For many, today has been difficult to endure. Though Pitchfork is not a political publication and music may seem like a trivial topic right now, certain songs and albums are what helped many of us get up this morning and try to move forward. Here’s what our staffers and contributors have been listening to in the wake of the election. We can only hope this music might serve as a small comfort to others grappling with a world turned upside down. (And yes, we made playlists for your convenience—Spotify, Apple Music.)
Albert Ayler: “Our Prayer”
The title of an Albert Ayler album came up in the office this morning: Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe. Is it? On better days, I like to believe it’s true. On other days, like this one, I’m not so sure. I do know that Ayler’s music, which re-imagines a complicated past and situates it in the tumult of the present, represents the best of what this country could be, even as we feel very far from that point at this moment. It has galvanized people to make the world a better place and helped to soothe those who suffer now. His music is also deeply humanist, and sometimes just reading the titles of his songs can lift me: “Children,” “Infant Happiness,” “Mothers,” “Spiritual Rebirth,” “Truth Is Marching In.” I’m listening to “Our Prayer” now, and honestly, I can’t say it “helps” a thing. But I do think that going forward we’ll have to look out for each other and work together to figure out what comes next; these things will only be possible if feelings like the ones expressed here are kept somewhere in our hearts.—Mark Richardson
Kamasi Washington: “The Rhythm Changes”
In the days leading up to the election, there was something pulling me back to Kamasi Washington’s “The Rhythm Changes.” I couldn’t figure out what it was at the time. Now I know.
My wife and I are proud black people, and we assumed sanity would prevail. My wife refused to even say the word “if”—to her, things would be OK when Hillary won the election. So when the results trickled in, and it was clear bigotry had prevailed, the all-too comforting chorus to Washington’s song bubbled up in my head:
Daylight seems bright, because of night
It’s shade we need, so we can see
Hold tight to your family and friends. Love your comrades and say peace to those with whom you feel connected. There are dark days ahead, and now more than ever, we must stick together.—Marcus J. Moore
Jessica Pratt: “Night Faces”
Last night around 11 p.m., when it became clear that Hillary’s supposed swing state firewall was cracking, and a hellfire was ravaging the land, I numbly walked outside. My head was watery and my hands tingled. I walked to the corner, near the pier. I stood and stared at the small weeds coming out of the bike path sidewalk. I looked at the lights of Manhattan. Then, I bent over and retched. Wiping my mouth with my hand, I stumbled back home to my wife and my 10-week-old son.
I woke up this morning and found myself reminded of things I already knew: We are not safe in this world; the illusion of “safety” is our first escape hatch from reality. We have each other. The reason it sounds worn by cliche is simply because it’s always been true. It’s true today.
I am listening to soothing music, music that doesn’t reach too far into heartstrings or insist on itself. I am listening to “Night Faces” by Jessica Pratt, a small woodland spell of a folk song that has lowered my heart rate. I am listening to the environmentalist composer John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, because it is music of impersonal benevolence that feels like it comes from somewhere grander than here.
I am also turning off music entirely and looking the people I love full in the face and telling them so. Please do that, too.—Jayson Greene
Pure Disgust: “Normalized Death” + Moor Mother: “Deadbeat Protest”
Pure Disgust, like me, are from Washington, D.C., where Trump will soon live. It’s hard for me to visit these days, as much as I love so many of the people still living there. My entire childhood landscape has been erased by gentrification. But these kids persist, making raw, necessary music. They are, also like me, punks. If you have been parroting the embarrassing lie that punk under Trump will be better, then you haven’t been listening to the punk of the last eight years. The genre’s had its incredible records and its garbage ones for as long as it has existed; Pure Disgust’s self-titled, from earlier this year, definitely falls in the former camp.
This is what it sounds like to survive when the world wants you dead. Singer Rob Watson is black. I am not black, but intersex and gay. The people who voted for Trump last night have put us, and other marginalized people, in further mortal danger.
