split hairs about the semantics of what [protest music] means, but I think it's about using heaviness and social disobedience as a way to implement change in a useful way. It’s an ideology, sure, but the actual content is left pretty blank and we hand that question and answer over to the audience.” Giant Swan are overflowing with thoughts, not all fully formed and some evidently lost down blunted alleyways, but this is endearing. Their manifesto is still under construction, and they have ample chances ahead to crowdsource improvements. A full UK tour looms, bookmarked by an enormous support slot with their old mates IDLES at London’s Alexandra Palace. They are excited by Black Midi’s dissonant antics on the Mercury Prize broadcast, though, as clued-up students of popular culture, are wary that the current wave of agitated British music could too be a trend diced up in boardrooms. Politics, Robin says, is not necessarily what they want audiences to focus on when trying to spark communal release. “I sometimes walk around thinking, ‘Yeah, I just live in a shit country.’ But at the same time, I’m not suffering daily. If we've got a pulpit, it's the stage. And maybe we were given a pulpit by people who had lost sight of what a pulpit was for. Though, yes, fuck those Tory cunts.” They view themselves as a conduit to pass energy on, one part of a positive feedback loop. Though they stand at the centre, Giant Swan’s message is one of sharing power, a mantra that resonates. It’s a dissolution of human ego, to invert the title of their more popular jams. Rather than noise for noise’s sake, I earnestly suggest that what they do best is inspire getting free together. Robin is charmed: “That’s it, you nailed it.” Then, like clockwork, comes the follow-up. “Let’s get free together – and listen to The Vines.” Giant Swan is out now via Keck
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“Sometimes we dwell on the negative, but we're not trying to do the classic thing of destroying without rebuilding”
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Words: Tara Joshi Photography: Melanie Lehmann Styling: Rhiannon Barry Hair: Issac Poleon Makeup: Francesca Daniella using Uoma Beauty
ALTERNATIVE REALITIES MUSIC
With long-awaited debut Athena, Sudan Archives transmits visions of her own Afrofuturist utopia
Clothing: Brand Clothing: Brand Clothing: Brand
Cincinnati-born Sudan Archives – real name Brittney Parks – has been reading Bernal’s controversial book lately, and thinking about blackness in unexpected places. Certainly her own work, often labelled as Afrofuturist, interrogates perceptions about white spaces. Sudan plays the violin, an instrument synonymous with classical and folk-adjacent sounds – two genres inextricably linked with white spaces in the West (a recent UK study found that only 1.7% of orchestral musicians were from a black or ethnic minority background). All of this is, in part, what inspired the title of her debut album, Athena, and its artwork: a nude sculpture of Parks evoking an ancient goddess. Parks has always been influenced by powerful women. She references characters like Sailor Moon, Xena and Chun-Li; goddesses like Oshun and Mami Wata; as well as her mother – but, equally, she’s interested in challenging accepted dogma. “I like the philosophy behind questioning the roots of things,” she nods, taking a drag from her vape, smoke plumes dancing around the room. The shoot in the photographer’s home studio has just finished, and Parks’ been riffing warmly with everyone involved, meaning our conversation is interrupted with sweet goodbyes – but she always picks up her thread of thought again, furrowing her bleached eyebrows. “Like, what’s ‘good’ and
what’s ‘bad’? That’s what the album is about: accepting that humans have flaws, embracing the light and the dark. But also questioning God and the devil – why are they mad at each other? Is the devil even a bad guy? Maybe they’re the same thing, the same spirit just with different personalities.”
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In ancient Greek mythology, Athena is the goddess of warfare and wisdom. What’s lesser known, perhaps, is that Athena has also been linked to the Egyptian goddess Neith. It’s this detail that inspired white academic Martin Bernal’s work Black Athena, which explores the debt Greek culture owes to Africa and the Middle East. Across three volumes, Bernal argues that the classical world has been historically whitewashed – the (incorrect) assumption, for example, that ancient sculptures were white has fuelled a retroactive erasure of people of colour in antiquity. With the inaugural volume originally published in 1987, Black Athena ultimately drew criticism for its inaccuracies, yet it is still praised for pushing forward a reframing of classical history beyond a Eurocentric agenda.
While all this might sound cryptic, Athena is Parks’ most direct work to date. Since 2017’s self-titled EP, Parks has become known for glitchy violin loops that nod to the kinetic energy of West and North African fiddles (she first started learning violin in the fourth grade, after a troupe of fiddlers played for her class). Her stage name, incidentally, came from her mother nicknaming her “Sudan” aged 16 because of her fascination with African jewellery, but also because she liked to use Guitar Center on her iPad to find instruments like the djembe and thumb piano. Soon after, she began to make beats on GarageBand, all topped by Parks’ delicate vocals, singing quiet, enigmatic poems she’d penned. “I used codewords back then,” she says, “Everything now is more vulnerable, more confrontational. I’m not hiding anything anymore. That’s why I’m naked on the cover.” In person she’s candid, and unafraid to take risks at the photoshoot. Her mother is present as she’s posing for the camera – the pair of them will head to Barcelona immediately after we’re done – and seems a little bemused at one of the topless styling choices (“What’s she wearing under that jacket? Oh, nothing? Oh, OK!”). But Parks is unconcerned. Everything about the way she poses for the camera, how she swings her long braid around as if it were a whip, even how she answers my questions with thoughtful assertion, shines with a regal confidence. I ask if, in today’s political climate, she feels compelled to take up space by being unapologetically herself. “I feel like I'd be doing it anyway,” she admits. “But I wake up every day and deal with issues because of how I look. That's also what the album's about… dealing with being a dark-skinned girl and getting fetishised. It’s political, but they're also my own real, personal situations.”
“Everyone's thinking about Donald Trump. I'm thinking about how maybe something's up with our spiritualism”
034 It’s in contemplating the personal that Parks also considers her own morality. She honed her violin-playing in church, because the schools she attended didn’t have music programmes. Perhaps that’s why she feels an affinity towards spiritualism, although it is a spiritualism not specifically rooted in Christianity. For Parks, music offers one way to get in touch with a higher power, or frequency, and she worries that, as the world moves away from shared belief systems, people are losing that ability. “Everyone's thinking about Donald Trump. I'm thinking about how maybe something's up with our spiritualism,” she questions. “Church used to bring all these different groups together so they could be their higher selves, so what do we gotta do to come together now?” Athena taps into this collective power. In Sudan Archives’ early days, the project was, in her words, “bedroom music” comprised of homemade beats and vocals recorded on an iPad, with additional production from Leaving Records founder Matthewdavid. Now her creative family has grown. Athena marks the first time she has opened her musical vision up to others, with production credits from major names like Paul White and Rodaidh McDonald – they’ve worked with Charli XCX and The xx respectively – as well as friends from Cincinnati.
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The result is a record that’s glossy, luxe and cinematic, right from the delicate pizzicato opening of Did You Know – a song that soars into the cosmos with its reverb-laden finger cymbals, as she reminds us that “life is not perfect”. Black Vivaldi Sonata swirls with a seductive grandeur, imagining the possibilities of a war in heaven, while Coming Up opens with a classic hip-hop trope: the voice of an unknown
man leaving her a voicemail. Athena is an album that draws from a vast palette of sounds that seem to exist in their own sublime universe, an Afrofuturist utopia. Some weeks after we meet, I call Parks at her home in Los Angeles. It’s occurred to me that, after all we’ve spoken about good and bad and Black Athena, we barely touched on Afrofuturism. I’m curious whether the label means anything to her and what she’s trying to achieve with her work. “Well, what does Afrofuturism mean to you?” she throws back at me. Before the book Black Athena, historians like Frank M Snowden Jr, a black professor at Howard University, were researching the ancient world. They were documenting an era where discrimination against black people did not exist. In the same way, Afrofuturism imagines alternative realities, societies and mythologies where people from the African diaspora exist free from marginalisation. It creates and celebrates superheroes – or gods and goddesses – who have previously been disparaged. I raise this to Parks and she answers thoughtfully. “When I’m on stage, I want to be a superhero, or an anime character. I’m not really doing it on purpose, but I’m definitely on that wave. All those anime characters and mystical cartoons usually have their swords, right? I like to think of my violin bow as my sword.” Athena is out now via Stones Throw Records
“That’s what the album is about: accepting that humans have flaws, embracing the light and the dark”
Life and Soul
Shanti Celeste has charmed dancefloors the world over with warm, uplifting house music. Now, she’s pushing her sound further than ever before
038 Words: Aurora Mitchell Photography: Bex Day
The first thing you see when you walk into Shanti Celeste’s living room is a painted canvas. The inviting centrepiece depicts an image of a tangerine hanging in the sky above a multicoloured mountain range. Celeste painted the piece herself, and a variation adorns the cover of her debut album, aptly titled Tangerine. When she meets me at the door, she’s even wearing tangerine-coloured jeans. “Fruit is really colourful and I like everything colourful and sweet,” she tells me, by way of explanation, and the statement reveals something about the 30-year-old Chilean-born producer’s nature. She’s animated, positive and naturally funny. We’re here to discuss her anticipated debut album, but not before she cooks pasta for us – good food is important to her. The album, which lands this month, comes via Peach Discs, the imprint she runs with Berlin-based DJ and producer Gramrcy. Launched in 2017, the label is evolving steadily. The roster is a balance between electronic music’s new wave – like Ciel and Chekov, who chose to release their debuts on Peach Discs – and established artists like Call Super and Hodge. She’s also preparing to head back on tour again after a busy festival season, which included a highly celebrated back-to-back slot with Call Super at Lente Kabinet. “We kind of just banged it out and it was like – ” she clicks her fingers – “one tune after the other.” But the set also had more significance in the larger scope of her life: “It's when I had first stopped drinking and I wasn't used to
it yet. I was getting quite nervous,” she remembers, before adding with typical candour: “but I just took half a pill and then was fine.” Best known for her club-ready productions that explore the headier realms of house, her debut album marks a new chapter for Celeste. When approaching Tangerine, she liberated herself from the expectations that come with the dancefloor, although she’s hesitant to use those words. “When I say this, it makes it sound like my album is going to be extremely experimental... and it's really not! It was just nice to have that freedom, whether it came out as an experimental piece of work or just a Shanti Celeste album.” The track Natura is one of Tangerine’s most unexpected moments, and feels personal. For it, she flew to Chile – where she lived until she was 12 – and recorded herself playing a kalimba in her dad’s living room. The instrument is a kind of finger piano traditionally made from a pumpkin, belonging to her father. “My dad loves all kinds of music and dancing and playing in drum circles. He has a kalimba, and he has loads of drums that he's made – he makes djembes with agave plants. There were always djembe, kalimba and other South American and African instruments in his house.” The recording, as it exists on the record, feels almost three dimensional; a piece of meditative sound design, but it originally took a very different form. Her friend said the track reminded her of a horror film. “I was like, oh fuck,” she explains. “Every time I listened to it I pictured a little
girl in white pyjamas walking across a dark room and I was just like: I can't use this. So I found another bit that I recorded which was a little bit more chirpy.” Tangerine is a marked departure from her sound in other ways as well. Despite her refusal to go all-out dark, she reveals that it is the first time she hasn’t felt self-conscious about making music that uses minor chords. “Everything has to be really euphoric or rhythmic or just ravey. Just whatever comes out, as long as it's not emo.” She stresses the word emo, to make her point. “Deep is fine but not emo – not sad. So with the album, I was like, well now I can be emo.” The album, she concedes, isn’t really emo. Instead, it wanders through lots of different sound palettes that she’s delved into over the last six years: bubbling synth droplets, tranquil ambient, deep techno and pumping sunrise house. For many, Celeste’s reputation is pinned to her productions for labels like Future Times, Idle Hands and her first imprint Brstl, and a glance at her track titles suggests an impulse for joy – Golden, Good Spirits, Universal Glow. Tellingly, she reveals that the images conjured in her mind when producing are, “moments on the dancefloor, people hugging, people feeling euphoric.” Days Like This, one of her earliest releases released on Idle Hands, features deep, shimmering pads that sound like she’s grabbed a sunrise from the sky and placed it into a synth.
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“I've started realising that I just really like feeling that euphoria”
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“For years I used to get so anxious when I DJed, every single time”
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041 Her period behind the counter coincided with a spike in US house reissues, with records by the likes of Moodymann and Kerri Chandler coming into the shop. She lights up when she discusses this formative period in her life. “I loved New York garage-y house and I love Chicago drum machine-y stuff. It's definitely music that's really influenced my sound, just that particular swing and shuffle…” While she still loves that sound, she’s been seeking a different, more heightened energy lately. “I've started realising that I just really like feeling that euphoria. Rave culture here in the UK and in Europe is just more jacking and energetic.” Now, based in London and at the height of her career, you sense that Celeste is figuring out what’s important, what makes her happy. With a busy touring schedule that can take her from Europe to Japan to Australia in the space of a month, she’s figured out how to make touring more comfortable for herself. “I like routine. It makes you feel grounded,” she says. “It makes me feel like my life is not out of control, when oftentimes it does feel like that.” She continues, somberly recounting
her first experience of insomnia which occurred recently, disrupting her normal sleep pattern. “It was horrible. I was crying, I was anxious…” The topic of anxiety comes up frequently during our conversation, and she is open about the aspects of her career that she’s found tough. “For years I used to get so anxious when I DJed, every single time,” she says. “I do get why people would want to have a drink to relieve anxiety because I used to do it.” Now, though, she’s given up alcohol entirely, which seems to be working for her. She reaches into her fridge and holds up a bottle of natural wine that has been languishing there untouched. “I enjoy myself when I DJ anyway – the more time I spend not drinking alcohol, the more time I can enjoy DJing.” Celeste is most excited when regaling me with stories from behind the decks. She regales me with anecdotes from a recent set in Berghain’s garden alongside Moxie, Peach and Saoirse, detailing a particular moment when she played Slam’s Positive Education. “We were all bouncing around and everybody was really high and obviously that tune has a massive drop and everybody was…” She emulates the crowd’s excitement. “It was everybody together, collectively.” This reaction feels like the essence of Shanti’s mission as a DJ – connection. “Everybody was united and we were all just exploding with happiness, together.” Tangerine is released 15 November via Peach Discs
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Idle Hands, and the scene surrounding the Bristol label and record shop, had a formative impact on Celeste. She moved to the city in 2009 from the Lake District, where she first began raving at quarry parties. Celeste was supposed to be studying Illustration at The University of the West of England, but she dropped out, instead taking a job at Idle Hands, run by her friend Chris Farrell. The atmosphere was encouraging and creative, and in 2011, she founded the label Brstl with Farrell.
