The London jazz scene is all about synthesis, melting a variety of influences into one pot. That pot is never the same from performer to performer, although they all share certain touchstones. One the face of it, at least at first, the debut solo record from accomplished scene drummer Yussef Dayes is a post-bop record – flashy keys and woodwind lines, melodies like the wind that blows through the urban streets at night. Then his drumming – powerful, vibrant, equal parts jazz, funk, and throbbing psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll. You can just as easily imagine him pounding away in place of Mitch Mitchell or Jimmy Chamberlain as you can see him adding a sultry desert rhythmic lilt behind the careful sax blasts of Shabaka Hutchings (which he does here). The list of guests is impressive as well, touching on many big names in the UK jazz scene as well as his own small daughter Bahia. It provides a wide variety, but no one guest ever overrides the general imprint Dayes places on the record – it’s his energy, his vibe, his baby.

Imagine my gigantic surprise when experimental pop weirdo/genius King Krule released the first single from this record and it was called “Seaforth.” Now he was talking about the Merseyside neighbourhood on the docks and not, say, the tiny dying town in southwestern Ontario where I grew up, but still – the song has the kind of ‘maybe we’ll be okay’ universal vibe that speaks to you no matter where you situate your own personal Seaforth. The rest of the album wonders deeply about whether we’ll be okay or not. Over the course of decaying relationships, general melancholia, and the in-between moments of doubt and vacillation, he plays with the confines of guitar, voice, and free-blasting sax. Much of this record is done in major key, but a major key played slowly, slurred at times, like a celebration where you got so sad you drank too much, and then started shouting.

The first band to make it pushing hyperpop, 100 gecs are one of those duos you either love or hate. At their heart they’re an oversized obnoxious ska band, driven by the frenetic, sketchy movement of social media and the uncertainty and anxiety of modern existence. The ska influence is most noticeable on tracks like the winsome “Frog On The Floor” and the wince-inducing “I Got My Tooth Removed”, but that’s not to say it’s not all horns and swinging. “Dumbest Girl Alive” and “Hollywood Baby” are built on gigantic riffs that win through sheer volume, and tracks like “One Million Dollars” and the ultra-catchy “The Most Wanted Person In The United States” show a willingness to be weird and experimental. The pair of them have basically been memed to the top – where they’ll go from here is anyone’s guess.

Margo Price has always been a step above her Nashville peers. Her debut, 2016’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, was the first country record to be released on Jack White’s Third Man Records; there’s always been more rock in her country songwriting. The most immediate comparison point has been someone like Sheryl Crow, with roots in Bobbie Gentry, Dolly Parton, and Janis Joplin. Strays, though, borrows a great deal of bombast from the classic rock side, especially from Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. One of the Heartbreakers plays on this album, of course, but it’s more than just fitting in parts to make a whole. Price’s songwriting is on a level to match her guests and her notoriety; a song like “Been To The Mountain” feels like it should have been everywhere, and the shivering ballad “Lydia” is an ominous warning to countless people on a path to oblivion. The highest marks, though, go to “Country Road”, a goosebump-inducing number that channels the best of The River-era Springsteen.

In 2018, Sabrina Teitelbaum was known professionally as BAUM and traded in alt pop. The more she did this, the more she was convinced it was a bad move. Eventually, after recording a full album with Yves Rothman producing, she called an end to it. It rang hollow, from the name to the material, and then COVID came along. She ditched the name, the pop songs and the pro songwriters that came along with them, quit drinking and doing drugs, and picked up a guitar and a whole host of Nineties alt rock – Hole, The Cranberries, The Breeders, Pixies, The Smashing Pumpkins. It’s clear that not writing her own songs was a big part of the issue she was having as BAUM, because as it turns out she’s an excellent alt-rock songwriter. They’re airy with just the right sort of crunch, with turns of phrase that are barbed enough to stick around in your head long after you’ve moved on. The lyrics are suitably confessional, confrontational, and filled with a rogue’s gallery of bad nights, toxic relationships, and drugs. Rothman made a good choice to stick around as well. His thick, modern production draws out the little nuances in Teitelbaum’s songs and adds the right spring to the hanging-in-the-air moments in them. It shouldn’t be a surprise that, 30 years after the peak of the Alternative Revolution, artists are cashing in on the highlights of the era, but it’s surprising that those highlights can be put together so well.