It happens day after day after day
I'm not sure what more i can say
I question why no one chooses to talk about this
But I figure it's been embedded into our lives
I am no longer safe
Normalized death
I am no longer safe
Normalized death
I haven’t gone to sleep, because I am afraid to wake up in a world that wants me annihilated. Listening to these wonderful, bright kids from my hometown pour all their rage into creativity, the thing that brought me to punk too, makes me feel like I am not alone—in solidarity, and in love.
Also bringing me healing noise today: Moor Mother. Camae Ayewa’s dense and powerful Afrofuturist soundscapes are genuinely revolutionary music—not just retreads of power electronics from Broken Flag’s heyday but what this aesthetic can look like in the hands of someone interested in building something new. This is what it sounds like to put your fist through machinery, to rip out the cords of a synth’s beating heart. If we are truly invested in building a better future, we need to listen.—Jes Skolnik
dvsn: “Too Deep”
This morning I read, cried, showered, and dressed in silence. Out on the street, the solemn mood was too much, the anger and fear and downright embarrassment in our country too loud in my mind. For reasons I don’t quite understand, I knew what to put on in its place: dvsn’s Sept. 5th. On the surface, the OVO duo’s debut is rooted in carnal pleasures, but these songs understand that lust is better when there’s love behind it. So while a track like “Too Deep” is clearly explicit (opening line: “I won't make you pull out”), the entendre swings the other way, too: These two people ended up too deep in love, and they don’t want it to end.
On a base level, this election was about love. I can’t help but of that Obama tweet from 2012—“four more years,” accompanied by a photo of him hugging Michelle like nothing else in this world even matters. However you feel about President Obama and the First Family, you cannot deny that they tried to inspire more acceptance in the American people, on a number of different levels. Trump and his followers are a reaction to that. But we cannot lose faith in love right now. When institutions fail you, look to those you hold dearest—embrace them, kiss them, lose yourself in them. It will carry you through, at least until we figure out what happens next.—Jillian Mapes
Leonard Cohen: “It Seemed the Better Way”
There can be a strange comfort in the repetitions of history, how our holiness seemingly only exists to be undercut by our basest desires. It is a constant Leonard Cohen knows well. This is an elegy about the past, for now.—Ryan Dombal
Gil Scott-Heron: “Winter in America”
The only consolation for how bad it feels to live in a country where our fellow citizens elected a white supremacist who may round up Muslims, Latinos, and anyone else who offends him—not to mention a vice president who believes in conversation therapy for gay children—is that America has always been, in many ways, bad. The righteous among us have persevered and made good things happen anyway. At this moment, I don’t exactly have comfort, just resolve—that Trump isn’t anything new, more an outsized and powerful version of the same bigotry that’s plagued us forever, and that it is our job, as much as it ever has been, to fight. “Winter in America” makes something beautiful out of the chilliest truths, and it will be our mission for the next four years to do as much with our own political realities: to look at a barren, cold wasteland and try to find something, anything, we can all sing along to.—Alex Frank
Damien Jurado: “Reel to Reel”
A brief soundtrack in a day of personal silence, for feeling hollowed out, with defiance faintly stirring.
You're a smooth talker
With eyes like lightning
And the radio
I sing like our mother
Put away the hairbrush and maybe something you don't know
I read it in the tabloids in a truck stop in a thunderstorm
I cannot tell you why I sought out this song this morning, four years after last hearing it, never before having paused to absorb the lyrics. But plenty can roil just below a surface, steadily and inexorably, in four years.—Stacey Anderson
Solange Knowles: A Seat at the Table + Theo Parrish: American Intelligence
I am certain this album was a gift from the universe in anticipation of the pain at this moment. In particular, I’ve been listening on repeat to “Mad,” a song that perfectly captures the fury that exists in me right underneath the surface. I’ve always had a lot to be mad about, but now the world will respect that anger, will understand where it comes from, will not judge me when all I want to do is scream.
