Music

From her first video, 2012’s mesmerizing “Hide,” the singular focus of her vision was apparent, a holistic project that rendered FKA twigs’ operatic approach to club beats inextricable from her astounding art direction. In the seven years since, she has made her art into a kind of theatrical multimedia experience, crafting elaborate shows and videos that intertwine and smudge the lines of classicism and the avant-garde. She is astonishing, ambitious, and seemingly good at everything, singing over her own ticker-tape beats, self-directing wildly conceptual videos, and ravenously hoovering up dance disciplines (apparently up to and including Chinese sword fighting) until she masters them. Yet in spite of twigs’ distinctive soprano (spectral and often papery) and her experimental production (...

For the last several years, Davido has been reshaping the sound of Nigerian pop. As a prolific hitmaker and one of Africa’s biggest stars, he has pivoted away from global ambitions toward revamping the traditional sounds of his homeland. He released his debut album, Omo Baba Olowo, seven years ago and hasn’t released another until now. It feels like the stars aligned for it: Drake is still courting the sound, Burna Boy has a Grammy nom, UMG is moving into the region, and the music is crashing into our shores. A Good Time is a nearly gapless immersion into his potent, wavy signature sound. Nigerian pop music—with its endorsement-based revenue structure and rejection of collaborative songwriting—isn’t really conducive to ideas like cohesion. Davido has championed the use of songwriters, and ...

Death metal glories in ugliness—rhythm guitars the texture of churned shit, leads like pig squeals, vocals like reverse peristalsis. But Blood Incantation do beautiful things with that ugliness. Their ugliness moves; within 40 minutes on their second album Hidden History of the Human Race, the Denver quartet brings death metal to exalted places, places it hardly ever goes, without ever losing the essential, foul tang of the sound. It helps that they are incredible players, virtuosic in the most basic sense. In just the first few minutes of the opening epic “Slave Species of the Gods,” guitarists Paul Riedl and Morris Kolontyrsky evoke the cold steel-shavings scrape of Slayer’s Kerry King and the hair-flip theatrics of Metallica’s Kirk Hammett. But their virtuosity comes from their vocabula...

Jeff Parker always writes parts that sound unassuming at first listen and unavoidable by the fifth. It’s the X-factor that the guitarist and master collaborator has brought to every project on his long and still-growing list of projects, jazz or rock or otherwise: Tortoise, Isotope 217, the recently reunited Chicago Underground Quartet, his solo work as a bandleader, his work as a soloist, and his supporting contributions for countless others. Despite his ability to do backflips with a guitar, his best-known lick from Tortoise’s 1998 song “TNT” is more like a heel-click—an easy, humble gesture, perfectly timed and placed. It’s a preternatural thing, of course, but it’s also a skill that he’s cultivated by changing up his scenery and embracing the unfamiliar. A few years ago, while splittin...