Music

Not many parties start with someone contemplating suicide. Yet that’s how Bad Bunny chose to begin the video for “Si Veo a Tu Mamá,” the opening track of his second album, YHLQMDLG. We see a close-up of a despondent young man, standing on a stool and staring through a noose, ready to hang himself as a party buzzes around him. He’s saved by an empathetic little boy who understands his pain, and introduces him to the cure: Listening to Bad Bunny. It’s a macabre choice for a dance record, a collection of distinctly Puerto Rican party beats that pays homage to reggaetón’s past and future. And on its surface, the song, built atop a morose, Casiotoned version of the “Girl From Ipanema” bossa nova melody, might seem more suited for the elevator of a Florida nursing home than the club. But it’s al...

In her long career as a sound collagist and pop music obsessive, Meg Remy has thrived in moments of feminized vitriol. The women of Remy’s songs are so often threatening to asphyxiate themselves, on the verge of suicide, and mad as hell. For much of her career, U.S. Girls has been an exploration of female violence and rage. But Heavy Light, Remy’s seventh album, lives in that period of emptiness that comes after. Like 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited, Heavy Light is a sideways look at the history of pop music and the capitalist world in which it thrives. What’s different here is how it sounds, and how it feels. These songs capture the watershed moment when your throat closes up, your head cools off, and your tears run dry: It is when you enter what can only be described as a zone of weightless g...

A typical Lil Uzi Vert song boils down to a few core topics: the millions in his bank account, the cars an average person wouldn’t know how to start, jewelry that wouldn’t shine on anyone else, clothing brands that most can’t pronounce, and girls who would never bat an eyelash at someone other than Uzi. But a typical Lil Uzi Vert song also sounds like it was ripped from a harddrive that fell out of the back of a spaceship, all delivered with a medley of influences from the generations that came before him. There’s the spirit of Meek Mill freestyling on Philadelphia street corners, the breakneck pace of G Herbo, the melodic designer-brand fever dream of a True Religion-wearing era Chief Keef, injected slightly with the pint-sized angst of punk-pop heroines like Hayley Williams of Paramore. ...

When Dana Margolin repeats her lyrics like incantations—“I am charming, I am sweet,” “I’m bored to death, let’s argue,” “You will like me when you meet me”—it can be hard to gauge whether she wants to believe these facts, or decimate them with irony. This is among the frictions that power Every Bad, the sometimes twisted, often transcendent, always incendiary album from the Brighton four-piece Porridge Radio. The band’s once-minimal sound—reminiscent, back in 2015, of Frankie Cosmos’ witty Bandcamp-as-diary style—has scaled colossally, transforming into a fever dream that lifts every song. Where 2016’s Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, recorded in their drummer’s shed, had a dark streak, Every Bad is unabashed sorcery. Margolin’s dusky voice and serrated riffs sometimes recall Polly Jean Harv...