Jagjaguwar

Liminal space – We all know it, a familiar friend. The haze we slip into on our way to sleep. That warmth on your eyelids you feel when you turn your face to the sun and drift out of time for a few minutes. Those moments of stillness that belong to you in the sacred minutes before the alarm goes off, before you are fully able to acknowledge the outside world that waits on you like some hungry panther, eyeing you from strange trees. Inhabiting this zone is a luxury, but the best sort of liminality lives in a very specific dream space, one we spend the rest of our lives chasing: The deep sleep that most children know. Somewhere between familiar household sounds and being carried to your own bed, there’s the quiet that only belongs to you and some dream self – someone that you haven’t met yet, but that you make future plans for and secret promises to. June McDoom’s debut full-length, Follow the Light, feels exactly like exploring this space and pushing forward, slipping out of time and waking up someplace new, a place that’s barely familiar enough to feel like home but somehow already wholly personal and meant for you alone. June grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built of strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and student of sound all his own, built his own speakers and maintained no less than three sound systems across as many rooms. The bass from his solitary DJ sets would sneak its way through her bedroom floor, making itself at home like some wayward cat as she listened to folk records, finding harmonies that were new and special to her. On the edge of the Florida Everglades, two musics in one room, meshing into something indescribable. Lushness as past and premonition. The low end of where she comes from, and the high, gentle harmony of what she would eventually seek out, sharing the same humid air. She would find folk music on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel’s contributions to The Graduate, all the while nobody around her listening to it and her parents referring to it as “that sleepy music.” She did not mind being the only one; the solitude afforded her the opportunity to fall in love with harmony first, before words, before anything else. Harmony is the thing that reaches her, and now it is the thing she effortlessly reaches for. You will hear it all over this album, with chords opening up to greet you before you have any idea what she’s singing about. Yet and still, an elder also traveled a similar path: Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a distinguished mento man who played banjo and guitar, built his own rumba boxes and worked hard to keep Jamaica’s oldest form of rural acoustic folk music and storytelling alive. Mento is the genre at the root of all of it – we have the form to thank for ska, rock steady, reggae, dub and everything that came after, and he is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift and a map. Even her name is part of it, though she will tell you she landed on it more by feel than reason. She records as June McDoom, born Alyssa, June being a nickname one of her grandmothers, Joan, went by, a name she thought was cool to carry and simply liked the sound of. An etheric channel that reverberates all the same. A dub all its own. For years, this was just the sound of her family, a comfort and constant companion that did not yet feel as if it also belonged to her. It took going out into the world, living, loving, learning and coming back home, to find that she had earnestly built a full life of her own – and that there was a sound to meet it. She put on an Alton Ellis record one day and realized the soundshe had been seeking had been there her whole life, a steady groove meant to hold anyone with ears and heart enough to listen. She set out to create and ended up making music that held space for all of the sounds and feelings that she loved. Not a reggae or dub record, not a folk record, but the harmony of one laid over the rhythm of the other. Sonic liminality, echoed out into the cosmos in some places. She and her longtime partner, Evan Wright, created the songs slowly, by hand. Songcraft for the pair meant stacking parts over time, chasing texture, exercising restraint in their explorations, keeping things minimal on purpose. Nearly every one began as just her voice and a guitar before the two of them fleshed it out, Evan playing most of the instruments while June layered in the vocal harmonies she so loves to arrange. They opened the record by cutting live drums with Victor Axelrod, the producer who records as Ticklah, down in his Sunset Park basement, then carried the songs home and built the rest themselves across long days in the studio they keep at home, tracking to tape and digital both, even hauling out to a friend’s house for the harp. Dub and Wall of Sound influencing the low end, with echoes of Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle and the washy, stellar guitars of Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand haunting the outer edges of what her sound would shapeshift into. Angelic heroics, and nothing less. It was not easy, by any stretch. A casual listener won’t know that she spent twelve hours a day mixing because she wanted perfection, or that she started the process over when, on a Christmas visit, her parents told her that they couldn’t hear enough of her vocals. “Without You,” the album’s lead single, carries the fingerprints of that patience: it began with live drums running straight through and slowly became something else entirely, the deeper she steeped it in Cocteau Twins, until a dub bassline and a shoegaze shimmer met in the middle, in the last place you would think to look for either one. That was the standard she wanted to meet and surpass – but you, listener, will only hear a record that could have gone overboard but didn’t. Generous in its way, it invites you in as an active participant on the path, leaving room for you instead of telling you how to feel. At the heart, the core of all of this, is June’s grandmother Aggie. She formed the center, both in family and in this recording – a guide for June in moments of stillness, in moments of uncertainty, and at the edges that she wants to keep close. Indeed, the song “Memory” was written with her in mind. That is the light making its way through the pinhole in this camera of the mind, the guide that helps June to focus, to see and to step forward confidently. People who love you showing the way, their energy still present and shining even when their form has moved on. There’s a harder, quieter undercurrent that moves through this album – one that June explores in “Outside the Window.” There are so many different iterations of a self, all belonging to so many different sets of people and realities. What obligation do you have to them, and can you meet all of the promises that you made to yourself in those sleepy, hazy moments when you pretended you weren’t a kid anymore? What is authenticity? Who defines that? Who do you owe it to? What do you owe yourself? These are questions that prowl around the corners of the overthinking artist’s mind when creating an album this intimate, this exacting, this personal. You’re learning how to be a person in public while keeping a degree of interiority all of your own, trying to make sure that you don’t let your life pass you by as you’re trying to meet your own standards. Future You is an ancestor that your current self gets to meet. As June layers these songs, she is figuring out who she is in real time. The album holds that answer, and offers it to you, the listener, as well. It knows that none of us are just one person, but a multitude of people we’ve had to let go of, kill off, commit to meeting at a future date and time. A continuum: There’s an entire lineage of selves that we all carry with us each day, and others that we will eventually meet. We are reaching back to those people and waving hello to them at the same time, along with the lineages of people who helped to shape us and get us here. A collection of people and things that don’t seem to go together, but we let them in anyway. Dark. Light. Equals. Opposites. All there in sound, in spirit, in daily action. We turn into the light when things feel dark. We get used to feeling around for it if we can’t see it. We let the warmth of it hit our faces and slowly open eyes to see.