Losing a frontman as intense, integral, and iconic as Isaac Wood would be the death knell for any band. Yet the standard-bearers for English post-post-punk did just that, releasing the film and subsequent album Live At Bush Hall to showcase that they were more than just Wood. In this they by-and-large succeeded. The Arcade Fire influence they dove into on last year’s Ants From Up There is met with a deep, nerdy vein of theatrical abandon. They were clearly always theatre kids at heart, and on Live At Bush Hall they let that particular freak flag fly. Given the band’s infamous propensity for putting out a masterwork of a particular sound and then abandoning it utterly, it is impossible to predict where the group goes from here. Kid A-esque electronic? Reflektor-era dance pop? Ska-funk? As another intense, integral, and iconic lost frontman once said, “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”

Big|Brave are on the outskirts of metal, a strange, dusty part of town where Lovecraftian horrors lurk behind soaped windows and the graffiti on the walls is written in a language that is almost but entirely not familiar. They share a lot more in common with noise acts like, say, Pharmakon, Lingua Ignota, or Black Dice than they do Slayer. With that said, they maintain their current address in the ring road of metal by dint of their heavy Earth-like riffing – it’s doom metal, but for drone heads. Previous Big|Brave records leaned in heavier on the noise aspect, but singer/guitarist Robin Wattie’s work with The Body on the collab album Leaving None But Small Birds shaped out the crushing doom aspects of her writing more, with the result being the near-perfect balance they achieve on nature morte. Blurred, crumbling chords hang shivering in the air, dissolving into feedback before being replaced by a newer, darker one. Then, through the shadows, a glimmer of light. There is a clearing here, you can rest. But only for a moment.

When the concept of Voir Dire first floated I rolled my eyes. The album was exclusive to some fucking start up site or another and each song was released as an NFT, which is about the dumbest goddamn thing I can imagine. Earl has always wanted to do things differently, so you have to accept the good with the bad. How good could it possibly be, Earl and the Alchemist I thought? Which is, of course, a level of cope approximately the size of the moon. Luckily it got a normal release and I am here to tell you that it’s Earl and the Alchemist – of course it’s as good as it sounds on paper. Maybe better. Earl nearly disappeared on the ultra-experimental Some Rap Songs a few years back but last year’s SICK! brought him into a more corporeal form and working with everyone’s current favorite producer has strengthened that form even more. Apart, both elements here are on fire; together, they’re a bonfire.

Philly’s Irreversible Entanglements are the hottest avant/free jazz band around, which is admittedly a weird thing to say. They are the masters of taking chaotic woodwind blasts and then, just at the right moment, coalescing them into absolute banger passages. The icing on the top is, of course, Moor Mother, the Poet Laureate of the Underground, possessed of righteous fire poetry and also a haunting voice, leaving tracks like the smoky “Sunshine” sweating in the hot sun. Protect Your Light is their first record for famed jazz label Impulse! Records, and is also the first where they eschewed their usual free-flowing, spontaneous approach for careful planning and layered overdubs. The result is chaos – but a coherent chaos.

Of all the people who deserve increased attention, it’s Jeff Rosenstock. Since the Oughts he’s been the living exemplar of punk rock DIY, a guy who always seems to be on the right side and always kicks serious ass while doing it. Witness his head-on tackling of merch cuts earlier this year, which drew in no less than Chris from Propagandhi, who used to be all about this sort of thing, to his line of fire. Never let your idols grow old. HELLMODE could be considered his first foray into ‘pop punk’ but there’s always been a poppier side to his work – “9/10“, “TV Stars” – that has informed his full-blast high-energy numbers to a significant degree. It’s the first time he’s gotten a professionial studio treatment, though, and it powers him to the next level without sacrificing any of the raw vibe he’s brought to his more ramshackle recordings.

Bright Green Field was 2021’s razor-sharp edge record, noisy and willful even among its post-post punk peers, an auspicious debut among auspicious debuts. O Monolith is their Difficult Second Album. It doubles down on their whiplash stylistic variety – the band hungers, devours everything it comes across. At the same time, it’s as though they’re beginning to make sense of their own selves; a lot of Bright Green Field was held together seemingly through sheer luck, whereas many of the compositions on O Monolith have more solid grounding, more real structure, less fog and mist. There are floating synths now. It’s an album that displays that signature Squid groove – nod your head to “Undergrowth” – but also capable of holding forth an odd, fever-dream rumination on rats erasing human languages in the wake of their simultaneous invasion of England with Roman colonizers. It’s a document of a band pressing at the boundaries of expectation that their own hype has generated, and plotting ways to break through.

