Authenticity has long been a point of personal pride for Drake. Since Meek Mill called his authorship into question in the summer of 2015, Drizzy has recalibrated his approach to music-making, dialing back the raps and transitioning into a style that samples black dance music around the world. Some might call it an identity crisis, if it hadn’t earned him his first ever solo No. 1. His new project More Life, which he’s made a point of branding a “playlist,” scans like 80 minutes of club music from Canada, American, the UK, the West Indies, and Africa on shuffle. It’s a release that accidentally interrogates his authenticity far more deeply than any ghostwriting allegations ever could. As he circles the globe on More Life, Drake ends up posing intriguing questions about art’s lineage through migration and who gets to claim the culture of others. 

To understand Drake’s world and map his connections to these sounds, it is important to understand the way the people of Canada, the Caribbean, and Africa are linked. All black culture and music in the wake of the African diaspora shares some similar DNA, despite some subtle recoding in sound and slang by region. A genre like UK grime traces its roots back to jungle and dancehall. Dancehall often shares similar elements with Afrobeat. Through immigrants, the music and its mannerisms reached Canada, where it has seeped into the very fabric of Drake’s home country. 

According to Statistics Canada, Canadians from the Caribbean are one of the “largest non-European ethnic-origin groups” in the country. Most of those immigrants made homes in Toronto and Montreal and feel “a sense of belonging,” according to the Ethnic Diversity Survey. Toronto rapper Kardinal Offishall, long an ambassador for Canadian rap with ties to the West Indies, made the relationship plain over the weekend. “Toronto been about Caribbean culture before I did Bakardi Slang. It’s LITERALLY our history,” he wrote on Twitter. “The Caribbean diaspora is alive all over the world. It’s up to fans to learn our culture...not water it down for a mainstream audience.”

Offishall is absolutely right about one thing: Toronto has become a melting pot for Caribbean culture. The lineage has blurred. But he is also the child of Jamaican immigrants, a clear inheritor of island culture. On “BaKardi Slang,” he stood directly at the intersection of these two places. That isn’t to say that Drake, the son of a black man from Tennessee and a Jewish woman from Canada, can’t also be shaped by the culture of the West Indies—which would undoubtedly have been a presence in his life growing up in Toronto—but it would be misrepresentation to call it his own. 

It’s worth noting that many people are influenced by the interlocking yet diverse web of black music woven by the diaspora, but Drake is the only one trying to claim all of it at once, which speaks to both the scope of his ambition and the depth of his hubris. One minute he’s using riddims ascribed to the clan name of Nelson Mandela, the next he’s arm-in-arm with UK rapper Giggs kissing his teeth. Sometimes he’s channeling Jamaican patois. Others he’s, as the Brits say, a roadman. On a song called “Portland,” he proudly proclaims, “It’s all Habibis ting.” There’s a song called “Gyalchester.” More Life will make you wonder, Where is Drake from on this song? Canada? South Africa? Jamaica? London? Atlanta? Where will he be from next? Is he at the center of the diaspora, or merely at its furthest reaches, following footprints in hopes of a hit? It isn’t that Drake is unfit to channel any of these places and things (because many of them overlap); it’s that he’s convinced he has a right to every one of them. Culture isn’t an iPhone skin—you don’t just shed one for another because it’s trendy.

For one thing, it might be easier to receive Drake as the conduit for world music if he wasn’t already a notorious wave-rider. He took half the Weeknd’s album to make Take Care; hopped on remixes of Migos’ “Versace,” iLoveMakonnen’s “Tuesday,” and Wizkid’s “Ojuelegba” to share in their moments; torpedoed “Cha Cha”’s chart run with “Hotline Bling” (premiered on OVO Sound Radio as a “Cha Cha” remix); sapped the energies of international sensations for “One Dance” and “Controlla” (which arrived on Views without the leaked Popcaan verse); and fast-tracked What a Time to Be Alive with Future and Metro Boomin to capitalize on their momentum. He’s used Bun B as his Houston liaison and Aaliyah as his unwitting R&B talisman. He’s a swag vampire, a sound poacher, and an identity thief. It’s hard to believe his work as a global ambassador isn’t also mostly self-serving, or at least in service of building his wider OVO brand. In a bit of irony, Drake, who is constantly rapping about people using him for their gain, does exactly that to everyone else. 

But Drake safeguards himself from these kinds of criticisms by allying with a well-respected delegate from a given genre or region—often making sure their interests align with his. These relationships are transactional, collabs offered from Drake under the guise of a look but really used to bolster his claim to a person or place’s slang or sound or hype. They provide built-in deniability against detractors who might label him an interloper or appropriator.

With these things in mind, it makes sense he’d deem More Life a “playlist”—like he’s Zane Lowe broadcasting an assortment of songs he’s compiled as the gatekeeper for international vibes. As Drake producer Nineteen85 explained it: “[Drake’s] so aware of what everybody else is doing musically that he likes to introduce new music and new artists to the rest of the world.” He sees himself as a curator and a tastemaker. But really, he’s something of a well-informed cultural tourist. Here are the destinations he hails from on More Life, and the talented friends who stamp his work visas.

London via Skepta + Giggs

Though there are mentions of Toronto on “No Long Talk,” the track is heavily indebted to the UK rap and grime scenes. As if to underscore this point, Drake enlists British rapper Giggs for the first of two features on More Life (the second of which, “KMT,” not only dives waist deep into Caribbean slang but also bites Xxxtenacion’s “Look At Me.”) On “No Long Talk,” Drake sounds like a different person calling man yutes and saying they’re on a diss ting. But with Giggs at his back, he’s confident. As if in need of another cosigner on his rep, Skepta later gets his own interlude.

Nigeria via Wizkid

Another song on More Life that seems to cross-pollinate culturally, “Madiba Riddim” has a distinctly Afrobeat pulse and gets its name from a South African clan name and Jamaican patois. “People change, I’m not surprised/Devil’s working overtime/Voodoo spells put on my life,” he sings. Wizkid isn’t featured on “Madiba Riddim,” but his presence (or lack thereof) is clearly felt. The song doesn’t sonically stray too far from their past collaborations, including “One Dance” but particularly Wizkid’s “Hush Up the Silence.” Wizkid is something of an avatar for all of Drake’s deepest excursions into Afrobeat. It’s somewhat telling that the two still haven’t met yet.

Jamaica via Popcaan

It isn’t a coincidence that Drake opens “Blem” repeating the word “unruly,” a favorite tag of Popcaan, one of dancehall’s brightest stars. The song repurposes the key components of Popcaan’s pop dancehall: it’s breezy and wine-friendly. There’s talk of forwarding to the islands, while Drake deems a lover’s ex a wasteman. The title and hook use UK slang derived from faux patois. Perhaps there’s a (better) Popcaan version of this song somewhere waiting to be leaked.

South Africa via Black Coffee + Bucie

For a slight change of pace, Drake ventures to South Africa for this Afro-house cut, linking up with breakout producer and DJ Black Coffee. (South African singer Bucie also has a songwriting credit.) “Get It Together” has a distinctly African flavor with thumping polyrhythms that propel the track forward. “The African rhythm, even when it’s not obvious, is in our music,” Coffee told Pitchfork in September. “I think our responsibility now is to make sure that it goes to the mainstage, and it’s not pigeonholed to ‘world music’ or put on smaller stages as ‘world music artists.’ We can be where everyone is.” It’s safe to say this collaboration is putting those words into practice.

Atlanta via Young Thug + 2 Chainz

It often goes unrecognized because the Atlanta sound has become so prevalent, but Drake has made himself at home in the city. The Toronto nickname he adopted—“6 Man”—also works with a zone on Atlanta’s Eastside, underscored by his Gucci Mane flow on the If You’re Reading This… track. Then there’s the whole “Versace” remix, and What a Time To Be Alive (which at one point Future claimed “never happened”). Not to mention that at least one Atlanta rapper literally wrote raps for him. On “Sacrifices,” Drake enlists tourmate Young Thug and longtime collaborator 2 Chainz, two of Atlanta’s greatest treasures, to do much of the heavy lifting. It isn’t heavily indebted to trap the way opener “Free Smoke” is, but it is a prime example of the way Drake turns connections into cultural capital—capital he’ll spend the next time he needs cool points to mend his image.

In a music world rife with gimmicks, the Brooklyn by way of Brattleboro, Vermont label OSR Tapes has spent a decade sticking to the simple notion of releasing profound, purposeful music with no expectation of making a cent. Originally standing for nothing, the label’s acronym came to represent “open session rock,” which founder ZachPhillips has explained as “a psycho-spiritual orientation toward songwriting and music production temporally open to continual re-signification.” That’s a highbrow way of saying that OSR Tapes values music that engages with bizarre experiments, visceral emotionality, and fractured rhythms. Their releases are about as diverse as they come: reissues of home recordings discovered at liquidations, one of the Roche sisters, and a 19-musician Japanese ensemble.

OSR’s unusually eclectic lineup is met by a staunchly independent, not-for-profit ethos. At times they’ve even shunned contemporary modes of sales: They had a brief fling with offline distribution in 2014, which meant that all purchases were done over phone or through a physical catalogue. The break “worked wonders emotionally and terrors economically,” but OSR returned to the internet in 2016 for what would be its final full year. They’ll close for good on April 30, 2017, with no future orders and a “considerably diminished” Bandcamp presence after that. Here’s a guide to seven of our favorites among OSR Tapes’ 86 releases, most of which you can *currently* download as a bundle on Bandcamp for the low price of $15.98.

Chris Weisman’s Monet in the 90’s (2014)

Though this sweet collection didn’t see the light of day until 2014, mysterious guitar guru Chris Weisman originally recorded it in late 2008 while playing in the garage pop trio Happy Birthday alongside King Tuff’s Kyle Thomas and Ruth Garbus. Monet in the 90’s forsakes Happy Birthday’s fuzz-drenched bubblegum, instead allowing complex acoustic arrangements and inverted tuning shine on their own. From the Beatles-y pop opener “Working on My Skateboarding” to the squiggly “Son of Country,” any perceived simplicity here is squarely the result of experimentation. A devout jazz fan, Weisman has said that his improvisational playing allows him to approach music in an “intuitive and non-cerebral” way. “I don’t want to just make weird theoretical ideas that only super-advanced people [can play and understand],” Weisman told Tiny Mix Tapes. “I want to make radical art that is accessible to the beginner.” Monet in the 90’s—sold out on vinyl but still available via digital download—makes a great entry point into Weisman’s intriguing work.

Ruth Garbus’ Joule EP (2014)

Formerly of the psych-folk outfit Feathers, Ruth Garbus is known these days for the considerably less pastoral music she creates under her own name. After dropping out of the Rhode Island School of Design, Garbus moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, where her sister Merrill (yes, tUne-yArDs) lived. Ruth quickly found the artsy town to be a welcoming environment for her experimentation, building on a solo output that started with 2006’s delightful Ruthie’s Requests. Bookended by 2010’s Rendezvous with Rama and 2016’s Hello Everybody 7” is her best work, 2014’s JouleEP. Over five barebones lo-fi pop tunes, Garbus and her warm electric guitar paint dreamy and abstract images. On “Certain Kind,” Garbus sings, “Stopped at Walmart just to buy a bong/Crystal bridges over poverty slums/Purple gum,” nailing the strange mundanities of travelling. To bring it back to the compact energy its title suggests, the effort it takes to listen to Garbus’ EP is minimal but the reward is huge.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz’s Hello New York (2016)

Japanese ensemble Maher Shalal Hash Baz are a rare beast. Over their 30+ year career, the folk/psychedelic/free-jazz group spearheaded by Tori Kudo have mined improvisation and polyphonous playing for bits of accidental harmony. Though their name comes from a verse in the Book of Isaiah that translates roughly to “plunder quickly” or “hasten to the spoils,” the group never seems rushed. Most recent album Hello New York is a great example of this: over the course of 34 songs, 19 musicians (eight of which are guitar players) create some truly freaky though incredibly charming noise, including one disconcerting cover of Pharrell’s “Happy.” Hello New York is appropriately avant-garde in a Warholian way—there’s even a cover of “Sweet Jane” (known as “Dulce Juana” here).

Palberta’s Shitheads in the Ditch (2014)

Perhaps the youngest band on OSR, Palberta have been making rambling anarchic noise since forming in 2013 at Bard College. Their second full-length, 2014’s Shitheads in the Ditch, recalls the erratic compositions of the Raincoats or Liliput, the childlike wonder of Beat Happening, and the subterranean evils of Pharmakon. Songs squelch along at bumpy tempos, race against the clock, and slam against walls with certitude. To listen to Palberta is to rediscover the multitudes of language: every word has its own delicious sound, cherished by each singer in round-robin-like fashion. And in a somewhat meta move, all three members of Palberta—Nina Ryser, Lily Konigsberg, and Anina Ivry-Block—recently contributed to an OSR covers compilation.

CE Schneider Topical’s Antifree (2016)

On the second CE Schneider Topical record, the duo comprised of Christina Schneider and OSR founder Zach Phillips craft funky, otherworldly sensations without any computers or synthesizers—a detail they make a point of noting. That all these bizarre sounds are organic adds another layer of kaleidoscopic wonder to already magical music. With sudden glass-shattering shrieks interrupting its lackadaisical psychedelia, the title track could soundtrack a nightmarish carnival. Meanwhile, “Wrestle Anthem” is a dreamy and surreal look at the sport as metaphor, while “Female in Images” finds Schneider satirizes gender tropes in art. “When I am a singer I obey the band/I sing lyrics I don’t understand/When I make it all up I sound like a man,” she sings in a purposefully high-pitched voice.

Hartley C. White’s This Is Not What You Expect (2014)

In 2014, OSR compiled the first four albums (over the span of 25 years) from this Queens-via-Kingston musician as This Is Not What You Expect, a title that at least attempts to prepare you for the unpredictable. A devout student of the martial arts since the mid-’60s, White has developed a style called “who-pa-zoo-tic,” which is inspired by Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do practice. Whopazootic pulls from the martial art by “utilizing a broken rhythm, and not adhering to any specific musical form… but by using whatever works for any particular song or musical creation.” As such, This Is Not What You Expect displays a deliberate asymmetry. Its slapping basslines, gnarly rhythms, and repetitive arrangements are deeply rooted to its mantra-like lyrics about the meaning of music and under-the-radar existence.

Blanche Blanche Blanche’s Wink with Both Eyes (2012 original/2015 reissue)

While OSR’s main man Zach Phillips plays in the current CE Schneider Topical incarnation Jepeto Solutions, his enduring project remains Blanche Blanche Blanche. After forming in 2007 while living in Brattleboro, Phillips and Sarah Smith released nine albums before entering an extended hiatus in 2014 (according to their website, a 10th record is in the works). Like CE Schneider, Blanche Blanche Blanche forgo samplers to create experimental, free-flowing synth-pop that could soundtrack an alien comedy. The bass clashes against the vocals, which sound more like monotone warbles than human singing. Noises snap out like jack-in-the-boxes, disappearing as quickly as they arrive. Overall, Wink with Both Eyes proves that Blanche Blanche Blanche contemplate and ultimately push the confines of pop music—much like their parent label.

Who died, and who did the killing?

That’s the central mystery of “Big Little Lies,” HBO’s limited series based on Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name. But like the book, the show does not bask in that single question. It asks so, so many. Like, why does Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) drive a Buick? How much does it cost for Renata (Laura Dern) to clean the windows of her glass house, from which she’s always throwing stones? Is there a cannibal at the Otter Bay School? And if so, is it Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), secretly reprising his “True Blood” role for that maximum HBO synergy? There is, however, one question that trumps them all: How does six-year-old Chloe (Darby Camp) have such deep, varied taste in music? And what does it mean?

Chloe’s taste in music is not a minor aspect of her character—it defines her. We’re supposed to recognize that early on in the show, when she says to classmate Ziggy (Iain Armitage), “When I grow up, I want to run a massive label.” This girl is a mogul in the making. She’s not thinking of limited runs of hissing cassettes—she’s dreaming of Grammys. Hell, she’s wearing Apple earbuds around her neck in numerous scenes, including the opening credits.  

In both the book and the series, Chloe is first introduced via musical circumstances. In the book, she puts her mother in her place for bad taste, after Madeline starts ad-lib mom-rapping on the way to school orientation. Meanwhile, the show introduces Chloe by way of her car-stereo domination, blasting PJ Harvey’s “The Wind” on the way to that same orientation. Basic NorCal mom Madeline—whose Fleetwood Mac knowledge extends to Rumours and whose favorite Neil Young song, we’re safe to assume based on the show’s syncs, is “Harvest Moon”—is obviously not the hip influencer responsible for her first-grader’s exquisite taste, and so she asks Chloe to turn Polly Jean down. For what?

It can’t be a fluke on the part of the show’s creators that Chloe’s soundtrack picks are so spot-on. When she listens to Charles Bradley’s “Heartaches & Pain” before school, she’s steeling herself for the day ahead. Her choice of Janis Joplin’s version of “Ball and Chain,” a song that tells of a woman staring out a window while bummed out about love, is basically the arc of Madeline’s romantic life. She knows how to comfort her mother, too, which we see when she uploads Alabama Shakes’ “This Feeling” onto Madeline’s phone after Abigail (Kathryn Newton), Madeline’s oldest daughter and Chloe’s step-sister, decides to move in with her father, Nathan (James Tupper). And the folksy yearning of Villagers’ “Nothing Arrived” is certainly suited for consoling her mother after she gets into a car accident, then has to lie about why she was in the car in the first place.

“Big Little Lies” music supervisor Sue Jacobs has done some press since the show began airing last month, and she commented on Chloe’s taste—but only in a way that justifies it as an emotional signifier. “It’s all about tension, the whole push and pull of all of the music as a counterpoint,” she told Vulture. “That’s why Chloe is always carrying an iPod.”

But nobody has asked Jacobs, or show creator David E. Kelley, or director Jean-Marc Vallée, who is apparently quite involved in the music selection, what it means that Chloe—a child in an affluent community, under the watchful shadow of a squadron of helicopter moms—has such extensive cultural savvy on her own. It serves the feeling of the show, but how does it serve the plot?

There are plenty of ways Chloe’s taste could be explained away. She could be the new, music-focused Tavi Gevinson. She could be Father John Misty’s ghostwriter. She could be a cyborg that her computer engineer dad Ed (Adam Scott) created and had programmed with Bob Boilen’s taste, to serve as a distraction from the emptiness that Madeline and her mom-friends now feel. Or, it could be something bigger than that. Something more sinister.

In both its book and TV forms, “Big Little Lies” is not about how children are at the whims of their parents, but about how the parents are at the whims of their children. Playdates, birthday parties, Disney on Ice? The kids are in complete control. The domestic war that serves as the crux of the story is even catalyzed by Madeline’s annoyance with a teenager who was texting while driving. If Madeline had never confronted that texter, she would’ve never twisted her ankle in the middle of the road. And Jane (Shailene Woodley) would have never stopped to help Madeline if her son, Ziggy, hadn’t suggested it. This created the bond that cracked a rift in the Monterey mothers community and would, we’re to assume, lead to somebody’s death. These core women (and their respective husbands) are each like that CGI cow in Twister, swirling around in a natural storm over which they have no control. Most of these kids, the ones causing the storm? They have no idea how in control they are. Chloe, on the other hand, does.