The expansive American experience Lonnie Holley quilts together across his astounding new album, MITH, is both multitudinous and finely detailed. Holley’s self-taught piano improvisations and stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach have only gained purpose and power since he introduced the musical side of his art in 2012 with Just Before Music, followed by 2013’s Keeping a Record of It. But whereas his previous material seemed to dwell in the Eternal-Internal, MITH lives very much in our world — the one of concrete and tears; of dirt and blood; of injustice and hope. Across these songs, in an impressionistic poetry all his own, Holley touches on Black Lives Matter (“I’m a Suspect”), Standing Rock (“Copying the Rock”) and contemporary American politics (“I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America”). A storyteller of the highest order, he commands a personal and universal mythology in his songs of which few songwriters are capable — names like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joanna Newsom and Gil Scott-Heron come to mind. MITH was recorded over five years in locations such as Porto, Portugal; Cottage Grove, Oregon; New York City and Holley’s adopted hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. These 10 songs feature contributions from fellow cosmic musician Laraaji, jazz duo Nelson Patton, visionary producer Richard Swift, saxophonist Sam Gendel and producer/musician Shahzad Ismaily.

The expansive American experience Lonnie Holley quilts together across his astounding new album, MITH, is both multitudinous and finely detailed. Holley’s self-taught piano improvisations and stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach have only gained purpose and power since he introduced the musical side of his art in 2012 with Just Before Music, followed by 2013’s Keeping a Record of It. But whereas his previous material seemed to dwell in the Eternal-Internal, MITH lives very much in our world — the one of concrete and tears; of dirt and blood; of injustice and hope. Across these songs, in an impressionistic poetry all his own, Holley touches on Black Lives Matter (“I’m a Suspect”), Standing Rock (“Copying the Rock”) and contemporary American politics (“I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America”). A storyteller of the highest order, he commands a personal and universal mythology in his songs of which few songwriters are capable — names like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joanna Newsom and Gil Scott-Heron come to mind. MITH was recorded over five years in locations such as Porto, Portugal; Cottage Grove, Oregon; New York City and Holley’s adopted hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. These 10 songs feature contributions from fellow cosmic musician Laraaji, jazz duo Nelson Patton, visionary producer Richard Swift, saxophonist Sam Gendel and producer/musician Shahzad Ismaily.