A slinky summit meeting between Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, and Kamasi Washington, Dinner Party on the surface sounds like a winning affair, and when you dive deeper this initial feeling pays off massively. The nighttime R&B moments gel immaculately with the sultry jazz bits, making the perfect afterparty accompaniment. They call a lot of dark-themed, light-sounding hip hop ‘high rise‘ music, but be serious here for a moment: this is about as high a rise as you can get.

A lot of post-punk bands shave the edges off their sound with each subsequent album. Witness Joy Division, who responded to the death of Ian Curtis by going more and more mainstream synth-pop with each new album. Maybe Shame has done the same thing, but it’s difficult to tell behind all the skronky guitar riffs, strange-angled songwriting, and anthemic chorus moments. Are the edges sanded off? Hard to tell. The hooks are there, but they’re sharply barbed. It’s dissonant but easy to shout along to, caustic but still smooth. In short – perfectly evolved post-punk.

‘Confident’ and ‘assured’ have always been words that could be reliably used to describe the music of Scottish hip hop group Young Fathers, but Heavy Heavy takes it a step beyond. This isn’t just assured, it’s jubilant – an ecstatic party record of world-shaking rhythms and soaring choruses. Like a sudden storm that brews up out of nowhere, it bursts overhead and leaves you drenched, shaking, and elated.

All of the energy of jazz and punk with almost none of the downsides of either. A stunning work of Americana filtered through folkways and Don Cherry, consistently moving, always electric, and utterly tragic. Branch died three days before the album was released, making this the final entry in a discography that was only just starting to show how bright it could shine.

Names are a funny thing, especially for artists. We try them on, produce some work that fits the vibe, and then just as quickly we try to discard them, to disavow them. They become too much weight to bear, or they don’t fit our purposes anymore. Trevor Powers retired the name Youth Lagoon in 2016 after three strong psychedelic bedroom-nostalgia records, and moved instead to releasing a pair of increasingly strange albums under his own name. In 2021, though, an allergic reaction to an over-the-counter medication made him suffer from extreme acid reflux, coating his larynx and vocal cords with acid for eight straight months. It got so bad he couldn’t even speak, having to communicate with written messages on note pads. In the aftermath, Youth Lagoon was reborn, but a different, more refined version of Youth Lagoon. Where albums like Wondrous Bughouse would slather themselves in blurred melodies and stoned bedroom pop, Heaven Is A Junkyard plays it straight, focusing on Powers’ strengths as a lyricist and a hook maker. Songs like “Prizefighter” and “Idaho Alien” are sad and sticky, making you come back again and again to hear the bits that hit your brain just right. These are songs about sad, broken people discovering beauty and meaning in their dilapidated lives, and I can’t think of a more apt theme to explore modern American society in this crumbling year of 2023.

Named for the signs that are ubiquitous in the broken parts of America, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips is an experimental album even by Armand Hammer standards. The duo of Backwoodz founder billy woods and A&R man Elucid team up with a high energy cast including Pink Siifu, JPEGMAFIA, Junglepussy, Moor Mother, and El-P, but nothing is as easy to parse as you might think. The production shifts and rolls, moving from gloomy samples to retro video game sounds to weird synth loops, backed here and there by thick drum beats, and sometimes nothing at all. Some of the samples came out of a session involving Elucid, Child Actor, and Shabaka Hutchings – all star stuff for an album so deeply and willfully weird in its approach to beatcraft. The album’s approach to age is perhaps more straightforward. Both woods and Elucid are over 40, balancing careers, fatherhood, and aging parents. A lot of the album is built on themes of trying to figure out where to go, what to do, and how long you can stave off the relentless march of death in a country where you increasingly have to be rich to survive to old age. What kind of a country produces an informal industry where insured citizens sell critical health supplies to the uninsured through profit-taking intermediaries? It’s absurd, and that’s the central conceit of the record: the precarious nature of modern existence is honestly bullshit, there’s no beginning or end, and all you can do is roll with the punches and crack wise when you can.