It’s important to note that the TV show does diverge from the book in a few ways. In the book, for instance, the events are set in Sydney, Ziggy is named after Ziggy Marley rather than Ziggy Stardust, and parents are shamed for sending their children to school with sausage rolls. Because of these and more differences, we can’t assume that the answer to the central question—who died, and who did the killing—will be the same in both stories. In fact, HBO has plenty of reason to switch it up, just so fans of the book have reason to continue. This is why we feel the freedom to posit here the theory to end all theories, which is that Chloe is not only a musical savant, but also the killer.

Well, not exactly the killer, but the one who sets the killing in motion. Chloe’s understanding of human emotionality and music’s powers over it are clear from the moment she tries to use Leon Bridge’s “The River” to purify some bad blood between two classmates, Ziggy and Amabella (Ivy George). She knows that a certain song will elicit a certain emotion, whether it be fury, love, or empathy. She also knows that her father is keen on performing an Elvis song at the upcoming Presley and Audrey Hepburn-themed fundraiser for her school, where—as episode one reveals—the killing takes place. The only other thing we know about that strange event? That Ed will be performing “Pocketful of Rainbows,” the 1960 Presley song that Chloe suggests to her father over the far more obvious “Suspicious Minds.” Ed points out that the song isn’t listed among the karaoke options, and Chloe replies with a self-assured “exactly.” She knows what she’s doing: she’s choosing a song that will incite Ed to commit a rage-fueled killing.

Here’s how we picture it going down: “Mister Heartache/I've found a way to make him leave,” Ed sings, possessed in his rhinestoned suit by the need to disappear his own mister heartache: Nathan, who never seemed out of Madeline’s heart completely. “No more heartaches/Now that I've found a love so true,” Ed croons, gyrating toward Nathan. Nathan is talking to Bonnie (Zoë Kravitz), his young new wife, as Madeline emerges fresh from the bathroom. She stares at the two of them, grimacing as Nathan’s hand grazes Bonnie’s ass. Her face transforms, though, as she sees Ed. He walks through a ribbon of light reflected from one of several Swarovski disco balls and the two smile at each other. For a moment, she is happy.

Ed closes in on Nathan from behind. He thrusts his rhinestoned belt into Nathan’s rhinestone belt and reaches under his own rented white cape into his waistband, grabbing hold of the ivory handle of his great-grandfather’s hunting knife. “Got a pocketful of rainbows,” he whispers into Nathan’s ear, before grabbing him around the throat. “And an armful of you.”

He stabs Nathan in the gut. Nathan clings to Bonnie’s necklace as he falls to the ground, pearls showering down around him. Madeline rushes over but as her stiletto kisses a pearl she is sent toppling. The backing track for “Pocketful of Rainbows” cuts out. Ed is dazed as he looks down and sees his hand painted red with Nathan’s blood. He runs outside to find Chloe sitting on a rock overlooking the beach. We see a close-up of her, the secret mastermind. She’s wearing earbuds and crying, but we can’t hear the song this time—just the ocean. She would never have forgiven Nathan for taking Abigail from her. Things would be back to normal now. They’d all live together again.

Fade to black.

When Sam Smith released a much-discussed cover of Whitney Houston’s hit “How Will I Know” in 2014, he made two key changes—one daring, the other depressing. He slowed the pace, inverting the original’s froth to bore straight into its pain. But he also neutered the lyric, censoring the “boy” Whitney had pined for to instead aim all his yearning at a genderless, anonymous “you.”

Why would an out gay artist—one frank enough to repeatedly discuss the man whose romantic rejection inspired his breakthrough album—still get cagey about pronouns in a cover? Smith gave a tidy explanation in hisFader cover story: “I’ve made my music so that it could be about anything and everybody—whether it’s a guy, a female, or a goat.” That sounded inclusive enough to snow plenty, especially those who never liked thinking about man-on-man lust to begin with, even within the unseen ether of a pop lyric. But for gay people—and for the increasing population that identifies with them—Smith’s move probably felt like a drag. Certainly that’s how this gay person felt.

Here was the top-selling openly gay star in current pop—as well as the only artist of his sales stature to ever come out during his first flush of fame—still deflecting, still making assumptions about what the mainstream audience wants or needs. In the process, Smith implicitly extended a history of hiding. And for what—the pretense of universalism?

Smith’s lyrical tweak came as a contrast to far more progressive changes in pop, which had begun to gather steam right around the time of his Whitney cover. Over the last three years, increasing numbers of LGBT artists have pointedly used the proper pronoun when singing of their romantic pursuits. That growing list includes Frank Ocean, Tegan and Sara, John Grant, Olly Alexander, Troye Sivan, Kevin Abstract, Mary Lambert, and Chad King of the hit duo A Great Big World. At the same time, Smith’s reticence speaks to something LGBT artists have long felt uncomfortable expressing. Decades after gay artists felt emboldened to announce their identities, many still shield their lusts.

Why has desire lagged so far behind identity in queer pop? Why have so many LGBT stars felt comfortable saying who they are but not who they want?

If you survey the history of queer music over the last century, you’ll see a group of people struggling with these questions, along the way coming up with lots of camouflages and codes to make their feelings palatable. As far back as the 1920s, blues mamas like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith sang of gay characters, though they didn’t directly express their very real own desires in that direction.

It wasn’t until 1962 that the first man-to-man album of love songs appeared, if quietly so. That shadowy work, recently reissued by Sundazed under the cheeky title Love Is a Drag, featured covers of American standards previously recorded only by women, including “My Man” and “The Man I Love.” This time, they were delivered by a man—Gene Howard, a talented and clearly openly-minded straight guy who’d previously performed as a star singer in Stan Kenton’s band. Amazingly, everyone involved in the creation of this earnestly intended album was straight. The album was intended as a marketing splash, and while it made small waves in hip Hollywood circles, few outside the gay demimondes of San Francisco and Greenwich Village knew it even existed. 

Tellingly, there wasn’t another work to vaguely compare with this compilation for at least another decade. Pronoun-proper gay love songs didn’t appear in notable numbers until the “womyn’s music” movement of the ’70s. Lesbian artists like Holly Near, Meg Christian, and Cris Williamson led the way with gender-specific songs, including "Imagine My Surprise" (by Near) and "Sweet Woman" (by Williamson). But their recordings sold only in the ghettoized world of women’s bookstores and coffee shops.

In terms of major label exposure, the first openly gay artists were men, starting with the glam-rocker Jobriath, who referred to himself as “a true fairy” when Elektra Records released his debut album in 1973. The next year brought "out" artist Steven Grossman, whose album Caravan Tonight drew a small cult when it appeared on PolyGram Records. Grossman’s songs centered on identity rather than lust, while Jobriath presented himself as a virtual alien rather than a recognizable human being.

The early ’80s saw several striking assertions of gay sexuality, including Tom Robinson’s cut “Now Martin’s Gone” and Bronski Beat’s “Why.” The latter broke into the UK Top 10 in 1983, despite the mention of a gay kiss in its lyrics. Reflecting the extreme outlier role of those artists, however, anger fueled far more of their songs than eros. It wasn’t until the spread of AIDS that a full wave of major pop stars took that first step of at least coming out. Even then, it took a full of decade of pressure from activist groups like Act Up and Queer Nation—as well as tens of thousands of deaths—to make that happen.

Finally in the early to mid 1990s, we saw the first “out” mainstream stars, starting with women like k.d. lang, Melissa Etheridge, and the Indigo Girls, followed by men like Elton John, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and Rufus Wainwright. Many of these stars had hinted at their sexuality for years, and certainly clued-in fans sniffed out the truth long ago. But the need to make things crystal clear took on a greater urgency with LGBT lives on the line. Even so, these artists rarely mentioned the genders of their lovers in their songs.

A crack in queer pop’s last big taboo didn’t start until 2012, when Frank Ocean sang of a “boy” who obsessed him in “Forrest Gump”—gender specificity that listeners have come to casually expect from Ocean. By 2013, Mary Lambert was repeatedly crooning the chorus "she keeps me warm" in Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Same Love,” a hit initially recorded for the same-sex marriage battle in the trio’s native Washington. Perhaps the most overt gesture quietly arrived last year from Kevin Abstract, the Atlanta rapper (and sometimes singer) who offered an ode to his American Boyfriend to a genre that had long made macho conventions central to its identity.

Despite such changes, some of the artists who forged them struggled with their decision. A Great Big World’s 2015 hit “Hold Each Other” found its two members—one gay, one straight—each making the gender of their romantic pursuit plain. But the impetus for this came from the hetero member of the duo, the one used to expressing his sexuality without consequence. The group’s gay member, Chad King, told Billboardthat his first thought upon hearing that suggestion was, “I can’t do this, no one does this.” He had spent his whole life singing about girls “because it’s just what people do… that’s what the pop world is like.”

And to a great degree, it still is. Two decades after top singers first came out in significant numbers—and more than 40 years since the modern gay rights movement began—we have to wonder why the honest use of pronouns has been so recent, and so rare. A key answer, it seems, reflects those elements that have been successful in mainstreaming the modern LGBT movement over the last decade and, just as importantly, those that have not. Undoubtedly, the most effective strategy in selling the movement to the masses over the fast-advancing last decade and a half has been the near total elimination of the sex from the discussion. Gay politics in the millennium has focused on three decidedly chaste and conservative issues: the rights to join the military, get married, and have children. It doesn’t get more heteronormative than that.

This approach stands in jaw-dropping contrast to the gay movement of the ’70s and early ’80s, which defined liberation as being confident enough to carve out an entirely alternative life. Extending the hippie tenants of “free love,” gay culture from three and four decades ago equated sexual expression, or even promiscuity, with liberation. While that mindset brought great encouragement (and a hell of a lot of fun) to the gay community, it appalled the mainstream. It wasn’t just the same-sex angle that made many clutch their pearls—it was the movement’s confident unmooring of sex from love, or even from relationships. While that sensibility hardly defined the lives of many LGBT people, the mere introduction of it as an option proved subversive enough to shake conservatives to their core. The oppositional sensibility—however encouraging to those of us who prize “otherness”—kept the community marginalized, feared, and mocked.

The effect of this wasn’t lost on LGBT spokespeople of the last decade and a half. Learning from this earlier outcome, they began to increasingly emphasize the similarities between gay and straight people rather than the distinctions. Conformity became the new mantra, a strategy that proved far more effective than rebellion ever had—even if that stance stripped the movement of something fundamental to its core.

In a way, gay pop stars were way ahead of the curve on this approach. As pop darlings trying to attract as wide an audience as possible, they knew instinctively how to downplay the divisive specifics of sex choice. Instead they emphasized the righteous angle of identity. Coming out simply meant being true to oneself, something any person of empathy could champion. To go below that and get gritty about gender objects was seen by many as offering “too much information.” Or, to paraphrase Sam Smith’s reasoning, to make music that wasn’t “for everyone.”

But why wouldn’t it be? In the same way that words matter, so does specificity, particularly in art. When artists reveal their individual obsessions and desires, it not only makes for more vivid songwriting—it can bring listeners closer to them, even make them relate in ways they might not have expected. (Frank Ocean showed this in Blonde’s “Good Guy,” setting the scene of his sexual frustration in a gay bar.) Straight people can learn a lot about how to adjust to this mindset from LGBT people. We’ve had years of practice with it. For our entire lives, we’ve had to switch gender pronouns, and Photoshop in different mental images while listening to pop songs or watching movies. If 10 percent of the population can manage to dream their desired details into the 90 percent art made by straight folks, then why can’t the reverse be true too?

For LGBT stars, using the proper pronoun represents an even riskier kind of coming out. However difficult that advance has been to enact, the fact is, it's clearly happening—and the Obama era surely helped encourage it. While the Trump/Pence regime promises to make this tougher, there’s also a renewed protest movement of progressivism under foot. The broad outlines of that pushback show the support that remains for LGBT issues. At the same time, the newly politicized work of huge stars like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar broadly demonstrates the resonance of outspoken messages in pop culture. Amid this defiant new climate, more stars in the spotlight may come to realize something key: Singing the truth of your life isn't shutting anyone out—it's inviting them in.

By the time Other Music closed last June, it had become more than a record store—it was a creative hub for independent music in New York City. So when the folks who program the eclectic Sunday Sessions at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 outpost were looking to create a music version of their annual art book fair, they could think of no better partner than the Other Music crew. Called Come Together and held this past Sunday, the event combined performances, films, workshops, and panels with a label fair that sought to channel the spirit of the record shop, down to its blue and orange color scheme.

“We had that place for 20 years and we were selling records,” says Other Music’s Josh Madell, “but the real energy was about the community in there—the artists hanging out, people from all the different labels, and people from all over the world passing through every day.”

At Come Together, there were workshops on sustainability, zine making, and virtual reality meditation; panels on the state of DIY in NYC and internet radio, and a live broadcast on-site with Know Wave Radio. But the heart of the event was the label fair, a pop-up market featuring some of independent music’s most forward-thinking labels, all packed into a room on PS1’s second floor, hawking their wares and communing with friends. As Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles talked shop with Superchunk’s Laura Ballance at the Merge table, two kids grinned with glee at the next table, poring through records from Lio Kanine’s personal collection.

Finding ourselves amid what felt like the beating heart of the indie record business, we surveyed some label reps to take the pulse of the industry. Here’s what they had to say. 

Laura Ballance // Co-founder, Merge Records

Hometown: Durham, North Carolina
First album ever purchased: Black Stallion Soundtrack
Last album purchased: A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got it From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service (streamed)
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: I really don't know.
Of all time: Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

How important is vinyl to your business? Cassettes?
All the formats are important in terms of percentage of sales, but vinyl takes a lot of our time and energy, and you have to pay a lot of attention to it. It helps put a record on the map, kind of. It has to look good, people notice it. We do some cassettes with some of our artists but not all of them. With the younger, hipper artists it seems like a good thing to do, but we wouldn't do a Mark Eitzel cassette, probably. I personally don't totally understand the cassette thing. Where are these people listening to these cassettes?

Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Some but not all. We offer FLAC files on our web store. Most people don't know the difference. A lot of people accidentally buy FLAC files and they're like what the hell?!

Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
It means we're making less money off of records, period. What it means is you have to be highly adaptable and strategic, and try to figure out how to promote records without spending money—sort of follow the wave or whatever. Honestly, I can't complain about streaming. Technology in the music industry—it changes all the time and it’s gonna keep changing. This is a phase, and we'll see where it goes from here.  

Lio Kanine // Owner + President of Kanine Records

Hometown: Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York
First album ever purchased: Echo & the Bunnymen, Crocodiles. I just fell in love with them day one when I was a kid.
Last album purchased: I just purchased Sneaks [It’s a Myth] across the hall at Merge.
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: Probably the Fear of Men record [Fall Forever]
Of all time: I would have to say Surfer Blood, Astro Coast. That's already surpassed 20,000 copies on vinyl alone. We did the first Grizzly Bear record [Horn of Plenty] and got like half of that. But that Surfer Blood record just constantly still sells, and I'm about to press another 5,000. People like the classics.

How important is vinyl to your business?
It's everything. A lot of people I talk to who run labels are like, “Man, physical is like retarded, it's all about digital,” and they’re wrong. Because whether people are spending tons of money on physical product, there still is discovery, from coming to a store or fair, or people wanting to have something to collect and hold in their hand. If I was a band and someone said, “I’m only putting out your record digitally,” I would feel cheated a little that I worked this hard in my life and no one's gonna invest enough to put my art on a piece of plastic, you know? It's a form of identity.

Cassettes?
We do all formats for our bands—you should let the customer dictate to you what they want instead of you dictating to them. And they're telling me they want cassettes so I'm gonna make cassettes for them. I think it’s great, it's another music discovery tool where you can charge cheaper. Young kids don't have $20 bucks to buy a brand new vinyl, but maybe they have $20 bucks to buy four new cassettes—and they will. It's just another nostalgic thing for them to have, and it's cool.

Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Not really. As long as it’s clean and fine.

Has streaming’s dominance changed the way you approach your business?
I really think it hasn't changed it drastically like everyone says. It's just another music discovery platform, and I try to keep all platforms even so that everyone has a chance to choose on their own. With Spotify, you can put it up early before you have the physical, and it can help you gauge how much physical product you should press. If I'm only getting 1,000 streams on a record that's been out two weeks, it might tell me there's not a large demand for this band so maybe only press 500 to start. If I'm getting hundreds of thousands of streams, you might press a couple thousand vinyl. The digital realm you can break down by territory and you can see where the band's more popular, so it can help a band decide where to tour heavier and spend more money on marketing in that area. When it was only physical, you couldn't do that until six months later, when you got the sheets from the stores that told you how much sold in each area.

Phil Tortoroli // Co-founder, Styles Upon Styles + Label Manager, RVNG Intl.

Hometown: Queens, New York
First album ever purchased: Will Smith, Big Willie Style
Last album purchased:Jan Jelinek, the loop record [Loop-finding-jazz-records]
Your label’s best selling record of 2016: Zach Cooper'sThe Sentence (for Styles Upon Styles)
Of all time:Gabriel Garzón-Montano's debut EP [Bishouné: Alma del Huila]. It's very tight, it's a timeless record. Definitely our best seller, and keeps selling.

How important is vinyl to your business?
They're very important, not necessarily financially. They're important more to feel like an established label in the tradition of record labels—to be able to put forth something that keeps you within this longer narrative that involves labels from 1900s to now.

Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Our customers who are DJs do, but the layman customer, I don't think so. For all of the stickers on our vinyl, we say if you want digital, to hit up a generic email and if people do, we just send them WAVs. We don't do download cards anymore, it's just extra waste. I'd rather have that communication with a fan and deliver it.

Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
It's definitely a large part of our revenue now. We incorporate streaming into all of our marketing strategies, both pre-release and post-release. We spend as much time pitching Spotify curators as we do press. It's the equivalent of pitching radio 20 years ago.

What's the payola game like over there?
I'm trying to figure it out, I dunno. Who do I gotta pay?

Bri Aab // Radio Promotions Director, Beggars Group

Hometown: Wilmington, North Carolina
First album ever purchased: Lou Bega’sMambo No. 5, whatever that one is [A Little Bit of Mambo]. And that is the only good song on that record, FYI.
Last album purchased: Probably Sneaks, Gymnastics. I tried to purchase that Arca 12-inch with hand-sewn fishnet stockings around it [“Reverie / Saunter”], and it sold out in a moment. I was at work and I was like, "This is on XL [a Beggars label]!" The people in the office who got it cheered and the people who didn't get it they were like, "fuck off!"
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: It was probably Radiohead [A Moon Shaped Pool]
Of all time: I'll have to check Nielsen, but the ones that are up there are Queens of the Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork, Interpol, Vampire Weekend, the xx, Grimes

How important is vinyl to your business?
Super important. We didn't bring any CDs to this Matador table—you can kinda feel out a situation where you know you're gonna have a lot of vinyl purchasers. We have Matador Direct, our own distro team exclusively dedicated to retail, and that's primarily vinyl. We do a lot with indie retail, contests, giving them tickets and exclusive color vinyl, things like that.

Cassettes?
It depends on the band. For Car Seat Headrest, you release a billion albums on Bandcamp, you're a DIY kind of band, you're gonna have tapes. For some bands it doesn't make sense to have tapes, especially electronic bands. I think it doesn't sound great.

Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Yeah. If I send out something that isn't a FLAC or a WAV, I catch shit for it immediately. It's a pretty intense scene. People aren't just listening on their laptops anymore.

Dre Skull // Owner, Mixpak

Hometown: Cleveland, Ohio
First album ever purchased: A Michael Jackson record. It was a parent-directed purchase as a child, so I can’t even say definitively.
Last album purchased: Something that I used to have: I picked up a Congos record to introduce the music to my son.
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: Either Popcaan’s Where We Come From or Palmistry’s Pagan.
Of all time: I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's definitely either VYBZ Kartel’s Kingston Story or Popcaan’s Where We Come From.

How important is vinyl to your business? Cassettes?
It's not fundamentally important to our business in a financial sense, but obviously there's a market for it. It still has a powerful feeling to manufacture something, whether it’s for the artist to feel they've made something that's substantial in a physical form, or for us at the label to put all that energy—sometimes years of work—and to be able to hold it. But because we're reaching people all over this earth, if we were only working in physical formats, that would be holding us back. So we're definitely not trying to run from the digital consumption of music. I don't think we've done cassettes, but we would, and we probably will.

Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
We find that different artists in different genres are resonating in different consumption models. One of the most powerful places dancehall, for example, is consumed is on YouTube, and so clearly that's not about the quality of the audio—it's about the ease of access and the curation that happens there.

We deliver high-res audio through our distribution, so then it really becomes up to what stores are willing to sell and how it's gonna get priced. I've heard rumors that Apple is gonna get into the hi-res audio game, and we're happy to serve that market. I think there's different ways to listen to music, from a different point of view, and I want to serve those people if that's of interest. But also, I've had the best times and moving personal experiences listening to the worst quality mp3. It's the music, more than anything for me.

Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
It's been really powerful and positive for our business. I think it's changing our future more so than changed what we've done so far, but it just gives us greater faith in investing and putting together big projects. Ultimately you're getting access to a global distribution platform, and you're not needing to push someone over that mental threshold of, "I’m ready to buy this." You just need to get them to, "I'm aware of this and I'm ready to listen to it." With streaming, the record industry as a whole is growing, but we see on a very personal level that the business is growing.

Bill Kouligas // Creative Director and Founder, PAN 

Hometown: Berlin. I come from Athens originally.
First album ever purchased:Guns & Roses, Appetite for Destruction
Last album purchased: Visible Cloaks, Reassemblage by RVNG Intl.
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: The last release we did by Yves Tumor [Serpent Music]. It crossed over into different worlds somehow.
Of all time: The Objekt album [Flatland] we did three years ago, plus all the Lee Gamble records sold really well. I don't really know who sold the most.

How important is vinyl to your business?
I wouldn't say it's really important, we just love vinyl and we're still romantic about it. But we've been doing a lot of different projects lately, using a lot of internet-based practices to present work. It could be websites themselves, or projects that expand over time online, or digital-only releases. So it's not that the vinyl is essential, it's just that a lot of music really translates well on the format.

Cassettes?
We've never done them.

Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Some people do, but it's not too often. We sell in all formats anyway.

Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
Of course, but it's a new era—it’s up to all labels and artists as well to create new ways to present music somehow. The digital era of things relies on technology that develops so fast every day, so even if you come up with something, in two months’ time, it will be old fashioned somehow. Which I think is also interesting because you can use it in a very creative way somehow, not just relying on a new way to do things and expect that to last for another 50 years or 100 years. Vinyl was crucial because it was a very advanced technology at the time that it happened, and it managed to last for so long. But when you're talking about digital ways to make music, it's a whole different scenario.

Adam Downey // Co-owner, Northern Spy Records

Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
First album ever purchased: Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell
Last album purchased: Moor Mother, Fetish Bones
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: Probably the Horse Lords record [Interventions] or Ravi Shankar’s In Hollywood, 1971, which is not a reissue. It had never been released.
Of all time: Maybe Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. The album's called Your Turn. That or the Shilpa Ray’s Last Year's Savage.

How important is vinyl to your business? Cassettes?
Vinyl is hugely important, mostly because that's what my artists want, and that's what they sell on the road. For us, artists are the best-selling store now, just at the merch table after playing. Cassettes are also important. They're easy to transport and cheap to make, and if we want to try out a band we really dig that doesn't have a huge tour planned, it's easy to press a cassette, put it out there and see how people react.

Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
I would have said no a month ago, but recently I’ve been listening to our test press copies on a very hi-fi system, and when something's super compressed, it really comes through. When there's no space and depth to the sound, it's super obvious on a really beautiful system. I think some people care, and if some people care… our audience is small, everyone matters.

Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
Oh fuck. It's crazy. It's something we just think about a lot now. We put out a cassette and digital release by this artist Odetta Hartman, and didn't think it would do anything, and all of a sudden it had a million streams on Spotify, and she was getting better gig offers. It was kind of an a-ha moment. Like holy crap, we can kind of take risks on small things and maybe they'll take off on Spotify. Spotify is just one of our biggest accounts now. It's a weird world.

Six years ago, on assignment from Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, Nico Muhly, the National’s Bryce Dessner, and Sufjan Stevens began working on what would become a project of near-endless proportions. By 2012, their songs about the solar system were debuted in the Netherlands, reprised at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and live workshopped at Dessner’s MusicNOW Festival in Cincinnati. The trio performed with percussionist James McAlister while visual artist Deborah Johnson’s fluorescentanimations projected onto a black orb floating overhead. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like a piece strictly meant for a live setting—until a few tweets and interviews confirmed that Planetarium remained a work in process, much to the delight of fans who’d closely tracked the endeavor.

Now, as 4AD confirmed yesterday, the collaboration will see a proper release on June 9. The crux of Planetarium’s appeal remains its least understood aspect: a fixation on outer space’s unknown. Led by Stevens’ voice, Planetarium is loosely based around the sun, moon, planets, and other celestial bodies. This topic has been a theme within Stevens’ music since practically the start—perhaps first manifesting in astrological form across his firstcouple records before moving towards astronomy—and it’s lasted long after his interest in cataloguing the 50 states and reimagining Christmas hymnals had faded.

His galactic fascination is obvious in songs like “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois,” but it’s also present in the paranoid echoes of Age of Adz’s “Get Real Get Right.” In fact, the entire stage design for the Age of Adz tour rode on the back of Royal Robertson, a schizophrenic artist who painted intricate scenes of aliens and futuristic cities. By backing away from conspiracy theories but preserving some of their iconography, Stevens ruminates on space as an analeptic place. He’s able to capture the universe’s wonderment without coming across like some deranged pop-punk icon, trying to warn people about what creatures the government is hiding from us.

For someone who’s dodged the divisive label of Christian rock despite near-constant religious references, space is just another location where God may reside. “Logistically I suppose my process of making art is driven less by abstractions of faith or politics and more by practical theory: composition and balance and color,” Stevens once said. “In every circumstance (giving a speech or tying my shoes), I am living and moving and being. This absolves me from ever making the embarrassing effort to gratify God (and the church) by imposing religious content on anything I do.” When Stevens acknowledges a higher being on “Seven Swans” or “From the Mouth of Gabriel,” it’s done in a way that allows the listener to interpret how heavily religion weighs it down—even if he’s wearing the feathered wings of an angel while singing.

Stevens has never been trying to convert his listeners to Christianity, nor is he burying a secret desire for everyone to worship the same god. It’s about ideals. Just before President Trump was sworn in, he wrote passionately about why the Ten Commandments are about prioritizing love over the self. Outer space becomes an alternate landscape where Stevens and his listeners can imagine abiding by transcendentalism’s totality of life. Cue another one of Stevens’ Tumblr posts about space, this time quoting scientist J.B.S. Haldane about the universe and queerness, where the definition of the latter is up for debate in regards to how fate determines its role in a person’s life. The universe beyond Earth becomes a place of unfathomable promise, unlimited love, and earnest selflessness—the themes Steven most often sings of in his music.

Yet there’s more to Stevens’ obsession with astronomy than dressing religious beliefs in planetary outfits. The expansiveness of the universe naturally elicits melancholy, a feeling that has long permeated Stevens’ music. His chord progressions and vocal declinations often narrate unspoken conflict bound up in sorrow. Quotidian details lend images to that feeling: avian nicknames, sheets on a clothesline, goldenrod as a gift. On the anniversary of Voyager 1 taking its last photos ever, Stevens posted a video about the “Pale Blue Dot,” arguably one of the most life-affirming and life-defeating images of outer space because it confirms how small we really are. The image symbolizes a type of hollowness. His music does the same.

When performing Planetarium at BAM, Stevens, Dessner, and Muhly launched into a vocoder-heavy rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Though it glistens with electronics, the cover feels bare because Stevens delivers it with his signature style of openhearted despondency. It’s as if while singing it, he imagines what it’s like to live beyond our planet, a place he seems to believe is riddled with selfishness, ego, and hatred. At the Planetarium show in London, a reporter for the Guardiandescribed the song "Earth" as "a maelstrom of inhuman religious slogans, warlike trombones, and MIA-style afrobeat mania, then it blows itself up." Perhaps projecting outer space imagery into his music—and exploring the theme at large in Planetarium—could be a way for Stevens to distance himself from the downward spiral of our own planet.  

Above all else, the outer space that Stevens sings about seems to line up with absolute transcendentalism. A scroll through his Tumblr reveals nearly every post ends with the phrase, “The world is abundant.” What’s more abundant than outer space? Stevens’ departure from more pastoral folk imagery is one meant to signal a new utilization of traditions, activism, and creativity—or, as he once said, “The new folk aesthetic is the outer space aesthetic.” So when he takes to his website to share tidbits like a black-and-white documentary from 1960 about the universe, he seems to remind himself of beauty as truth and truth as beauty. As he put so eloquently during that Ten Commandments breakdown, don’t imitate others when you can improve yourself instead.

Which brings us back to Planetarium’s lead single, “Saturn.” Stevens sings from the viewpoint of Cronus, the mythological Titan who, in Goya's famous painting, devours children to uphold his position of power. Dessner and Muhly’s instrumentation—a repetitive blend of synth and strings, darkening the early version of the song that surfaced in 2013—dramatizes that tension, and they end it on a note reiterating transcendentalism: a repeating call for love. According to Stevens, we must think for ourselves for the greater good of the world, and hopefully for a world beyond our own. At the very least, a vast expanse of positivity is what he’s been chasing all along.

When sharing the song, Stevens seemed to feel relieved, as if one step closer to touching outer space in his own way. “This was such an epic endeavor because the universe is constantly expanding, but we rose to the occasion!” he wrote. Just like that, once again, the world is abundant.

Kendrick Lamar doesn’t need new albums to cement his cultural dominance. Between 2012’s good kid, m.A.A.d city and 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, he set the rap world ablaze with his scene-stealing verse on Big Sean’s “Control (HOF).” And that was when not gracefully responding to getting Macklemored at the Grammys, or teaming up memorably with everyone from TDE labelmate Schoolboy Q and fellow Compton rapper YG to Miguel, Flying Lotus, and Tame Impala.

Now, a little more than two years after TPAB and one year after its companion LP untitled unmastered., Lamar has been teasing what seems to be a new album, seemingly slated for April 7. His pace over the last two years, however, has not exactly slowed. In addition to a smattering of guest verses, memorable TV performances, and Reebok ads, Lamar has also emerged as an avatar for the Black Lives Matter movement: TPAB’s “Alright” became a recurringchant atpolitical protests, and Kendrick forged a bond with President Obama.

While we await more new music, here’s a rundown on the state of Kendrick Lamar.

March 24, 2015: To celebrate To Pimp a Butterfly’searly arrival, Lamar performs a surprise concert on a moving truck, as later seen in a Reebok-sponsored clip. A proper sneaker commercial follows a few weeks later. It’s in the context of selling shoes that some of Lamar’s subsequent pop crossovers may make more sense: He’s as canny about commerce as art.

May 17, 2015:TPAB‘s official release date was scarcely past before new Kendrick verses started materializing, including on a never-officially-released Kanye West remix as well as on a Glasses Malone single. Not many collaborations could be bigger, though, than Lamar’s collision course with Taylor Swift, who had talked up“Backseat Freestyle” the previous fall in her 1989 rollout. Lamar reciprocated by freestyling over“Shake It Off” before going full Swift, via two verses in her shade-throwing “Bad Blood” remix and a role (as “Welvin Da Great,” whatever that means) in the song’s explosion-filled action video. Lamar’s abbreviation-filled barbs on an apparent hater, complete with a “Backseat Freestyle” callback, aren’t his most striking, but presumably he’ll scoop up a few pennies from the clip’s billion-plus YouTube views.

June 22, 2015: As listeners continue to digest the momentous sprawl of TPAB, Lamar keeps up his steady pace as a guest star, including a blistering performance on Bilal’s R&B opus “Money Over Love.” Closer to ubiquitous is his goofy boastfulness on this remix of Jidenna’s “Classic Man,” which both lends credibility to Janelle Monáe's Wondaland Records signee and anchors K.Dot to a Top 40 hit. Remarkably enough, the remix also ends up reinforcing Lamar’s connection to Moonlight.

June 28, 2015:  At the BET Awards, Lamar performs TPAB’s triumphant protest anthem “Alright” while standing on a vandalized police car. FOX News pundits troll in their usual way, where it’s hard to tell if they’re truly this ignorant or just getting paid a lot of money to behave like despicable cartoon villains. Lamar’s response—”How can you take a song that's about hope and turn it into hatred?”—is beautiful. So is the song’s video, by director Colin Tilley.

July 7, 2015: Lamar’s Reebok designs, with colors symbolizing peace between Los Angeles’ warring Bloods and Crips gangs, surface.

September 10, 2015: Lamar performs on Stephen Colbert’s first “Late Show.” Though he previously debuted a new song (untitled mastered.’s “untitled 03 | 05.28.2013.”) as the final musical guest on “The Colbert Report,” he sticks to a medley of TPAB tracks this time.

December 9, 2015: President Obama tells an interviewer that “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of the year—a claim he follows up by deemingTo Pimp a Butterfly the best album of 2015 (fact). A month later, Lamar shares a PSA documenting his recent visit to the White House.

January 8, 2016: Lamar debuts a new song (untitled unmastered.’s “untitled 02 | 06.23.2014.”) on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

January 18, 2016: Kanye West shares “No More Parties in LA” ahead of The Life of Pablo’s release. Lamar is in vivid form, waxing grandiose as Madlib’s hypnotic production unfolds. Kids, don’t try this come-on at home, or really anywhere: “I like your bougie bootie/Come Erykah Badu me.”

February 11, 2016: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Lamar joins forces with BJ the Chicago on “The New Cupid.” It’s another showcase for how well Lamar’s deft lyricism can work in a more retro-soul context. The video, with an amusingly bewigged Hannibal Buress, also deserves a watch.

February 15, 2016: Nominated for almost a dozen Grammys, Lamar ends up winning five, including Best Rap Song for “Alright” and Best Rap Album for TPAB. Perhaps more importantly, Lamar gives an unforgettable Grammy performance that previews a new song (untitled unmastered.’s “untitled 05 | 09.21.2014.”). Concurrently, Kendrick notes he has a “chamber” of unreleased material for TV performances.

March 4, 2016: With no advance notice, Lamar drops untitled unmastered. He explains: “Demos from To Pimp A Butterfly. In Raw Form. Unfinished. Untitled. Unmastered." It will top the Billboard 200 chart.

April 24, 2016: Beyoncé releases a surprise new visual album, Lemonade. Kendrick guests on “Freedom,” which features production from Just Blaze, samples that span from Puerto Rican band Kaleidoscope to Alan Lomax field recordings, and songwriting by UK tunesmiths. Lamar’s blazing verse serves as a call to arms against the forces of institutionalized racism. Cynics could argue it’s hard to be against freedom; Lamar’s verbal virtuosity helps ensure the track transcends facile sloganeering.

May 9, 2016: Kendrick does spoken-word in a new Reebok commercial. One of his proper verses it’s not, but thematically it’s not far off from his catalog. He’ll follow it up with a freestyle in yet another Reebok ad three months later.

July 4, 2016: Lamar and Janelle Monáe perform at the White House, singing Happy Birthday to Malia Obama. A few months later, Kendrick will show how just friendly he’s gotten with Obama by challenging him to a basketball game.

July 23, 2016:DJ Khaled shares “Holy Key,” featuring Big Sean, Kendrick, and Betty Wright. Guess whose masterfully cadence-jumping lines on love and hate perfectly set up Wright’s booming send-off?

September 2, 2016:Isaiah Rashad shares “Wat’s Wrong,” featuring Kendrick. Its languid, sun-baked Southern rap production leaves space for perhaps Lamar’s most ferocious guest verse of the past couple of years. “How many souls do you touch a day?/How many hoes do you fuck a day?/How many flows do your thought convey?/How many know you can't walk away?” he begins—and it’s tough to stop quoting.

September 6, 2016: Sia releases a new song, “The Greatest,” featuring Lamar. As motivational lite-pop goes, it’s an unremarkable track. Not much stamina seems to have been required of Kendrick, either, as he says “ayy” several times and is gone before you know it.

September 19, 2016: Danny Brown premieres“Really Doe,” with Lamar, Ab-Soul, and Earl Sweatshirt. Along with a characteristically dense word-puzzle of a verse, Kendrick also raps the hook. For a posse cut, it feels like cheating to say this, but it might be the strongest non-Kendrick track he has been part of these last two years.

October 5, 2016: Maroon 5 release a new song, “Don’t Wanna Know,” including a Kendrick cameo. It sounds like all the generic post-Jack Ü trop-house clogging up streaming playlists, and the less you know about it the better. Kendrick’s verse is fine, but like life itself, it’s too short to be worth wading through this flavorless sonic goop.

October 20, 2016: Lamar reveals he’s working on the untitled unmastered. follow-up and has been collaborating with Rick Rubin. “I have ideas and I have a certain approach,” Kendrick says of his next album. “But I wanna see what it manifests. I wanna put all the paint on the wall and see where that goes.”

November 25, 2016: The WeekndreleasesStarboy, which features Lamar on the bluesy contemplation “Sidewalks.” Kendrick is his usual syllable-twisting self, weaving an up-from-the-streets narrative, and Abel Tesfaye has been effusive about praising his collaborator. Still, there’s probably a reason this drab Auto-Tuned lament wasn’t one of the four songs shared before Starboy arrived in full.

January 4, 2017: Kendrick unveils a new Reebok design, the Club C Capsule. In a later short film, he’ll say, “This sneaker represents that call for unity and equality, while also pushing people to look beneath the surface and uncover the hidden messages.” Keep in mind, this is a sneaker.

February 24, 2017: TPAB collaborator Thundercat releases a new album, Drunk. Lamar appears on “Walk On By,” a woozy setting for one of his sharper guest verses in, um, months. As if taking full advantage of Drunk’s eccentricities, Kendrick indulges in dense wordplay, from the opening “from my eyewitness binoculars” to a jab at the Republicans’ one-time faux folk hero “Joe the Plumber.”

March 1, 2017: He sheds more light on his next album. “To Pimp a Butterfly was addressing the problem,” Lamar says. “I’m in a space now where I’m not addressing the problem anymore.”