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Aesthetic:
I’m late to meet experimental DJ and producer LSDXOXO as I’ve taken several erroneous public transport connections to get here. As I step off the bus and rush through a vacant lot, I stumble into what seems to be a shipping yard, just without a nearby ocean. Finally, I find the studio, apologising profusely, just as LSDXOXO is getting the last round of hot pink extensions weaved into his thick cornrows for Crack Magazine’s photoshoot. “Oh, don’t even worry,” he says cooly, “my Uber thought I was going to the airport…” Berlin can still be untouched, unconventional and unexpected. That might be what drew LSDXOXO, aka Rashad Glasgow, away from his spiritual home of New York and towards the German capital, a little over a year ago. And it’s no wonder; Rashad’s particular brand of eclectic and homespun club music, which constantly sways the needle between Baltimore house, techno, hip-hop and pop, seems perfectly tailored to the city’s non-stop nightlife scene. “Oh, it's a lot different here,” Glasgow states as we sit down. His freshly faded hair is now braided, and he’s wrapped in an oversized black hoodie with his own logo on the back. He’s laid-back and subdued, which is interesting, given his reputation for off-the-wall DJ sets, usually dressed in everything from rhinestoned bodices to intricately constructed leotards. But in person, he’s charming and a little reserved, always maintaining eye contact even when sinking deep into the couch opposite me. “I feel like in New York, or pretty much in the States all around, things are quicker than they are here. Parties are
over within six hours, but in Berlin, one DJ set lasts at least three hours. I like it because it's much more challenging – you really have to curate it out more so you're making room to have these peaks and valleys within your set.” This ability to think on your feet, to continually recalibrate your music to fit certain moods and atmospheres, is central to Glasgow’s work. “I started producing in freshman year of high school,” he replies, pinpointing where his unique approach to music production comes from. “Then I went to college, and Tumblr had its golden era – everyone's a photographer, everyone's a curator, everyone does this, everyone does that. I had a Tumblr blog and I'd just haphazardly make these crunchy, really badly put-together mashup tapes, with anything from techno to baile funk to Dominican merengue. Eventually it got to a point where people were asking me to produce for them, and also DJ. It just sort of happened.” Immediately adopting the LSDXOXO moniker (“I liked it because it sounded like an AIM username, it was super troll-y, and that's just how I approached music as an artist,”) Glasgow continued to self-release tracks on the internet, until he started collaborating with other artists, lending his singular sound to now-established acts like Cakes da Killa and Bbymutha. “The first track that made me feel like I had done something was Truth Tella [ft. Cakes da Killa],” Glasgow says enthusiastically. “I sampled a Pokémon instrumental from back in the day, it was Lavender Town! It was the first time that I was proud of what I was putting out into the universe.” Truth Tella, released in 2014, is pure LSDXOXO. The track’s woozy synth line, mimicking a GameBoy left to melt in the sun, is said Pokémon sample, and it runs laps around Cakes’ banjee vocals. It’s a style that Glasgow has built on ever since.
Around the same time, Glasgow became an essential figure in GHE20GOTH1K, the nightlife collective run by Venus X. Having lived in New York during the ascension of this particular scene myself, it was inspiring to see how quickly the fabric of the city’s nightlife changed with the influence of DJs like LSDXOXO. Some would even argue that it was the last big shift in New York club culture, an idea that Glasgow isn’t 100 percent unaware of. “A lot of my friends who are still in New York say that I'm the reason that everyone DJs the same set now,” Glasgow says with a cheeky laugh. “I'm definitely not gonna claim that, but a lot of the scene right now, there's one formulated idea of what is a good DJ set, and it all draws from the same areas of inspiration. I feel like there's definitely been a switch, but it comes in waves, so it'll pass eventually.” When you’re so deep into a scene, it's sometimes hard to remember that it’s still a subculture. In the grand scheme of things, Glasgow is a queer black person in an industry predominantly run by straight, white men. While to some, the way he dresses could be seen as a gimmick, but it’s more a way to assert himself in those spaces. “I've always worn crazy things because it's just a part of my imagination,” Glasgow says. He has the bemused demeanor of someone who has encountered this particular problem a lot. “When I go out into the world and I have a piece of clothing on, it's looked at as a political statement. Whereas to me, I'm not trying to get anyone's attention – I'm just trying to feel comfortable in the character that I am. Being in this field, where everyone who is successful is a straight, white man, it's really interesting to take up space in these arenas. I'm being booked in places where everyone else is a white man and they don't really expect me to deliver, but I'm usually headlining.” I ask him if he ever feels the pressure to conform. “As a black person in general,
you always feel like you need to prove something. My feet are firmly on the ground in any space that I take, and it's not being taken from me. As long as I'm doing what I do, then I'm not going to feel threatened.” As such, Glasgow knows what he’s doing is unique. It’s an ethos that has permeated all his records thus far. On his 2014 mixtape Whorecore, Glasgow leaned into a psychedelic, almost ambient electro dreamscape, while last year’s Body Mods, is perhaps his most cohesive and acclaimed release to date, pulled from Baltimore house and ghettotech. Moving forward, Glasgow is still expanding his sound towards new frontiers. His next release (and first proper album) contains a lot of firsts: first physical record, first label release, and Glasgow’s first shot at recording his own vocals. “I did house-y vocals, like Cajmere and Miss Kittin. Just bitch tracks, a little Deee-lite influence, you know!” He pauses. “It's really interesting to see how different the process is between just producing music and releasing it, versus writing it and having to deliver the vocals, or else you have to re-record it, or rewrite a whole song and sit on it forever. It's really exciting for me to be a whole artist, to attach my own narrative to my music more directly.” LSDXOXO appears at Trauma Bar und Kino 23 November
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A wave of gentrification has undoubtedly washed over the city of Berlin in the past few years, but it hasn’t extended quite as far as the neighbourhood of Alt-Tempelhof.
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Words: Cameron Cook Photography: Joseph Kadow Styling: Olive Duran Hair: Fah Makeup: Victoria Reuter
044 Suit: Richert Biel Tights: Falke Earrings: Sabrina Dehoff
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046 Top: Richert Biel Trousers: Richert Biel Necklace: Models Own Earrings: Sabrina Dehoff
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Body Suit: Yumiko Tights: Falke Skirt: A.F. VANDEVORST Earrings: Sabrina Dehoff
Produced exclusively for Crack Magazine by Alexis Jamet - @alexis_jamet
YEULE FRI 1 NOV SOLD OUT SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS GEORGIA TUES 5 NOVSOLD OUT SCALA GIRL BAND TUES 5 NOVSOLD OUT ELECTRIC BALLROOM ALICE HUBBLE TUES 5 NOV SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS CORRIDOR WED 6 NOV SOLD OUT THE WAITING ROOM MELLAH THURS 7 NOV CORSICA STUDIOS PALACE SAT 9 NOV SOLD OUT ROUNDHOUSE ONE TRUE PAIRING MON 11 NOV DALSTON VICTORIA SHARDS WED 13 NOV CHATS PALACE SHURA THURS 14 NOV ROUNDHOUSE EZRA FURMAN THURS 14 NOV O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN MEGA BOG THURS 14 NOV THE ISLINGTON
KATHRYN JOSEPH MON 18 NOV EARTH HACKNEY
PONGO WED 27 NOV REDON BETHNAL GREEN
COUSIN KULA MON 18 NOV ELECTROWERKZ
JERSKIN FENDRIX WED 27 NOV BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB
DOG IN THE SNOW TUES 19 NOV SET DALSTON
BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 28 NOV ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL
HONEYMOAN WED 20 NOV PAPER DRESS VINTAGE
PEOPLE CLUB THURS 28 NOV THE ISLINGTON
KEDR LIVANSKIY THURS 21 NOV BLOC
GREAT DAD THURS 28 NOV BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB
TINA THURS 21 NOV BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB
FAT WHITE FAMILY MON 2 - THURS 5 DECLD OUT EARTH HACKNEY 5th SO
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HAYDEN THORPE TUES 3 DEC CECIL SHARP HOUSE
W.H. LUNG MON 25 NOV RICH MIX
KIWI JR WED 29 JAN THE WAITING ROOM
ART SCHOOL GIRLFRIEND TUES 26 NOV RICH MIX
GHUM THURS 30 JAN ELECTROWERKZ
NURIA GRAHAM OUT TUES 26 NOV SOLD SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS
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PARALLELLINESPROMOTIONS.COM
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WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
As the dust settles on a particularly turbulent decade, we’ve been in a reflective mood.
The last 10 years were defined by fluidity. A fluidity that has spread across all areas of culture and society, from information and identity to tech and politics. Looking back now, the Very Online 2010s did away with some monolithic, long-held truths and asked us all to adapt to a world of evershifting boundaries. Disorientating and strange, the decade was also alive with new possibilities. Maybe that’s why the 2010s gave rise to a new generation of daring artists who took delight in collapsing boundaries, resisting genres and subverting systems. Some are no longer at the mercy of traditional record labels, choosing instead to release music directly to their fans. Some did away with the album altogether. Some raged against oppression, and others just raged. Many built communities of fans, a few walked a path of one. In the following section, we go deep on four key flashpoints that have shaped the decade. Jake Indiana explores how the LGBT+ community rediscovered its roots and reconfigured club culture beyond all recognition; Dean Van Nguyen traces 10 years in hip-hop through the lens of its philosopher king Earl Sweatshirt; Jhoni Jackson measures the seismic commercial resurgence of reggaeton and urbano; and Will Pritchard investigates how grime and myriad other strains of UK-made rap music fought their way into the mainstream. We also count down the albums and tracks that shaped this, the most unusual of eras. Who knows, maybe you’ll agree with them all and offer no argument. In the spirit of the decade, we hope not. Now, as we strap ourselves in for whatever comes next, we can’t help but ask: what just happened?
THE
UNSTO P PABL E RISE OF REGGAETON In the last decade, reggaeton has exploded into the mainstream. We trace its booming ascent and undeniable impact
When Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina was unleashed into the world in 2004, it spread like wildfire. The quickly-iconic hit signalled a new era of Latinx representation in mainstream culture, something that had been missing since Mexican-American pop star Selena was tragically murdered at the height of her powers in 1995. Fifteen years later, and it still commands a perreo intenso (or, intense grinding) like no other when DJs drop it in the club – which they do, all over the Anglo world, frequently. Fast forward to 2017 and Daddy Yankee is featuring on Luis Fonsi’s chart-busting hit, Despacito, signalling another reggaeton revolution. By the following year, the song’s unprecedented commercial success had even garnered Fonsi Guinness World Records recognition: it spent 16 weeks at No. 1 in the Billboard charts (it was unseated by Old Town Road), became the most-streamed song worldwide and was the first YouTube video to hit five billion views. And that’s just the beginning. But in its commercial triumphs, and in comparison to Gasolina, Despacito also serves as an indicator – and a guidepost – for how the genre’s sound has permeated into the mainstream. Right now, reggaeton is closer to pop than it’s ever been, a powerful force in the music industry, underwritten by skyrocketing YouTube views, Billboard chart placements and global concert sales.
The genre’s popularity in Western markets might seem sudden to some, but it has a history. Reggaeton, an intoxicating blend of Spanish-language reggae, dembow rhythms and dancehall, is an adaptable, living genre. For better or worse (depending on who you ask) reggaeton has evolved over time – and never more so than in the 2010s. Its latest commercial iterations rely heavily on trap and pop, harnessed by chart-topping artists like J Balvin, Ozuna and Arcangel. It’s upped the dancehall quotient at times, and dialled it down, incorporated more or less of its fundamental rhythm, dembow, and even spawned surprise mutations, like when Bad Bunny’s Tenemos Que Hablar folded in touches of pop-punk. The building blocks of the genre, though, trace back to late70s Panama. The US-controlled Canal Zone construction drew in West Indian workers, and when the area was returned to Panama in 1979, Jamaican riddims paired with Spanish lyrics flowed on local buses called Diablos Rojos (red devils). In the early 90s, the sound grew with the Puerto Rican collective The Noise, which included pioneering female artist Ivy Queen. Founding figure DJ Negro ran a club in San Juan by the same name, and it was there that the collective, plus artists like Daddy Yankee, Tego Calderon and Wisin & Yandel, propelled the movement. Reggaeton was a fountain of unadulterated joy for many, warranting close dancing and unrepentant sexuality as a form of catharsis. And as it’s prominence rose, spreading to other
55 Latin American countries and the US, the genre became an unmatchable source of pride for Latinxs. As a result of the Gasolina-aided mid-00s commercial boom, the past few years have been a blur of hits – many that have changed reggaeton’s landscape forever. A major accelerant in this is Bad Bunny’s boundary-breaking debut album X 100PRE. A rich tapestry of trap, reggaeton and bachata, it features a cameo from Ricky Martin on self-love anthem Caro, and with Solo de Mi, Bad Bunny fortified the song’s affecting lyrics with a message of solidarity with domestic abuse survivors in its music video. Most notably, though, the album was praised for its unabashed emotional vulnerability and, paired with Bad Bunny’s meticulous manicures and eccentric, neon-hued fashion sense, presented male reggaetoneros in a different light altogether. Operating in the same arena where Puerto Rican artist Anuel AA espoused homophobic lyrics in 2018 diss track Intocable, Bad Bunny’s aesthetic and social stance felt significant. Reggaeton and urbano are, in some corners, also running parallel to the #MeToo movement. Artists like Natti Natasha, Karol G and Becky G are flipping the genre’s overt malenarrated sexuality to the female POV, reclaiming agency with each beat. There’s the aforementioned politics of Bad Bunny’s X 100PRE and, earlier this year, he teamed up with Puerto Rican rapper Residente in what many heralded as a step forward in feminist progress. Their joint track Bellacoso is all about being horny as hell – but explicitly “sin acoso” (or, ‘without harassment’), spotlighting consent as the centre of the song.
An offshoot of this is the neo-perreo movement, a digitallydrenched, feminist iteration of dembow led by artists like Tomasa Del Real, Ms Nina and DJ Rosa Pistola, and outspoken queer artists like Sailorfag, La Pajarita La Paul and the late Kevin Fret, Puerto Rico’s first openly gay Latin trap artist who was fatally shot in his hometown this year. For a genre with roots in the hyper-patriarchal Latinx landscape, the inclusion of feminism and queerness shores up the genre’s ability to grow and adapt to the world around it. This progress wouldn’t have been possible in any other decade. As an Extremely Online generation, people from marginalised backgrounds the world over have created new platforms for themselves on the internet, raising their communities and culture to new heights. Latinxs have also followed suit in this movement, boldly expressing our varied identities with unflinching pride. In the 2010s, reggaeton became our protective shield, with its infectious hooks, waist-pumping beats and inimitably radiant energy. It crystallised into the worldwide genre we always knew it could be if it was given the chance. And in a Trumpian, increasingly right-wing landscape where our Latinx identity is not only misunderstood, but largely not tolerated, the genre’s success offered a sparkling counter to the antagonising narratives associated with us on the news. This was the decade Latinxs demanded space and reggaeton became truly visible – and we invited everyone along for the ride, one perreo intenso at a time. Words: Jhoni Jackson Illustration: Larissa Hoff
ALL HAIL EARL, THE UNLIKELY EX IL E WHO DEFINED THE D ECAD E IN RAP From Drake to Kendrick, the 2010s haven’t been short on rap icons. But it took a parent-baiting collective from LA to incubate the most intriguing of them all Let me begin this benediction with the ceremonial yelling of “Free Earl!” and a reminder that we must never take the greats for granted. Before casting our minds back to the mystery of the missing teenage rapper, let’s retreat even further in time. It’s the first flickers of the decade and the coronation of young Earl Sweatshirt (née Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) is toasted over a glass of “death juice”. The video for Earl features members of Odd Future mixing the recreational drug in a blender and the twisted Los Angeles odyssey that follows its ingestion. It’s guerrilla filmmaking at its most visceral, the fish-eyed lens capturing the stoned crew freaking out, pulling faces, flaming off their skateboards onto the hard LA concrete. A lot of creative thinking goes into what you can do with blood capsules. Meanwhile, Earl raps from a beautician’s chair, lobbing densely packed bars with nimble internal rhyme patterns and snappy oneliners to bend the brain. He’s 16 years old. Nobody has ever been this good, this young. Earl will become one of the most influential rappers of his generation.
