GAS
A sea of strings swims into view, and the crackle of vinyl reaches out of the mix like tendrils. The tone is tense, urgent, paranoid, and minor-key, interrupted by long exhalations on a major-key chord. There’s no beat, but anyone… Read More
pop
Rx PapiGud
When baby-faced Swedish rappers like Yung Lean and Bladee first started racking up views in the United States, their viral success was owed as much to the beats as it was the bars. The cooing vocal samples, angelic synths, and… Read More
Lotic
Sometimes, when a person first starts living in their true identity, a modest weight begins to lift off their shoulders. For a few years afterward, they might still experience an ineffable but persistent mental pressure. Over time, though, that burden… Read More
JJJJJerome Ellis
JJJJJerome Ellis says, “For me, the stutter is a wild animal, and it is my ongoing practice to follow it where it wants to go.” The multi-instrumentalist, writer, and composer frequently lists “stutterer” among his disciplines, referring to his glottal… Read More
Parris
Of all the ways that Parris could have described his long-awaited debut LP, it’s unlikely that “This is an album built on Pop” is what anyone expected. In recent years, pop tropes have become commonplace even in electronic music’s most… Read More
Jon Hopkins
What music should soundtrack the psychedelic revolution? That’s one of many meta-inquiries bewildering neuroscientists as they work to make psychedelic-assisted therapy more widely available—and legal. The music, they’ve discovered, really matters, since it not only supports the trip but can… Read More
Xeno & Oaklander
Xeno & Oaklander—the duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride—came up through Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd Nights, an endearingly gloomy fixture of late ’00s New York. In the early days, the pair’s music was of a piece with the sounds popular… Read More
aya
A DJ set from aya can be both thrilling and disorienting, a giddy maelstrom of jungle breaks, Dutch techno, UK funky, South African gqom, and who knows what else—plus edits of Charli XCX and “Call Me Maybe,” for good measure.… Read More
Markus Guentner
The bell sound on “Concept of Credence,” from Markus Guentner’s new album Extropy, is just the bees’ knees. It comes out of nowhere, through a crack in the dense clouds of choir-synth-string-harmonics that form the bulk of the record, and… Read More
Helado Negro
For Roberto Carlos Lange, 2019 seemed to be the type of year that any songwriter hopes one day to see. After over 10 years of crafting introspective and alluringly amorphous songs as Helado Negro, among other projects, Lange pulled it… Read More