'Oh Me Oh My' is both elegant and ferocious. It is stirring in one moment and a balm the next. It details histories both global and personal. Lonnie Holley's harrowing youth and young manhood in the Jim Crow South are well-told at this point — his sale into a different home as a child for just a bottle of whiskey; his abuse at the infamous Mount Meigs correctional facility for boys; the destruction of his art environment by the Birmingham airport expansion. But Holley's music is less a performance of pain endured and more a display of perseverance, of relentless hope. Intricately and lovingly produced by LA's Jacknife Lee (The Cure, REM, Modest Mouse), there is both kinetic, shortwave funk that call to mind Brian Eno's 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' and the deep space satellite sounds of Eno's ambient works. But it's a tremendous achievement in sonics all its own.It's also an achievement in the refinement of Holley's impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. On the title track which deals with mutual human understanding", Holley is able to make a profound point as ever in far fewer phrases: "The deeper we go, the more chances there are, for us to understand the oh-me's and understand the oh-my's." Illustrious collaborators like Michael Stipe, Sharon Van Etten, Moor Mother and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver serve as not only as choirs of angels and co-pilots to give Lonnie’s message flight but as proof of Lonnie Holley as a galvanizing, iconoclastic force across the music community.

There are poets like the great Mary Oliver, who might suggest that one’s primary function when moving through the world, for as long as they have life and the ability to move through the world, is to play close attention to that which others may foolishly call small, or quotidian. The brain and heart are both containers, with as much space as you wish for them to have, and to live is to create collections of found affections. Sounds from your beloved and familiar blocks, movements of the trees and the people beneath them, the way someone you adore may hold you for a few lingering seconds before releasing from a hug and vanishing into a crowded crosswalk. To think of our living, our making, and our loving in this way means that, at least for some of us, we may be propelled forward by the prospect of what’s next. What moment we can hold and place in our overflowing pockets.

The work of Lonnie Holley is, for me, a work of this kind of accumulation and close attention. The delight of finding a sound and pressing it up against another found sound and another until, before a listener knows it, they are awash in a symphony of sound that feels like it stitches together as it is washing over you. Tonky is an album that takes its name from a childhood nickname that was affixed to Holley when he lived a portion of his childhood life in a honky tonk. Lonnie Holley’s life of survival and endurance is one that required – and no doubt still requires – a kind of invention. An invention that is also rich and present in Holley’s songs, which are full and immersive on Tonky, an album that begins with its longest song, a nine minute, exhaustive marathon of a tune called “Seeds,” which begins with a single sparse sound and then expands. Chants, faint keys, strings, and atop it all, Holley’s voice, not singing, but speaking plainly about working the earth when he was young, the violence he endured in the process of it all, going to bed bloodied and in pain from beatings. The song expands into a metaphor about place, about the failures of home, or anywhere meant to protect you not living up to what it sells itself to be, even if you tirelessly work at it, work on it, work to make something worthwhile of it.

“Seeds” not only sets the tone for an album that revolves around rebirth, renewal, and the limits of hope and faith, but it highlights what Holley’s greatest strength as a musician is, to me, which is a commitment to abundance, and generosity. He is an incredibly gifted storyteller with a commitment to the oral tradition, such that many listeners (myself among them,) would be entirely content sitting at the feet of a Lonnie Holley record and turning an ear to his robust, expansive storytelling. But Tonky is an album as expansive in sound as it is in making a place for a wide range of featured artists to come through the door of the record and feel at home, no matter how they spend the time they get on a song. 

