Sassy 009 – Dreamer+ ([PIAS] Électronique)
The debut album from Norwegian electronic artist Sassy 009, Dreamer+, explores just how dreams, identity and memory intertwine. Broadly centring on a fictional figure who must navigate loss through their dreams, it is a bold and fascinating journey through the corridor between the conscious and the subconscious. All of which is explored through a dynamic blend of twitchy hyperpop, rumbling acid techno, and 1990s trip-hop.
Dreamer+ is an ambitious and assured debut. Musically, Sassy 009 explores the fringes of electronic music, always ready to distort her sound should it become too predictable. For an album that is musically assured, it contains startlingly personal moments of fragility and self-doubt. These are the moments that really connect. Musically and thematically, she has created a constantly engaging album that will stay with the listener like fading images from a dream. – Paul Carr
Jill Scott – To Whom This May Concern (Human Re Sources / The Orchard)
To Whom This May Concern comes a decade after Jill Scott’s last album, 2015’s Woman. As Woman’s singles defined that record’s flavour of 1960s and early 1970s soul, with earthy horns, fatback drums and soaring vocals, the cosmic sounds of To Whom This May Concern fit seamlessly with pop’s retrofuturistic fascination with the 1980’s. Scott’s signature mix of poetry, hip-hop, jazz, and soul is as vibrant as ever.
In Scott’s groundbreaking early singles “Love Rain” and “A Long Walk”, she flaunted her fluid delivery and sharply observed storytelling honed by performance poetry with the sensuous overtones of a classic soul singer, delivered over an organic, jazz-inflected backdrop. Her new songs “Offdaback” and “A Universe” recall that impact with slinky, shimmering keyboard loops amidst rolling breakbeats, over which Scott recites freeform poetry that marches to the beat of its own drum whilst simultaneously providing a perfect sense of syncopation. – Jeremy McDonagh
SLIFT – Fantasia (Sub Pop)
What SLIFT have done, in the simplest reading, is taken an instinct toward enormous, ten-minute jam-cathedrals and disciplined it. Most of the songs on Fantasia run between five and seven minutes; only the title track flirts with the nine-minute mark. Repetition has been pared back. Verses do not return. Choruses are scarce. The album moves the way the band’s live shows move, forward, always forward, with the song that ends not quite resembling the song that began.
The dreamy, drifting SLIFT of the early records, the doom-bearing SLIFT of Ummon, the cinematic SLIFT of ILION, all of them are here, organized at last by a clear-eyed political anger and a willingness to write a song that ends rather than evaporates. For a band that has spent a decade jamming on themes until they spiraled into space, to come home for a moment and tell us in plain language that the planet is on fire and the men with claws are dancing, and to do so without sacrificing a single decibel of the noise that brought them to us, is a small triumph of artistic discipline. – Mary Chiney
Vince Staples – Cry Baby (Loma Vista)
With his new album, Cry Baby, Vince Staples impressively pivots, offering his most outward-scanning commentaries. Throughout these ten tracks, he addresses the US’s polarizations, deadlocks, and murderous history as well as the country’s ongoing slide into a late-capitalistic, warmongering, and racist dumb-down.
Cry Baby is also Staples‘ most rock-oriented album since 2017’s Big Fish Theory, the majority of its tracks featuring notably riffy guitars. “Blackberry Marmalade” is structured around grungy progressions and booming synth sounds. Staples launches the track (and album) with the line, “Empires built on bloodstained ground”, proceeding to render pics of racially-charged altercations and persecutions. Meanwhile, his chorus is one of his hookiest. An artist attuned to thematic and tonal balances, Staples pairs a pop melody with confrontive content, mixing the sweet and the bitter. – John Amen
Taroug – Chott (Denovali)
In the heart of Tunisia lies a giant salt lake called Chott El Djerid, or “Lagoon of the Land of Palms”. Measuring 160 miles across, the lake has been the subject of numerous works of art, most famously Star Wars, where it was used as a filming location in A New Hope. Although Chott El Djerid is crossable by foot or car in the summer, when the lake is dry, this is generally inadvisable—the salt crust on the surface is often thin and unstable. What appears as a desert can quickly turn into a drowning pool.