Anarchic shock tactics and an ability to harness the growing power of social media helped Odd Future ascend to the top of the cultural zeitgeist. Tyler, the Creator’s jazzy piano chords, robotic melodies, and rigid drum machines formed the backdrop for songs that were punchy but with the brevity of a Tumblr post. Kids gravitated to the unruly personalities and chants of “kill people, burn shit, fuck school”, but this parent-baiting masked songs that were honest about suicide, depression and overbearing elders. At the turn of the decade, Odd Future captured the desperate condition we call being a kid. Their outrageous displays of teen lunacy and subversion of rap norms promised a brave new hip-hop landscape that years later would be populated by a Cobainian icon in Lil Peep, plus the young stars of SoundCloud rap who made rusty music that bottled adolescent unruliness. The quantum mechanics of hip-hop tells us that there must always be a stylistic tension between East and West. Earl and Odd Future’s warping of traditional rap was in contrast to what was going on in New York, where cats like Joey Bada$$ – another teenage talent – adored classic boom-bap. The Beast Coast collective lived their lives in the spirit of bohemian b-boys and the God MC Rakim. Their focus on lyricism seemed extra sharp when compared to the to-the-point bars of Southerners like Waka Flocka Flame, but failed to maintain the level of interest Earl and his fellow Odd Future alumni have.
57 Isn’t it crazy how history has a way of repeating itself? Just as New York was being heralded as back by rap traditionalists who approved of its old school ethos, Los Angeles entered its second great era by worshipping the gods of its past. Assisted by the city’s jazz virtuosos and beat scene kings – Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Terrace Martin – and revelling in region-specific sounds without ever sounding as nostalgia obsessed as the Beast Coast revival, LA was as happening as the days of DJ Quik steering his Caddy around South Central. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was indicative of the bounce coming back to the wild, wild west, giving voice to the #BlackLivesMatter generation in the process. YG and DJ Mustard were the new Snoop and Dre. SchoolBoy Q made music that scraped the darkest corners of LA gangster rap. And then there was Earl. With his sonic proclivities ignoring Cali’s pastoral grooves for something more cold and sinister, Thebe’s ideology seemed to run counter to his fellow Angelinos. Earl’s rise hinges on his removal from Los Angeles. The mystery of his disappearance was all the more gripping in an era of instant accessibility to all stars at all times. It’s a story that will be etched in the official hip-hop history book. Earl’s mom, concerned that her teenage son was on the wrong tracks, sent the young rapper to Coral Reef Academy, a retreat for troubled
boys in Vaitele, outside of the Samoan capital of Apia. There, Earl dried out, read the work of Richard Fariña, swam with whales and worked with victims of sexual assault. What returned was an artist with a thickening voice, more personalised writing process and no interest in commercial compromises. Chum, Earl’s comeback release, offers a bleakly honest detailing of his painful feelings towards his absent father, his ponderings on racial identity, and a loving acknowledgement of his “big brother” Tyler. The flow was still there – try wrapping your mind around a line like “his sins feeling as hard as Vince Carter’s knee cartilage is”. But Chum saw the maturing Earl lay down a lyrical and musical marker that countless rappers have drawn inspiration from since. Who rivals Earl in terms of pure influence? There’s Drake, of course. The 6 God’s pop-rap ethos and soap opera dramatics make him Earl’s natural counterpoint. A scene built around Drizzy’s “Toronto sound” – itself largely cribbed from Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak – never really materialised and his culture vulture transgressions make him a clown prince who would be king. Future’s sumptuous psychedelic mumbles were aped with such regularity that he pretty much became a sub-genre. No sane person would call Lil Wayne a “2010s rapper” but the shockwaves of his legendary 2000s run continue to reverberate. Wayne’s spiritual offspring and acknowledged disciple Young Thug has been a transformative figure as his idiosyncratic tics, once looked upon as singular and other, became a vital text studied by a small army of rappers in his wake. It’s Earl’s name I find myself regularly reaching for most when describing the sound and/or ethos of new rappers though. We close out the decade with a small conglomerate of rising artists – Mike, Medhane, Adé Hakim, Slauson Malone, Caleb Giles – offering the most interesting thing happening in New York rap by making music that’s best described as “Earlwave”. Hakim even contributed to 2018’s Some Rap Songs, which pulled Earl’s sound into even stranger places. The expression “King of New York” meant nothing in the 2010s but despite a lack of geographical roots, maybe Earl is the young monarch. It’s worth reminding ourselves that Earl is still only 25 years old. The kid who started the decade claiming he’d been “sent to Earth to poke Catholics in the ass with saws” ends the 2010s as a hip-hop vanguard. After 10 years of strange new personalities, hundreds of microscenes and few obvious narratives, one of the certainties of rap’s future is that Thebe’s influence seems destined to spread even further. Words: Dean Van Nguyen Illustration: Catherine Morton-Abuah
THE REQUEERING OF THE
D ANCEFL OOR
The 2010s saw the LGBT+ community stage a reclamation – and reconfiguration – of club culture. The result? Some of the most innovative music of the decade
Words: Jake Indiana Illustration: Jude Gardner-Rolfe
59 Picture, if you will, what ‘clubbing’ entailed in 2010. For a vast majority of the nightlife-going public, hitting the club meant grinding, bottle service and a melange of the pop and hip-hop tracks dominating the charts. A pivot away from the manic energy of 90s rave culture (and an even further cry from the hedonistic pleasure dome of the 70s and 80s in which it was born), clubbing had become sanded down into something overtly palatable to the mainstream: straight, sanitised and accessible. If any broad stroke narratives emerge of how clubbing has progressed over the course of this tumultuous decade, the resurgence and reclamation of the dancefloor as an explicitly queer space stands out as the most viscerally realised. The schematics of what constitutes a queer party – from the music and artists to the patrons and codes of conduct – outgrew subcultural status to become crystallised as the utopian ideal of partying. In other words, queer club culture has gone hella viral. Manifesting as the soundtrack to spaces that were literally the only outlets for freedom of expression for the LGBTQ+ community, club music’s origins are inherently queer. And yet it is small wonder that it has taken until the 2010s, arguably the most important decade for gay liberation since its inception, for this operational shift to take place. The importance of moments such as the US Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage in 2015 can’t be overstated, but it is the unprecedented rapidity with which the discourse on gender identity and alternative sexualities entered the public lexicon (and evolved in their own respects) that bears the most weight on this repositioning. With precious few outlets where many of today’s trans and non-binary queer folk can express themselves and explore their identity without fear of persecution, the dancefloor has become the nexus of this discourse. “It’s really important that we understand that [partying in queer spaces] is ultimately still, if not a form of leisure nightclubbing, a cultural practice and a temporary community,” says Wanda Gaimes, a selfdescribed “post-academic” specialising in international politics and co-founder/organiser of the femme-focused Berlin party Lecken. “It is a way to realise your politics in a way that's much easier than activism, for instance.” The tenet Gaimes outlines can easily be used to ascribe the merit of any designated LGBTQ+ space, but in the context of her work with Lecken and the countless other organisations in cities around the world striving toward similar goals, it pinpoints what distinguishes this decade’s developments from those of eras past: namely, that the struggle to create these queer spaces is coming from within the confines of the gay community itself in addition to the world at large. By definition, a venue or event that is only available to cisgender men is not a queer space, thus making the parameters of a traditional gay club antithetical to the radical potential of queer club spaces. Equally problematic is the
widespread use of the term ‘queer’ to designate areas that are decidedly not. The Berlin institution Berghain for instance, unanimously agreed upon as the Mecca of the nightlife world, is widely regarded as the ultimate arena for queer expression, yet it began as a strictly men-only venue and tips its infamously discriminatory door policy heavily in favour of men. To build a truly queer club environment this decade meant either a reclamation of a given space or a comprehensive construction of an entirely new space. It meant repurposing what Gaimes refers to as the “Berghain-model of a dancefloor and a dark room inspired by gay cruising subculture and practices” along with the tried and true combination of “quantised beats and chemical substances” and reconfiguring it to better suit the needs of a fast-growing community without alternatives. It meant compressing the lessons of years of club culture and innovating it beyond what had ever been attempted. Naturally, this quest yielded some of the most innovative music, events and ephemera of the 2010s, resetting the boundaries of what club music can be, or what occurs at a queer party. Collectives like NYC’s GHE20G0TH1K upended notions of how fashion and nightlife intersect in addition to reimagining the city’s rich heritage of ballroom and vogue culture, while artists like Juliana Huxtable centralised such mediums as performance art and spoken word into the sphere of the party. Parties like Lecken are at the forefront of a movement prioritising femme/femme-friendly patrons while agencies like Discwoman stand as a sharp rebuke to the male-dominated world of electronic music. An uninhibited sense of exploration permeates these spaces, and it is clearly what has made them so infectious and desirable to the point of widespread public recognition. It also works both ways; artists like SOPHIE have rocketed to pop superstardom while espousing the aesthetics and allures of the queer club world, while DJs like Honey Dijon incorporate documentation of this world and its history into their sets, educating as they entice. The 2010s have been a stern reminder to us all that ideas of progress are not nearly as linear as we once thought, that battles won may need to be fought over again before all said is done. Even so, the remarkable revitalisation of the dancefloor as a force of queerness feels like nothing so much as a Pandora’s box of possibilities for the next decade and beyond.
BRITAIN’S RAP
REVOL UTION The 2010s have been a dramatic time for Britain’s rappers and MCs. Having started the decade scrambling to make pop hits, the UK’s rap stars are ending it headlining Glastonbury and with arms full of awards The UK’s MCs are ending the decade on a high. In this year alone: Stormzy headlined Glastonbury and covered Time magazine; Kano sold out the Royal Albert Hall; Dave won the Mercury Prize; and AJ Tracey’s Ladbroke Grove has spent 34 weeks in the chart, and counting. Reach further back into the recent past and you’ll find Ivor Novello awards, an MBE for Wiley, any number of cosigns from Drake, and crossover features from the likes of Stefflon Don (with French Montana) and Ms Banks (with Tinashe). If there’s been a defining trend in the UK in the last 10 years it’s been British rap musicians’ long-awaited takeover of the mainstream. Ironically, the 2010s began with something of a whimper for UK MCs. With the glory days of the first generation of grime gone, the scene’s elders were reduced to churning out electro-pop fodder like Can You Hear Me (AYAYAYA) and Heatwave in order to chart. It’s bizarre to think that in 2010, Example may have been the most popular rapper in the country. Some would dispute the claim that grime had fallen off completely. The fourth edition of Lord of the Mics landed in 2011. Artists like P Money, Merky ACE, and D Double E were still putting out music and playing bookings, and the instrumental side of the genre continued to tap a rich vein of creativity. However, the point at which Skepta released a porno as a music video in a bid to “do something that nobody else has done” arguably confirmed the scene’s identity crisis and signalled that the creative well had run dry. Doldrums seemed inevitable.
Few people would have named Meridian Dan as the MC most likely to deliver grime its defibrillator shock, but the infectious German Whip proved to be just that. Dan’s credentials as a sometime member of Tottenham’s Meridian and Bloodline crews, and the track’s features from JME and Big H, helped it bridge the gap between mainstream and underground in a way that no shameless shot at the charts ever could. Along with Skepta’s That’s Not Me and Stormzy’s Shut Up, it signalled the beginning of a cultural shift that would eventually see Tory party culture minister Matt Hancock pen a 2017 op-ed for The Times about how much he loves grime and exporting it around the world. Brushes with mass popularity weren’t necessarily new for UK MCs, but to achieve such sustained recognition without compromise was virtually unheard of. When Dave and Fredo’s Funky Friday went to the top of the singles chart in October 2018, DJ Kenny Allstar – a longtime advocate for the UK’s homegrown scene – called it “a turning point in the culture,” arguing that “it showed that they could do their music on their own terms, without watering it down or making it more poppy.” An update in 2016 finally gave grime its own category in the iTunes store, but this was arguably too late. Not only because streaming would soon surpass downloads for the first time, but because, by now, grime’s influence had outgrown its own confines. The success of its leading artists had forced open doors in the industry, attracted an extensive new audience, and stirred the ambitions of UK MCs from a far broader spectrum.