“First of all, fuck Elon Musk / eight dollars too much”

Peggy and Danny Brown have been two of the most successful underground MCs of the past ten years. The two of them have somewhat similar backgrounds: Danny Brown grew up semi-poor in Detroit (lay off ’em, they’re living in Mad Max times) and Peggy grew up poor in Brooklyn and Alabama before joining the army and doing a tour in Iraq. Both of them have also made careers out of consistently scaring the hoes. There is nothing pop-oriented or smooth about either of their sounds; both make music for repeated listening, rather than casual consumption, and both have turned hectoring, nasally voices into weapons. On this collaborative album they double down on it, making the exact opposite of a Drake record. The production is wild, handled almost entirely by Peggy. It’s a mix of bombastic samples, drums that skitter back and forth between breaks and boom bap, and cuts that sound like they’re tweaking. Witness the “Milkshake” sample on “Fentanyl Tester”, which becomes a voice on its own, or the sudden way a whole chunk of gospel falls into distorted-to-hell drums on “God Loves You.” The chemistry between the two MCs is on point throughout, even if Danny alludes in interviews to driving Peggy crazy with his antics throughout the recording process. He did a stint in rehab for alcohol after the recording was done, so it was likely not just shenanigans. Danny has also said in interviews that he hopes Peggy forgives him for some of the things he did, and so do I: this record feels like part one of a very artistically lucrative partnership.

I, like many people, thought Lana Del Rey an industry plant when she first blew onto the scene with her second album Born To Die. Her mixture of pop chanteuse and trap sounds seemed too raw and unfinished, like some record producer had decided it was good enough as long as the sex appeal would sell. Sometime around “High By The Beach”, from Honeymoon, I started to realize that I might be wrong. By Lust For Life I was coming around to the idea that she might actually be a great songwriter, and then when Norman Fucking Rockwell! dropped in 2019 I was convinced that she was one of the greatest. Like her work since then, Did you know solidifies that feeling. The record takes it’s time – it’s an hour and seventeen, after all – but it gestures grandly over the work she’s accomplished so far, working in back references to earlier work, mythologizing herself, creating new chapters in upper middle class Americana. “A&W” – easily the best song released this year – does all of this in the space of just over seven minutes, leaving the rest of the album as a sort of celebratory victory lap. As the cover notes, it’s a victory party with lots of guests. Jon Batiste shows up on the glittering “Candy Necklaces”; Jack Antonoff and his band Bleachers show up on a song named for his then-fiancé, now wife, Poor Things actress Margaret Qualley; and the ultimate answer to “Who is the Lana Del Rey for men?”, Father John Misty, shows up to duet on “Let The Light In”. Lana Del Rey, of course, covered “Buddy’s Rendezvous” from Misty’s last album, the criminally underrated Chloe And The Next 20th Century, so the guest spot seems natural. Lana has said in interviews that when she first learned to play the guitar she realized that there were millions of songs you could write with just six chords – and so far she’s not only proven that correct, but also that most of them can actually be quite good.

I have been up and down the East Coast a couple of times and it has come to my attention that everywhere along the interstate is exactly the same. Outside of the interstate system you can find the diversity of America, but in the stops along the way – often situated on the outskirts of suburbs – all look alike. It’s an endless stretch of cheap strip malls, endless corporate chain replication, sprawling gas stations, hotels, and truck stops. In the South the flavor changes, but only slightly: billboards for waffles and wi-fi at hotels, and signs directing you to massive pornography shops competing with signs exhorting you to repent or face hell. Growing up in these sorts of flat, faceless places often leads teenagers to do the same sorts of things teenagers anywhere will do, but with greater abandon.

Karly Hartzman is from Asheville, North Carolina, and she knows fully well the dangers of growing up nowhere. She also knows the crossover that can be best found in those sorts of dusty once-prosperous places: the relentless youth energy of punk and the pain and sorrow of the kind of country music that existed before the Eighties and is only now starting to poke its head out of the ground again. As such, Wednesday is alt-country, but that doesn’t really tell the whole story – or anything close. It’s the kind of alt-country that comes from growing up steeped in grunge and despair, and needing to confess your sins. It’s music that tells stories: about getting too drunk, about taking Benadryl just for something to do, about sneaking in and out of places, about having sex in places you shouldn’t, with people you really shouldn’t. It’s about the blather that gets shown on TVs on the pumps at endless gas stations on the highway, about dying Formula 1 drivers, about administering a dose of Narcan and then belting out Drive-By Truckers songs ‘real loud’ on the the way home. Hartzman has an eye for cutting detail and it makes these songs into a collection of modern Southern gothics, where the grotesque is really the ordinary things that we do and have done to us every day.