Spearheaded by songwriter Dylan Young, ‘Massive Shoe’ is Way Dynamic’s third foray into alt-folk pop coloured by his own creative fingerprint. In the past year, Way Dynamic have released their sophomore LP ‘Duck’ to excellent reviews, toured with Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman & The Wind, and are now already returning with another full length release ‘Massive Shoe’, resuming Young’s exploration into minimalist folk-pop, baroque pop and art rock. Yellow Green Red in their album review for ‘Duck’ aptly describe Way Dynamic as; “Brian Wilson’s lust for pop perfection brought back to earth by Randy Newman’s silliness and Christopher Cross’s knack for an original melody that already feels familiar”. Adding a touch of Neil Young balladry, Massive Shoe continues this formula, as they lyrically dive into topics such as navigating relationships, struggling to communicate, mistakes and humanity, while maintaining a sense of ambiguity that washes over you rather than slaps you in the face. Although Way Dynamic can draw parallels to many of the artists above, the album never falls into songwriting tropes of that era, instead Young manages to bob and weave in the face of any typical motif, keeping the album engaging and lighthearted, and maintaining a sense of adventure in his music. ‘People Settle Down’ sets us off with a groove and backing vocal hooks, before we shift into more tender songs such as ‘Miffed It’ which floats above a guitar melody that may be the earworm of the year. Before you can settle into the tender songs, the album shifts again with absurd pop song ‘My Visit (To Hell)’, lyrically chronicling Dylan’s journey through hell over a bouncy beat and progression. The album title ‘Massive Shoe’, alludes to one always having bigger shoes to fill. Despite Way Dynamic’s brilliant past releases, and the “massive shoe” left to fill after each album, Young consistently manages to outdo himself as he patiently builds a distinctive and impressive discography.

