Music

Yves Tumor plays a sex god on their latest album, a carnal rock record called Heaven to a Tortured Mind. If you were only familiar with the experimental ambient and noise Tumor was making just four years ago, this might sound unlikely. But transformations and roleplaying are key to understanding why Tumor is among the most interesting artists working today. Genre-bending is an inadequate rubric for describing what makes Tumor’s sound so enticing; with each new record, they seem to embody a genre—its history, its texture, its tropes. The mutations and evolutions across their work are something closer to method acting. Every gesture or affect on display across Tumor’s previous albums represents an engrossing performance of whatever genre they’re studying at the moment. When Tumor became a da...

It happens to most of us at an early age: the realization that life will not follow a straight line on the path towards fulfillment. Instead, life spirals. The game is rigged, power corrupts, and society is, in a word, bullshit. Art can expose the lies. The early music of Fiona Apple was so much about grand betrayals by inadequate men and the patriarchal world. Did it teach you to hate yourself? Did it teach you to bury your pain, to let it calcify, to build a gate around your heart that quiets the reaches of your one and only voice? Fetch the bolt cutters. Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound. No music has ever sounded quite like it. Apple recorded Fetch the Bolt Cutters both in and with her Venice Beach home, banging on its walls, stomping on its ground. Self-reliance is its rule, curio...

Ever since an artist once known as Lonny Breaux decided to defy his label Def Jam and deliver his debut, Nostalgia, Ultra, straight to the internet, the textures of popular R&B have become increasingly homegrown. Whether it’s the lithe heartbreak workout of LE1F affiliate Rahel’s 2015 album Alkali or the collaborations of singer Alexandria and producer Ethereal, there’s been a bounty of music for those who crave soulful vocals over beats from somewhere underground. On her debut album Forever, Ya Girl, the Chicago-bred, New York-based singer/producer/multi-instrumentalist KeiyaA merges Earl Sweatshirt-ish grime and the grit of deconstructed club with hints of psych and funk. It’s easier to find a singular sound when you’re working on your own, which KeiyaA did almost entirely—she poses ...

Last year, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt celebrated 25 years of mad-genius musical experiments as Matmos with a Plastic Anniversary—an album recorded entirely using plastic. That’s how Matmos albums work; a concept that might seem silly or crass at first glance is backed by a mountain of research, executed with passion and, in that case, ornately recorded using a parade of PVC pipes, riot shields, and breast implants. Since 2001, Daniel’s side-project the Soft Pink Truth has run parallel to Matmos, applying similar twists to the dancefloor. Yet nothing in either project has presaged Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, a cathartic, emotional windfall unlike anything Daniel has ever recorded. Daniel thought hard about how to process the anger and despair born out of a worldwid...