It’s against this backdrop that Chott arrives, the second full-length album from Tunisian producer Taroug, out via Denovali Records. Everything about this LP is echoey and huge, from its searing string arrangements to its down-swooping synths and solar-plexus-pummeling drums. Like its namesake, Chott feels both Saharan and oceanic, an album that creates an illusion of safety and solid land while constantly threatening to give way underneath you. – Parker Desautell
Telehealth – Green World Image (Sub Pop)
Telehealth are a modern-day band guided by a particular ideology; in contrast to Devo, their thesis seems to be one of inquiry rather than assertion. On Telehealth’s Sub Pop debut, Green World Image, there is a sense of interrogation into the savage absurdities inherent in current economic and social realities. There might even be a tone of resignation to the paradox of, in their words, “the anxiety- and profit-inducing system Telehealth inhabits and critiques at the same time”.
In other words, Telehealth are bemused by, but also uncomfortable with, the bitter incongruity of benefiting from the rapacious system that they lambaste. Their new album, Green World Image, is a vehicle for the group to purge their demons and reconcile themselves to a hypocritical existence. We gotta make a living, after all, and this is the system we have, for better or worse. The record sports angular grooves and twitchy rhythms, nostalgic and futuristic at once, but mostly looking askance at our modern-day neoliberal nightmare as we doomscroll ourselves to oblivion. – Alison Ross
Thin Lear – Many Disappeared (First City Artists)
Matt Longo, who writes, records, and performs under the moniker Thin Lear, is an old soul trapped in the body of a millennial. The New Jersey-based artist, who grew up writing short stories, applies that narrative practice to his haunting, sometimes deeply personal songs, with echoes of the towering figures that preceded him: in his songs (and his mature execution of them), one can hear echoes of Harry Nilsson, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and Randy Newman, among others. On his latest album, those qualities are magnified in what might be his strongest record yet.
From performance and production standpoints, Many Disappeared is a gorgeous, elegantly produced masterpiece. In addition to Ross-Spang’s sterling, organic production, Longo is joined by Will Sexton on guitar, Rick Steff on keyboards, Dave Smith on bass and former Uncle Tupelo and Wilco member Ken Coomer on drums. They understand the assignment, giving Longo’s songs plenty of room to breathe. – Chris Ingalls
Tinariwen – Hoggar (Wedge)
Tinariwen’s music is perhaps more poignant than ever, made with a reverence for history and a sense of community that grows stronger over time. As always, their music speaks truth to oppression, and the quiet strength it radiates is clearer than ever. In part, perhaps this is because their new album is a kind of homecoming, if a bittersweet one. Currently unable to return to Mali, the group recorded Hoggar in Tamanrasset, Algeria, in studios owned by next-generation assouf band Imarhan. It’s the same place where Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Alhassane Ag Touhami, and Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni–all founders and current members–first met in exile and began making music together back in 1979.
Yet another moving installation in the Tinariwen oeuvre, Hoggar grounds its audiences in the group’s realities with deep care. Iconic though their sound is, Hoggar reminds us, it is also as dynamic as the people who shape it, not only the band’s regular members but all those they include in their community. In short, Tinariwen’s tenth album is a gem, of course. – Adriane Pontecorvo
Jessie Ware – Superbloom (EMI)
Similar to its predecessors, What’s Your Pleasure? and That! Feels Good!, Jessie Ware’s Superbloom is indeed another ethereal escape to the dancefloor. However, it charts its own course as a garden-themed concept album—borrowing imagery from the seminal children’s classic The Secret Garden, perhaps with a dash of the Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors. The result is as satisfying as anything Ware has released in the last six years.
Superbloom leans heavier into its disco references, with the production and songwriting on Ware’s latest LP more dedicated to the essence of disco music, which is essentially the promise of sex. Her previous records were pop albums made in the present with a certain zest that borrowed from the past. Superbloom is a disco record through and through. – Jeffrey Davies
A.A. Williams – Solstice (Reigning Phoenix)
A.A. Williams’ new album, Solstice, doesn’t necessarily offer any major surprises. That said, her go-to templates land as perennially relevant (and still frequently spellbinding). The notable shift is that throughout the set, Williams’ voice is less bathed in reverb, chorus, and echo. Solstice’s instrumentation oscillates, as expected, between melancholic space-sprawls and unsettling grunge-escapes. The result is a tweaked sense of contrast: the instrumentation is panoramic, sublime, while Williams’ voice is grounded in the micro, landing as hyper-present and exemplarily confessional.
With Solstice, Williams claims her status as one of her generation’s transcendent singers and further develops her persona as the tragic shero. Surrounded by gossamer and doom-heavy sounds, she navigates confusion, the barbs of romance, and the knowledge that nothing can ultimately save or distract us from who we are. Illusions are shattered. Once untethered, we collapse into nihilism or embrace auto-absolution. Williams captures that limbo between the two, teetering on the line between self-destruction and self-actualisation. – John Amen