61 Influenced as much by dancehall and Afrobeats as they were by US rappers like 50 Cent, MCs like J Hus, MoStack and Kojo Funds were experimenting with new hybrids of the Afro-rap sound pioneered by artists like Sneakbo, Timbo and Naira Marley. Giggs, meanwhile, continued his inimitable rise to dominance alongside a vanguard of trap rappers such as Suspect, Fredo, and Nines. In south London, crews including 150, 67, 410, Harlem Spartans, and Zone 2 were developing a sound of their own – drawing influence from the nihilist tones of Chicago drill artists to paint a bleak but revealing picture of inner city life that revolves around crack cocaine and retributive violence. Elsewhere, the likes of Dave, Little Simz and slowthai were ploughing their own distinct furrows, and Stefflon Don and Yxng Bane emerged as bonafide pop stars-in-the-making. Whilst in the past, distinct movements like these might face the threat of dilution in the pursuit of mainstream recognition, this time around the decentralisation of the industry – as well as learning from past mistakes – meant that artists were less reliant on appeasing traditional gatekeepers. Scenes could incubate at their own pace and, crucially, the platforms showcasing these artists were growing alongside them too. Consider the now infamous 2016 Evening Standard review of Skepta’s triumphant Ally Pally sell-out show, in which the author mistook energetic reloads for technical malfunctions. The booming success of platforms like Link Up TV, the revamped GRM Daily, Mixtape Madness, and BL@CKBOX now meant that artists could easily reach an audience of millions without needing to be understood by newspaper critics. At the time of writing, GRM Daily has 2.38 million subscribers to its YouTube channel, Link Up TV has 1.69 million. Mixtape Madness has 811,000, while BL@ CKBOX, which is known for identifying and showcasing emerging talent, boasts 128,000. By way of comparison, the BBC Radio 1Xtra channel has 1.02 million. Once again, these platforms borrowed from the grime pioneers. Jamal Edwards’ SBTV (1.15 million subscribers) had paved the way for online freestyles and music videos – itself a more widely accessible version of the physical DVDs used to document the scene’s early days. And in the same way that online forums like RWD and GrimeForum provided direct access to artists and spaces for passionate fans to congregate and chew over the latest releases, beefs, and radio sets, the proliferation of social media allowed the day-to-day machinations of these expanding scenes to play out in real time. This constant, intimate access helped fans feel more directly connected with artists and their
music – regardless of where they were from. This summer, when Dave, from Streatham, south London, invited a freshfaced 15-year-old from Wells, Somerset, up onstage at Glastonbury to go bar-for-bar with him on Thiago Silva he created a defining moment for the festival. He also simultaneously demonstrated the expansion of grime and UK rap fanbases outside of the country’s urban centres, into the suburbs and beyond. However, in some ways, UK MCs still face the same topdown challenges they did ten years ago. While Form 696 – the risk assessment form used to stifle grime and countless other black British-led genres in their prime – has gone, musicians are still being blamed for the rise in youth violence. The Metropolitan police has actively targeted rappers in the capital, forcing the takedown of their music videos and invoking anti-terror laws to prevent them from recording or performing. A DCMS select committee report in March this year uncovered evidence of “persisting prejudice against urban music and grime artists.” Picture editors at national newspapers still can’t tell two black men apart. And while the recent plaudits earned by artists such as Stefflon Don, Ms Banks, Lady Leshurr, Little Simz, Flohio, and more are richly deserved, it’s worth questioning why female MCs are still so often confined and othered in their own separate category. Likewise, despite the world-shrinking effect of the web, artists outside of the capital remain neglected by a Londoncentric industry. Coverage of regional music scenes is invariably accompanied with a dose of sneering or bewilderment at the sound of a non-southern accent. The success of MCs like Aitch, Jaykae, and Mist remain the exceptions that prove the rule. The tide on these latter issues is shifting, albeit slowly. And with the increased bargaining power gained over the past decade’s foundation-setting, the UK’s MCs enter the new decade as a power unto themselves. It may have taken what seems like forever, but the world is finally tuning in to these important voices. Now let’s hear what they have to say. Words: Will Pritchard Illustration: Tom Noon
THE TOP 20 ALBUMS OF THE D ECAD E
Ruminations on death, loneliness, identity and hyperreality. The album didn’t die in the 2010s, it just got really, really weird
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Grimes Visions 4AD
Frank Ocean Blonde Boys Don’t Cry
Grouper Ruins kranky
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Push the Sky Away Bad Seed Ltd
Whatever you think about her recent pivot to billionaire-adjacency, it’s hard to deny that Claire Boucher has been one of the defining musicians of the 2010s. Her most enduring body of work is undoubtedly 2012’s Visions, her third full-length release. Visions frequently achieves a golden ratio between grounded pop songwriting sensibilities and ethereal-feeling electronic transcendence, by way of a seamless, cyborg-like blend of Boucher’s voice and her complex, layered instrumentation. It was and is, to say the least, visionary.
The Frank Ocean record we were all waiting for. It followed a protracted waiting period while Ocean filled the void with zines, experimental carpentry and side-album Endless, released to fulfill the last of his obligations with Def Jam and ending a four-year silence. Blonde is a clean break; it’s Frank Ocean set free. It’s an album of fluidity and impermanence. Stunning arrangements dissolve mid-song and float into some new elegant form. Pitched down vocals sound druggy and dissociating. Memories are glimpsed, lovers appear in past tense, relationships, youth and fame are viewed from the rear view mirror. Even André 3000 is plagued by uncertainty as he ponders the fleeting nature of wealth and glory. But the more time spent with Blonde the more rewarding it becomes, revealing so many perfect moments it has a sort of mystic seduction, subtly gorgeous and somehow devastating at once.
Liz Harris has always dealt in subtlety, whether it’s the bare, introspective quality of her output as Grouper, or the private nature of her personal life. When she released 2014’s Ruins, her “unplugged” record, her craft was crystallised. Recorded in a small Portuguese village, the album serves as a document; a tribute to her daily, miles-long walk from the studio to the beach, but also as an acknowledgment to a failed love – confronted most explicitly on the paralysing beauty of Call Across Rooms. Suspended in its understated grandeur, Ruins is ostensibly Harris’ most accomplished work to date.
It was Nick Cave himself who best described Push the Sky Away when he said it was a “ghost-baby in the incubator, and Warren [Ellis]’s loops are its tiny, trembling heartbeat” (you’re doing me out of a job here, Nick). It was the first in what would be a trilogy that became overshadowed by the unimaginable tragedy of subsequent records, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen. Sonically this record set the tone, ushered in by Warren Ellis’ weightless, eerily and elegantly atmospheric clatter which soundtracked Cave’s fiery, beautiful words. Higgs Boson Blues, a song that begins and ends with Cave groaning "can't remember anything at all”, and Jubilee Street might just be the best songs they’ve ever recorded. Few musicians would have expected to hit their musical peak in their 50s or with their 15th album – but Nick Cave is not like any other artist.
Lauren O’Neill
Rachel Grace Almeida
Anna Tehabsim
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Danny Wright
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J Hus Common Sense Black Butter Records
Rustie Glass Swords Warp Records
Kanye West Yeezus Def Jam
Beyoncé Lemonade Columbia Records
If there was ever a fragment of doubt that J Hus was going to be a star, it disappeared the moment Jae5 hit the opening chords of Common Sense. Orchestral and jubilant, the lavish instrumental of the record’s title track lays the foundation for an album so triumphant you can hear Hus grinning through every bar. Bolstered by a string of wellloved singles – who, honestly could choose between Did You See? and Friendly? – Hus’ debut album saw him perfect his art, helping to define the emergent sound of Afroswing in the process. From the tongue-in-cheek braggadocio of Bouff Daddy to the defiant Spirit, on Common Sense, Hus raised the bar for every MC in the country.
Glass Swords sounds like the soundtrack to a Sega Mega Drive game your eldest cousin told you about when you were 12, but wouldn’t let you play. Fizzing, crystalline and joyously frantic, Rustie’s debut bounces between old skool rave, trap and that weird period when Skrillex was transforming dubstep into EDM with wild abandon. We defy anyone not to be transported, Tron-like, to the moment they first heard this record when the opening of Ultra Thizz effervesces into being. What’s more, cuts like Surph and Hover Traps point down the road that PC Music would take to critical acclaim, paving the way for the revolution that SOPHIE would start with Bipp. A glimpse into the club sounds of the future, Glass Swords sounds every bit as vital eight years on.
This album is so old. It arrived when one sight of Kanye’s face projected on buildings would generate manic delight, not fear that he had been appointed Secretary of Commerce. So yes it’s old, yet not dated. The topics stared down, the blown-out crunch backing his screams, and intense centrifugal force of all these collaborators spinning together remain absolute dynamite. Kanye’s legacy as the godhead of our times as-yet-untainted and something to celebrate with your full chest. The thunderous opening of Black Skinhead, the sheer odd-ball nature of Bound 2 and egoism of I Am A God; it was Kanye unleashed, riding MBDTF’s legacy into the sun. 2013 was a fun year. And Yeezus was the biggest riot of all of them.
Forget the decade – Beyoncé Giselle KnowlesCarter is the defining artist of this entire generation. Who else could take something as personal as a troubled marriage and turn it into an indelible pop culture moment, with no preamble or promo? Having already ushered in the era of the surprise drop with her self-titled album in 2013, with Lemonade, Bey gave us her Thriller, her Pet Sounds, her Nevermind: an album that transcends the mainstream, transcends genre, and transitions the artist from blockbuster hit maker to undeniable genius. By tethering her personal life to greater themes of race, identity and wealth in America, Beyoncé reached a peak that she has yet to come down from.
Mike Vinti
Mike Vinti
Albums of the Decade
Gabriel Szatan
Cameron Cook
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Rich Gang Tha Tour Part 1 Cash Money Records
Lana Del Rey Ultraviolence Polydor
FKA twigs LP1 XL Recordings
Jam City Classical Curves Night Slugs
Unveiled during the peak of Young Thug’s prolific run of mixtapes, Tha Tour Part 1 provided a refreshing demonstration in streamlining and direction. In fact, the mixtape was such a musically refined piece of work that the discussion around whether or not Thug and Rich Homie Quan’s elastic, melodious style qualified as rap suddenly felt all the more arbitrary. Thug’s splattery flow is counterpointed by Quan’s more traditional, sculpted delivery while Birdman’s overlord presence brings a level of prestige that places the record in the rap pantheon. Spacious, piano-heavy beats from London on da Track give the tape a glimmery sheen that spans the best in both A-list hip-hop and classic R&B. The story of Young Thug and the distribution of rap music in this decade is one hallmarked by impermanence – albums which never materialised, landmark projects leaking and artists locked in deals with labels incapable of keeping up with their output. Tha Tour Part 1 transcended that climate completely. A glowing career high for modern rap’s most enigmatic innovator.
Ultraviolence marks a moment of becoming for Lana Del Rey. Ever since Video Games, critics had railed against her perceived inauthenticity – but rather than engaging, she doubled down on her vision: a heightened reality gilded in sadness that transcended the critical stonewalling. Yes, she’d hinted at what was to come with Born to Die but, audacious as it was, her debut did little more than set the scene and determine the blocking. On Ultraviolence, the drama unfolded. Now we were introduced to the interior world of Lana Del Rey, an antiheroine who luxuriated in toxic relationships. The atmosphere of bracing desolation is embellished by little more than ringing guitars and orchestral flourishes, allowing lines like “mimicking me's a fucking bore” maximum impact. The surety of her art was so great, in fact, that she landed a blow on critics who’d previously waxed misogynistic, on Fucked My Way to the Top. Del Rey, clearly, caught us all off guard: we thought we had her figured out. She was way ahead of us.
FKA twigs emerged fully-formed; her pair of debut EPs presented an artist with a singular vision, raw talent and a sound that was as inviting as it was hard to define. She didn’t really have anything to prove with the release of an album proper, but if she did, LP1 damn well proves it a lifetime over, ad infinitum. Across nine tracks (and one polyphonic hallucination of an intro), twigs charts a bold new sonic terrain for R&B, influencing an ensuing half-decade of imitators who failed to live up to this record’s sheer audacity. The arrangements here are skeletal and layered with surgical precision, like the meandering bassline which spins itself into a melodic cyclone on the magnificently paced Two Weeks. The nonlinear construction produces genreinversions that still sound breathtaking; Give Up is trap by way of the funhouse mirror, while the instrumentation of Pendulum interlocks enough elements to remain unclassifiable entirely. At the album’s bleeding, breaking heart, twigs offers a futurist document of intimacy, eschewing neither the highs of carnal pleasure nor the devastating lows of emotional isolation. Hers is a dark outlook, but if we accept twigs as ahead of her time, which of us is fool enough to expect a happy ending?
Speaking of the eureka moment behind his debut album, Jam City explained that he would “isolate a soft Kerri Chandler organ chord or a bell texture and let those really powerful elements hang there.” Little did he know, the process he was explaining – taking familiar ideas and abstracting them from their context to form radical new structures – would go on to inspire one of the decade’s most exciting musical movements (and most infamous buzzword): deconstructed club. At the time of release, Classical Curves sounded unlike anything that had come before. Although packed with references to Detroit house, funk, grime and and Jersey club, these elements had been exploded and reassembled beyond recognition. The rhythms were stop-start; the drums exploded like malfunctioning machinery; and all recognisable sounds had been re-rendered with a hyperreal gloss sheen. Perhaps more than any electronic album of the decade, Classical Curves sounded unrelentingly like the future. Today, the album's sonic hallmarks are still being rehashed and reinterpreted to create some of the most exciting, exhilarating and bewildering moments found on the dancefloor.
Louise Brailey
Duncan Harrison
Oscar Henson
Jake Indiana
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Jenny Hval Apocalypse, girl Sacred Bones
Kendrick Lamar To Pimp A Butterfly Aftermath/Interscope Records
SOPHIE Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-insides Transgressive
Solange A Seat at the Table Columbia Records
Apocalypse, girl is Jenny Hval at her mischievous best. Twisting pop-informed ideas around a narrative of introspection and mass destruction, she brings big sweeping themes into focus with razor sharp wit; joining the dots between womens’ experience through extreme close ups and sprawling existential narratives. Her fifth solo record, it spiralled from childhood dreams to post-feminism via Armageddon, and “the huge, capitalist clit” – but never felt pretentious. Hval used Apocalypse, girl to think on post-feminist deception and the traps of domestic pursuits within a pop palette, and it’s in this she secures her most rewarding results. This soft hallucinatory experience reaches its peak on Sabbath. “I’m six or seven and dreaming I’m a boy,” she begins. It’s a lucid depiction of warping gender identity, at once focused and abstract, set to a bright, skittering pace, and captures the reasons Hval’s work is so beguiling. A politically-charged fever dream.
Galvanised by the growing neo-black power movement that arose following the rise of #BlackLivesMatter and a heightened sense of political consciousness among young people, To Pimp a Butterfly mirrored a moment of culture shift. After Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, Kendrick widened his gaze, seeking to capture the collective feeling of a generation exasperated by state violence, institutional racism and police brutality. Few songs were able to articulate this growing sentiment quite like Alright, which became the battlecry at protests across the world. Ultimately, though, Kendrick’s third studio album captures the history of black America by honouring of the lineage of jazz, rap and funk. You could argue that the album’s cover art holds even more weight now, when President Donald Trump resides in the White House and the idea of ‘blacking out’ the lawn is a distant dream, but significantly, it’s a stark reminder that those who helped build America are still suffering the consequences of being black.
From her very first release, SOPHIE was an enigma. Affiliated with PC Music, the public speculated over her gender, even accusing her of appropriating femininity. Fast forward to 2018 and the video for It’s Okay to Cry reveals her face. It signalled a new era for the producer, one who’d previously seemed camera-shy. Then there’s her sound: more emphatic, more ambitious. SOPHIE had previously stated that “genre is a stupid question” and she pushed her boundary-blind approach with Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides. Synthetic sounds are tied to questions of artificiality and authenticity. Distorted vocals by Cecile Believe scale across octaves, unbound by notions of gender and the human voice. SOPHIE taught listeners that their reality can be of their own making; fun and fluid. Above all, Oil of… was the sound of transcendence; it glowed with an optimism that still feels revolutionary.