March 23, 2017: He posts a “IV” graphic on Instagram and deletes his earlier posts, prompting speculation about his next album, which will be his fourth. The next day, Kendrick releases a new song, “The Heart Part 4.” It’s the latest installment of his career-spanning “The Heart” series, it hints at the date April 7, and it’s an unrelenting assault on everyone from Trump to, perhaps, Drake. Kendrick convincingly warns all comers: “My spot is solidified, if you ask me.” In much more minor news, the same day Mike WiLL Made-It releases Ransom 2, which features Lamar alongside Rae Sremmurd and Gucci Mane on “Perfect Pint.”

In the UK, Britpop was no mere genre—it was a pop culture phenomenon that bred a new generation of rock stars, set box office records, and yielded Downing Street invites for its key progenitors. But in North America, it was strictly a subculture. Even after “Wonderwall” turned Oasis into Rolling Stone’s most reliable supplier of outrageous pull-quotes, stateside Anglophiles remained a secret society. They congregated at niche dance nights, harangued their local newsstand to see if they had received last week’s copy of the NME, and sat in near-empty movie theaters with 20 other enthusiasts the day Trainspotting opened.

Post-Oasis boom, Britpop came to be associated with lad mags and Union Jack-waving nationalism in the UK, but across the pond, it was still the province of uncommon people. These were the kids who rejected the mosh-pit machismo of post-grunge American alt-rock, perhaps choosing hedonism over miserablism. But the funny thing about these Anglophile enclaves is the way instinctively they went bullish on anything British, erasing the aesthetic and philosophical divisions that existed among UK scenes. At long-running weekly parties like Tiswas at Don Hill’s in New York and Blow Up at Toronto’s El Mocambo, you’d find suit-sporting mods rubbing shoulders with veritable Richey Manic mannequins, or lager-lugging Liams in Man U jerseys dancing to Blur’s “Girls and Boys” alongside Brett Anderson-like androgynes making their first steps toward coming out.

And very occasionally, amid all the Brit hits, you’d hear a band from the colonies or the commonwealth—groups that shared their overseas peers’ penchant for anthemic choons and outsized swagger. They may not have dominated the tabloids in their home countries as Oasis and Blur did in the UK, but they did achieve some degree of underground renown, or enjoyed a cup of tea on a major label during the dying days of the alt-rock goldrush. Between the $40 import CDs and $15 copies of Select, being a Britpop enthusiast outside of the UK in the mid-’90s could be an expensive proposition. But these bands provided fans in their homelands all the melody-making at more affordable domestic prices. With the Brits now ranked and filed elsewhere on Pitchfork, let’s have a look at seven Britpop albums from the rest of the world.

Chainsaw Kittens, Pop Heiress (1994)

Chainsaw Kittens would surely hold the distinction of being  Norman, Oklahoma’s oddest band if only they didn’t share a zip code with fellow freaks the Flaming Lips. But years before Wayne Coyne assumed the role of flamboyant face-painted guru, Kittens frontman Tyson Meade was taunting Midwestern college crowds with his cross-dressing performances, multi-octave voice, and lascivious lyrics that skewered religion and celebrated his queerness. With its potent cocktail of glam camp, fuzz-punk overdrive, and stadium-sized hooks, Pop Heiress should’ve turned the Kittens into the American Suede. But seeing as America at the time didn’t have much use for the actual Suede, the Kittens would have to settle for getting paid in Billy Corgan name-drops. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

You Am I, Hi Fi Way (1995)

You Am I’s 1993 debut, Sound As Ever, might have fit better on a a Best ’90s American Indie Rock That Isn’t Actually American list, with the Australian band’s formative fuzzed-out sound pushed further into the red by producer Lee Ranaldo. But on the follow-up, Ranaldo helped You Am I realize their true calling as a post-grunge Kinks. Singer-guitarist Tim Rogers pulls from a seemingly bottomless well of hip-swiveling riffs (“Ain’t Gone and Open”), wry character studies (“Handwasher”), sunny-afternoon strummers (“Purple Sneakers”), and enough harmony-rich hooks to wholly justify swiping the title of the record’s jangly standout from the Everly Brothers (“Cathy’s Clown”). Alas, Hi Fi Way did little to change the band’s stateside fortunes, but down under, the album is considered the Morning Glory-sized classic that established the band as a national rock institution—their very own Au’asis, as it were. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

Sloan, One Chord to Another (1996)

Sloan are essentially You Am I’s Canadian cousins. Both bands started as noisy rock acts before firmly embracing more timeless British Invasion influences, and both would enjoy considerable mainstream success in their home countries while resigning themselves to cult status elsewhere. Following the bubble-grunge of Smeared (1992) and the stripped-down indie pop of Twice Removed (1994), One Chord to Another marked the moment where Sloan started to wield their power-pop prowess without obfuscation. And it was here that the Beatles became as much a human-resources model as a musical one. Where the band’s four members had always rotated turns at the mic, One Chord threw their distinct personalities into stark relief, showcasing Patrick Pentland’s McCartney-esque swings between raw rockers (“The Good In Everyone”) and brassy serenades (“Everything You’ve Done Wrong”), Chris Murphy’s wry wordplay à la Lennon (“Autobiography,” “G Turns to D”), and Jay Ferguson’s gentle George respites (“Junior Panthers,” “The Lines You Amend”). But in Sloan’s case, their Ringo—drummer Andrew Scott—is actually their resident Syd Barrett, answering his mates’ radio-ready missives with warped, piano-wobbled musings (“A Side Wins,” “400 Metres”). (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

Lilys, Better Can’t Make Your Life Better (1996)

The Lilys became a different band with each album, thanks to the aesthetic whims of madcap leader Kurt Heasley and a revolving-door personnel policy that rivals the Fall’s. After shaking off their early ’90s shoegaze guise, the Lilys delivered a major-label debut that’s full of Kinks—in the big-K and little-k senses. Better Can’t Make Your Life Better is classic Brit-rock contorted: while “Shovel Into Spade Kit” revs up on a snarling riff you’d swear was emanating from an old Pye Records 45, Heasley spends the rest of the circuitous song smashing up the vinyl and gluing the pieces back together into curious new combinations. But the complicated approach could yield simple pleasures: Thanks to a plum placement in a Levi’s ad, the delirious, cowbell-clanging “Nanny in Manhattan” became the rare mid-’90s American rock import to jostle for chart space in the UK Top 20. (Listen on YouTube)

Superdrag, Regretfully Yours (1996)

At a time when MTV was starting to clog up with mewling third-generation grunge and ersatz industrial, Knoxville, Tennessee's finest tunesmiths planted a flag for classic ’60s craftsmanship with “Sucked Out.” The song waged war on the sorry state of ‘90s alt-rock radio from within, with a shot of shout-it-out, Revolver-spun jangle pop that went straight for the jugular, thanks to an instantly iconic chorus where frontman John Davis sounds like he’s on the verge of losing his larynx. And there was a whole lot more where that came from, be it the muscular melancholy of “What If You Don’t Fly” or the adrenalized surge of “N.A. Kicker”—songs that should’ve elevated Regretfully Yours to a ’90s generational touchstone rather than just a fondly remembered Buzz Bin blip. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Take It From the Man (1996)

Take It From the Man was one of three double albums Anton Newcombe and co. released in 1996. But compared to the Spacemen-3-on-a-Maharishi-retreat vibe of Their Satanic Majesties Second Request or the after-hours psych-folk of Thank God for Mental Illness, this set was distinguished by a brash, insurrectionary intent to beat the Brits at their own game—right down to slapping a Union Jack on the cover as a capture-the-flag taunt. If the original British Invasion rendered a musical movement in militaristic terms, Take It From the Man represented a counter-strike, answering Britpop’s increasing bloat with the leanest, meanest, most authentically snotty garage-mod rave-ups this side of Spinal Tap’s “Gimme Some Money” (in the best way possible). But for all its ’60s signifiers, Take It From the Man so thoroughly embodied an eternal anti-establishment ideal that its centerpiece song (“Straight Up and Down”) also made perfect sense as the opening theme to a TV show about 1920s gangsters. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal)

The Dandy Warhols, ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down (1997)

The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s West Coast friends-cum-rivals shared their love of ’60s psychedelic pop and ’80s stoner-drone—but they were far more determined to join Britpop’s big guns on the cover of the NME. The Portland band shamelessly exhibited the sort of boho glamour and craven ambition that were rare among American indie rock bands at the time, and with their major label debut, they made significant strides toward fulfilling all the rock-star fantasies their Capitol promo budget could buy. But while Come Down is best known for spawning the cheeky heroin-chic critique “Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth,” it’s the tough glam strut of “Boys Better” and the strobe-lit rush of “Every Day Should Be a Holiday” that come closest to conjuring the decadent allure and communal ecstasy of the best Britpop. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal) 

This month’s standout mixes traverse trance states, Japanese footwork, and Romanian minimal techno. New York’s DJ Voices and Unscented DJ dig deep into the jazzy garage that poured out of New York and New Jersey discotheques in the early ’90s. Portugal’s Photonz pops the manhole cover on a dank electro underground. Those are just a few of the routes available in an unusually splintered garden of forking paths—read on and listen in.

Kablam – RA.564

The Swedish musician Kablam knows just how to grab your attention: “I keep my dick hanging out of my pants/So I can point out what I want,” is the first thing you hear here, intoned lewdly. It’s a pitched-down snippet of the Knife’s 2003 song “Hanging Out,” and it serves not only as a hat-tip to Kablam’s fellow Swedes but also a marker of her determination to knock down the dance music patriarchy for once and for all. A member of Berlin’s Janus crew of avant-club radicals, Kablam delights in chaos and unease. Beats speed up and slow down; synths and voices break down into fields of shrieking cicadas; a Michael Nyman composition for strings morphs into a throbbing dembow remix of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” of all things. Scattered throughout are moments of sheer audacity and startling beauty, each one a wormhole to a whole new world.

Bing & Ruth – Solid Steel Radio Show 24/2/2017

Bing & Ruth’s David Moore turns in a stellar listening set for Ninja Tune’s Solid Steel series, using the concept of trance states as a jumping-off point to explore sounds as disparate as vintage American blues, gospel, Julianna Barwick’s reverberant vocal fantasias, and Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking of the Titanic.” The emphasis on repetition is reflective of Bing & Ruth’s own hypnotic work, and it’s easy to see how the haunting atmospheres of some of the music showcased here—like Smoke Dawson’s “The Minotaur,” a 1971 fiddle recording—have influenced the billowing sonic signature of Moore’s ensemble. Among the unexpected treasures: an unreleased piece for processed guitar by Hubble (Ben Greenberg, formerly of Zs), sounding like a wilder Manuel Göttsching; and a lovely David Moore solo piece rescued from a 2007 CDR, which is as direct as Bing & Ruth are diffuse.

Zora Jones – FACT Mix

Sometimes you wonder if Zora Jones doesn’t hear the way that spiders see. Her sounds constantly fracture into splinters, the colorful beats tumbling like baubles in a kaleidoscope. It’s no wonder that she calls her label, which she runs alongside Sinjin Hawke, Fractal Fantasy. In a new mix for FACT she tears the roof off as usual, and it’s gripping from start to finish: spinning footwork rhythms and processed vocal samples go careening into candy-colored trap-rave, hyperactive kalimba sequences, and ultra-vivid IDM. The mix is composed almost exclusively of Jones’ and Hawke’s own work, both solo and in tandem—atop, of course, a bed of bootlegged rap and R&B, the pair’s mischievous stock in trade.

Carsten Jost – NE211

Both at the helm of the Dial label and making his own music, Carsten Jost is a master of atmosphere. He brings that same flair to this set, which he recorded on Christmas night, alone, in the living space in his gallery on Canal Street while “thinking about the stars and the ever-expanding universe and its mysterious power sources.” Following a scene-setting intro from a Harmony Korine short film for Proenza Schouler and a bright-eyed segment from Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar soundtrack, he finally gets to the real goods: deep, minimalist house and Detroit techno delivered in classic Dial fashion. For fans of German dance music from the turn of the century, it’s a treat to hear cuts like Donna Regina’s woozy “Star Ferry (Isolée Remix)” surfacing again. The whole set, in fact, is a highly satisfying deep dive into bittersweet techno, delivered with all of Jost’s usual panache.

DJ Voices & Unscented DJ – Do It the Jazzy Way (Mix for Sisters #35)

It seems fitting to find the New York house icon Pal Joey popping up in the comments on this mix, as it is essentially an extended tribute to the style that Pal Joey pioneered—using drum machines, razor blades, and reel-to-reel tape—on classics like 1989’s “Soho” and “Dance.” The heavily swung drums and rickety MPC snares heard across the set have one foot in the world of early hip-hop, while walking basslines and extended piano solos tip into full-on jazz mode. As DJ Voices (Kristin Malossi) and Unscented DJ (Brandon Wilner) point out in their notes, this early ’90s style of garage house was mostly a New York and New Jersey thing, with a key assist from ever-alert Japanese producers. It’s a stellar mix, full of swing and spark and joy.

Petre Inspirescu: Clubberia 284

Few genres are more widely derided these days than late ’00s minimal, a sound that most of the dance music scene tends to treat with all the chagrin of a bad high school haircut. In Romania, though, minimal techno remains not just on trend but all-powerful, with the [a:rpia:r] crew (Rhadoo, Petre Inspirescu, and Raresh) taking the trippy percolations Ricardo Villalobos introduced with Thé Au Harem D'Archimède and stretching them into even more psychedelic mutations, in which elastic sound design and elliptical rhythms are paramount. This two-hour set, recorded at Tokyo’s Dommune club last November, makes for the rare occasion to get to hear Inspirescu outside of some insane hour of the morning. But it might just make you feel like you’ve been up all night: It rolls like fat globules dancing in colored water, like ball bearings on a slippery floor, like an electrical storm filtered through a sieve. It’s a long road with a barely perceptible incline, but if you’re less interested in hooks or melodies than the all-enveloping groove, there’s reason to travel it. And about 93 minutes in, there’s a passage of almost startling beauty—one that might make you wonder why anyone wrote off minimal in the first place. 

Foodman – NTS Radio, 21st March 2017

The Japanese footwork producer Foodman’s recent set for NTS Radio has a highly unusual effect: For those not well versed in Japanese culture, at least, it replicates the sensation of traveling in a foreign land, where everything feels faintly bewildering, in the most invigorating way. Foodman’s own productions are strange, staccato affairs brimming with empty space, and his mix here begins in the same way. From there he goes, well, everywhere: pulsing ambient tracks with breathy Japanese-language vocals; the Japanese rapper Dotama spitting over pointillist beats and clarinet; the flutes and tablas of Talvin Singh’s 1998 track “Traveller,” in all their Fourth World excess. Along the way there’s something that sounds like calisthenics instructions set to waltz piano, and toward the end he dips into Japanese indie rock before switching gears once again, closing with his own “Ure Piii.” It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but if you’re looking for an hourlong trip far outside your usual stomping grounds, this is just the ticket. 

Tobias. – @ Mind Off x Re:Birth, Tokyo – 17.1.17

There’s a straight line from the sort of techno that Tobias Freund was making 20-odd years ago and what he’s doing today. Then as now, he has always emphasized throbbing pulses, linear constructions, and psychoactive frequencies. This recent live set from Tokyo captures him at his most electrifying, with tightly coiled arpeggios wrapped around hyper-efficient drum programming and cut-up vocal fragments. 

Wilted Woman – Bandcloud Guest Mix – March 2017

How far-out can you get in 30 minutes? When you’re Wilted Woman, an American producer and Berlin Community Radio resident DJ, the answer is: pretty damned far. She kicks off with a happy hardcore remix of Nena’s immortal “99 Red Balloons,” plunges into chopped-and-screwed German electro-pop, and then feints left into some kind of gummed-up industrial dub overlaid with harsh noise. Ten minutes in, a woman declaims over percolating disco-punk beats, “Ich hab’ kein Geld/Mein Hund ist alles was ich hab’” (“I have no money/I only have my dog”). An extended passage of vintage-sounding electro-pop, acid, and DJ Richard’s bleached-bone techno puts us back on firmer ground until she pulls the rug out again with the disorienting finale. We're left with more questions than answers, wanting to know much more about Wilted Woman’s blurry world.

Photonz – DW Podcast 24

Portugal’s Photonz tends to deal in knife-edged techno, but on this set for France’s Dimensional Waves, he sounds even deadlier than usual. Setting aside his fascination with early trance music, he zeroes in on the whipcrack syncopations of classic electro, and the results are spell-binding. Gurgling analog synths, white-hot drum machines, and clammy metallic atmospheres conjure throwback vibes halfway between Bronx B-boying and Rotterdam raves, sounding as volatile as a tapped electrical transformer in a vacant lot. 

And check out last month’s Best Mixes column for even more tunes.

Welcome to Pitchfork’s new monthly metal column, where we’ll guide you through the genre’s new music and various happenings with an eye towards a specific theme. This month’s theme is space. Below you’ll find five of March’s best metal albums that found inspiration in the darkness and beauty of the cosmos.

For many metal fans, Black Sabbath’s 1971 album Master of Reality is the moment when the genre exploded into something new. Album opener “Sweet Leaf” is arguably the song that birthed stoner metal, while “Solitude” explores how quiet and melodic a song could be while retaining its evil aura. But it wasn’t until the very end of Master of Reality that Sabbath truly launched out of Birmingham and into the stratosphere. On the album’s closer, “Into the Void,” Tony Iommi delivers one his most primal riffs atop Geezer Butler and Bill Ward’s pummeling rhythms, while Ozzy Osbourne sings about a rocket ship bound for the unknowable terrains of the galaxy. It’s an explosive escape scene unlike any in rock history—one that, along with Hawkwind’s similarly starry-eyed work, established a new trend in heavy music: outer space as an outlet for the unfettered imagination.

Tellingly, Black Sabbath’s galactic mission wasn’t a choice—it was a necessity. The subtext within “Into the Void” suggests that humans have destroyed their own planet—with pollution, with violence, with ignorance—and left the population no choice but to abandon it for a new home. In this apocalyptic view of space—not as a destination to explore but a refuge from our bleak reality—lies the inherent metalness of the cosmos. From Bowie’s interstellar theater to Janelle Monáe’s dystopian soul-dance, science fiction has long been a common theme across a number of genres. But metal bands have often used space’s boundless terrain to explore their own dark anxieties—black hole as blank slate, essentially.

In Kyuss’ “Space Cadet,” Josh Homme looked to the sky and saw only his own alienation reflected back. On Spanish tech-death group Wormed’s latest record Krighsu, space is relentless and impenetrable, with the band’s intricate compositions reflecting the overwhelming chaos of the unknowable. And throughout the ’80s, Canadian thrash metal group Voivod carved their name into the lineage of cosmic metal. Their music wasn’t always about space—“Sometimes you’ve got a riff, and you cannot see a UFO in the music,” vocalist Denis “Snake” Bélanger once said—but more often than not, Voivod did see the aliens; it was a glorious, gruesome vision.