For another musical tour de force that examines the state of black America—from unfettered joy (“Footwork”) to the need for self-care and redemption (“Be In Yo Self”)—look to Theo Parrish’s underrated 2014 LP, American Intelligence. No longer rooted in the techno and house that defined Parrish’s earliest releases, the album manages to be both his riskiest move yet and the sonic equivalent of a long, familiar hug. I turned to it first, needing to be surrounded by sounds that remind me of those I love, and those who’ve struggled to make this world better for me.—Britt Julious
Solange: “Cranes in the Sky”
Early last night, with an unearned sense of confidence, I welcomed my wife and 5-year-old at the door as our copy of Janet Jackson’s Control spun on the turntable. I tried to stick with the celebratory, pro-woman theme as we watched the results roll in: Janelle Monáe’s The Electric Lady was next, and Grimes’ Art Angels was also in the queue. But the mood shifted, and we started listening to what was on the TV instead.
This morning was worse, and started early. In a quick pass through online radio, I heard the protest songs of byone eras—Dylan’s “The Times They are A-Changin’,” Bright Eyes’ “When the President Talks to God”—but after I took my son to preschool (with a ridiculously extensive warning to be nice to people today, especially girls and anyone who might be bullied… all of which he totally didn’t get—he kept calling Trump a liar and talking about the one kid at school who was a fan of Trump—but maybe someday?), the only music that seemed right for the walk home was Solange’s new album. I started with “Cranes in the Sky,” its mournful attempt to escape a source of pain, and skipped around through “F.U.B.U.” by way of “Don’t Touch My Hair.” These songs sounded stunning when they first came out, but their stoic introspection feels especially necessary now.—Marc Hogan
Loose Joints: “Is It All Over My Face?”
I put on a DJ Richard record for a moment this morning. Then I shut it off almost immediately—transportive but too grim. My girlfriend, just off the phone with her mother, exhausted but lovingly trying to be positive, usually gravitates towards peaceful sounds, so I tried Laraaji, master of Zen. She requested something more up. I scanned through the albums. “Arthur Russell?” She shrugged. But I pulled out two of his disco projects as Loose Joints, “Is It All Over My Face?” and “Tell You Today.” They’re buoyant, fun songs, and we danced a little. Then we kissed and then I went to work.—Matthew Schnipper
PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke: “This Mess We’re In”
I woke up this morning frozen in a ball of stress. My partner fell asleep hours before I did, horrified and exasperated. My rabbit sat at the foot of my bed without a care in the world except crunching on his hay. While I lay in bed, my typically quiet apartment was filled with the sounds of sirens.
Can you hear them?
The helicopters
I’m in New York
No need for words now
We sit in silence
The subway was silent, the packed elevator was silent. Friends told of their tears over texts. I can see the Statue of Liberty from my desk. Today is so foggy, she may as well not be there at all. Writing about music feels pointless today, as does pretty much everything else. But listening to music, that is an action that can truly help.
And I have seen
The sunrise over the river
The freeway
Reminding of
This mess we’re in
—Quinn Moreland
Jim O’Rourke: “Women of the World”
I live in Barcelona, six hours ahead of New York and nine ahead of Los Angeles, so I was asleep by the time dread began sinking in for my compatriots at home. It was only upon waking up at 7 a.m. here, grabbing for my phone, and seeing stunned subject lines in my inbox that I realized how wrong things had gone.
It didn't even occur to me to listen to music after that, to be honest. The first couple of hours were a blur. My wife and I got our daughter up and planned to drown our sorrows over a hearty breakfast at a nearby café. Getting out of the shower, though, I heard a familiar sound coming from the living room: chiming acoustic guitars, rising vocal harmonies, a dazzling array of bright figures—like a wind farm strung up in Christmas lights. My wife had put on Jim O'Rourke's “Prelude to 110 or 220/Women of the World”—a cover of an Ivor Cutler and Linda Hirst song—and was holding our daughter in her lap. The mood in the living room, in contrast to the one in my head, was peaceful, and the sun streamed in the windows.