When last we heard from Singaporean artist yeule, on last year’s Glitch Princess, they were making confessions through glitch, creating strange forms of pop that could only have come from the internet age. It was a collision of the spiritual and the technological, the sort of high that they’d been chasing ever since first watching a video of Grimes performing live in the early 2010s. The follow-up, though, brings up a more pertinent side of their interests, one that has been on the mind of so many younger artists of the modern era: Nineties alt rock. Their youth was often rootless, so going back to music they felt rooted in at the time substituted for a sense of place and became a comfort. Time marches on but the music you loved as a child stays the same forever (unless you were really into lostprophets I guess). At the same time, of course, familiarity can become a crutch, and it’s not like yeule’s love of cutting-edge pop forms was going to go anywhere. The result is a fascinating blend of the old and the new, a comfort blanket of shoegaze and the bubble-grunge guitar power of the Smashing Pumpkins combined with glitch and hyperpop sounds, programmed drums and sugar-rush melodies. I want more of this. I want alt rock that sounds like it was recorded by people who’ve never left their bedroom in their lives. I want the title “Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries” to be real. The chord changes the underpin “4ui12” are so core shoegaze it’s physically painful, like adolescent heartbreak. The way the guitar hangs just so in the hook for “dazies” melts me – literally goddamn melts me. Aside from “Ebony Eye”, “Aphex Twin Flame” might be the closer I’ve chanted along to the most this year. It’s urgent, emotional, and it demands you turn the volume up to 10 and break off the dial. Give in.

When my sister-in-law somehow got tickets to see boygenius in NYC she called my wife to ask her if we’d ever heard of the band. My response, of course, was “Boygenius? Phoebe Bridgers? Lucy Dacus? Julien Baker? Never heard of ’em.” The joke being that you’d have to be dead not to have heard of them. None of them are strangers to these year-end lists. Phoebe Bridgers – the household name, famously the nemesis of David Crosby near the end – landed at #18 in 2020 with Punisher. Lucy Dacus – my pick for the best songwriter, famously called Obama a war criminal when he tweeted about them – ended up at #7 for 2021’s Home Video. Julien Baker – the secret weapon people really should dig into more – came in at #67 on that same list for Little Oblivions. Their boygenius EP in 2018 only made the hype for this record inevitable. The fever pitch in the rollout was insane – there were several days where it was all anyone on my feed was talking about. Well, this record and people grumbling about why people kept talking about it. The intensity of their live shows only fanned the flames hotter; the entire package from album to tour seemed like a Moment that people would be talking about for years to come. It wouldn’t have worked if the songs weren’t there, but they were, greatly. There are many moments where you can definitely tell who wrote what: “Emily I’m Sorry” is as efficient a summary of Bridger’s songwriting as I can name, and “True Blue” is Lucy Dacus to the fingertips. When they come together, though, it’s magic, the kind of immersive blending and harmonization not heard since Crosby, Stills and Nash. There will have to be a second record. It may or may not be as good as The Record. That’s for the future to decide. For now, boygenius is on top of the world.

So to answer, no. Never heard of ’em.

Hip hop has been thus far remarkable resistant to something that has been a big thing in rock ‘n’ roll since time out of mind: the travelogue. Bands that go on tour inevitably end up writing an album about the travails of going on tour, with music to match. A lot of times these albums are forgettable; no one really cares about the feelings of middling groups doing the circuit of state fairs. For all of these, though, there are a few that shine bright: Bowie’s Lodger, R.E.M.’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi, Jackson Browne’s Running On Empty. Hip hop has been obsessed with different themes, though; the biker road warrior mythos doesn’t hold anywhere near as much weight in a genre more in line with fantasies like Scarface and Goodfellas.