Consider this your invitation to Café Molly, a lounge bar like they don’t make them anymore. The lights are low, the martinis are ice cold, the banquettes are velvet, and the stage is set for the electrifying talent of whistler Molly Lewis. Molly’s soft-focus cocktail music conjures up visions of classic Hollywood jazz clubs, Italian cinema soundtracks and lingering embraces between lovers. After the exotica stylings of The Forgotten Edge EP and the tropicalia-indebted Mirage EP, Molly wanted to encapsulate the sound of Café Molly for her debut album On The Lips, a dreamy tribute to classic mood music. That spellbinding sound, which usually comes to life in Los Angeles, has also popped up in Mexico City dancehalls, graced the runways of Paris and London Fashion Weeks, and made a magical appearance at a children's fairyland. Molly Lewis’s love for this smoky corner of the world doesn’t end with her songwriting. She is a devotee and an archivist, capturing and enlivening the pieces that endure. She was a regular at the legendary shows by Marty and Elayne, the lounge duo who spent almost 40 years playing LA’s Dresden bar. The duo came to global fame after an appearance in 1996’s Swingers and kept going long after that spotlight faded, finally finishing their nightly residency after the death of Marty at the ripe age of 89 last year. “That felt like the end of an era,” says Molly. But there are still flashes of that world to be found, and she finds them. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in New York lately, where there are a lot more of those moody, classic jazz bars,” she explains. Molly celebrates the poet Kenneth ‘Sonny’ Donato, a former drinking buddy of Charles Bukowski, on the album’s swooning ‘Sonny’. “He’s a total LA character with a great voice and great style, as well as a champion of me and my music,” says Molly, who met Sonny when he was tending bar at Hollywood’s iconic Musso and Frank. “He would MC my Café Molly shows and introduce the night with a poem about LA. Everyone loves him.” Over the past few years Molly has flexed her one-of-a-kind musical skill alongside Mark Ronson on the Barbie soundtrack, as well as with Dr Dre, Karen O, actor John C Reilly, Mac De Marco, fashion houses Chanel, Gucci and Hermes, and folk rock royalty Jackson Browne. After a performance with longtime friend Weyes Blood on Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love during a Café Molly evening at LA’s Zebulon, Molly supported the singer on a US tour, introducing her sound to a brand new audience. “I forget sometimes that what I do has that factor of surprise and uniqueness – it is something that most people have never seen before,” says Molly. She too might never have entered the idiosyncratic world of whistling had she not as a teenager seen the 2005 documentary Pucker Up, which details the International Whistling Competition. Equally amused and bemused by the eccentric event, in 2012 she competed herself. Spending her early twenties in Berlin she then moved to LA to work in film – and returned to the contest in 2015 to take home first prize. One evening Molly did a turn at an open mic at the Kibitz Room, a tiny late-night bar inside historic LA deli Canter’s. Her display led to appearances at performance art happenings across the city, and she soon caught the ear of independent record label Jagjaguwar. On The Lips was recorded with producer Thomas Brenneck of the Menahan Street Band, Budos Band, Dap-Kings and El Michels Affair, at his newly-built Diamond West Studios in Pasadena. The pair bonded over the work of 1960s soundtrack composers Alessandro Alessandroni and Piero Piccioni, and, with something of an open door policy during the sessions, a stream of acclaimed musicians ended up across the album’s 10 tracks. “We were all sitting around having beers and amazing people would just come by,” says Molly, who fitted out the studio with a vintage tiki bar she picked up at a local flea market. “It was a wonderful place to be social, sometimes almost too social!” Step forward Nick Hakim, who would lend bossa nova piano to ‘Cocosette’, which also features the smooth sounds of Latin Grammy-nominated Brazilian guitarist Rogê. Elsewhere Leland Whitty of Canadian instrumental group Badbadnotgood lends a searing saxophone line to the jazzy ‘Lounge Lizard’, while Sal Samano and Alex Garcia of Chicano soul group Thee Sacred Souls appear on the melancholy ‘Crushed Velvet’. Badbadnotgood’s Chester Hansen also plays bass across the album, while Beck collaborator Roger Joseph Manning Jr. lends organ to the lush ‘Moon Tan’, which pays homage to film score composer Piero Umiliani. Experimental jazz pianist Marco Benevento and El Michels Affair’s Leon Michels both crop up on the perky ‘Silhouette’. There are a couple of covers, too, just like you’ll hear at a Café Molly night. This time it’s Dave Berry’s 1960s pop standard ‘The Crying Game’ and Jeanette’s ‘Porqué Te Vas’, which Molly fell in love with after hearing it on the soundtrack of Carlos Saura’s acclaimed 1976 drama Cría Cuervos. “The original is such a great song – I always wanted to do a few covers and I don't really gravitate towards more upbeat music in my own songwriting, so it was fun to try and think of a more upbeat track to include, to try to kind of change up the movement of the record.” With her intoxicating compositions, and wry brand of stagecraft (she might not be singing up there, but she can sure tell a joke) Molly Lewis looks set to join her heroes in the storied lore of the Los Angeles lounge scene and beyond. So pull up a chair, order your favorite drink, and prepare to fall for On The Lips.