In recent years, outer space has continued to open itself up to mankind in new ways. Just last month, a series of Earth-sized planets were discovered, all of which could have the potential to to host living creatures—and will likely inspire sci-fi metal albums before that reality comes to be. In the meantime, two of last year’s finest metal albums—Vektor’s opus Terminal Redux and Blood Incantation’s debut Starspawn—offers glimpses toward the genre’s future while taking the space theme in a new direction. For Vektor, it involves an intricate concept about a heroic astronaut and an intergalactic bureaucracy threatening cosmic war. Blood Incantation, on the other hand, refined their sci-fi themes into less narrative-based lyrics, alluding to space-age conspiracy theories with sparse bursts of poetry. The album’s final words—“You are the stargate”—could even be perceived as a happy ending, a continuation of Black Sabbath’s vision of escape to the cosmos as a means of saving ourselves.

And so the tradition continues this month, with five extraordinary new albums that navigate cosmic terrain with confidence, delving even deeper into the void.

Junius // Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light

Junius’ third album, Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light, takes lyrical inspiration from spiritual theorist Elisabeth Haich, whose writing explored mankind’s internal ability to overcome the pains of daily life. What’s striking is how the Boston duo excels in further communicating just how routinely overwhelming this task can seem. Multi-instrumentalist Joseph E. Martinez’s clean, gothy vocals would fit just as well over a Depeche Mode song, but here he finds a companion in drummer Dana Filloon’s deathly grooves. Together they eschew Haich’s considered writing for a more dramatic kind of catharsis: wallowing in the bleakness of earthly existence as a means of transcending it.

Artificial Brain // Infrared Horizon

At the end of last year, Will Smith of the Long Island death metal quintet Artificial Brain shared the concept for his band’s upcoming album: “Like Dante’s Inferno but with futuristic machinery and robots.” Out next month, the record is a nauseous whirlwind of guttural vocals and jazzy chord progressions, telling the story Smith describes over music that reflects its technology-driven world. First single “Synthesized Instinct” sucks you right into the band’s scorched landscape. Keith Abrami’s intricate drumming is the crucial ingredient—soaring atmospherically and stuttering violently between the song’s disjointed sections, giving the song a jarring pulse that might make you question modern programming as you thrash along.

Gorephilia // Severed Monolith

Before listeners heard a note of Severed Monolith, Gorephilia’s first new album in five years, the band shared the cover art: a ghastly skeleton imploding in space, lightning bolts crashing through the body. While certain songs and lyrics further depict the artwork’s interstellar violence (particularly the extraordinary “Return to Dark Space”), the music is death metal at its most primal. Dual guitarists Jukka Aho and Pauli Gurko trade riffs with an almost bluesy edge—like Tony Iommi by way of Autopsy—and offer as much in atmosphere as they do in grueling momentum.

Lunar Shadow // Far From Light

For Germany’s Lunar Shadow, inspiration comes from history’s great epics, be it Tolkien or Conan the Barbarian or Number of the Beast. On Far From Light, the quintet crafts a few new epics of their own, with suitably dramatic titles like “The Kraken” and “Hadrian Carrying Stones.” Even when they’re telling tales of characters like “Earendil,” Tolkien’s seafaring hero who carried a star across the sky, the band lets the music do the heavy lifting, creating a hazy environment that forgoes the standards of modern studio metal. The drums remain comfortably distant while proggy acoustic guitars do the atmospheric work, as if synths and effects pedals hadn’t yet been invented in this galaxy. But the band’s old-school approach also helps Far From Light adhere to the timeless thrill of those early metal records: music as absorbing as the mythology that surrounds it.

Cloud Catcher // Trails of Kozmic Dust

With its gnarly odes to voodoo children and celestial empresses, Trails of Kozmic Dust finds Colorado’s Cloud Catcher settling further into their swampy, vintage sound. These eight slices of bluesy psych-rock capture heavy metal at its most classic. With a record store’s worth of riffs at his disposal, vocalist and guitarist Rory Rummings’ extended solos—equal parts cosmic grandeur and classic rock worship—are the record’s highlight. The whole album serves as a reminder that space might represent our projections of the future, but it’s been there long before any of us. “We’ll leave this world far behind/Believer in ancient times,” Rummings sings optimistically in closing track “Righteous Ruler.” And just like that, the great unknown feels a bit more familiar.

Last June, a Angel Olsenteaser video surfaced on her label Jagjaguwar’s YouTube channel. Looking for details about the enigmatic clip of Olsen in a tinsel wig, some listeners ran it through the song-recognition app Shazam. They discovered the synth-drenched track previewed was titled “Intern,” and that it was from an album called My Woman. The only problem: Olsen’s album wasn’t supposed to have been announced for a couple of weeks.

As with rival apps including SoundHound, Shazam has been available on smartphones for almost a decade now, but premature album unveilings like Olsen’s seem more common lately. Earlier this month, Shazaming a Perfume Geniusteaser brought word of an upcoming album, No Shape, that wasn’t formally announced until two weeks later. In January, the cover artwork for Father John Misty’s upcoming Pure Comedy was already visible on Shazam shortly before the official rollout. Last September, the album and song titles of the xx’s I See You could similarly be found on Shazam before they’d been revealed by the band. Others with art or information available on Shazam prior to a proper announcement over the last year include Animal Collective, Danny Brown, Dirty Projectors, Avalanches, Justice, Moby, Crystal Castles, and Warpaint.

This spate of Shazam-leaked publicity campaigns illustrates the sheer complexity of distributing music in a digital world. When a new album is on the way, a label’s distributor ensures the audio, metadata, and other details are provided to digital services ahead of the release date. All this data should be in the YouTube system, for instance, so that if something leaks, the label can quickly complete a takedown request. It’s during this several-week process that Shazam receives the info as well.

Part of the thinking behind having unreleased albums on Shazam is that once industry folks around the world start picking out singles, playing songs on the radio, or posting audio snippets, it’s helpful if listeners can learn what they’re hearing. “This gets messed up when you get really cute about trying to hold back the album title and making that part of the story,” Jagjaguwar founder Darius Van Arman acknowledges. And, as artists from Burial to Frank Ocean have long demonstrated, amid all the internet’s instant accessibility, a little elusiveness can go a long way. Secrecy sells.

But these Shazam leaks may have a positive side for artists and labels, too—so much so that some acts presumably “leak” their album announcements this way. “Sometimes it’s not accidental,” Van Arman says. “I think now when that happens it’s really intentional. It’s just a way to help people feel like they’ve discovered the information themselves.” Good luck finding a band who’ll admit their supposedly grassroots album-title discovery was Astroturfed, but it’s a reasonable hunch.

As for the Shazam spoiler of My Woman, Van Arman says it ended up being a happy accident. The abbreviated “Intern” video, and people finding out about Olsen’s hotly anticipated LP by Shazaming it, “performed as the album announcement in a viral way,” he notes. “I’d love to say we intended that. At the end of of the day it was a great result. The mysterious ‘Intern’ video was a breadcrumb to some news that people were excited to discover using Shazam.”

Shazam, for its part, doesn’t have much to say about the matter. “Each month, Shazam adds hundreds of thousands of songs to its catalog, which contains tens of millions of songs,” a company spokesperson tells Pitchfork in a statement. “We receive music from hundreds of partners from around the world and work closely with them. Occasionally, there can be miscommunications, and we work closely with our partners to minimize these.”

Given that vast amount of music released on a regular basis, seeing album information show up on Shazam or other digital services seems like it’s going to be par for the course for all but the most closely guarded releases. Don’t look for Drake or Beyoncé, say, to shrug off having their secrets aired anytime soon. Another silver lining, of course, is that the issue isn’t the leaking of full albums, as it was a few years ago, but just the premature publication of details about those albums.

“This is not something nefarious like there used to be that guy stealing all the CDs at the plant,” says Jon Romero, director of digital marketing for Vector Management, where the client roster has ranged from Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood, and Lyle Lovett to the B-52’s, the Strokes, Ke$ha, Kings of Leon, and Prophets of Rage. “This is more like a glitch in the matrix that’s bound to happen.”

For Van Arman, a glitch like this is worth the other advantages Shazam holds for labels. “Instead of getting this information about sales or whatever, which is hard to specify where it’s coming from, with Shazam a lot of it’s geo-targeted—very specific to a location or region to due to IP address,” he says. “It can give, very early on, labels a sense of where fans are for an artist.” Beyond that, by definition these are listeners whose interest was piqued enough to Shazam a song. A label could put billboards up in, say, Pittsburgh and people there might stream the record, but that doesn’t give an indication of whether the listeners are actually fans of the music, the way Shazam theoretically does.

And when absolutely necessary, labels and artists can still maintain an album’s mystique. After the Olsen album title emerged via Shazam, Jagjaguwar changed its practice. Now, when an record’s very existence must be kept secret, the label holds off from submitting the information to Shazam. “We were a little bit more deliberate about it,” Van Arman reflects. “When the Bon Iver record came out and we were always holding back the announcement of that, people were Shazaming it. It didn’t have the same result that happened when Angel Olsen was Shazamed.”

Don’t expect all artists, however, to be so circumspect. For those in more of an indie mold, an organic-feeling way of disseminating the news of a new album may be a feature of Shazam, not a bug. But for blockbuster acts, where huge amounts of money are at stake, leaks still sink ships.

In January, following Coachella’s lineup announcement, scrutiny fell on the festival’s owner, Philip Anschutz, over his financial ties to groups promoting anti-LGBTQ causes. The media-averse Colorado billionaire made his fortune in energy but via his ubiquitous company AEG, now controls a broad swath of the live music industry—from venues and festivals to tours by Kanye West, Paul McCartney, and Taylor Swift. Given the charged political climate of late, some music fans became understandably concerned about what values their ticket purchases were supporting, inciting a flurryof headlines despite his foundation’s spending having long been public.

Perhaps unbeknownst to many in the music community, recently it has come into focus that Anschutz also has longstandingconnections to Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s controversial nominee to the Supreme Court. The Republican-controlled Senate has vowed to confirm Gorsuch as early as this week, but GOP leaders may need to invoke the so-called nuclear option and override a Democratic filibuster. Gorsuch is a contentious choice in part because Republicans didn’t so much as meet with moderate judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Scalia. But Dems have also challenged the staunchly conservative Gorsuch for his past rulings, voicing concerns about his independence from Trump, and, significantly, his ties to Anschutz.

Denver-born Gorsuch was working at a Washington law firm in the early 2000s when he first represented Anschutz and his businesses. In one case, Gorsuch successfully argued against a teacher pension fund, which claimed an Anschutz-controlled company was essentially ripping off investors by granting its majority shareholder a $373 million payout. Gorsuch later represented Anschutz amid an accounting fraud scandal at his telecom company Qwest Communications, in which Anschutz settled up with the government for $4.4 million but wasn’t found liable for wrongdoing.

Notably, Anschutz also had a hand in Gorsuch ascending to the federal bench in the first place. In 2006, a lawyer for Anschutz wrote a letter to the administration of President George W. Bush recommending Gorsuch for an opening on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. “Mr. Anschutz spoke with Senator Allard [of Colorado] about Neil Gorsuch, and Senator Allard suggested that we pass along Mr. Gorsuch’s resume to you,” it read in part. If you’re curious what a letter like that can do for someone’s career: Two days before the letter was sent, The Denver Post reported three front-runners for the appointment; Gorsuch was not among them.

As an appeals court judge, Gorsuch recused himself from many cases involving Anschutz, as shown by a list Gorsuch submitted to Senate. In 2010, Gorsuch spoke at Anschutz’s “annual dove hunt” at the 60-square-mile Eagles Nest Ranch. Attacking what he described as threats to the rule of law, Gorsuch ironically enough cited the “vitriol” associated with nominating judges.

Anschutz is a prolific donor to charitable and political causes alike, and his gifts also link him to Gorsuch, if only circumstantially. As the Times noted, Anschutz has donated to the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which Trump has credited for helping him decide who to nominate. Trump’s adviser for the Supreme Court, Leonard Leo, is the longtime executive vice president of the Federalist Society, an association of conservatives and libertarians who “place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law.”

Unmentioned in earlier reports, however, is the fact that Anschutz is a founding member of Wedgwood Circle, an arts investing organization with religiousundertones (and what appears to be quite the brochure). Wedgwood Circle’s CFO is Neil Corkery, who pops up frequently in IRS disclosures by conservative nonprofits—and who was also the most recently disclosed CFO of the Judicial Crisis Network. This is the group expected to spend at least $10 million on advertising for Gorsuch’s confirmation campaign—a hefty sum provided by donors who are legally permitted to remain anonymous. (Cole Finegan—an attorney at Hogan Lovells, a firm that represents Anschutz's businesses—told Pitchfork that these donations have not come from Anschutz, “directly or indirectly.”)

Regardless of who is behind this so-called dark money to confirm Gorsuch, that is far from the only matter concerning Senate Democrats. Gorsuch’s past with Anschutz also has come up in his hearings. Pressed by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont on whether Gorsuch would recuse himself from Supreme Court cases involving Anschutz, the nominee didn’t answer directly.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York also criticized Gorsuch’s ties to Anschutz. “Let’s look at how Judge Gorsuch got to this point,” Schumer said in a news conference. “He was recommended for the federal bench by Philip Anschutz, a hard-right special interest billionaire. Then he was handpicked for the Supreme Court by the right-wing special interest laden Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society … Now, millions of dollars in undisclosed special interest donations are being used to prop up his nomination. Americans deserve to know who is funding this effort to get Judge Gorsuch on the highest bench in the land."

When Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island asked Gorsuch why unidentified donors are so keen on having him on the bench, Gorsuch replied, “You’d have to ask them.” Whitehouse responded, “I can’t because I don’t know who they are.”

Whether fans or artists care to react in a way that expresses their ideological differences with one omnipresent music mogul remains to be seen—while there were early calls to boycott Coachella, the reality is complicated. But increasingly, the music community may at least start to know who Philip Anschutz is.

Black girls searching for themselves in lyrics must often compromise. Surrender your blackness, your femininity, or both. Look past the harm or the invisibility, find what you need, and take only that with you. Back then, so-called white genres like emo were as much my guilty pleasure as they were social currency—a means of relating to white faces within a town where racial divides existed largely along socioeconomic lines. The closet-sized newsroom for my high-school paper was soundtracked almost entirely by Taking Back Sunday, Dashboard Confessional, Fall Out Boy, and Brand New; occasionally this one Kottonmouth Kings song snuck on the playlist. I latched on to emo, needing music that could speak to my molehill problems posing as mountains, as well as my desperation to fit in despite uncertainty about who I was.

It wasn’t music that seemed like it was made for me, but the suburban, middle-class frustration of Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends spoke in a language that I could understand—at a time when I thought no one would. “The truth is you could slit my throat, and with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt,” goes the iconic lyric from “You’re So Last Summer,” epitomizing the melodramatic existential crisis that is adolescence. This was the age when every struggle and unrequited love felt like an attack on life itself—a feeling perfectly captured by Adam Lazzara and John Nolan’s dueling vocals, like a warring ego and id finishing each other’s sentences. But it also went deeper than that. Mental health dilemmas, real or imagined, were less commonly discussed within the black community back then—a silence that until very recently, extended to black popular music. And so it felt impossible to see my adolescent self in rap’s glamorous posturing and street tales. My issues felt more “Ghost Man on Third,” where death’s only threat comes from the unraveling narrator himself, than the rightfully paranoid menacing of 50 Cent’s “Many Men (Wish Death).”

While hip-hop has long been considered hyper-masculine, early ’00s emo musicians mostly framed themselves as victims of both the world and the lovers who supposedly failed them. That trait—a privileged and immature way of processing pain—made Tell All Your Friends and other albums like it a welcome fuel-to-the-fire for self-loathing teenagers. To be sure, rap that deals in angst has existed from the very beginning, but representation isn’t so much about what exists as what can readily be found, packaged in plain sight, and given the tools to succeed. That the phrase “emo rap”—as in Lil Uzi Vert or Drake—has begun to embed itself in the wider pop-culture lexicon is no coincidence. It’s not that purveyors of rap only recently became capable of such expression. It’s that mainstream audiences finally seem ready to process expressions of black pain—specifically that of black men—that aren’t coated in a facade of bravado, sex, or violence.

In a 2003 Village Voice article, Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged the myths perpetuated by the era’s hip-hop, then led by 50 Cent. “The streets as gangsta rappers claim as their source are no longer as angry as they are sad. For that reason alone, gangsta rap should be dead by now,” he wrote. “But still it lingers, fueled by America’s myth of the menacing black man. Gangsta rap today is about as reflective of reality as, well, a reality show. And yet still it lumbers across the landscape of pop, shouting, ‘I’m real.’”

Indeed, the early ’00s would have been an apt backdrop for an emo-rap opus, several years before Kanye West wallowed in AutoTune on 808s & Heartbreak. Broken relationships, heartache, and a general outsider feeling existed much like they always have, but opportunities to portray that reality in terms of sheer emotional havoc had been limited. Unlike emo, rap wasn’t granted the privilege to “force no difficult questions, just bemoan the lack of answers,” as Andy Greenwald once describedthegenre. Instead, despair was marketed as everything but, manifesting as bombast, materialism, and warped nihilism. “A true narrative of ‘the streets’ and the black men who inhabit them would depict a deadbeat ex-con, fleeing mounting child support, unable to find work, and disconnected from the lives of his kids,” Coates continued. “It would chronicle his gradual slide off the American radar even as his mother, daughter, and girlfriend (not wife) make inroads. It’s a story that doesn’t lend itself to romance. More importantly, it doesn’t fit the image of black men in the American imagination.”

Coates’ “American imagination,” like Claudia Rankine’s “racial imaginary” and Toni Morrison’s “white gaze,” speak to the quandary of creating art that will inevitably be consumed, critiqued, or otherwise confirmed by white people and is, therefore, subject to the limitations of their experiences and assumptions about yours. There may be no modern genre more visible in this regard than hip-hop—music borne by resistance that has, quite literally, been weaponized against its creators. It’s unsurprising that aggression has existed as the primary mode of expression for negative emotions in rap. Historical precedent shows that black people become hyper-visible when we’re angry, but run the risk of erasure when we’re sad: one mode humanizes us, the other further demonizes. Street rap, in particular, had suited the needs of both audience and artist in an unwitting social performance, a mutual exchange of credibility (and profit) for biased confirmation of stereotypes.

But over time, rap’s tough-guy representation has slowed its dominance. Jay Z’s tender but restrained “Song Cry,” from 2002, softened slightly into the loneliness of Kanye’s “Heartless” in 2008, which turned completely inward three years later with the pity party that is Drake’s “Marvin’s Room.” Gradually, this spectrum of vulnerability has allowed in more nuanced issues like mental health. With its first-person revelations of unseen misery, Kid Cudi’s 2009 “Soundtrack 2 My Life” opened a door for Kendrick Lamar’s “u,” a searing confessional about how difficult self-love can actually be. There’s a long road ahead to fully destigmatize these matters in hip-hop, but it feels crucial right now that adolescent rap fans in black communities can readily find songs that speak to their angst—coming from a face that resembles their own.

In hindsight, it seems unfortunate that I couldn’t place my teenage self somewhere—anywhere—within the rap available to me. But the music that finds and moves us doesn’t always line up with the identity that the world sees or expects. I learned to code-switch early, realizing that fandom could be just as performative as the art itself. I could pound out the “Grindin’” beat on a lunchroom table, but in another world just down the hall, a Taking Back Sunday lyric held the same cultural relevance. Both in its creation and consumption, music is a racialized (and gendered) experience that highlights rather than voids identity politics, but it’s also the great connector. It took going to college, in a place brimming with black people of all different social backgrounds, to find faces like mine that had also taken refuge in Tell All Your Friends. It turns out there’s a lot of us black emo kids, but maybe we—like hip-hop itself—needed extra time to figure out how to be both.