At this point, it seems borderline insulting to bring up Beyoncé when referencing Solange; she has more than proven herself to be an iconic and ingenious artist in her own right. But that wasn’t the case before she released A Seat at the Table. As a singer, Solange had struggled to find her footing, and while she had a few hits under her belt, nothing had connected enough for her to break out of her family name and blaze her own path. All that changed with Cranes in the Sky, an ode to finding the strength to love yourself in spite of the trappings of modern living. Suddenly, Solange had found her vision, and it had been there all along – the strength and vulnerability of being a black woman, the unapologetic urge to demand her space in the world. Don’t Touch My Hair, FUBU, Where Do We Go – these songs are anthems, and more than that, they refuse to kowtow to the status quo, which in some sort of satisfying irony, is why they are so universally beloved. In an era where conserving your sanity can be challenging to say the least, ASATT is a life raft amidst a churning ocean of uncertainty and rage.
Anna Tehabsim
Jesse Bernard
Albums of the Decade
Vivian Yeung
Cameron Cook
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PJ Harvey Let England Shake Island Records
DJ Rashad Double Cup Hyperdub
Kendrick Lamar Good Kid, M.A.A.D City Aftermath/Interscope Records
Dean Blunt BLACK METAL Rough Trade Records
There is a mournful shimmer that smothers Polly Jean Harvey’s 2011 masterpiece, Let England Shake. The Great War – one of the most seismic events in European history – is a bleak subject to take on, and in the hands of Harvey, she mines maximum devastation. See, for instance, the lilting guitar that accompanies On Battleship Hill, on which Harvey laments: “On Battleship Hill's caved in trenches/ A hateful feeling still lingers/ Even now, 80 years later/ Cruel nature/ Cruel, cruel nature”. Her eye is sharp and unflinching. On The Words That Maketh Murder she observes the carnage: “soldiers fall like lumps of meat” and “arms and legs were in the trees”. The evocative and disturbing imagery offers warning signs that ring loud and clear in our unstable, divided times. The futility of bureaucracy summed up when she wryly wonders “What if I take my problems to the United Nations?” – an institution designed to prevent such wars from happening again. A potent turn of phrase in 2019. The Great War did shake England, with a force that would see trauma trickle down into subsequent generations. As soldiers advance on All and Everyone, Harvey recreates the pace of a charge to chilling effect, never losing sight of the inevitability at its heart: “death was everywhere”. Nine years on from the release of Let England Shake, its power to shock remains undiminished. We should pay close attention.
The only full-length album ever released by DJ Rashad is far from the definitive document of Chicago footwork, the genre that crept into dance music like a jungle vine during the 00s, changing the rhythmic mathematics of the floor forever. But where the Bangs & Works compilations offered the jagged blueprints of a breakthrough style, and LPs by originals like RP Boo pushed the sound to its toughest extremities, no one hit the heady heights of footworking soul like Rashad. Along with his Teklife co-conspirator DJ Spinn – who features on most of Double Cup’s tracks along with Taso, Manny, Earl, DJ Phil and the UK's Addison Groove – Rashad knew exactly how to extract the blunted, blissed-out core of footwork. Double Cup is the ecstatic pinnacle of that approach, spanning woozy, fat-headed funk (Show U How), pitch-dark misanthropy (the iconic I Don't Give a Fuck) and cripplingly emotional soul flips, like the Floetry-sampling Let U No, perhaps the most beautiful footwork track ever conceived. Who knew that so much pure, skin-tingling affect could be wrought from tracks called I'm Too Hi and Drank Kush Barz? It's hard not to ruminate on what might have been, had Rashad not passed away six months after its release; the sheer immediacy of these 14 tracks suggests that he was only just getting to grips with his crossover potential. Still, Double Cup remains a timeless epitaph to an irreplaceable talent. Rest in power.
“Even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.” That’s the concise theorem on life delivered by The Perks of Being a Wallflower’s Charlie Kelmeckis, 15, as he surveyed his suburban Pittsburgh reality. What Charlie didn’t say is that you can choose loyalty to your home soil. Fluke of birth placed Kendrick Lamar in Compton; love for his city led him to spin his own coming-of-age saga. Taking us on a tour of the same streets that Eazy-E once steered his Chevrolet Impala, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City captures economic degradation, hardened male bonds and brutal violence in a corner of America that was once a byword for urban mismanagement. The battle for Lamar’s soul is viscerally played out, whether it’s in the offering of a few shots of liquor, or the pressure to partake in bloody retribution. On Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst, Lamar delivers a mournful requiem that would put the button on an entire career and life. We now know that he was just getting started. King Kendrick’s ultimate choice was to write dissertations on national erosion and political reckoning that encapsulated the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Good Kid, M.A.A.D City was the origin story. Great coming-of-age tales don’t necessarily require exceptional humans as protagonists – Lamar certainly was that. But on this album, he cuts to the bone by presenting as a single human in Compton’s 97,000.
The second decade in an already exhausted century. How has it felt? Endless? Overwhelming? To put it bluntly, it has been a period – particularly in the UK – summed up by paradox. Huge acceleration and total paralysis. Future shocks and ghosts of history. Perhaps that’s why, as the 2010s draw to a close, BLACK METAL stands out to us as the definitive LP of the era. From the airy wash of opener LUSH to the final rumbles of GRADE, it is a record as dark and emotionally unclear as the time that created it. Dean Blunt’s reputation remains that of the prankster. The roll-call of his stunts – from sending a stooge up to collect his NME Award in 2015, to selling toy cars stuffed full of weed on eBay – have seen him talked about as a post-modern pisstaker. When it was released in 2014, reactions to BLACK METAL were typically half-baked, from misclassifying it as hip-hop to dismissing it as "difficult". What’s striking then, re-listening five years on, is what a work of beauty it is. The ominous Blade Runner swells that give way to crowing saxophones, the brief dub trips that scatter into smoke. Love songs; songs about loss; songs about escape. The way a spectral Joanne Robertson drifts through the album like something half remembered; sometimes duetting with her lead, at other points like she’s been dreamt up in a cloud. Then there is Blunt: an estranged, stoic figure who half-sings, half-talks. Sometimes sneering, often tired. Dean Blunt may not be the greatest artist of the past decade – it’s a role he likely has no interest in playing – but in his 2014 album he created the most unique musical artefact of our strange, lonely time. It is disoriented, vulnerable and knotted with detail. Poe-faced and ironic, yet bursting with humanity. A snatch of glory that occurs when a unique personality tangles with the universe. No other record this decade sounds like BLACK METAL, and it is doubtful one will ever again.
Thomas Frost
Chal Ravens
Dean Van Nguyen
Angus Harrison
Albums of the Decade
THE TO P 20 SONGS OF THE DECADE
From the crypto-commercial nu-pop of SOPHIE to the viral juke of Footcrab, an eerie Fugees sample and an ill-fated cockroach, these are the tracks that defined a decade
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Daphni Ye Ye Dan Snaith
Beyoncé ft. JAY-Z Drunk in Love Columbia Records
Kendrick Lamar Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst Aftermath/Interscope Records
Addison Groove Footcrab Swamp 81
There are certain electronic tracks we loosely dub “winders". Essentially, winders are tracks where, around three minutes in, you realise you have little idea where the track will end up. Ye Ye by Dan Snaith operating under his Daphni guise, is the ultimate winder, steering its tension-filled path to no specific destination but absolutely devastating the dancefloor in the process. It’s a trick few producers can pull off, but by harnessing the power of a circling synth line, odd vocal stab and the drama inherent in surging forward momentum, Snaith created one of electronic music’s all-timers. We defy your synapses not to fire the moment those head-spinning synth chords kick in.
It’s doubtful that anyone has ever gifted the club a better excuse to go ballistic than Beyoncé purring “I been drinkin’” at the beginning of Drunk in Love. Though her world-shaking 2013 self-titled album contains many highlights, Drunk in Love – a grown-up and opulent spiritual successor to Crazy in Love – is one of its best moments, as Beyoncé's silky vocal rides muffled drums and synths which sound like how the sky looks at night. Slinky but somehow still totally bumping, the track is one of the great paeans to the end of the night fumble. Though for most that’s more “it’s 6am and wow I’m on a floor mattress in Bermondsey” than “fucked up my Warhol,” the sentiment remains appreciated and sublimely well-executed.
Kendrick has no shortage of legacy-defining songs. From the political urgency of Alright to the head-spinning flow of Rigamortus, you could spend days trying to pinpoint his greatest moment. For our money though, it has to be Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst. Sprawling across two parts and a total track length of 12 minutes, Kendrick immerses the listener in tales of Compton, blending narrative poeticism and introspection seamlessly into an epic that sits at the core of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. Just as impressive, if not even more so, is the fact that through it all, he never misses a beat, twisting his flow into strange new shapes to make rhymes work and maintain pace. Heartbreaking and defiant in equal measure, it’s Kendrick at the height of his powers.
According to Tony Williams, aka Addison Groove, Footcrab almost never saw the light of day. Initially built as nothing more than a tool for bridging the gap between juke and dubstep in his sets, it eventually found its way to Loefah, boss of the Swamp 81 label. To say the track became ubiquitous would be an understatement. Played by pretty much every DJ of note from across the electronic music landscape, it found its way into the sets of everyone from Villalobos and Surgeon to Kode9 and Mr Scruff, onto the record shelves of a million hypebeasts around the world and straight into our hearts.
Lauren O’Neill
Mike Vinti
Thomas Frost
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Steven Dores
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Savages Husbands Matador Records
Azealia Banks 212 Prospect Park
Kanye West Runaway Roc-A-Fella Records
Robyn Dancing on My Own Konichiwa Records
Punishing drums. Threatening bass. Blunt, rusty riffs. Savages’ chic, muscular first single, released in 2013, doesn’t waste a single second on polite introductions. The black-clad four-piece take just 20 seconds to start a riot, and then Jehnny Beth hollers an “Ohhh” so powerful it could stop a mosh pit in its tracks. Surrealist lyrics twist a domestic scene into a claustrophobic post-punk nightmare, punctuated by a heated, exhilarating violence which explodes between the verses. Finally the fever breaks with a staccato yelp, piercing and breathless, that rejects a whole worldview with a single word: “Husbands! Husbands! Husbands! Husbands!”
When a young Azealia Banks exploded onto the scene with 212 in 2011, it felt like the arrival of an artist who was destined to shake up the industry. And she did – but more on that later. The track, with its hydraulic vogue-friendly beat, house chimes and snarling, raunchy rhymes, became the centrepiece of New York’s ‘hip house’ movement that also included Zebra Katz and Cakes da Killa. In its memorable black-and-white, seemingly homemade video, a Mickey Mouse sweater-clad Banks delivers a performance so whip-smart and veloce, it could snap your neck. Yes, we’ve now reached a point where Banks’ personal controversies overshadow her musical output, but somehow 212 still manages to send a shockwave through a dancefloor like little else. All together now: “I’ma ruin you cunt.”
Runaway is Kanye at his most vulnerable and self-aware, with lyrics like “You been putting up with my shit just way too long” working not just as an admission of being a bad boyfriend, but also as an acknowledgment that his narcissism might have eroded the patience of his audience. The production, which is full of tender piano and beautiful flourishes of bass, is lush and grandiose. The fact the music video features intricate ballet dances also felt intentional – Kanye knew this was the kind of rap song that deserved to be looked at as high art. On Runaway Kanye is too heartbroken to puff his chest out. It’s concrete proof that he’s just as human as the rest of us.
Few songs have survived the last 10 years like Dancing on My Own, Robyn’s cough-your-heartout-of-your-mouth ode to a) knowing someone you love is lost to another person, and b) getting extremely drunk about it. The universality of the feelings Robyn moulds around staccato synths and a pounding, singalong chorus might account for the track’s sustained pre-eminence, but it’s more accurate to say that, as a perfect sonic articulation of an emotion, Dancing on My Own could never be anything but timeless.
Katie Hawthorne
Rachel Grace Almeida
Songs of the Decade
Thomas Hobbs
Lauren O’Neill
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Blawan Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage Hinge Finger
Pusha T Numbers on the Board Def Jam
Grimes Oblivion 4AD
Rihanna Work Roc Nation Records
The early 2010s threw up a number of club tracks whose impact played out on the internet as much as the dancefloor. Blawan’s explosive Why They Hide... is a prime example, doing the rounds on YouTube – and emergent Dance Music Twitter – before anyone had even heard it in the club. But the buzz was deserved. The track revels in B-movie schlockiness even as it lays waste to dancefloors with its cavernous, dead-eyed kick and creepy Fugees’ sample. Why does it still sound so fresh? It had a quality that a lot of 2010s techno checked at the door. It had a sense of humour.
One of Kanye West’s more unconventional bangers, Numbers on the Board is built around a Ye beat that sounds like someone is running a hammer through the cracks of a radiator. But the fact the beat is so minimalist means Pusha T’s slick raps are allowed to take centre stage, with stirring lyrics like “I can go blow for blow with any Mexican” designed to be shouted back raucously at live shows and make street dealers feel like titans. Perhaps some people still saw Pusha T as a one-dimensional gangster rapper before this song came out, but its release showed just how adaptable his flow was, proving he could sound at home on just about any beat. With Kanye behind the boards, Pusha T sounds like one of the greats and this song encapsulates that reality more than just about any other.
Oblivion was the first clear sign that Claire Boucher had aspirations beyond Montreal’s DIY community. Released in an era where poptimism had yet to gain cultural currency, the second single from Visions would provide the 22-year-old with her breakthrough moment. The song tackles Boucher’s own experience of sexual assault, and the lyrics are fittingly disturbing, especially when delivered in Boucher’s high register: “I never walk about after dark/ It's my point of view/ 'Cause someone could break your neck”. The mood is carried into the sound – Oblivion’s first act sees throbbing arpeggios glittering darkly, like a goth Giorgio Moroder but, as the song progresses, seasick synths take over, lending the song’s “see you on a dark night” refrain added menace. A total game-changer of a track.
Work felt like a re-introduction. A bold, unapologetic mission statement from a singer who had been so low-key for so long that many had begun to question her return to music at all. But Work, in its understated brilliance, felt like a new reality, one you could wine your waist slowly into. As the first single from her sublime eighth studio album ANTI, Work’s smooth blend of dancehall, R&B and pop was immediately met with warmth. But this was a pointed departure from previous material. Operating in a glossy pop arena that relied so heavily on clear, explicit enunciation belted from the highest rooftops, Work’s indecipherable lyrics felt like a political statement; a moment of reclamation, of repositioning. Rihanna became the kind of multifaceted pop star that could play a trick on you at every corner, all while retaining a firm stronghold on the charts. Such is the power of RiRi.