Consider this your invitation to Café Molly, a lounge bar like they don’t make them anymore. The lights are low, the martinis are ice cold, the banquettes are velvet, and the stage is set for the electrifying talent of whistler Molly Lewis. Molly’s soft-focus cocktail music conjures up visions of classic Hollywood jazz clubs, Italian cinema soundtracks and lingering embraces between lovers. After the exotica stylings of The Forgotten Edge EP and the tropicalia-indebted Mirage EP, Molly wanted to encapsulate the sound of Café Molly for her debut album On The Lips, a dreamy tribute to classic mood music. That spellbinding sound, which usually comes to life in Los Angeles, has also popped up in Mexico City dancehalls, graced the runways of Paris and London Fashion Weeks, and made a magical appearance at a children's fairyland. Molly Lewis’s love for this smoky corner of the world doesn’t end with her songwriting. She is a devotee and an archivist, capturing and enlivening the pieces that endure. She was a regular at the legendary shows by Marty and Elayne, the lounge duo who spent almost 40 years playing LA’s Dresden bar. The duo came to global fame after an appearance in 1996’s Swingers and kept going long after that spotlight faded, finally finishing their nightly residency after the death of Marty at the ripe age of 89 last year. “That felt like the end of an era,” says Molly. But there are still flashes of that world to be found, and she finds them. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in New York lately, where there are a lot more of those moody, classic jazz bars,” she explains. Molly celebrates the poet Kenneth ‘Sonny’ Donato, a former drinking buddy of Charles Bukowski, on the album’s swooning ‘Sonny’. “He’s a total LA character with a great voice and great style, as well as a champion of me and my music,” says Molly, who met Sonny when he was tending bar at Hollywood’s iconic Musso and Frank. “He would MC my Café Molly shows and introduce the night with a poem about LA. Everyone loves him.” Over the past few years Molly has flexed her one-of-a-kind musical skill alongside Mark Ronson on the Barbie soundtrack, as well as with Dr Dre, Karen O, actor John C Reilly, Mac De Marco, fashion houses Chanel, Gucci and Hermes, and folk rock royalty Jackson Browne. After a performance with longtime friend Weyes Blood on Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love during a Café Molly evening at LA’s Zebulon, Molly supported the singer on a US tour, introducing her sound to a brand new audience. “I forget sometimes that what I do has that factor of surprise and uniqueness – it is something that most people have never seen before,” says Molly. She too might never have entered the idiosyncratic world of whistling had she not as a teenager seen the 2005 documentary Pucker Up, which details the International Whistling Competition. Equally amused and bemused by the eccentric event, in 2012 she competed herself. Spending her early twenties in Berlin she then moved to LA to work in film – and returned to the contest in 2015 to take home first prize. One evening Molly did a turn at an open mic at the Kibitz Room, a tiny late-night bar inside historic LA deli Canter’s. Her display led to appearances at performance art happenings across the city, and she soon caught the ear of independent record label Jagjaguwar. On The Lips was recorded with producer Thomas Brenneck of the Menahan Street Band, Budos Band, Dap-Kings and El Michels Affair, at his newly-built Diamond West Studios in Pasadena. The pair bonded over the work of 1960s soundtrack composers Alessandro Alessandroni and Piero Piccioni, and, with something of an open door policy during the sessions, a stream of acclaimed musicians ended up across the album’s 10 tracks. “We were all sitting around having beers and amazing people would just come by,” says Molly, who fitted out the studio with a vintage tiki bar she picked up at a local flea market. “It was a wonderful place to be social, sometimes almost too social!” Step forward Nick Hakim, who would lend bossa nova piano to ‘Cocosette’, which also features the smooth sounds of Latin Grammy-nominated Brazilian guitarist Rogê. Elsewhere Leland Whitty of Canadian instrumental group Badbadnotgood lends a searing saxophone line to the jazzy ‘Lounge Lizard’, while Sal Samano and Alex Garcia of Chicano soul group Thee Sacred Souls appear on the melancholy ‘Crushed Velvet’. Badbadnotgood’s Chester Hansen also plays bass across the album, while Beck collaborator Roger Joseph Manning Jr. lends organ to the lush ‘Moon Tan’, which pays homage to film score composer Piero Umiliani. Experimental jazz pianist Marco Benevento and El Michels Affair’s Leon Michels both crop up on the perky ‘Silhouette’. There are a couple of covers, too, just like you’ll hear at a Café Molly night. This time it’s Dave Berry’s 1960s pop standard ‘The Crying Game’ and Jeanette’s ‘Porqué Te Vas’, which Molly fell in love with after hearing it on the soundtrack of Carlos Saura’s acclaimed 1976 drama Cría Cuervos. “The original is such a great song – I always wanted to do a few covers and I don't really gravitate towards more upbeat music in my own songwriting, so it was fun to try and think of a more upbeat track to include, to try to kind of change up the movement of the record.” With her intoxicating compositions, and wry brand of stagecraft (she might not be singing up there, but she can sure tell a joke) Molly Lewis looks set to join her heroes in the storied lore of the Los Angeles lounge scene and beyond. So pull up a chair, order your favorite drink, and prepare to fall for On The Lips.