It couldn't have been more perfect for the moment. Not only for the song's rueful sentiment, especially in light of the fact that we now must wait yet another four years, if not longer, for a woman to finally, rightfully, hold the presidency. (As the song goes, “Men have had their shot, and look at where we've got.”) Not only in the face of Trump's misogyny, and the fact that his election is an insult to women everywhere—along with people of color, undocumented immigrants, and the economically disadvantaged who are doubtless going to suffer under his mismanagement. But also because it contained a crucial kernel of optimism, no matter how remote, no matter how implausible; the song's sparkling uplift offers a reminder that we must fight, and we must win. Because, with a climate-change denier like Trump in the White House, if we don't, the world as we know it will come to an end. And it won't take long.—Philip Sherburne
Woods: Songs of Shame
After defeat comes blankness, grey. It's raining and I'm on a bus home from Pennsylvania, which went red. That was when we went to bed. Live to fight another day, and another one. Cold disappointment and bitter stubborn resolve: “Military madness is killing the country/ So much sadness between you and me." This is bad. Not wholly surprising, not unfamiliar. Still, I wish it were otherwise—not just the finale or this season, but the whole show.
Friends from European time zones long attuned to the slow creep of fascism send messages throughout the night. It's going to be a long winter. I haven't listened to this album in forever. Fittingly, it's called Songs of Shame.
“Oh yes we were both born to lose/And yes we still try, don't we all”—Nina Mashurova
Helado Negro: Private Energy
I was almost too afraid to listen to anything this morning, for fear of ruining something I love by inexorably linking it with this sinking feeling. But when the knot in my stomach turned just a little too tightly, I turned to Helado Negro, for the simple reason that it has never failed to make me feel good. Roberto Carlos Lange’s sci-fi lullabies are cosmic rays beamed through space, able to rouse me from my darkest moods and fill me with positive energy. His rolling baritone acted as a soothing balm, a salve that cured an admittedly catatonic state. It didn’t make me feel any less scared, defeated, or distraught. But it helped me to stop holding it all in.—Matthew Ismael Ruiz
Randy Newman: “Political Science”
Last night, while making fried chicken and sweet potatoes ahead of what I knew would be an anxiety-filled evening, I decided to try and find a little bit of dark humor, just a kernel of levity. I had a private sing-along moment to Randy Newman’s “Political Science,” a dry-as-sand satire of America’s views on foreign policy. Although Newman wrote it in 1972, the two-minute song has, sadly, remained as prescient and biting as when it was first released. After all, before he became Pixar’s artist-in-residence, Randy Newman was an anomaly: a barstool piano-man underdog, an intellectual everyman whose voice intentionally borders on dopey to veil his lyrical barbs.
This afternoon, after fitfully alternating between crying and sleeping all morning, I turned “Political Science” back on. And wouldn’t you know, it resonated so purely with my raw shame and disbelief that, instead of marveling at Newman’s songwriting prowess, all I could do was weep. It’s the line “You'll wear a Japanese kimono/And there'll be Italian shoes for me”—do we truly think other cultures exist only for us to pillage them? So we can resent their suffering? Commodify their losses in our never-ending quest for, what, “freedom”? White America elected Trump, and the driving force behind that vote was exclusionary. Just like the America that Newman gives voice to in “Political Science,” we see ourselves distorted in a funhouse mirror, lashing out at everyone in sight but victimized by no one but ourselves, our true image plain as day to all around us.
I can’t wait for this song to be funny again.—Cameron Cook
Gowns: Red State
I’ve always ascribed to art the same powers of salvation that some people seek out in religion, but this morning, for the first time in my life, I woke up an unbeliever. Even the music I loved most seemed frighteningly trivial. I didn't feel like I deserved the distraction or the uplift, anyway. But my need to fill an empty apartment with sound eventually prevailed. The first album I tried was the Cure's Disintegration, which I've used to drown all forms of heartbreak since I was 15 years old. Today, though, the idea of disintegrating over a tragedy as small as your own love affair disgusted me. Searching for comfort in music just felt selfish.