Maps, though, is a different beast. Inspired by woods’ tour of North America and Europe after Covid restrictions were lifted, the record replicates the bleary feeling of moving rapidly from one place to another, waking up in one place and going to sleep in a completely different place day after day. It’s framed with the monomyth: woods takes up the call to adventure (touring) on “Kenwood Speakers” and returns home on “NYC Tapwater”, having gone through the gauntlet of temptation and the abyss of revelation, coming through the other side slightly older and slightly wiser. wood’s lyrics are his usual mix of cutting weariness and clever observations, speckled with that food talk that always adds spice to his rhymes. Kenny Segal’s production is a 180 from their last outing. That album, 2019’s Hiding Places (my intro to woods) was wall-to-wall dank, slow guitar dirges that drew out the sorrow and despair in woods’ verse. Here it’s fittingly more on-the-move, restless samples running through hard-edged drums that seem to fade in and out, like songs heard on radio stations as you move between cities. As a travel document, and a document of woods’ evolution as a lyricist and collaborative artist, Maps excels. Travel is exhausting, and midway through you start to wonder why you’re doing it in the first place, but when you look over it at the end you realize that you might have learned something, or at least gotten some new experiences.

An artist’s return to the form they’re best known for shouldn’t necessarily be a cause for celebration, but in Sufjan’s case it’s been a long time coming. His last real ‘singer-songwriter’ record was 2015’s Carrie & Lowell, a career highlight that has become rather TikTok famous in the last few years. The eight years after were spent exploring electronic music, marrying his typical orchestral flair for melody to experimental production. The results were mixed; while 2020’s The Ascension was superb, as was A Beginner’s Mind, his collaboration with Angelo De Augustine, his five-volume collection Convocations felt superfluous and his other collab albums from the era were similar. When he dropped the single “So You Are Tired”, then, it was a big deal: stripped back, much more akin to his old work, but subtly working in his electronic experiences here and there as an enhancement, rather than a focus. The rest of the album bears this out: fingerpicked guitar following into sweeping baroque movements, kitchen-sink arrangements that bring to mind the Sufjan of the 50 state project.

This isn’t the same Sufjan of that long-gone ambition, though. For one, it’s a record of Sufjan at his lowest. If the dynamics remind one of the intimately-quiet to zoomed-out, heavens-wide loud, the mood is one of pure heartache. After the album came out, he took to Instagram to dedicate it to his late partner, Evans Richardson, chief of staff at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It served as Sufjan’s public coming out moment, confirming maybe the worst-kept secret in indie music, and also made the album a locus for heartbreak of all kinds, a sort of collective moment of grief for everyone who’d lost someone in the last few years. His health problems after the launch were no joke, either. He suffered from Guillian-Barre Syndrome in the leadup to the release and had been in the hospital for a month prior. He is now, at the age of 47, having to relearn how to walk. Touring seems unlikely any time soon. The album seems to say deliver yourself unto hope, though. It also ends with a cover of a Neil Young song from Harvest. Young, who’s been through more than most in his life, would probably tell you to just steer into the curves and let them take you where they will.

When we were discussing the artistic response to living in nowhere on the Wednesday entry, the caveat must be made that this is what the straight kids’ response is. What do the queer kids do when they grow up in corporate strip mall hell? They get the fuck out, if and when they can. That was certainly the response of Sean Bowie to growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee. The first destination out was San Diego, then L.A., and then knocking around Europe for almost three years with Mykki Blanco. The real first stop on the escape tour, though, was music. As a distraction from the ‘unpleasant’ circumstances of their youth they taught themselves to play every instrument in your standard rock band: drums, bass, guitar, keys. Their work as Yves Tumor began as anything so straightforward, however. Originally, the Yves Tumor name was given to sound collage experiments and experimental electronic work. Around 2018, this began to shift. A move to Warp Records brought out more cohesive aspects of their ideas: elements of psychedelic soul, ambient pop, and noir jazz. Since then they’ve added more genres in, to the effect that their music is a constantly flowing but now highly coherent thing, not psych rock, not alternative, not pop or soul or electronic but a swampy amalgam of all of these things, filtered through the fluid, ever-changing vision Bowie brings to their music.

Their last name is rather apt. They’re queer, constantly evolving, on the cutting edge of taste. Praise A Lord is their most accessible output to date, a high-flying mixture of Nineties alt-rock, Oughts indie, sultry R&B, and still those old strange samplings, the kind that might have once gone into a collage. There are moments of the Strokes, moments of Smashing Pumpkins, moments that speak to touchstones like Linkin Park and Incubus that then melt away into sampled Zambian rock from the Seventies, brittle post-punk, glittering house-infused synthwave. Tumor is a blacker, queerer David Bowie, freed from the trappings of glam rock and free to explore nearly sixty years of music with which to construct meanings. They are, in short, the perfect post-modern global rock star in the making, someone capable of communicating in a language that spans race, gender, generation, and genre.

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