Dunya, the title of Mustafa’s masterfully crafted and breathtakingly tender full-length debut, roughly translates from Arabic to “the world in all its flaws.” It’s a lofty subject for a young songwriter, but as with every theme at the heart of the Sudanese-Canadian artist’s work—from religious devotion to childhood trauma, gang violence to romantic intimacy—he approaches it through a personal lens. Blending genres and moods, weaving novelistic details into instantly memorable folk songs, he has crafted a record that feels like a series of personal breakthroughs, arriving one after the other. The first thing that strikes you about Mustafa’s music has always been his writing: a simple, piercing tone that can make any story feel as raw and earnest as the words to a love song. With a hushed delivery that can silence his surroundings, Mustafa evolved swiftly from a child prodigy reciting poems throughout his native Toronto to a behind-the-scenes pop songwriting force. On Dunya, he becomes a full-on auteur in his own right. “I’m trying to preserve and celebrate the ordinary life in the hood,” Mustafa notes of his lyrical inspiration. Exploring his upbringing and trajectory onward, these songs are equally disarming in their simplicity and multilayered in their emotional breadth. Featuring appearances from collaborators such as Aaron Dessner, Rosalía, Clairo, Nicolas Jaar, and more, alongside Mustafa’s longtime creative partner Simon Hessmann, the music reveals a confident, distinctive voice that’s never sounded more poised for the masses. Even when it sounds like he’s taking on the world, Mustafa is speaking only for himself: a story that he knows is just getting started.

For all the attention that was paid to her 2012 break-through Tramp, Sharon Van Etten is an artist with a hunger to turn another corner and to delve deeper, writing from a place of honesty and vulnerability to create a bond with the listener that few contemporary musicians can match. Compelled by a restless spirit, Van Etten is continuously challenging herself. Now, the result is Are We There, a self-produced album of exceptional intimacy, sublime generosity, and immense breadth.Most musicians are quite happy to leave the production end of things to someone else. It’s enough to live your music without taking on the role of producer as well. Yet Van Etten knew it was time to make a record entirely on her terms. The saying goes “fortune favors the bold” and yet this boldness had to be tempered. For this, Van Etten found a kindred spirit in veteran music producer Stewart Lerman. Originally working together on Boardwalk Empire, they gently moved into new roles, rallying around the idea of making a record together in Lerman’s studio in New Jersey. Lerman’s studio expertise gave Van Etten the freedom to make Are We There the way she imagined. Van Etten also enlisted the individual talents of her band, consisting of Heather Woods Broderick, Doug Keith and Zeke Hutchins, and brought in friends Dave Hartley and Adam Granduciel from The War on Drugs, Jonathan Meiberg (Shearwater), Jana Hunter (Lower Dens), Peter Broderick, Mackenzie Scott (Torres), Stuart Bogie, Jacob C. Morris and Mickey Freeze. It is clear from the opening chords in the first song, Afraid of Nothing, that we are witnessing a new awareness, a sign of Van Etten in full stride, writing, producing and performing from a place that seems almost mythical, were it not so touchable and real. Always direct, and never shying away even from the most personally painful narratives, Van Ettten’s songwriting continues to evolve. Many of the songs deal with seemingly impossible decisions, anticipation, and then resolution. She sings of the nature of desire, memory, of being lost, emptiness, of promises and loyalty, fear and change, of healing and the true self, violence and sanctuary, waiting, of silence. The artist who speaks in such a voice is urging us to do something, to take hold and to go deeper. Living in this way, the questions of life remain alive, as close and steady as breathing. Many of the ballads of old are as dark as pitch, and people for whom the issues of life and death were as vivid as flame wrote them. You could turn off the electricity, remove all the instruments and Sharon’s voice and words would remain. They connect her to the mystic stratum which flows just beneath the everyday, which is rarely acknowledged as the forces of distraction sweep our attention away.