So, finally, I put on Gowns' Red State, a masterpiece of enervated, feedback-laced folk born out of the numbness and misery of poverty-stricken life in the Dakotas, where singer/guitarist Erika M. Anderson (now better known as the solo artist EMA) spent her youth. Nine years after its release, Red State still captures the apocalyptic mood of rural, white America with a potency I've never seen achieved in any other medium. We fail to understand that desperation at our peril. Some of Anderson's final words on the album, which constitute a rare moment of resolve amid all the bleakness, are going to follow me for weeks:
You've gotta look it in the eyes and say that I don't believe
You've gotta hold it underwater so you'll see where it bleeds
You've gotta stare into the mirror until you name this disease
You gotta know
We've gotta know. And we've gotta fight.—Judy Berman
Nicolas Jaar: “No”
When Nicolas Jaar spoke to us earlier this year, he said his song “No” was inspired by artists and activists’ answer to a referendum laid before them by the Chilean government in 1988: “Do you want Pinochet to stay for eight more years?” Pinochet, the authoritarian dictator who murdered and tortured many under his regime, had been installed as the leader of Chile in 1973 following a U.S.-backed coup. “[The resistance] effectively turned a negative message into a positive message, which seems like the most elemental change that you can do,” Jaar said.
“No” is sung in Spanish—the translated chorus goes, “We said no, but the yes is in everything.” The lyric, printed on the cover of Jaar’s Sirens, reads bleak after the result of last night’s election, but it comes from a place of small hope. In 1988, the referendum passed; Pinochet conceded the presidency, general elections were held, and democracy lived on. It’s important to honor those that have fought the good fight in the past, just as we now must.—Noah Yoo
Ben Frost & Daniel Bjarnason: Sólaris
When words fail, I usually turn to composed music. This is a bleak, low-sunlight album full of dread, drones, and full-orchestra portamentos that make it feel like the laws of gravity are bending to a breaking point. It feels too on the nose in retrospect, but whatever, it was the impulse at the time. I woke up to an equation that felt unsolvable, so this was the music of being suspended in that moment of incomprehension. Maybe it helped to define this, and cast it into a relief so that I could move on to something more productive. These days, I try to recognize what I’m feeling and sort it out at once, accept the waves as they come, as opposed to beating it back or getting out of the ocean altogether. I've already switched to Aquemini to try and crowbar my mind into something better.—Jeremy D. Larson
Shy Glizzy: “Going Thru It” ft. Boosie Badazz
There isn’t a satisfactory way to process what’s happening. We need to mourn, but we can also try to scrounge some optimism as we stare into an abyss. I’ve worked too hard overcoming depression my entire adult life to see that work go away, even for one day. It’s moments like these I believe in the redemptive power of music, and I’ve loved Shy Glizzy’s “Going Thru It,” an ode to resilience, ever since it was released in 2015: “Fuck all that bullshit, I’mma pour up/I’m going through some shit.” I love how Glizzy works through many emotions casually in just a few minutes. The steady hand of his delivery and rationale has helped me in my darkest times since I first heard it.—Matthew Ramirez
Frank Ocean: “Ivy”
“I thought that I was dreaming.”—Matthew Strauss
Tove Lo: “Habits (Stay High)”
My late father was a severe alcoholic and smoker; having that history, plus being a writer and gay, has made me feel the odds of becoming an addict are stacked against me, and so I’ve always kept drug use to a minimum. I rarely feel entirely safe in this world, and now wonder where I will find the strength needed to go forward. If Trump’s vow to repeal Obamacare succeeds, I could soon lose my physical therapy. My partner of 13 years and I were planning to get married next year; we may also lose that option.
As a country, we get Trump, but as a Californian, I’m now eligible for recreational pot. If I want to stay high all the time to keep Trump off my mind, I’m free to do that. I know from family history that’s not a tenable option, and yet I’m still stuck with Tove Lo’s song in my head, spiraling heedlessly. This is the rare instance where music hasn’t given me any guide map I can follow.—Barry Walters