Louise Brailey
Thomas Hobbs
Gemma Samways
Rachel Grace Almeida
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Girl Unit Wut Night Slugs
Frank Ocean Pyramids Def Jam
Skepta ft. JME That's Not Me 3 Beat Productions
Lana Del Rey Video Games Polydor
Where were you when you first lost it to Wut? The decade’s first true-blue belter, once heard, is not easily forgotten. Splicing together cues from the UK’s then-booming dance underground, US hip-hop and high-sheen R&B, Girl Unit – aka Philip Gamble – created something far greater than the sum of its mutant parts, making a star of himself and Night Slugs, the forward-facing label that released it. To listen to the track now is to be transported back to autumn 2010, from the nods to juke in the percussion to those effervescent, trance-leaning synths that, in hindsight, explained why even the witch house contingent played along. But, for all the stylistic time-stamps, Wut transcends fad or fashion, essaying something ageless in its pursuit of endless euphoria. Wut is a pinnacle, a high watermark, a crowning achievement. Most of all, Wut gave us fair warning that the decade was going to be one hell of a ride.
One of the through-lines that runs through Frank Ocean’s catalogue is the idea of time. Long drives, fast years, endless streams. Pyramids is his only song which spans centuries – Cleopatra at the pyramids of ancient Egypt juxtaposed with a Vegas pimp falling in love with a client. It’s the kind of concept that’s so wild ambitious it could only be handled by a songwriter as deft and sensitive as Frank Ocean. Evoking Prince’s Purple Rain era, Frank freewheels between genres with ease across the 10 minutes. The murky R&B of the opening chapter, the smoky club synths of the first drop, the sweet release of the spaced-out middle section collapsing into that timeless hook – “She’s working at the pyramids tonight”. Blonde is often cited as proof of Ocean’s status as a generation-defining songwriter, but there’s a case for Pyramids being the best example of how he captures the mood of the era. It’s distracted but obsessive, here and there, full of big ideas and dead ends; euphoric but completely devastating.
It’s easy to mythologise about music but the point at which Skepta stepped onstage in a black tracksuit at the 2014 MOBOS to collect his award for Best Video felt like a defining moment. He’d spent £80 on the shoot for That’s Not Me, during which he delivered his bars into a pair of headphones, pirate radio-style, against a backdrop of shaky VHS freestyle footage. The track grazed the UK Top 20 and set out Skepta’s stall for a return to form that would culminate in the shape of Konnichiwa. Much was made of the Drake co-signs that followed, but the track wasn’t an international victory so much as a long overdue recognition of a sound maligned for too long. It didn’t matter that That’s Not Me was a throwback. In fact, its rough-edged nostalgia was entirely the point. Skepta had blown the doors off an industry that had failed consistently to show faith in its most invigorating homegrown talents.
Video Games introduced the world to Lana Del Rey, but it took us a minute to warm to her. Del Rey’s timeless, modern classic had been passed over by record executives who warned that it was too dark and not commercial enough. This was a time when Ke$ha dominated the charts – no wonder Del Rey’s self-described ‘Hollywood sadcore’ felt like an odd fit. A co-sign from The Weeknd, who posted the song to his Tumblr for 11 days, helped Video Games find an audience. Radio play and global chart placings followed. The rest is history. Video Games framed Del Rey as one of the most exciting pop stars to arrive. Rejecting glossy pop for old-fashioned romanticism – sweeping strings and sultry vocals – she crafted a fantasy world where the mundanities of a relationship are all-consuming. It was the first hint at the immaculately curated sonic and aesthetic world that Del Rey would spend her career building; a world that’s still uniquely her own.
Louise Brailey
Duncan Harrison
Songs of the Decade
Will Pritchard
Vivian Yeung
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Objekt Theme From Q Objekt
William Basinski For David Robert Jones Musex International/BMI
Tyler, the Creator Yonkers XL Recordings
SOPHIE Bipp Numbers
Objekt’s tongue-in-cheek attempts at aping the basic genre conventions of club music has yielded some of his wildest and most exciting works. Take Cactus, the track that arguably cemented his reputation as one of the defining producers of his generation (or any generation, to be honest). Ostensibly created as an ode to tear-out dubstepper Rusko, the result was a wildly unique slice of wobbly dancefloor chaos. While Objekt has never expressed the intention behind 2017 song Theme From Q (besides the clearly nonsense backstory that it took inspiration from a tune heard at an imaginary club in west Berlin), it certainly sounds like his attempt at making a 90s house banger. In classic Objekt fashion, what was actually made was an alarmingly effective club weapon that looked both back and forwards with equal reverence – and subsequently got played literally fucking everywhere. The combination of deliciously programmed breaks, head-turning fills and breakdowns, and the catchiest melody heard this side of a football terrace, brought the world of dance music to a rare, unanimous decision: that this one slaps. We agree.
Marred by the deaths of numerous musical heroes, 2016 truly felt cursed. George Michael, Prince and Leonard Cohen were among the artists we lost that year, but the death that cast the longest shadow came early – on 10 January. Few people knew David Bowie was battling liver cancer, compounding the shock that reverberated across the world. A year later, William Basinski released his 23rd album A Shadow In Time. The 20-minute eulogy For David Robert Jones, one of two immersive compositions, remains one of the most haunting tributes made to the late icon. Basinski, of course, is no stranger to exploring the contours of tragedy in his work, with 2002’s The Disintegration Loops a rumination on 9/11 and memory. But there’s something truly wrenching in hearing the composer write the loss of his friend into fraying analogue. The most powerful moment comes six minutes in, when a saxophone drifts across the surface of the piece, its texture eventually crumbling away into silence. To Basinski, the motif evokes Bowie’s track Subterranean, a B-side of Low. “I try to stay in the moment – and the moment is eternal,” Basinski has said, shoring up how ambient music has always been linked to its environment. For David Robert Jones encapsulates a specific, unarticulated feeling that settled on us collectively, in the aftershock of a terrible, unforgettable year.
If there’s one track that marks the tipping point when teens started to care more about hip-hop than indie, it’s Yonkers. The wider world’s introduction to Tyler, the Creator, and by extension the rest of Odd Future, this track started a cultural revolution – one that is still going on today. From Billie Eilish’s gothic teen ballads to America’s favourite boy band BROCKHAMPTON, it’s impossible to imagine how the stars of today would sound had Tyler not appeared on our iPod Touch screens eating cockroaches and threatening to stab Bruno Mars. Though Tyler’s sound has evolved numerous times in the years since, Yonkers is still decadedefining. It’s a flag in the ground, the start of a musical career that has captured the post-genre zeitgeist better than any other. Back then, few would imagine Tyler as the emotionally vulnerable polymath he is now, but even in 2011 there was something about him that was captivating. Something akin to the rebellious spirit of punk heroes past that galvanised a generation of teenagers to don satanic cat t-shirts, learn every crass insult and swear word on Goblin and Bastard and carve upside down crucifixes into their desks. In the months after Yonkers’ release, Odd Future were the Wu-Tang Clan and Sex Pistols rolled into one, commanding an army of frenzied teens across the world and causing enough panic among parents that they ended up on Newsnight. For better or worse they also helped introduce Supreme to the non-skating world. Nothing has been the same since.
SOPHIE is now so unanimously revered that it's hard to remember a time when no one knew what to make of her neon-lit, turbo-pop universe. After a sneak-entry with the electro-house 12" Nothing More to Say, the Scottish producer went nuclear with her next three singles – Bipp, Lemonade and Msmsmsm – which together offered an allencompassing vision of futuristic delirium, a sound so bizarre yet so fully realised that it simply had to be acknowledged: finally, here was music that sounded fucking new! At the time, though, few of us dared to stan. The suspicion that there was some kind of mystifying conceptualism behind the project was a turn-off for journalists worried about being hoodwinked – was all this helium-voiced exuberance ultimately vacuous? Or worse, was it just a piss-take, manufactured to make us all look stupid? Neither was true, of course. Five years later and Bipp has lost none of its impact: a fizzing fantasyland populated by alien squeaks and sighs and weightless melodies cast from plastic, chrome and silicon – materials of the now-andfuture bent into danceable shapes, just as steel and battery acid fuelled the techno machine music of the 80s. At the same time, Bipp captured an emerging nostalgia for an era not yet boiled down into "remember when?" clichés – the cheap-andcheerful sincerity of 90s Europop, with its brittle, multi-girl harmonies: "I can make you feel better, if you let me!" The faceless robo-lover of our dreams promises us sheer pleasure and nothing but: a six-second sugar-high and chemical dependency, dopamine-jolting phone alerts and immediate fulfilment, over and over, endlessly. Bipp contains the shadow of both excess and comedown, attractive and repulsive in equal measure, like fullblown addiction. And SOPHIE nails this modern malaise like no one else, speaking to us as both object and subject: the perfect double agent. After all, before she revealed herself as a glamorous, fully human avatar for crypto-commercial nu-pop, she was licensing Lemonade to a McDonald's advert – and getting away with it. Fast forward to 2019 and SOPHIE is the only artist in the world who can play an Amazon-sponsored music festival and make it look like a winking inside joke. Just as Andy Warhol's canvases of Marilyn Monroe managed to both underline and undermine the power of celebrity in the 60s, SOPHIE's Bipp exists as a mirror-like meta-commentary on the 00s, celebrating all that we reject. That's genius, and we're powerless to resist.
Steven Dores
Vivian Yeung
Mike Vinti
Chal Ravens
Songs of the Decade
a four day festival of howling spirits and curious minds
ALFOS (ANDREW WEATHERALL & SEAN JOHNSTON) CALL SUPER CARISTA CHARLOTTE ADIGÉRY DJ TENNIS FLOATING POINTS (LIVE) FORT ROMEAU GILLES PETERSON JOHN TALABOT KATE TEMPEST KINDNESS MOSCOMAN PIONAL SIMPLE SYMMETRY YOUNG MARCO YU SU & MANY MORE
PLUS TALKS, WORKSHOPS & FILMS FROM JEREMY DELLER, CAMILLE WALALA, HASSAN HAJJAJ, RICHARD RUSSELL, PATTERNITY & MANY MORE
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Clams Casino In his own words, Clams Casino remembers the moment he dropped his double life and started taking music seriously
January 2011 started out pretty normally for me, but within the space of 12 months, my life changed forever. I’d been in college studying physical therapy. I’d completely set myself up to believe that this was what I was going to do with my life; I studied hard, and by my final year, I was working in a hospital, learning on the job for no money.
Music had always been a hobby of mine, but in 2007 I decided to take it more seriously. I was using the internet to connect with rappers and get my beats out into the world. After a few years of sending messages to rappers on MySpace, I began producing songs for some of my favourite artists, from my room in the attic of my mother’s house. I made songs with Lil B, Havoc
of Mobb Deep, Soulja Boy. That gave me the motivation to keep going. I had a small following online from that work, and that made me feel like I was living a double life – studying and working at the hospital by day but also working hard to get more recognition during any free time I had outside of school. In March 2011, after seeing requests from fans online asking for me to put out instrumental versions of songs I had produced for artists, I released a collection of them (Instrumentals). From here, things got more exciting. I remember being in the hospital after the tape came out, checking my phone in the bathroom and at lunch breaks in the cafeteria and seeing all of the reactions to this project. The music that I’d made as a backing for rappers to take the spotlight was being taken in a different context by fans of electronic music – a world I wasn’t completely in tune with. In fact, I was a little confused with all the genres I’d never even heard of being attached to my name. That moment I released my first instrumental mixtape changed everything, and changed the way I thought about my music. People started seeing me as less of a producer and more of an artist in my own right. The more textured music I was making may not have made sense to a lot of rappers, but in an electronic world, it was welcomed. Some of those beats that were never used by rappers went on to be released by Tri Angle Records on the Rainforest EP in June, and I started to see even more of a diversification of the crowds that were listening to my work. I didn’t have to fit into a box. Moon Trip Radio is out now via Clams Casino Productions LLC
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Lives
Unsound 2019 Various venues, Krakow 6-13 October
Club to Club Various venues, Turin 30 October-3 November Club to Club started out as a series of club events in the early 2000s, bringing a more progressive, experimental curve to Europe’s electronic festival landscape. Over the past few years, their line-ups have become more high-profile with blockbuster bookings like Thom Yorke, Kraftwerk and, last year, Aphex Twin. As they look forward to their 20th anniversary next year, the 2019 edition felt like a festival finding a new beat. By placing live acts in time slots typically occupied by DJs, bands found a new intensity at Club to Club. Black Midi’s frenetic, freeform compositions function better live than they do on record, and the kinetic sounds of their debut album Schlagenheim puts the band’s remarkably skilled musicianship front and centre. In the vast, looming confines of the Crack Magazine stage, their darker moments became all the more disorientating. Improvisation became a through-line for the acts on the Crack stage. The explosive, cosmic wanderings of The Comet is Coming reverberated around the hangar. Kelsey Lu’s magnetic free spirit shone brightest when she ad-libbed vocals and allowed the music to move her physically. Her hypnotising cover of 10cc’s I’m Not In Love was particularly special. Even in the electronic realm, impulse and improvisation felt present. 72 Hour Post Flight created a gorgeous landscape of ambient textures. SOPHIE unleashed 60 minutes of bright sketches and pummelling productions, rearranging them in real time. During a talk at the festival’s evening symposium, Shabaka Hutchings spoke about composition as a process which doesn’t end when the song is written, but when the tracks are played to an audience and their response guides the final form of the music – an approach he clearly shares with SOPHIE despite their music existing in different worlds. Club to Club still carries the tenor of something that started as a series of parties formed by real music lovers. At a retrospective talk celebrating 30 years of Warp Records, one of the label’s senior figures spoke about the enduring ethos of the imprint. “Why not not let the borders mean too much?” he said, “let’s just smash everything together.” It was a nice reflection of Club to Club. ! Duncan Harrison N Silvia Violante Rouge
We sang together like brothers at family lock-ins, like siblings reunited at a birthday party. We were family for three hours that Monday evening; a clan 5000 strong brought together at the Royal Albert Hall by Kano, our conductor who steered proceedings. It was the final night of his Hoodies All Summer tour, another jewel in an already glittered career. Kano entered the arena wearing dove-white, beckoned to the stage by eager whistles. Free Years Later opened up the set as it opens up Hoodies All Summer, but now it was backed by a choir and a live band armed with steel pans and strings, drum kits and silver brass. They regaled the Royal Albert Hall with pulsating melodies while Kano discharged the lyrics of defiance and liberation that define his latest masterpiece. Kano writes like a poet and performs like a titan. Since Hoodies All Summer’s release, the hunger for a live rendition of cult track Class of Deja has been rabid. It was the unspoken current that weaved through the evening. In a short interlude, when the lights went black and the stage briefly vanished from our view, a lone figure trotted out into the darkness. When the stage lights flickered on, there was D Double E in a green tracksuit and matching commander cap. The time for chaos had come. Kano rushed back to the stage and Ghetts followed shortly after. They performed the track for seven wild minutes, passing the mic back and forth. We were an audience entranced, a crowd who had grown with Kano from his first Gold album at 20 to the new spring of his 30s. By the evening’s last notes, you sensed that, though the show was over, this was not the end. Some undetermined time from now, in another venue, under a different glass dome, this scattered family would reunite. Kano has an audience that has grown with him, individuals whose hearts sing to his music and who will tear up the Royal Albert Hall with him again. !