When Adrianne Lenker was 5, a railroad spike fell from the beginnings of a makeshift treehouse in her family’s Niswah, Minnesota yard, landing on her head and almost killing her. This moment moves into focus on “Mythological Beauty,” the lead single from her folk-rock band Big Thief’s gorgeous sophomore album, Capacity, out June 9 via Saddle Creek. But where other songwriters would let the vivid details of such childhood trauma take the lead, 25-year-old Lenker calmly examines the memory from her mom’s perspective. She imagines how it must have felt to be a young mother of three rushing to the hospital with a dishrag to your child’s cracked skull, wondering how life ended up like this and if there’s any turning back. Lenker often writes from this familial point of view on the new album. “I’m not quite sure if I’m writing the songs from myself to my future child, or to my inner child, or from my mother to me,” she tells me.

That Lenker can be as open-hearted and empathetic as she is, in light of all she has gone through, should be considered a gift to listeners. Even more striking is the timing. Speaking with Lenker three times over the last eight months, it becomes clear that she’s constantly processing her past, proverbially sorting through old photographs and going through as many bad memories as good ones in her songs. Her complicated history extends far beyond skull fractures, beginning with her birth into a cult and subsequent years of upheaval as her family extricated themselves from religion. From there, her early life became all about songwriting, thanks to her musician father. By the time she was 13, she was on track to become a child pop star—but ultimately it’s not what Lenker wanted. She walked away but never left music behind. Though Big Thief has just started to gain real momentum, following the Brooklyn quartet’s promising debut Masterpiecelast year, Lenker’s years of musical experience and quiet strength show in her work.

Compiled over the course of our ambling conversations, here is Adrianne Lenker’s story, in her own words:

I was born into a religious cult in Indianapolis, straight up. They had an apartment complex in this one area, and there were all these rules. My parents met through church and got married really shortly after, when they were both searching for connection and meaning, just like everyone is when they’re 20.

They both carried heavy burdens from their childhoods and were growing up as they were raising us. And the church wasn’t like, “Hey, come join our cult”—they just made them feel like part of a community, beckoned them in with this warmth and acceptance. Then it revealed itself for what it was, and thank God my parents were just like, “We’re out of here.” I was only there until I was 4, but there was a lot of residual debris—I was coming out of what felt like a cloud of judgment and control for another four years.

At that point we lived out of our big blue van. I remember staying with all kinds of characters for a while, all around the Midwest. We stayed in Coon Rapids [Minnesota] in a tiny apartment with this Russian family: two parents and their five little kids, then three of us kids and my parents in a two bedroom. We stayed with these two women who were living this Amish lifestyle, so my sister and I had to wear dresses and scarves around our heads. I remember when my dad said we could wear pants—I was so stoked because I was a tomboy. I went straight into wearing long, baggy shorts and backwards hats.

We lived in 14 different houses until I was 8, renting here and there. My dad suddenly had this realization about the religious stuff. He felt like he’d been deceived and he was almost throwing religion off himself. It was like this pendulum that had swung all the way to one side with being repressed and pent up, so it just had to go to the other. My parents became very open, and it was a traumatic shift. We went from not celebrating any holidays to having our first Christmas and Halloween when I was 8 or 9.

At that point my parents bought a house [in the Minneapolis suburbs], but right before we bought the house, my dad was like, “We’re selling everything and moving into a bus, this is what God is telling us to do.” So, we sold all of it. And then, sure enough, that wasn’t what we were supposed to do. When we moved into the house, we just didn’t have anything, only lawn chairs in the living room, blankets and pillows to sleep on.

The first song I wrote, when I was 8, was about feeling really angry—like the weight of everything on my shoulders. That’s something I’ve always tended to do. I’m the oldest of three and I still do it. It was like, “The pile of things I got to do stacks up to the sun. I'm angry at the world. I just want this feeling to be gone. I'm not sure that I can take it anymore.” Then the chorus was like, “That's just the way life is sometimes.” My first few songs were about that—always thinking about life from outside of it. A lot of my perspective had to do with my dad because he was always having philosophical discussions with me, asking questions and encouraging me to ask questions.

He’s a songwriter and he would spend so many nights getting in these trances on the guitar or piano where he wouldn’t want to stop. That meditation—where the most important thing was following the path of inspiration and getting everything you can before it disappears—really seeped into me. He would always talk about the muse and how it will visit you if you put your soul in a certain state. On some level he was consciously giving me this tool for healing, but I’m not sure if he realized that it would become my main form of survival.

When I was little, he taught me everything he knew—basic chords but also chords and melodies that aren’t typical to learn in your first stages of playing guitar. He also had this way of recognizing his own shortcomings and bringing in teachers. My sister, brother, and I all took voice lessons, and we all practiced karate. He always wanted me to be independent and fearless. He taught me the tools to never be alone in any place, how to read people intuitively. When I was 12, he would put me on a bus to Minneapolis, and I would transfer in St. Paul and take another bus to go hang out with this musician and stay-at-home dad, who would show me records and work on songwriting with me. My dad would also take me to open mic nights, and I would play bars when I was 12.

My dad was basically my manager from ages 13 to 16. I was on this train towards becoming a child pop star. Not that I would have necessarily become a star, but that was the goal. It wasn’t my goal, though, which I learned after making a couple records with producers and professional adult musicians. I just didn’t know what my vision was at 13. Look at anybody’s work that they did between 12 and 20: You can see yourself growing up. It was like if you took a kid’s art project and put thousands of dollars behind it and said, “This is solidified.” It was frustrating for anyone who was part of it. I didn’t have a label or anything. My dad’s super resourceful and a really passionate speaker. He would just present my music and get people who believed in it on board, so there were a handful of people who funded these two albums I did between 13 and 16. But one of the biggest investors was definitely my dad, even though we were definitely broke throughout.

My parents started separating when I was 12, and I moved into an apartment with my dad [in downtown Minneapolis], while my siblings were mostly at my mom’s house. I went to school through eighth grade, but I had a really hard time in school socially. My dad agreed to set me up with two tutors [instead of high school], and I met with them a couple times a week to study for my GED. I got my GED when I was 16, and I was just doing music full time. But there was a turning point around then where things got really tough with my dad.

I left and stayed with a friend. I cut my hair. It was the first time that I asserted myself as an individual and decided to remove myself from the situation. And then I began working with this guy Jeff Arundel, who took me under his wing and reminded me that nothing’s at stake. I was so stressed. I’d had people who’d invested in my music and been made aware of that pressure constantly, even though I didn’t really like the music that much. That’s right when I started getting into Elliott Smith and Iron & Wine, and I wanted to move into a more stripped-down sound. I also wanted to go to school again and be around peers.

I heard about this five-week summer program at Berklee [School of Music] and went on a scholarship when I was 17. It’s an expensive school and we didn’t have the money, so I had this crazy motivation when I went for the summer program. I made an appointment with the Dean of Admissions and went up there with my guitar to play him a song. I told him that I didn’t know music theory but that I wanted to go there. And he felt something from the song.

After I went home, I got a call from him that Susan Tedeschi [of the Tedeschi Trucks Band] was doing a series of concerts to raise money for one student to get a full ride to Berklee. I ended up getting it, going to Berklee, and being one of like two girls in the guitar department while I was there. There was this running joke around school that if you were a girl, people would just ask you all the time, “So you’re here for vocals, yeah?” So it was super cool to be supported by this shredding female guitar badass. Not to focus on her gender, but it was just really encouraging to see a woman doing something that you mostly see guys doing. I hadn’t even thought about it until that point.

At Berklee I just kept at what I was doing and formed a band. It felt good to be away from home, to make my own decisions and not have this looming idea of a career over my head. I really developed a lot as a writer while I was there.

The summer [after I graduated] I moved to New York. I met Buck [Meek, Big Thief guitarist and her chief collaborator dating back to Buck and Anne] on the day I moved there, at this corner market Mr. Kiwi. Technically we had already played a show together in Boston, so we recognized each other but weren’t sure from where. I didn’t know anyone in the city, and he was like, “Well, I’ve been here for a little while, I ride my bike everywhere, I can show you how to get around the city.” We just explored, and eventually we started to play songs together. We decided to buy that white conversion van and go on tour, just make that our whole lives. We didn’t make a band just to make a band—we waited for the right people to come. Basically, right when I got to New York, the universe was like, “Here you go—here’s the beginning of your band.” If anything had been altered, everything could be different.

Earlier this week, Splendor & Misery—the sophomore album by experimental L.A. rap group clipping.—was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. The Hugo is the highest prize in science fiction/fantasy, granted annually to the genres’ best literature, cinema, television, comics, and visual art. But the awards have never been particularly receptive to music. The last time a musical album was recognized by the Hugos was 1971, when Paul Kantner’s Blows Against the Empire was nominated. The Jefferson Airplane guitarist’s solo debut grandly envisioned a countercultural exodus to outer space, helping set the stage for many more sci-fi concept albums to come, starting with prog-rock’s explosion.

The storyline that winds through Splendor & Misery is just as political as Kantner’s. Set in a dystopian future, the LP revolves around a mutineer among a starship’s slave population, who falls in love with the ship’s computer. This Afrofuturist narrative, as rapped by Daveed Diggs, is matched by a dissonant yet sympathetic soundscape from producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes—one that evokes the isolation and complicated passion of the premise. Visually, this arc is represented in Hutson’s cover art: a spaceman with his pressure suit in tatters, revealing bare feet. “It’s a reference to how runaway slaves have been depicted in the U.S. in newspaper announcements and paintings like Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series,” Hutson says.

Diggs is no stranger to awards, having snagged both a Grammy and a Tony for his role in Hamilton, but clipping.’s Hugo nomination is just as profound. It’s the crossing of a barrier that’s been in place for 46 years, one that’s kept countless speculative songwriters—from George Clinton to Janelle Monaé—from being recognized as legitimate creators within the genre alongside authors and filmmakers. “I’ve followed the Hugos pretty carefully my whole life,” Hutson says. “I just never thought my own work would cross over there.” 

Pitchfork: What’s your background in science fiction and fantasy?

William Hutson: All three of us have consumed science fiction for our whole lives. When I was a child, reading Tolkien and things like that were always important. My mom read a lot of science fiction, and she would just pile stuff up for me. Even when I was in fourth grade, she was like, “Oh, this is pretty good, you should read [Larry Niven’s] Ringworld. You should read [William Gibson’s] Neuromancer.” Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy was huge for me. I became really obsessed around college with all that late-’60s, early-’70s New Wave of science fiction stuff. So I started to connect my own personal politics to the types of fantasy I was reading, the sort of left politics made into science fiction.

 I was also a huge “Star Trek” fan. What I loved about “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was that it’s the only mainstream piece of science fiction that imagines, in the future, not only technology getting better, but humans getting better. I was like, “This is exactly what my politics are.”

How did science fiction start to shape clipping.’s music, particularly Splendor & Misery?

With the success of the band, it became our jobs, so we wanted more of ourselves in the project. Back when clipping. was just this weird side project that the three of us did, it was this very limited experiment. We needed to expand things. We needed to start talking about what actually mattered to us.

Our studio is in Jonathan’s basement, and Jonathan has this massive modular synthesizer that he’s been putting together for the past ten years. Modular synthesizers have this association with prog, which was always kind of science-fiction-y. They even look like a spaceship, and the sounds they make have been so association with goofy, retro visions of the future. In clipping., we’d always avoided the types of sounds that are traditionally associated with modular synthesizers, all those sweeping laser sounds. But Jonathan said, “I actually want to use this thing for what it’s for, just once.” But we need to frame it in a way that’s not cheesy somehow.

We’d made a song on our first album [2014’s CLPPNG] called “Taking Off” that lyrically had something to do with science fiction metaphors. We started to imagine that we could frame our next album as a more science-fiction-themed project. We started making beats. Jonathan and I would patch up the synthesizer and record 15 minutes of us turning knobs, then we’d edit it into something more structured.

Before Daveed started writing the lyrics, we decided we wanted a through-narrative to the songs. I got really into this idea of, “What if the Civil War had gone a different way? What if these struggles were projected onto a sci-fi universe? What if the history of slave songs and folk ballads had continued on into the future?” I wrote basically a short story that I gave to Daveed, then Daveed wrote the lyrics. His words changed everything—he added the love story between the computer AI and the mutinous survivor.

There’s been no shortage of great sci-fi albums since Paul Kantner’s 1971 Hugo nomination. Why do you think it’s taken so long for music to be recognized as a valid medium for science fiction and fantasy?

I have absolutely no idea what the science-fiction literary community’s relationship, as a whole, to music might be. But I think it has more to do with the indifference of the music industry to the sci-fi community. I made it very clear on social media that this is a world I want to be a part of, that the Hugos were important to me. I reached out to Hugo voters. I think Afrika Bambaataa, who totally deserved a Hugo, could easily have been nominated for one, if there’d been Twitter back then, and if people had really pushed for it.

We haven’t invented anything. Since the late ’60s, there have been many science fiction albums that have been narratively driven. Why the hell wasn’t Kilroy Was Here by Styx nominated for a Hugo? But the Hugos have said for a very long time that science fiction doesn’t belong to just one type of media. They are allowing for all this other stuff.

You’re up against “Doctor Who” and “Game of Thrones.” Would you want to see a separate Hugo category for music, so that musicians aren’t competing with these huge TV shows?

I don’t know if this is a selfish way to answer this, but not really. There are tons of science fiction albums being released, but I don’t think there are enough great ones to justify nominating five per year. Once every handful of years, a special award could go to a really outstanding science-fiction album. I’m not saying we are that, at all. But maybe sort of an honorary thing would be good—the science fiction community’s gesture toward a work in a medium they don’t necessarily cover very well.

I’m going to sound like an asshole now, but this is what happens if there’s a Hugo category just for music: every year the nominees are just five power-metal albums set in Tolkien-esque, high-fantasy worlds, with greased-up barbarians on the cover riding dragons? [laughs] I would love for there to be more science fiction music that attempts to be literary on a different scale.

The Hugo Awards ceremony, in Helsinki this August, is basically the sci-fi equivalent of the Oscars. Are you guys planning on attending?

Um, definitely two of us will be there. The other one, it depends on his schedule now that he’s a big star and all that shit. [laughs] The goal is to do a couple shows in Finland and Norway this summer, just to get us there. That’s looking less and less likely, but still, at least two of us will be there. Because fuck all that, I’m not missing this. We’re never going to get nominated for this again. Our next album will not be science fiction—actually, I shouldn’t say that, because it’s not done—but there’s no way it’ll happen again. Even though there’s no way we’re going to win against “Game of Thrones” or “Doctor Who,” I want to be there. If for no other reason, I would happily, awkwardly, sheepishly approach my favorite authors and tell them what their books mean to me.

Until recently, it seemed unlikely that there would ever be a fourth Slowdive record. Just a week after the February 1995 release of third album Pygmalion, the British quintet was dropped from Creation Records and effectively broke up. Pygmalion’s drastic departure from dream-pop had prompted the dissolution in multiple ways. Drummer Simon Scott had left Slowdive the previous year, feeling disillusioned by the drum machines, computers, and loops that guitarist and vocalist Neil Halstead had used to make the album largely on his own. But this direction also drew sneers from the British music press, who at that moment seemed more content to boogie to Britpop than sway to shoegaze. “Yet more career suicide,” was how the NME described Pygmalion.

The “yet more” is crucial here. For as beloved as Slowdive have become among a younger generation of subterranean listeners, their first two albums—1991’s Just for a Day and 1993’s Souvlaki—hadn’t made them critical darlings like Creation labelmates My Bloody Valentine. But then shoegaze and dream-pop experienced an unexpected revival in the late ’00s, as acts like Beach House and M83 hit their strides, chillwave boomed, and MBV finally returned to the road. With it came a new appreciation for Slowdive. By 2014, the demand for their reunion was high enough to support a five-month world tour and a slew of festival performances—and come May 5th, a new album via Dead Oceans. Although it’s been more than two decades since the group ganged up on the delay pedals in the studio, the swirling guitars, woozy harmonies, and soaring choruses of Slowdive make it sound like Souvlaki’s long-lost sister.

Pitchfork spoke to Halstead about why Slowdive decided to come back, what cemented shoegaze’s legacy, and how records still should require a listening ritual.

Pitchfork: Were you surprised at all by the warm reception to your reunion shows?

Neil Halstead: We were completely taken off-guard! People said to us, “You should get back together, you guys would be surprised.” And we were. We were also surprised that the audience was a younger generation, which was brilliant. It was heartening to see that the records have resonated with not just kids of our age.

How did it go from playing some shows to recording a new album?

When we first talked about getting back together, the main emphasis was on trying to do a record. Doing shows on and off for a year and a half was a really good way for us to create some momentum to make a record. Obviously we didn’t hit the ground running—we had to crank the engine up again. Because for us, it was a bit like, What kind of record would we do? Would it be like Pygmalion—which was more electronic, sample-based, ambient—or would it be something closer to our earlier stuff, which was noisier and more band-based? We ended up going for something that has the momentum of playing live. It’s a stepping stone record for us in terms of getting back into doing Slowdive—a familiar record for anyone who's heard us.

We’re all really excited about doing another record at this point. I always think of records as a moment in time. The next moment is maybe where we push the boundaries a bit more, where it doesn’t have to necessarily be so familiar.

You were the primary composer on Pygmalion. Was the process more collaborative this time?

This one was definitely a lot more collaborative than Pygmalion. A lot of Pygmalion was done in my bedroom, then I’d bring it to everyone. We were at a weird point in the band then. I was kinda dragging people along with that record.  

Everyone had a hand in bringing the new songs to fruition. “Falling Ashes” was a song that Simon [Scott, drummer] had more input on—he's super into field music and ambient stuff. Which was interesting because Simon was the first person to leave the band, so he wasn't involved with Pygmalion at all. He still says that’s the record he wished he was involved with, because that’s more of where he’s at musically these days.

What’s one perspective you brought to this album that perhaps you didn’t have before?

Around Pygmalion, we were all just starting to get more familiar with how studios work and working away with our own selves. We finished the band right at the point when you could buy a laptop and a couple of microphones and make a record, where computers were getting smarter with this stuff. Bringing that part of how you can work now to Slowdive was interesting.

About a year and a half ago, we started popping in studios. We went back to the first studio we ever did anything in [Whitehouse Recording Studio in Somerset], which was exactly the same. What would happen is, we’d do a few days in a studio here and there, then I’d bring it back to my studio in Cornwall and play around with it, send stuff to the other guys. We’d get back together again and work on something else or rework the old ideas. In the same way we made our first album, it was written and recorded at the same time. We still work together quite well—it would’ve been pretty disastrous if we’d lost that part of the Slowdive chemistry.

Why do you think shoegaze has stuck around?

Partly because the bands were never big bands—they were always these little bands making underground music and then Britpop came. In England, that opened up the indie world to the mainstream world. But shoegaze never became part of the big music industry. So maybe it was ripe for rediscovery, in the same way that when those Nuggets collections and Pebbles compilations—the old garage rock and psych—were reissued in the ’80s, they became really influential. You’d never heard your parents playing those records—they were never mainstream music. But they were brilliant bands that got a second bite after they were re-released. Maybe the internet had a real good impact on shoegaze because it’s given kids now a chance to check it out.