The band Unknown Mortal Orchestra sometimes enjoys making purely instrumental music. In addition to the vocal-based records they’re more well-known for, they’ve also begun to make an instrumental series called the IC where they spend time in a chosen city and improvise and collaborate on non-vocal music. Recently the band spent time in Colombia to make music and initiate their new keyboard player Christian Li. The resulting sessions have become IC-02 Bogota, a musical document of the time they spent in that exciting city and the possible background music for some strange parties and night drives in your future.

Their first album to chart in multiple countries around the world, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s sophomore record II was released in 2013. Featuring the significant American hit ‘So Good At Being In Trouble’, it received plaudits for its funky, groove-laden blend of DIY indie-rock, classic Sixties pop and psychedelia. Tenth anniversary edition features an unreleased song from the same sessions (‘Two Generations Of Excess’), the era’s B-sides and the five acoustic tracks from the contemporaneously released ‘Blue Record’ EP.

Created between Palm Springs, California and Hilo, Hawai'i, V is the first double album from the Hawaiian-New Zealand singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Ruban Nielson's Unknown Mortal Orchestra band. Designed to play as one continuous movement and road-tested on dry California freeways, V is the definitive Unknown Mortal Orchestra car record. It's also the fifth full-length album Ruban has released in twelve years. Across fourteen sun-bleached songs - written solo or with his brother Kody - Ruban draws from the rich traditions of West Coast AOR, yacht rock, weirdo pop and Hawaiian Hapa-haole music. Over a laidback blend of singalong anthems and cinematic instrumentals, he evokes blue skies, afternoons spent lounging by hotel swimming pools and the alluring darkness that lurks below perfect, pristine surfaces. It's a duality expressed in the dilapidated sunset blues and the salt-corroded soul Ruban explores through tracks like 'Layla' and 'Nadja.'During the pandemic's early days, Ruban reunited with Kody at a cousin's wedding in Hawai'i. With assistance from their father, Chris Nielson (saxophone/flute) and longstanding Unknown Mortal Orchestra member Jake Portrait, they brought everything Ruban had been thinking about together. The result was V, due for release on March 3, 2023, through Jagjaguwar. When they talked about records that moved them in that spine-shivering manner, Ruban started thinking about the 70s AM radio rock and 80s pop songs that had lurked on the edge of his subconscious mind for most of his life. He wanted to write his version of records like that, leading to the two glorious uptempo singles Unknown Mortal Orchestra released in 2021, 'Weekend Run' and 'That Life'.However, the golden good times never last forever. Not long after, health issues began to plague his extended family. Putting his recordings aside, he helped his mother and his uncle move home from New Zealand and Portland to Hawai'i, and began dividing his time between Hawai'i and Palm Springs. During this period he reconnected with his relatives, reassessed his past, and started to look at things with fresh eyes. Hawai'i brought back memories of the darker side of his parents' lifestyle as entertainers. On those trips, he heard those classic AM radio rock records everywhere. They were inextricably intertwined with the palm trees, swimming pools, and glamorized hedonism he’d internalized from his childhood. There's a type of music in Hawai'i called Hapa-haole (Half white). You can hear it expressed in signature Unknown Mortal Orchestra style through the humid guitar-led atmosphere of V's penultimate song, 'I Killed Captain Cook'. Although the songs are presented in a traditional Hawaiian manner, they’re mostly sung in English. Having been influenced by Hawaiian music since Unknown Mortal Orchestra's first album, Ruban saw a space for himself within the tradition. When he reflected on his success, he realised he had the responsibility and platform to represent Hapa-haole music on the global stage.

On their debut self-titled album, Women embraced sonic brashness that deeper examination revealed to be tinted with sly pop melody. With their second album "Public Strain", the band has honed a sound truthful to that reverb drenched noise while allowing the pop sensibilities to surface into clearer focus.This exact balance of delicate and dense is a pervasive thread throughout the album, reflecting the contradiction of the band's environment buried in urban sprawl framed by prairie landscape. Whether twisting through the urgent krautrock of "Locust Valley", an exercise of harmony through simplicity, or climaxing with the bittersweet melody of "Eyesore", the album somehow builds luminous contrast out of a palette of grays.