Aniefiok Ekpoudom N Anthony Yates
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Rachel Grace Almeida N Helena Majewska
REVIEWS
Kano Royal Albert Hall 7 October
What does solidarity look like in 2019? Perhaps it’s mutual respect, applying nuance to every interaction you have. Or maybe it’s taking everyone’s varied experiences and perspectives into account. To some, it means platforming and supporting marginalised voices, creating a level playing field. This year, Unsound pondered the meaning of solidarity with its 16th edition. Back in its home base of Krakow, the festival amplified its message with a jam-packed and diverse bill, spread out over a week. Guests were treated to panel discussions with music, art and technology’s most respected thinkers – Mat Dryhurst, DeForrest Brown Jr. and Ayishat Akanbi all took part in critical talks – and one-off events and workshops across different venues peppered the line-up. But the heart of the festival is at Hotel Forum – the vast, brutalist multi-room venue on the bank of Poland’s Vistula River, where the late-night schedule lights up the city. This year’s performances were driven by a fidgety high energy. Colombian-born, Mexico City-based DJ Rosa Pistola sent the crowd into overdrive with her big room reggaeton tech, Night Slugs affiliate Manara jerked the room into motion with a twitchy remix of Keyshia Cole’s crying-inthe-club ballad Love, and Nyege Nyege’s Slikback weaved together a spirited tapestry of dancehall, Coolie Dance riddim mixes and African club sounds. At one point, I even spotted someone fully dressed as the Joker (yes, makeup included) walking across to the bar, and later aggressively head-banging to Paula Temple’s dark, searing techno – an ominously fitting portrait. A real highlight came in the form of Sherelle and Fauzia’s back-to-back set. It’s safe to say Sherelle has been a dancefloor hero of 2019. The London DJ has famously led a new generation of selectors who take the pace upwards of 160 BPM, and her almost childlike joy at the decks with likeminded co-conspirator Fauzia transmitted into the audience like mist. The closing moments of their set were a rush of pure euphoria. As they made their way through a footwork remix of Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) and sweat literally dripped from the ceiling in the carpeted sauna that was the Ballroom space, it felt like Unsound’s message crystallised right before us in real time.
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Releases
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Brooke Candy SEXORCISM NUXXE
REVIEWS
On another – better – planet, Brooke Candy is a household star; a latex-coated agent of chaos and desire. Here on Earth, however, her ascent has been halted by a lack of willingness to conform or sanitise, which has seen her projects relegated to the realms of the ‘not easily marketed’. The same could be true of her longawaited debut SEXORCISM, if it didn’t feel so much of a time and place. If there’s one thing that makes sense in 2019 it’s an alternative pop album about the healing properties of sex. Featuring a veritable cast of industry misfits including Iggy Azalea, Charli XCX, Violet Chachki and Bree Runway, SEXORCISM finds transformation in sexual liberation. Futuristic pop, trap and house provide the stage for Candy and her gang to work, tackling pleasure as it intersects with power (Meet the Boss, Drip), identity (Nymph, Freak Like Me) and the more straightforward pursuit of escapism (XXXTC, FMU). While it does luxuriate in the provocative – there’s literally a track titled Cum – there’s a sense of solace at the heart of SEXORCISM that elevates it from a tapestry of filth into a battle cry for horny outcasts everywhere. !
Emma Garland
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Kanye West Jesus Is King Def Jam So Kanye has found God. Having teased a pivot to Christ with his mysterious Sunday Service performances – viewable on that most holy of platforms, Kim Kardashian’s Instagram stories – Ye’s new album Jesus Is King serves as his confirmation; an official renouncement of the devil, new dresses and all his other works. As you might expect, Kanye’s sound on Jesus… is all very God-forward. There are Biblical verses where bars should be, church organs swelling under Gospel choirs and more allusions to the almighty than your average mass. In places the results are suitably sublime, as in the opening minutes of Selah, where chanted hallelujahs build heavenly to a righteous sermon. There are even tracks, such as Follow God and Water, where Kanye’s redemption sounds complete, soul-led instrumentals channelling the best moments of his discography. More often though, it feels as if Ye is leaning on religious imagery as a crutch, repeating Christian clichés to the point that it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself of his religion as much as convert his audience. There’s also the issue of the mixing, which regularly ruins what should be the album’s most victorious moments, most notably the transition between No Malice’s verse and Kenny G’s saxophone solo (what a sentence, maybe God is real) on Use This Gospel. While certainly a step in the right direction after the shambolic Ye, Jesus Is King is ultimately the sound of a man hiding behind God. Kanye may well be born again, but it will take much more than this album to resurrect his reputation. !
Mike Vinti
Giant Swan Giant Swan Keck
Galcher Lustwerk Information Ghostly International Since the emergence of his breakout 2013 mixtape, 100% Galcher, Galcher Lustwerk has been walking his own path, bridging smoked-out house music with spoken word narratives that border on free association. The Cleveland-born producer is an electronic artist who uses his voice as a tool, dishing up nuggets about driving in cars, taking drugs and other threads in life’s rich tapestry. On Information, the New York-based producer’s debut for Ghostly International and third album proper, the character of the vocals takes on new guises. The gnarly deadpan sing-speak on Plainview is more dissonant than we’ve heard before, while Fathomless Irie’s repeated lines favour an even more minimal approach to language, without losing sight of the bold ambiguity that makes Lustwerk’s hip-house interesting. On Bit, organic instrumentation helps the stream-of-consciousness raps to leap onto the stage, anchored by some of the smoothest basslines you’ll hear all year, while Cig Angel’s live drums and I See a Dime’s sax establish a jazz club feel. Lustwerk has remarked that these are “midwest-minded, ‘hookier’ tracks”, and there’s undoubtedly a melodic sensibility that runs throughout Information. He’s also one of very few producers who can make a reference to vaping on a track and still sound cool: bathed in a bubble bath of his signature swirling, near-psychedelic pads, Overpay, Overstay features a couplet about “smoking a jay/ smoking a vape”. At least, that’s what it sounds like anyway. Galcher Lustwerk has been associated with the lo-fi house phenomenon in the past, but his electronic smarts feel too clearheaded, too slick and – arguably – too indebted to jazz for that label to stick anymore. Instead, Lustwerk’s hook-minded musicality feels destined for wider audiences; a kind of deep sophisti-house that’s ripe for stoners, ravers, hip-hoppers, house heads and anyone turned on by a groove. !
April Clare Welsh
Like a caged animal snarling as it lurches into the daylight, the self-titled debut album by Giant Swan, released on their own label Keck, gets off to a wild-eyed start with 55 Year Old Daughter. A powerful and pointed opener, it sets the scene with chopped, staccato yelps – you’d expect nothing less. Giant Swan have built up a reputation for their uncompromising live shows, and it’s satisfying to get an album-length take on the duo’s aesthetic, which welds the dark, glassy-eyed antiglamour of subterranean raves to the skittery sonics of experimental electronica. Building on a string of intense singles and EPs on adventurous electronic labels like Whities and Timedance, the duo’s debut drinks from the same punky, industrial well as Bristolian contemporaries Scalping, albeit with a more dynamic rhythmic range. Giant Swan veers from thudding techno (the gothic Pandaemonium), to grinding ambient (the menacing ‘I’ as Proof) and back again (YFPHNT’s hard-edged acid brutalism). Not a Crossing is a low-key highlight, producing the same unnervingly hypnotic effect as staring at a mildly unsettling scene for slightly too long, while Peace Fort 9 is plain spooky, with flashes of distorted noise periodically flaring from a gloomy melodic mist. Restless and spectral, Giant Swan are a welcome, noisy part of the electronic avant-garde. !
Adam Corner
King Princess Cheap Queen Columbia Records In an era where artist development seems nonexistent, Mikaela Straus is an example of what can be achieved with patience, trust and good genes. Born into the business (her father Oliver Straus is a recording engineer), she was always destined to be music royalty, but her path to becoming the queer pop icon better known as King Princess has been taken in slow, winding strides. King Princess' debut album, Cheap Queen, plays out like a cabaret as she builds up the narrative of a young woman deeply invested in the process of figuring herself out as she falls in and out of love. Opening with a suite of soulful, selfreflective confessions – best exemplified on the murky ballad Tough on Myself – we find her sifting through the smoke and cleaning up the mess left behind from a tumultuous heartbreak. Between those bittersweet moments, she reaches a stunning climax as the sonics shift on Prophet, a blues-drenched showtune bubbling hot with seduction. This exhilaration continues on Trust Nobody, but Hit the Back stands as one of the standout singles with fans hailing it as an "anthem for bottoms.” After all of those titillating moments, she gently closes with If You Think It’s Love. There's no telling what direction King Princess will head next, but this powerful debut has set her up for a longlasting reign at the top. !
Sydney Gore
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Tei Shi La Linda Downtown Records In the cover art for her 2017 debut, Crawl Space, Valerie Teicher appears serene as a tarantula creeps steadily over one eye. Like the collection’s claustrophobic title, the image is intended as a metaphor for Teicher’s journey, and the courage she’s shown overcoming various creative and emotional hurdles. You could argue the artwork for this follow-up is every bit as oppressive. And yet the mood within has lifted, finding the Argentina-born, Colombia and Canada-raised singer buoyed by a renewed sense of wonder at the world, as reflected in an album title that literally translates from Spanish as “the beautiful.” Characterised by shimmering synths, featherlight vocals and pillowy grooves, La Linda feels far less concerned with notions of cool than its predecessor, catering instead for the hopeless romantics amongst us. The gossamer funk of Dev Hynes duet Even If It Hurts is a standout, as is the dreamy doo wop of When He’s Done. Better still is Matando, on which Teicher embraces her mother tongue over xylophone arpeggios and cumbia-inspired percussion. As a collection, however, La Linda feels fatally frontloaded, and by the closing triptych of No Jueges, A Kiss Goodbye and We, Teicher’s songwriting is so finespun it’s bordering on soporific, and is essentially functioning as particularly sumptuous wallpaper. !
Gemma Samways
Sudan Archives Athena Stones Throw On her debut album Athena, Sudan Archives (aka LA-based singer and violinist Brittney Parks) explores the idea of duality in various forms. It’s there in the artwork – the artist as a Greek sculpture, both a pillar of strength and vulnerable in her nudity. It’s also there in her unique and innovative music – a mix of classical violin and lush, glitchy R&B. Parks’ experience as an identical twin has inspired Athena’s dives into polarity. She says she was framed as the “bad twin” by her stepdad growing up because she constantly missed rehearsals while he tried to transform the siblings into a pop sensation. She deals with the doubleness of twin life on a brief interlude called Ballad of Unhatched Twins I, which sounds like the arrival of new life, rising from gentle string swells to a flash of sound that whips and crackles. On the pattering Confessions, she moves onto the idea of belonging. “There is a place that I call home/ But that’s not where I am welcome,” she sings. Parks has described this record as “more confrontational” than her previous EPs. That’s true in places – like when she softly sings “fuck you ‘til you cry” on Down on Me – but, in another act of duplexity, Athena is also a record of true beauty and resilience. !
Rhian Daly
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’Jeff Goldblum I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This Decca Records
Mount Eerie Lost Wisdom pt. 2 P.W. Elverum & Sun It’s easy to become tangled in the sadness that has engulfed the music Phil Elverum releases as Mount Eerie. But there is more to his latest project than sorrow. Released as a sequel to 2008’s Lost Wisdom, Lost Wisdom pt. 2 sees Elverum once again in collaboration with Julie Doiron, the Canadian solo artist and co-vocalist of 90s indie outfit Eric's Trip. This is an album about the disorientation of a blank page, a new beginning. The follow-up to Now Only, Elverum’s 2018 critically-acclaimed record, Lost Wisdom pt. 2 feels like a natural extension of its predecessor, buoyed by the inevitability of change. This is echoed in opener Belief, as an unexpected drone cuts through the middle of the track, disturbing the soft delivery of the two vocalists. Throughout, Elverum employs the stream of consciousness lyrical style he’s known for, dipping into motifs of past releases. He mentions standing at the edge of a bottomless pit (like his 2004 song of the same name) and he sings of crows circling him (a reference to his grief-stricken masterpiece, A Crow Looked at Me). Sonically, Wisdom stays true to Elverum’s homemade production style and dedication to analogue recording, with warm, familiar melodies and sparse drums at the helm. Lost Wisdom pt. 2, in its refreshing candour, exhibits two artists at the peak of their songwriting. !
Sammy Maine
Shanti Celeste Tangerine Peach Discs Shanti Celeste has been partying for years. From her early deep house productions through her expanded repertoire of glitchy electro (Universal Glow), looser, rougher house (Alma) and more recent percussive workouts (Soba Dance), the dancefloor has always been her focus. Now releasing her debut album, this feels like the aftermath; the club shut and the sun up. Tangerine marks an attempt to encompass the sides of herself not previously shown in her work. Despite her accustomed ravey focus, she has always wielded a cerebral edge which makes this shift feel like a natural one, made clear in the meandering ambience of opener Sun Notification or shimmering choral plod of Slow Wave. There are also floor-facing cuts too which whiz by at high speed but grab attention with repeated listens. Inifinitas is a sure-handed slice of muscular house built around a classy bassline and celebratory pads, Aqua Block rolls with watery satisfaction, while the edgy halftime d’n’b of Voz (Instrumental) feels immediately familiar. Earlier in her career Celeste was extremely prolific, but it’s clear she’s taken her time with Tangerine. The result is unfussy, confident and plenty beautiful. !
Theo Kotz
Depending on your level of pop culture knowledge, it may surprise you to know that Jeff Goldblum has been able to carve out a nice side-career for himself as an accomplished jazz pianist, performing around the world with his own Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This is his second record of big band, American standard covers, and it harnesses quite effortlessly what has made Goldblum such a refreshing Hollywood fixture for the past 30 years – his charisma, irreverence and joie de vivre oozes through the album’s 11 tracks. While casual fans might find some of its easy listening vibes a little too basic at times, there’s something undeniably enjoyable about watching Goldblum, with a mischievous wink behind his retro glasses, hark back to the golden age of jazz. No expense was spared in the featured vocalist department: Fiona Apple, Anna Calvi, Gregory Porter, Miley Cyrus and more all lend a hand. Calvi’s sultry cover of Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English is a definite highlight, taking the disaffected sexiness of the original and ratcheting up with vibrato. Fiona Apple arguably made contemporary jazz cool again in the 90s, and here, she settles nicely into Frank Sinatra’s 1954 classic Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me as if into a warm, candlelit bath. Even Miley, definitely the most fishout-of-water of all the guest vocalists, holds her own during the old school, honey-sweet standard The Thrill is Gone. Ultimately, does I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This feel like a vanity project? Sure, maybe, but it’s also perfect at finding a middle ground between Goldblum’s internet zaddy memedom and his legitimate chops as a seasoned jazz musician. !