Speaking of a younger generation finding shoegaze, you worked with Beach House producer Chris Coady on the new album. Why him?

We definitely wanted to work with Chris because we all love Beach House’s records, and we love the way they sound. The stuff he worked on previously definitely had an influence on asking him to get involved.

We recorded the whole record but we needed someone to come in and just polish it, bring it together. We sent out tracks to a few different people, and we asked Chris if he wouldn’t mind doing a demo mix for us. When his came back, we thought, Yes, that’s the way we want to hear that song. He works out of Sunset Sound in L.A., which has this kind of brilliant heritage in pop music—all the Doors records, Beach Boys. That was a bias, really—we didn't realize that when we asked Chris to do it—but we all went out there.

This is the first Slowdive album in the age of streaming. How would you prefer people listen to it?

I would prefer people listen to it as an album, but I know that’s old fashioned. Songs need homes—that's how you create it. We’re already conscious of making a record with an A-side and a B-side, which is how we made all our records. We’re definitely that generation that actually grew up going to buy albums, getting really into artwork, reading up on them, and really enjoying them as a piece of art. For me, there’s still a brilliant kind of buzz when you buy a record: the ritual of sitting down, putting on the record player, listening to the A-side, and then turning it over.  

From MJ to Bey to JT, there’s a long history of standout members in pop groups breaking away in hopes of solo superstardom. But last fall, L.A. R&B group the Internet decided against those unspoken rules. They announced that every member would release a solo project before they recorded the fourth Internet album, following their bold third album Ego Death. “Once we all drop our solo projects, I know we’ll all feel free to do whatever is best for the band, for the Internet album,” Syd told the FADER last October. “So there’s no more, ‘Ugh, I really wanna do this in a song and this [album] is my only chance to do that.”

What makes this approach even more curious is that since their 2011 founding by Odd Future members Syd (then Syd tha Kid) and Matt Martians, the Internet has experienced a number of membership fluctuations. Between that FADER interview and an early 2017 tour announcement, keyboardist Jameel Bruner quietly left the Internet (much like Tay Walker, who played keyboards from 2011 to 2013). Syd, Martians, Steve Lacy, Christopher Smith, and Patrick Paige II remain in the group, and already they’re making good on their solo promises. Martian’s The Drum Chord Theory arrived this January, followed the next month by Syd’s wave-making debut Fin and Steve Lacy’s Demo, which the guitarist dubbed a “song series” (not an LP/EP).

When the Internet played NYC’s Webster Hall back in February, Syd, Martians, and Lacy spent a good chunk of the show hyping up the forthcoming solo projects from Smith and Paige. The lack of ego among them that night was impressive—everything was about what’s right for the team. This is in sharp contrast to Odd Future’s group dynamic, which has led to on-stage squabbling about Tyler, the Creator’s leadership. In light of the Internet’s unique approach to solo stardom in service of group greatness, here’s a brief guide to each member’s work within and without the “family,” as Syd calls it on “All About Me.”

Syd

(Photo by Frédéric Ragot/Redferns)

Duties: Vocals, Production
Role: The Cornerstone
Recent SoloRelease:Fin, February 2017, via Columbia

Fin shows that Syd isn’t just an intoxicating singer, a voice for same-sex romance on record, or even the Internet’s beating heart—she has the potential to pull double duty on the pop songwriting front too, à la The-Dream. If given the right push by radio, Fin standouts like “Body” and “Know” could crack the Top 40, with Syd playing the role of ’90s-R&B throwback possessing a strong pulse on what’s next. But for all her star quality (and major label status), Syd doesn’t embody a typical lead singer archetype. Throughout the Webster Hall show, she was a beacon of positivity, encouraging the audience to sing along to her bandmates’ solo songs.

Solo Standout Moment:

Group Standout Moment:

Matt Martians

(Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images)

Duties: Vocals, Production, Keyboard
Role: Mr. Miyagi
Recent Solo Release:The Drum Chord Theory, January 2017, via Three Quarter

Matt Martians’ older brother worked as OutKast’s A&R, and it’s clear he has applied that knowledge to the Internet. He seems keenly aware of what needs to happen for the band to continue evolving beyond an Odd Future affiliate.“I knew [2015’s Ego Death] was a make or break album,” he told Pharrell of the Grammy nominated album he executive-produced alongside Syd and Lacy. “We needed for the folks in the hood when they first hear this to be like, oooh.” His recent solo debut LP, The Drum Chord Theory, also provides that oooh moment, recalling his early days as the resident new-age funk wizard of Odd Future andproduction duo theJet Age of Tomorrow. Clad in his signature Lacoste hats and white sunglasses, Martians presents more maturity and confidence in Drum Chord Theory’s psychedelic sounds than even his recent Internet work.

Solo Standout Moment:

Group Standout Moment:

Steve Lacy

(Photo by Frédéric Ragot/Redferns)

Duties: Vocals, Production, Guitar
Role: The Future
Recent Solo Release:Steve Lacy’s Demo, February 2017, via Three Quarter

Not many people can say the first album they helped executive-produce was nominated for a Grammy; even fewer can say this occurred before they graduated high school. At just 18, Steve Lacy can boast as much. His recent Steve Lacy’s Demo is a testament to his status within a generation that believes determination and a charged iPhone can get you anywhere and everywhere. Though Lacy’s initial collection of songs is only 13 minutes long, he makes the most of this time by asserting his flair for Motown melodies and pop chords that paint a picture of teenage heartbreak.

Solo Standout Moment:

Group Standout Moment:

Patrick Paige II

(Photo by Jim Bennett/FilmMagic)

Duties: Rapping, Bass, Production
Role: The Secret Weapon
Upcoming Solo Release: TBA

Every group has a secret weapon, and for the Internet, it’s Patrick Page II’s ability to rhyme with the conviction, confidence, and lyricism of rap legends. With just one instrumental EP from last year under his belt, Paige has previewed his talents as a bassist and producer along the same lines as his band’s soul-funk roots. But the full extent of his MC skills are just starting to come into focus, as they did at the Webster Hall show when he took the spotlight for a currently unreleased song about his sister. A small glimmer of his solo potential, and a nod to the Internet’s hip-hop side.

Solo Standout Moment:Group Standout Moment (he co-produced and co-wrote):

Christopher Smith

(Photo by Imeh Akpanudosen/Getty Images for Coachella)

Duties: Drums, Production
Role: The Quiet One
Upcoming Solo Release: TBA

As the most mysterious member of the Internet, Smith has been quiet about potential solo projects (and pretty much everything else). But what is apparent is his ability to introduce a distinctly new energy to old songs in concert. With his promised solo set, there’s an obvious opportunity for Smith to emerge from behind his sunglasses and drumkit—a role that doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch after you’ve seen him chop it up amiably with fans following the Webster Hall show.

Solo Standout Moment:

Group Standout Moment:

I only saw Pan Sonic once, around the turn of the millennium, and when I did, I zonked out. Not because it was boring—quite the contrary: the sub-bass frequencies the Finnish noise duo wrung out of their arcane electronic gizmos were just the thing to lull me to a vertical sleep, right there on the oak floor of San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. The storied rock venue was a strange place for Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen to post up, but then again, short of a crumbling warehouse in East Berlin or a coal-fired power plant somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, there weren’t many places where their music didn’t seem completely alien. 

Pan Sonic may have named themselves after the Japanese electronics company Panasonic—who sent a cease-and-desist letter before the offending middle “a” was dropped—but there was nothing futuristic or consumer-friendly about their sound. Using a battery of custom-made tone generators, they conjured a form of electronic music that sounded like raw electricity: a high-voltage stream of endless crackle and throb. Their rhythms could approximate techno, but Pan Sonic’s music conveyed a kind of danger that was rare in dance music. At times, this jolt made it seem as if they were trying to tap into the very current that powered their machines—and in a very real way, they did try to become one with their waveforms. According to a legendary story, the duo once locked themselves in a room and submitted themselves to 10 hours of ultra-low frequencies at 125 decibels—an endurance test that threatened to scramble their insides.

Pan Sonic's influence over noisemakers of every stripe is incalculable, and Mika Vainio’s death this week leaves an enormous hole in the world of experimental electronic music. In tribute to his legacy, we select some of the highlights of his sprawling discography.

Panasonic – “Uranokemia” (1996)

Released before their late-’90s name change, “Uranokemia” is the lead track on their Osasto EP, released the year after their debut album, Vakio. More than almost any other track in their catalog, it sums up the unrelenting heaviness of which they were capable. There’s almost nothing to it: just a low buzz, a blast-furnace wheeze, and an analog drum machine pushed lovingly into the red.

Vainio / Väisänen / Vega – “Endless” (1998)

Pan Sonic had little in common with most other electronic acts; their true forebears were synth-wielding proto-punks Suicide. So it’s only fitting that the duo wound up collaborating with Suicide’s Alan Vega a few times, most notably on the 1998 LP Endless. In 2013, Vainio told The Wire a great story about discovering Suicide in the late ‘70s, at the age of 17. “Me and my friend were in a small town, Hämeenlinna, in Finland, and went to a shop selling mainly domestic equipment, like washing machines and whatever, but they had a rack of LPs too. And there was Suicide. I had very little money, so I asked to hear it. The guy behind the counter said: ‘This is really horrible, you don’t want to hear this.’ And I said: ‘Well, maybe you can still play it to me,’ and after ‘Ghost Rider’ started it was, phew, I felt immediately that something really important is happening.”

Ø – “Kuvio” (1994)

In addition to Pan Sonic, Vainio was a prolific solo artist, both under his own name and using a variety of aliases (Philus, Ø). “Kuvio” comes from the first Ø album, 1994’s Metri, and it is a mindfuck of startling intensity. Artists like Jeff Mills, Basic Channel, and Plastikman had already established the outlines of minimal techno, but “Kuvio” hollows it out to an unprecedented degree, stripping back to nothing but chilly, tumbling arpeggios backed by wraithlike tendrils of sound. The similarly reduced “Twin Bleebs” does something similar but adds phase delays to the equation, to an even more psychedelic effect.

Philus – “Acidophilus” (1998)

Pan Sonic preferred inscrutable, hand-soldered devices to off-the-shelf synths, but here Vainio pays tribute to the gooey squelch of the Roland TB-303. Released under his Philus alias, “Acidophilus” is a minimalist experiment in classic acid: slow, spaced out, and as gnarly as you can handle, with stereo panning that’ll do your head in.

Mika Vainio – “Osittain (Partly)” (2000)

Where his solo output could often land near brutal simplicity, his 2000 album Kajo channeled its humming electronics into gentler, more sensuous forms. “Osittain” balances unsteady drones with idling engines, crackling line noise, and oceanic static. It’s noise as buoyant as the Dead Sea.

Pan Sonic & Keiji Haino – “So Many Things I Still Have Yet to Say” (2010)

From Vega to Merzbow to Sunn O))) to Fushitsuha’s Keiji Haino (minimalist improv’s dark prince), Pan Sonic’s list of collaborators is a reflection of their own stature as noise savants. A few days after a 2007 collaboration at Berlin’s Volksbühne—which resulted in the live album Shall I Download a Blackhole and Offer It To You—Haino, Vainio, and Väisänen regrouped in the studio and came up with this slow-burning maelstrom of thrumming electronics, guitar feedback, and distant wails.

Pan Sonic – “Pan Finale” (2010)

Pan Sonic called it quits with 2010’s Gravitoni, but it wouldn’t be the last time. They regrouped in 2014 with the live album Okastus, announced their demise yet again, then returned last year with Atomin Paluu, the soundtrack to a film about the construction of the first nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster. But “Pan Finale,” the closing track off Gravitoni, will go down in history as the group’s definitive swan song. Beginning with a slow, loping rhythm, it gradually builds in intensity until it seems to have folded in all of the duo’s tricks from over the years, from noise blasts to delicate chimes. With its climax reached, the track simply shudders to a long, screeching halt, like a buzzsaw winding down. Its final note is a flat-lining EKG. RIP, Mika Vainio.

To paraphrase a wise sage, you come at the queen, you best not miss. Indeed, Remy Ma’s ongoing war with reigning rap-pop monarch Nicki Minaj is a high-risk, high-reward gamble. Executed well, a publicity-generating rap battle can be a boon to both artists, burnishing reputations and showcasing lyrical acumen, all while stoking sales and streaming stats. But this particular battle has even higher stakes. It stretches back a decade to a Minaj mixtape verse, reigniting last year following Remy’s six-year jail stint and accelerating this winter with Minaj’s verse on Gucci Mane’s “Make Love” and Remy’s salvo of diss tracks, including the Nas-jacking“SHEther.” Remy’s time behind bars coincided perfectly with the stunning rise of Minaj’s career, from mixtape scrapper to rap-feature MVP to platinum-seller to “American Idol” judge. It’s hard not to picture her behind bars all that time like a crazed De Niro, seething at Minaj and biding her time.

At the heart of many long-running rap beefs is a fight for sales steez and commercial accolades. That fact is exaggerated all the more by the elephant in the room here: gender. You can hear it in the verses where Nicki not only insults Remy’s skills as an MC but takes direct aim at her sales prowess: “Silly rabbit—to be the queen of rap, you gotta sell records, you gotta get plaques.” Simply put, the music industry has supported only a handful of platinum-level female rappers throughout hip-hop history. One rap queen generally reigns at a time, while a handful of others hang on at a lower commercial tier. There was one particularly fertile period at the turn of the millennium where the industry supported several women rhymers concurrently, but beyond that glorious moment, the history of female rappers as sales forces is thin. And in the 21st century, it’s steadily gotten worse.

Consider this: In the entire history of Billboard’s Hot 100, solo female rappers have fronted a No. 1 single just twice—Lauryn Hill’s 1998 half-sung “Doo Wop (That Thing),” and Iggy Azalea’s 2014 Charli XCX–backed “Fancy.” (That paltry number rises from two to 2.25 if we count Lil’ Kim’s equally billed verse with Christina Aguilera, Mya and Pink on their 2001 remake of “Lady Marmalade.”) And female rappers aren’t even guaranteed proper credit when they do support a chart-topping hit. On “No Diggity,” the classic 1996 BLACKstreet smash, Dr. Dre and Queen Pen rapped on virtually equal bars, but only Dre was listed on the single; Pen went unmentioned on both the CD-single cover and the Hot 100. Even Remy Ma herself has experienced a buried credit. As part of Fat Joe’s Terror Squad crew, she rapped on the summer 2004 chart-topper “Lean Back,” but despite equal billing with Joe on the single, only the group name was credited on the Hot 100.

This has long been the story of women in rap—a combination of disrespect, underinvestment, and relative invisibility. Given this unjustly narrow lane for women rappers to cross over into the mainstream, you might want to keep chart history in mind while you’re watching the blow-by-blow of Remy’s fight for Nicki’s crown. Let’s review.

Note: The history of female rappers is obviously older than 26 years, but 1991 is when Soundscan began tracking sales data for the Billboard charts, so we begin there.

1991–1993

Rap Queens: Salt-N-Pepa
Lower-Selling Ladies-in-Waiting: Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Monie Love

Artistically, at least, the late ’80s and early ’90s was for female rappers what it was for all rappers: a Golden Era. Queen Latifah and Monie Love joined the Native Tongues crew, Ice Cube and the West Coast scene nurtured Yo-Yo, and MC Lyte made history as the first solo female rapper to release a full album, 1988’s Lyte as a Rock (unlike earlier pioneers as Roxanne Shanté, who broke on singles). But for all of their acclaim, none of these ladies scored major radio hits or platinum LPs. The era’s most recognizable female rapper, Latifah went on a five-year hiatus from recording in 1993 to focus on acting, right after scoring her biggest (albeit still modest) chart triumphs: the Top 40 pop/Top 10 R&B hit “U.N.I.T.Y.” and the gold album Black Reign, a disc that took half a year to squeak to a half-million in sales. New York’s MC Lyte eventually scored her biggest hits after this period, minting gold with a handful of sample-heavysingles in the mid-’90s that did little to improve her album sales.

In this early period of rap-to-pop crossover, only pioneering Queens trio Salt-n-Pepa truly thrived commercially, thanks to a mix of provocation, hooks, and flow that got them over at radio. The group’s success predated the ’90s—they broke in 1985 on a Doug E. Fresh answer record (credited to Super Nature) and scored a platinum single in 1988 with their raunchy club classic “Push It,” which did even better at pop radio (No. 19) than at R&B (No. 28). But Salt-n-Pepa really came into their own as a commercial force in the early Soundscan era: 1990’s Black’s Magic rode the charts for nearly two years, spawning the slow-growing 1991 hit “Let’s Talk About Sex” and reaching platinum by 1992. Finally, in 1993, they dropped one of the few true multi-platinum blockbusters by any women in rap: the quintuple-platinum Very Necessary, featuring the smash party records “Shoop” (No. 4 pop, No. 3 R&B/HH) and the En Vogue–supported “Whatta Man” (No. 3 pop and R&B/HH). To this day, Very Necessary remains the only female rap album not affiliated with Lauryn Hill to sell that well. But Salt-n-Pepa couldn’t follow it up: 1997’s Brand New sold roughly one-tenth as much. It was a pattern that would repeat with women rappers, who were tasked with remaining not only sharp MCs but also on-trend pop stars.

1994–1995

Rap Queen: Da Brat
Lower-Selling Ladies-in-Waiting: The Lady of Rage, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes

Da Brat holds a unique place in the history of women in hip-hop. The Midwestern rapper born Shawntae Harris not only scored rap’s first platinum album by a solo lady (1994’s Funkdafied), she also achieved this without pandering to femme-pop glamour demands. To be sure, Da Brat had a look: the gangsta era’s main boo, kitted out in baggy gear like an early version of  Snoop from “The Wire.” By modern standards, her Jermaine Dupri–produced hits “Funkdafied” (No. 6 pop, No. 2 R&B/HH) and “Give It 2 You” (No. 26 pop, No. 11 R&B/HH) sound shamelessly poppy, but at the time they coexisted on hip-hop radio alongside Snoop Dogg’s and 2Pac’s more melodic hits. At Da Brat’s peak, Mariah Carey called her in for a remix of “Always Be My Baby,” during the same album cycle where Mimi teamed up with Ol’ Dirty Bastard. While Da Brat’s reign as gangsta queen was fairly brief—her 1996 follow-up, Anuthatantrum, sold half as well as Funkdafied and generated smallerhits—she did manage to hang in long enough for the late ’90s high-water mark of commercial female rap, going platinum one more time on 2000’s glossier, flossierUnrestricted.

During Brat’s mid-’90s peak, her competition was, frankly, thin. The Lady of Rage had arguably stronger gangsta cred thanks to her Death Row affiliation, but her albums sold poorly, and her best-received work was guesting on tracks by the likes of Tha Dogg Pound. As one-third of pop-and-B troupe TLC, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes racked up many multiples of Da Brat’s sales. If she’d ever gone permanently solo she might have been huge, but before her passing in 2002, her featured rapper appearances were few and far between.

1996–1999

Rap Queen: Lauryn Hill
Lower-Selling Ladies-in-Waiting: Pretty much everybody

Any article on the topic of industry achievements by women in hip-hop must include numerous sentences ending with, “…besides Lauryn Hill.” She is in her own league, her career overlapping with other platinum rap queens who did a fraction of her sales. But it must also be said that what broke Hill’s multihyphenate persona was her singing more than her rapping. The Fugees’ sextuple-platinum The Score was led by the rap-and-reggae joint “Fu-Gee-La” (including some great L-Boogie bars). But the fifth-best-selling album of 1996 blew wide open via a cover of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”—like many of the Fugees’ hits, a showcase for Hill’s husky contralto.

Two years later, Hill dropped her singing-and-rapping solo tour de force The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, an octuple-platinum album that is exceptional on every level. It spawned female rap’s first Hot 100 No. 1 (“Doo-Wop (That Thing)”) and remains its best-selling album by a country mile—as well as the 12th-best-selling rap album, period (eighth-best-selling if you remove RIAA-double-counted double albums). Perhaps even more notably, Miseducation was the first hip-hop album ever to win the Album of the Year Grammy—a title only one other rap album, OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, has ever matched. This is why I give Hill an overlapping slot on the hip-hop women timeline: In the mid-to-late ’90s, she was undoubtedly the Queen of Rap—but then again, she was basically the Queen of Everything. If she hadn’t infamously self-immolated her career at the start of the millennium, she could well have held the first lady of hip-hop title for a decade.

The Peak: 1997–2000

Rap Queens: Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Eve
Lower-Selling Ladies-in-Waiting: Amil, Queen Pen, Mia X, Rah Digga, Khia, Charli Baltimore, Gangsta Boo 

The turn of the millennium was a platinum age for female hip-hop: the only period in Billboard history where more than one lady MC was regularly topping the album chart and/or Soundscanning in the millions. It was the mirror image of the early ’90s, in terms of breadth of styles and personae—Lyte/Latifah/Salt-n-Pepa begat Missy/Eve/Kim-v-Foxy—except in the latter period, the ladies were all shifting tonnage. Of course, in those peak-CD years, the entire music industry was generating outrageous revenue—a rising tide that lifted all boats, including female hip-hop.

We’ll get to Missy Elliott—artistically, the queen of this class—because her dominant era lasted well into the early aughts. But the main event of late ’90s female hip-hop was Lil Kim vs. Foxy Brown, a parallel rise in careers that, predictably, turned into a Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford battle royal. Kim ultimately had the more durable career: three platinum albums (Hard Core, Notorious K.I.M., La Bella Mafia) and a half-dozen Top 40pophits including that “Lady Marmalade” diva-off and her earlier, seminal work with Junior M.A.F.I.A. But between the two, Brown actually scored the chart-topping albums: the collaborative 1997 LP by the Nas-fronted supergroup The Firm, and Foxy’s sophomore album Chyna Doll, which hit No. 1 in a slow January week in 1999 and ultimately generated lower sales and smaller hits than either Foxy’s debut Ill Na Na or anything Kim was releasing. The Kim/Foxy feud may have been trumped up by the industry—at one point industry kingmakers even tried to get them to record a Thelma and Louise concept album—but the fact that, commercially, both sold in the millions was a sign of female rap’s strength in this period.

Foxy wasn’t the era’s only female album-chart-topper, nor Kim the only one to emerge from an established all-male crew. Marketed hard as “Ruff Ryders’ First Lady,” Eve leveraged the blockbuster success of lead Ruff Ryder DMX (then at his peak) into a trio of gold and platinum albums. Sensing the wind shift, Eve turned poppier after 2000 and was rewarded with such massive crossover hits as the Gwen Stefani–supported “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” and the Alicia Keys–supported “Gangsta Lovin’” (both No. 2 pop hits and Top 10 R&B/HH hits). On these Eve smashes, women were delivering both the bars and the melodic hooks. Such mutually empowering team-ups between ladies were exceptional even then, and they would become rarer still in the 2000s.

2002–2005

Rap Queen: Missy Elliott
Lower-Selling Ladies-in-Waiting: Remy Ma, Trina, Shawnna, Jean Grae

As the music business began its decade-long post-Napster slump, women rappers saw an outsize dwindling of their chart fortunes. But not all of that can be blamed on the industry—hip-hop changed contours, too, relegating women to hook-girl roles once thug-n-love rap took off in the era of Ja Rule and Nelly. Arguably, the biggest ladies in hip-hop of the early-to-mid ’00s were women who didn’t rap at all: Ashanti and Beyoncé outsold any female rapper of the period and—to give them their due—were vital to the hybridization of R&B and hip-hop in pop.

But among ladies who actually rocked the mic in the early aughts, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott stood tall. The greatest of several rap queens in the late ’90s mega-platinum era, Missy essentially outlasted the industry implosion of 2001—and the waning of Kim, Foxy and Eve—and probably could have remained rap’s female MVP right up to 2010 if she hadn’t gone into hiding when the decade was only half-over. Her presence could be felt in hip-hop even after the left the scene.

From the jump, Elliott defied stereotypes about how women in rap should look, owning her fearless freakiness and sex appeal even as she struggled with a thyroid condition that affected her weight. Beyond Elliott’s cutting-edge sonics, natural flow, and critical acclaim, her commercial stats are stellar: a half-dozen studio albums from 1997 to 2005, all of them platinum except her last full-length, The Cookbook, which is merely gold. Elliott was also a reliable hit generator, racking up more than a half-dozen Top 40 songs before her hiatus. Her peak came in 2002, when Under Construction went double-platinum and generated a chart record infamous to us Billboard nerds: the longest-running No. 2 single in Hot 100 history, “Work It,” which sat behind Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” for 10 straight weeks.

This mid-aughts period is also when Remy Ma emerged, joining Terror Squad in 2004 in time for their second album and biggest hit “Lean Back,” and dropping her own solo debut There's Something About Remy: Based on a True Story in 2006. But it must be said—with one’s flak-jacket securely fastened—that outside of her own acclaimed mixtapes, Ma never really achieved full rap-queen status: Something About Remy peaked at No. 33 and sold less than 200,000 copies. (And even with their No. 1 hit, Terror Squad never scored a gold or platinum album.) With 20/20 hindsight, this makes Minaj’s choice of Ma as a mixtape target in 2007 fascinating. Remy had a major profile, yes, but unlike the acclaimed and beloved Elliott, she was also a manageable bullseye.

2006–2009

Rap Queen: Fergie
Lower-Selling Ladies-in-Waiting: M.I.A., Lil Mama, Lady Sovereign

In 2005, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences eliminated the Best Female Rap Solo Performance Grammy, lamenting the lack of available candidates. The award had only existed for two years, and Missy Elliott had won it both times. Female rappers, led most vocally by MC Lyte, protested the award’s swift eradication, but in hindsight it reflected a sad market reality. The female rap game had already been drying up commercially in the early aughts, and once Elliott began her unexpected semi-retirement in 2006, hip-hop was left without a consensus platinum-selling queen for about a half-decade. Into this gap stepped a young mixtape brawler named Nicki Minaj, a British–Sri Lankan hip-hop hybridizer going by M.I.A., and a singer/actress/arriviste rapper known as Fergie.

Does Stacey Ferguson, veteran of “Kids Incorporated” and pop trio Wild Orchid, even belong on this timeline? After all, the whole point of Fergie joining onetime backpack-rap troupe Black Eyed Peas—primarily as a singer—was converting the crew to pop schlockmanship. But however tempting it is to write Fergie out of rap’s herstory, she is essentially the inverse of TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes: a pop star incubated within a rap crew, who eventually dabbles in hip-hop. The fact is, in the late ’00s, Fergie was the only lady spitting bars and selling platinum, which speaks volumes about how low the bar for success in this field had fallen. (Just how low? For a hot second in 2006, British enfant terribleLady Sovereign was topping “TRL” with her snotty “Love Me or Hate Me.” It was a dark time.)

After mostly singing on her first album with BEPs, Fergie’s MC coming-out was 2005’s “My Humps,” which might’ve stayed an album cut if Top 40 radio programmers hadn’t forced its release. The ungodly ode to “lady lumps” swathed in designer couture not only reached the Top Three on the Hot 100 but also the Top 10 of Billboard’s Rap Songs chart. One year later Fergie dropped her solo joint The Dutchess, which went triple-platinum by 2007 and spawned five Top Five hits, two of them No. 1s helmed by Ludacris producer Polow da Don: the single-entendre “London Bridge,” and the self-hagiography “Glamorous.” Before the album’s run of singles was done, Ferguson was already reverting to midtempo adult pop (“Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Clumsy”), priming herself for a Madonna-level follow-up that never quite arrived. But even with her solo career on hiatus, Fergie kept rapping with her crew—as credibly as one can on a Black Eyed Peas record—on such chart-toppers as “Boom Boom Pow” and “Imma Be.”

If there’s any upside to the elimination of the Female Rap Solo Grammy, it’s that the Recording Academy inevitably avoided awarding it to Fergie in 2007. But the Academy also missed out on giving a gramophone to M.I.A.—one she deserved in 2009 just for performing on the Grammys nine months pregnant, backed by the kings of rap. In a better world, Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam would have become the platinum-level rapper she deserved to be in America. As late as mid-2008, it was inconceivable that the indie favorite would score any chart hits at all, at least before Pineapple Express’ trailer made use of the year-old “Paper Planes” and turned it into an improbable Top Five hit. Kala, the album containing “Planes,” quietly went gold in 2010, but she never troubled the upper reaches of the charts again. Of course, by then, America finally had a new chart-topping rap queen.

2010–present

Rap Queen: Nicki Minaj
Lower-Selling Ladies-in-Waiting: Iggy Azalea, Azealia Banks

In 2010, the situation with women in rap had gotten dire enough that future Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay produced a BET documentary called My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women in Hip-Hop, asking where all the female emcees had gone. DuVernay chronicled the music industry’s rap-industrial complex, which had pushed women to emphasize their sexuality over their bars, or underinvest in them altogether. At one point a rueful MC Lyte lamented of rap’s top label, “I don't believe Def Jam ever held on to two [woman rappers] at one time.” Ironically, DuVernay’s doc premiered just a couple of months before Nicki Minaj dropped her major-label debut, Pink Friday, which either defied the premise of My Mic Sounds Nice or reinforced its arguments about what it took for women to compete in rap.

With hindsight, Minaj probably didn’t need to pick a fight with Remy Ma on her Playtime Is Over mixtape in 2007—if the line, “Tell that bitch with the crown to run it like Chris Brown,” was even calling out Remy at all. As evidenced by Fergie’s “reign,” the field of top-tier, commercially viable female rappers was tiny by the late aughts—and Remy wasn’t even totally in the conversation on the charts. With her head-spinning flow, colorful personality, and literally colorful wardrobe, Nicki essentially lapped the field just by showing up.

Knowing what female rappers are up against, it’s impossible to assess Minaj’s exquisite career without viewing it through the prism of her predecessors over the previous two decades. Salt-N-Pepa’s raunchy fearlessness? Check. Lauryn’s telegenic sing-and-rap presentation? Check. Lil’ Kim’s flamboyance? Eve’s pugnaciousness? Missy’s quirk? Check, check, check. This cover-all-the-bases, hedged-bet strategy even led to momentary pushback by the hip-hop community, via a shady 2012 fight over her glossy pop hit “Starships” that resulted in New York radio station Hot 97 essentially forcing Minaj off their rap-centric Summer Jam festival.

Even with these minor speed bumps, Minaj has sucked so much oxygen from the room—three very pink and very platinum chart-topping albums, an “American Idol” judging stint that read like a stunt by the end—that she’s essentially held the rap queen crown for the duration of the 2010s. An occasional challenger has hacked off a piece of the kingdom, but not for long.

Australian interloper Iggy Azalea looked on paper like a label executive’s fantasy—a combination of Fergie’s pretty-white-girl looks and M.I.A.’s foreign status, crossed with a studious approximation of an American male rapper’s flow—and the industry primed her with more than a year of hype before The New Classic dropped in 2014. It sold gold and streamed platinum, but Azalea’s credibility and popularity fell off rapidly, and three years later her follow-up is still unreleased. With her firework of a debut, “212,” Azealia Banks looked like the decade’s most promising hip-hop newcomer in 2011. But self-sabotage and a feud with Interscope Records led to a split with the label and delayed release of her proper debut, Broke with Expensive Taste, which won critical acclaim but poor sales. And yet, half a dozen years later, we head into the thick of summer-song season with Minaj still dropping radio-ready tracks and setting Billboard chart records.

As MC Lyte said in DuVernay’s documentary, rap as a business has shown a remarkable inability to cultivate two queens at the same time. Like all rap beefs, Remy Ma’s undercard with her old rival might be, on some level, an indicator that hip-hop is still tussling with stakes and excitement, like living, breathing art forms should. But wouldn’t it be nice to imagine a world where both ladies could come out of the ring with their gloves raised?

“Y’all got ‘til April the 7 the get your shit together,” Kendrick Lamar warned on “The Heart Part 4.” After another week of waiting, the TDE phenom has returned with DAMN., a follow-up to 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly and its 2016 companion piece untitled unmastered. As is the Kendrick blueprint, the release is religious, political, topical, reflective, and heady all at once, and there are several layers of meaning to sift through with repeat listening. In just under 55 minutes, he wages war with a right-wing news network, blasts killer cops, provides origin stories, and threads an interwoven narrative of damnation and redemption. And he does it all with a rotating cast of musicians—some longtime associates, some upstart first-timers, some megastars. With the ensemble at his back and oversight from his label boss (and Dre), Lamar pieces together another opus that is as carefully crafted as it is adventurous. Here are some early takeaways from an album with lots to unpack.

Kendrick Lamar vs. Fox News

After Kendrick Lamar’s rousing performance of “Alright” at the BET Awards in 2015, Fox News blasted the Compton rapper for a perceived attack on law enforcement, calling his actions “wrong” and “counterproductive.” Kendrick initially responded to the comments in an interview with TMZ. “How can you take a song that’s about hope and turn it into hatred?” he asked. “This is our music. This is us expressing ourselves. Rather [than] going out here and doing the murders myself, I want to express myself in a positive light the same way other artists are doing.”

But the Fox clip still has Kendrick’s attention. Snippets of the pundits chastising his performance and lyrics—including one particularly incendiary quote from blowhard Geraldo Rivera (“hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years”)—are sampled on “BLOOD.” and “DNA.” On “YAH.,” he takes aim, rapping, “Fox News wanna use my name for percentage... Somebody tell Geraldo this nigga got ambition.” Later on the album, on “XXX,” he explains how these characterizations impact public perception: “It’s nasty when you set us up/Then roll the dice then bet us up/You overnight the big rifles then tell Fox to be scared of us/Gang members or terrorists, et cetera, et cetera/America’s reflections of me/That's what a mirror does.”

Some Familiar Faces + A Few New Ones

Like To Pimp a Butterfly, DAMN. doesn’t have a single feature from the TDE crew, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without familiar faces and frequent collaborators. Top Dawg CEO Anthony Tiffith is listed as a co-writer and -producer on half of the tracks. Longtime producer Soundwave returns for his eighth consecutive Kendrick project, with production on eight songs. Fellow Digi+Phonics member Tae Beast also appears. Standout TPAB contributor Terrace Martin returns for “LOYALTY.,” and “Money Trees” producer DJ Dahi co-produced a handful of songs. In addition to back up vocals, recurring guest Anna Wise landed a songwriting credit on “PRIDE.,” tweeting, “went from singing what kendrick wrote to him singing what i wrote.” Cardo, who produced two untitled unmastered cuts, also provided production. Following Kendrick guest spots for Mike WiLL Made-It and 9th Wonder, they each return the favor. Then, of course, the entire project was mixed by TDE’s in-house engineer, Ali.

The album also has its fair share of firsts. Kendrick finally got to work with Rihanna. Then there’s that U2 appearance that made the rap world collectively hold its breath last week. He also links up with soul-sampling rap guru the Alchemist for the first time, and provides looks to talented up-and-comers like the Internet’s Steve Lacy and BadBadNotGood. Kaytranada even chipped in autotuned vocals on “LUST.” The surprises come when you pore over the credits more carefully: James Blake co-produces the out-of-character “ELEMENT.” and Adele producer Greg Kurstin shows up, too. The album’s least familiar guest is (TDE-managed) singer Zacari, who was a late addition to the official tracklisting, but delivers a memorable performance on standout cut “LOVE.” There’s also a mysterious producer credited as Bekon on eight of the 12 tracks.

“The Heart Part 4” and “HUMBLE.” Take on New Life

Kendrick Lamar’s grand re-entry, “The Heart Part 4,” may not have made its way onto the DAMN. tracklisting, but it found a way to sneak into the proceedings. The song actually serves as a preview of sorts: its second beat shift, heard only for a few bars, is actually the Alchemist’s contribution to “FEAR.”

More notably, lead single “HUMBLE.” takes on new meaning within the album. As a standalone cut, it seems like an admonishment of lessers from the rightful king. But here there is a clear yin-yang relationship between the song and the track that precedes it, “PRIDE.” The latter is standoffish and holier than thou, weighing a hypothetical perfect world against the one we’ve got. “I can’t fake humble just ‘cause your ass is insecure,” he raps. “HUMBLE.,” in turn, is almost a response to that arrogance. Both serve a greater purpose in tandem: examining Kendrick’s internal struggle over humility.

Kendrick Tips His Cap

There are a few subtle rap homages on DAMN. that don’t go unnoticed. Legend Kid Capri does DJ drops on several of the album’s songs, most notably adding the cryptic final call, “Just remember what happens on earth stays on earth!/We gon’ put it in reverse.” On “ELEMENT.,” Kendrick recycles Juvenile’s signature flow from the 1998 song “Ha,” a nod to one of his biggest influences. Lamar has admitted to being a Hot Boys fanboy in the past, even calling Lil Wayne “the greatest.” “We always hold Lil Wayne in high regards,” he said. “Juvenile as well.” The use of the flow is no accident. And after defending Jay Z’s all-timer status on “The Heart Part 4” (“Jay Z Hall of Fame, sit yo punk-ass down”), he quotes the mogul’s 2000 Dynasty: Roc La Familia cut “Get Your Mind Right” on “LOYALTY.”: “It’s a secret society/All we ask is trust.”

Top Dawg Origin Story

DAMN. builds to the final moment on its closer, “DUCKWORTH.,” which seems to tell the tale of a chance encounter between Kendrick’s father and Top Dawg’s Anthony Tiffith years ago. Before that, though, it provides an origin story for the indie label’s founder, the hood-hardened eldest of seven kids. Dire circumstances led to a drug-dealing life on the streets, and eventually a dropped murder case. Having started robbing fast food spots, Tiffith planned to rob the KFC where Kendrick’s father worked, but Kenneth Duckworth won the gunman over by giving him free chicken. Fate would give Tiffith the chance to do right by another Kenny Duckworth. The story sheds a bit of light on the TDE executive, who is mostly a mystery to fans, pulling the strings from behind the scenes, often only popping his head out to provide release info or get into public scuffles with his artists. It’s also a fascinating full-circle moment. The album’s final lyric considers an alternate history: “Whoever thought the greatest rapper would be from coincidence/Because if Anthony killed Ducky/Top Dawg could be servin’ life/While I grew up without a father and die in a gunfight.” Instead Top Dawg Entertainment is at the center of the rap world, and Kendrick is its star.