Cameron Cook
Moor Mother Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes Don Giovanni Records Camae Ayewa – better known as Philadelphia musician, poet, artist and Afrofuturist Moor Mother – once coined her music “slaveship punk”. Following the cosmic footsteps of Sun Ra, her work, almost as visceral and affecting on record as it is in a live setting, is grounded in the history of the African diaspora. Moor Mother’s newest album, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is a continuation of her craft, combining her roots in Philadelphia’s DIY noise scene with her foundations in black poetry and ritual. Melodic vocal lines are swamped by distorted synths and piercing strings, a haunting reminder of imperialism’s propensity for silencing black voices. “According to you/ We were never here” she asserts in Shadowgrams, and in Engineered Uncertainty, Louis Armstrong’s Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen is drowned out by harsh broken percussion. Otherworldly textures, crashing drums and dark, rumbling bass accompany Ayewa’s cacophonous spoken word. With extra-terrestrial bleeps and such affronting lyrics as “Bodybag/ For you and me”, LA92 is a reference to the 2017 documentary of the same name, charting the Los Angeles riots that were triggered after the brutal beating of Rodney King by LAPD police officers. Ultimately, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes demands, with increasing fervour, that the listener confronts their own complicity. And it feels vital. !
Katie Thomas
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FKA twigs The experimental pop polymath essays female pain – and the sacrifice required to overcome it – on her redemptive second album
Words: Jake Indiana
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In this utter desolation, twigs was left with nothing but the purity of her own vulnerability, and it has resulted in the most powerful songwriting of her career. Nowhere is this more evident than on lead single cellophane, a bleeding-heart ballad that serves as a jaw-dropping showcase for twigs’ vocal prowess, ascending her range to heights previously unheard and colouring her tone with a well of raw emotion. Its accompanying visual reflects a reclamation of her physical form via a dazzling pole dance routine, crystallising the record’s tenet that profound strength and profound weakness are not diametrically opposed but a closed loop.
Directly contrasting the cohesion of her previous releases, the veritable tapestry of sounds woven into MAGDALENE is among the album’s most rewarding assets. Even so, holy terrain remains something of an outlier. This is not to suggest that a sharp veer into trap territory is a misstep (it in fact provides a welcome moment of buoyancy) or that twigs is incapable of selling the abrupt switch-up. Rather, with everyone from Skrillex to Arca to Kenny Beats to Jack Antonoff contributing to the final mix, the otherwise terrific beat sounds over-produced to the point of making it incongruous with the rest of the record. It is also debatable whether Future was the best choice for the album’s sole guest feature. His appearance is jarring, and while one might concede this was entirely by design, it is harder
to justify the presence of a rapper infamous for defaming and slandering his former romantic partners on a project focused on a woman’s recovery and healing. Because make no mistake, MAGDALENE is first and foremost a bracing document of female pain and the sacrifice required to overcome it. twigs does not harp on this despair; holy terrain charts escape on the dancefloor while the giddily camp sad day finds a release of tension in leaning all the way into the drama. Nevertheless, nothing quite dispels the severity of the project’s origins. “A woman’s work/ A woman’s
prerogative,” twigs sings on the haunting title track at the album’s centre. “A woman’s time to embrace/ She must put herself first.” The biblical figure of Mary Magdalene is an unexpected choice of muse for an artist so synonymous with innovation, and twigs steers away from any clear interpretations. Yet there is a whiff of familiarity in the story of a woman who was present for the crucifixion, burial and subsequent resurrection of everything she believed and once held dear. “She just helped me get somewhere,” twigs said regarding her titular inspiration. “She helped me think differently.”
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MAGDALENE pushes this conceit to its breaking point. Borne from a nightmarish turn of events that found twigs undergoing laparoscopic surgery to remove six fibroid tumours from her uterus following a devastating breakup, the virtuosic dancer was forced to reconstruct her relationship with her body while still navigating the emotional fallout of a broken heart. “I was left with no option but to tear down every process I had ever leant into,” she wrote in the album’s announcement.
The sparse arrangement of cellophane is a poor indicator of the vast sonic expanse twigs explores across MAGDALENE. Working extensively with Nicolas Jaar, her muscular melodies are given additional heft by the producer’s signature use of densely layered instrumentation, and the album thrives in these flourishes. The devastating mirrored heart is grounded by the feral snarls of submerged guitar that charge to the fore of the mix when you least expect it, while opening track thousand eyes is a dirge that layers obtuse slabs of grating synthesiser over the ear like molasses, only to give way to sudden shifts of soft-pedalled piano. fallen alien takes this dichotomy even further by interlocking two seemingly disparate parts – a breathy chorus over insistent keys and a fiery verse bordering on a proper rap that sits atop a pounding, air raid siren of a beat.
FKA twigs MAGDALENE Young Turks
The work of FKA twigs thus far has been a sustained metadeconstruction of dysmorphia; of the ways such overarching concepts as love, technology, trauma and agency can converge on the body and fundamentally change it to dissociative effect. It is the through line that connects her stellar run of genre-splicing projects released consecutively each year from 20122015 and it is the lens through which she has built the entirety of her visual aesthetic.
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079
Hard Core
Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core left all inhibitions at the door Words: Kathy Iandoli
Sarcastically titled Intro in A-Minor, Kim dives headfirst into attacking the vulnerability of men, particularly in the midst of ejaculation. It was an audacious move at a time when hip-hop was coming off gangster rap, where hyper-masculine tropes were the norm. As the man shouts “Kim!” in the throes of self-induced passion, Kim solidified her position as the Queen in a way that had never been done before. 1996 was a momentous year in hiphop music. The Fugees released their follow-up The Score, a record which made them household names thanks to Lauryn Hill’s adept lyricism. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum,
Jay-Z was coming through with his earth-shattering debut Reasonable Doubt, a project that at its core encapsulated the narrative of drug dealer turned hitmaker. Tupac Shakur tragically passed away in autumn, while The Roots lived on the same plane as The Fugees, releasing their third studio album, the geniusly musical Illadelph Halflife. A lot was happening, to say the least, and for newcomers wanting to walk a different path, the road was open. That November, we were met with two sexually charged debut projects from hip-hop’s would-be leading ladies: Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core and Foxy Brown’s Ill Na Na. While there had been some pioneers, like Lauryn Hill, women taking up space in hip-hop still felt like a rarity. Lil’ Kim, though, was blazing a trail. Her style was incomparable, she
Original release date: 12 November 1996 Label: Undeas Recordings / Atlantic Records
possessed a star quality and a new energy. Not only did she have a strong head start with her position as First Lady of Junior M.A.F.I.A., the Brooklyn hip-hop crew, but her mentor-slashparamour The Notorious B.I.G. was sitting at the top of hip-hop. While Biggie gave her the opportunity, Kim grabbed the baton and ran with it. If we’re passing out crowns here, it was only right that the next would go to the woman dubbed the Queen Bee. Her debut album Hard Core was exactly as the title states; an abundance of sex, money and violence, sprayed across 53 minutes. Kim used large strokes to paint her uninhibited masterpiece, and, significantly, wherever The Notorious B.I.G. appeared, Kim was able to unravel his interpretations of the female psyche in a way that felt seamless: “If Peter Piper pecked ‘em, I bet you Biggie bust ‘em/ He probably tried to fuck ‘em, I told ‘em not to trust ‘em,” she raps on the fiery Queen B@#$H. “Lyrically, I dust ‘em, off like Pledge/ Get hard like sledgehammers, bitch with that platinum grammar.” Her aesthetic was equally mind-blowing. Colourful minks with wigs to match, designer threads, all wrapped around a tiny under 5-foottall frame. It wasn’t without pushback. Kim was written off as “raunchy” by critics, when really it was a woman’s take on the overtly sexual lyrics that male rappers had spewed from the opposite direction for decades. Whenever female artists dare to claim agency of their desire, to showboat their sexual prowess and turn it into art, misogyny follows. The critiques were different, though, when directed at a black woman artist, like Kim. In 1992, when Madonna released Erotica, followed quickly by her book SEX, she was met with derision, though a large constituent still called it art. With Kim, her work was written off as smut when Kim was really changing hip-hop as we know it. It was a call to action, a
declaration of sexual freedom, and Kim stood at the forefront. On Big Momma Thang, she makes her sexuality explicitly clear. “I used to be scared of the dick,” she begins, “now I throw lips to the shit/ Handle it, like a real bitch.” Kim is claiming ownership of her own story of embracing sex and Jay-Z is on the track, nodding in agreement. The narrative changes gears for No Time, as Kim lists top-tier fashion designers and women known for abundant wealth to the tune of Puff Daddy’s signature ad-libs. She’s still horny, though, referring to herself as “the rhinoceros of rap.” However, by Spend a Little Doe, she’s shooting her boyfriend for not visiting her in prison. Intriguingly, that mafia narrative runs through a number of songs, including Drugs, M.A.F.I.A. Land, and closer Fuck You. The switch here though, is that while women are typically seen as an accessory to the men in mafia stories, Kim was the one in the position of capo. She is the one in charge, questioning loyalty, demanding her money, and waving the gun, even shooting it. Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core had a lot going on, but it needed to. In order for a woman to command the attention of the room, quick-witted lyrics and radio-ready singles were essential. But you needed something more – you needed a short, sharp shock. And Lil’ Kim knew how to shock. Hard Core is a watershed moment for female sexual agency and empowerment in hip-hop, and cemented her status as an icon. If that isn’t hardcore, what is? Kathy Iandoli is the author of God Save the Queens: The Essential History of Women In Hip-Hop, released through Dey Street Books/Harper Collins
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Lil’ Kim’s solo debut album Hard Core opens with a man masturbating at a porn theatre, using artificial popcorn butter as his lubricant.
With BATTLES Welcome to Downtime, a series in which we ask our favourite artists for their cultural recommendations. This month, we catch up with New York two-piece Battles. Words: Rachel Grace Almeida
Battles formed in 2002, masterminded by a set of musicians who’d cut their teeth in math rock. Their 2007 debut, Mirrored, remains a touchstone for bracing, strange and defiantly avant-garde music. Three albums later, and now a two piece comprising Ian Williams and John Stanier, they’ve shaped their frenetic, experimental sound into sharp-witted electronic music that still sounds like little else. It’s no wonder that their picks are suitably cerebral.
The Overstory By Richard Powers I’m reading a book right now that I really recommend. It’s a series of separate tales where trees are part of the characters, with human lives unfolding around them. Sometimes the trees are in the background of the story, sometimes more upfront, but they’re always indifferent to the dramas happening in people’s lives that take place around them. And lots of times people just abruptly die – whether it’s a car accident or suicide or murder – and the thing is, the trees are still there living their own lives, brutally indifferent. I’ve had a lot of people in my life suddenly die, and I can so relate to this kind of thing. Shit happens and yet the universe keeps going on without even seeming to notice. This book captures that feeling so beautifully. Ian Williams
A Mountain of Skulls and Not One I Recognize By Guy Richards Smit This 184-page hardcover book is the result of artist Guy Richards Smit’s skull painting series that began in 2015. It’s an exhaustively impressive and ambitious collection of gouache and watercolour paintings which includes 220 works, as well as essays by Christian Viveros-Fauné and Jerry Brotton. Like the text goes: “A Mountain of Skulls is an oddly affecting meditation on morality, history and unbelievable human suffering. A village’s worth of the dead, dumped in a mass grave with their personalities, traits, desires and dramas intact. A lumbering death march of wise cracking memento moris demanding their humanity be acknowledged.” Heavy stuff. John Stanier
Triadisches Ballet By Oskar Schlemmer My all-time favourite music video has always been Daft Punk’s Around the World, directed by Michel Gondry. A major influence for the video would without a doubt be Bauhaus associate Oskar Schlemmer’s mesmerising ballet Triadisches Ballet. Already an accomplished painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer at the time of its premiere in Stuttgart in 1922, Triadic Ballet would launch Schlemmer into international stardom and prestige. The ballet saw costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body. Essential viewing. John Stanier
Juice B Crypts is out now via Warp
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097
Danny Brown Words: Mike Vinti Danny Brown has always been comfortable laughing at himself. With his manic yawp and predilection for obscene and often surreal bars, he’s long been the successor to the weirdo rap canon that started with ODB. Don’t get it twisted though, Brown has never been a joke, and he’s been one of the most consistently on-form MCs of the last decade. This month we catch up with Detroit’s finest to talk comedy, personal hygiene tips and crying on the first day of school.
What’s your worst habit? Sometimes I forget to eat. What’s your wildest story from Gathering of the Juggalos? I saw a juggalo getting a blowjob in plain sight. The worst thing about the Internet? Hacking. It’s creepy.
What’s your earliest childhood memory? I remember my first day at school. My mom walked me into a place with a whole bunch of other kids, walked out and left me, and I started crying like a little bitch. Favourite meme? Myself. What annoys you the most in this world? People that don’t wear shoes at the airport. Put some fucking shoes on, man. What’s something most people don’t know about you? People still seem to get surprised by antisocial am. What would you I want written on your tombstone? What makes you laugh the hardest? motherfucker to “Baddest Unfortunately, I still laugh when people fall off things on live.” YouTube. Is there a particular movement inspiring you right now? Our Yola Mezcal movement; strong women, uknowhatimsayin¿ strong drink.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? The gift of life. What’s the best advice you’ve ever given? Wipe down, not front to back.
What’s your favourite food? Chicken gizzards. What has disappointed you lately? The Detroit Pistons. Heavy metal or EDM, for the rest of time? Heavy metal. What’s your favourite movie? The Hateful Eight.
What city really feels like home? Detroit obviously, but currently London. What makes you feel nostalgic? 90s video games. What’s your favourite comedy set of all time? Richard Pryor, That N***er’s Crazy. Cats or dogs? Cats forever.
is out now via Warp
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How would your friends describe you in three words Silly, loyal, trustworthy.
The best thing about the Internet? It made the world so much smaller.
What’s the biggest realisation you’ve had in the past year? I need to start taking better care of myself. I just be getting sore for no reason these days.
Simple Things Festival 2019 If there’s one day we look forward to each year – it’s Simple Things Festival. To say that the event is unmissable would be somewhat of an understatement. For one day every year, the festival stages a takeover of Bristol, celebrating underground talent, rising acts and top-tier DJs across some of the city’s best-loved venues. 2019 saw the festival widen its gaze and stage its most ambitious edition yet. The programme was expanded to include a day-long AV showcase in the former IMAX cinema featuring Kode9, AYA and Murlo, the debut of Aïsha Devi’s augmented reality piece I Am Not Always Where My Body Is and a headline performance of Holly Herndon’s PROTO. Ivor Alice was on hand to capture intimate portraits of some of the artists in attendance.
object blue
Avalon Emerson
Big Joanie
SIMPLE THINGS 2019
Biig Piig
Miink
Nilüfer Yanya