Staff Best of 2023
Following the release of the shoegaze masterpiece Delawarein 1992, and the intricate experimentations on National Comain 1993, Drop Nineteens disbanded. They had a great run. Shared stages with Radiohead, Hole, Blur, PJ Harvey. Went from being teenaged kids in Boston to mid twenty somethings with an MTV video under their belt. So when Drop Nineteens ceased to be, Greg Ackell felt content, music was a closed chapter.
3 Feet High and Rising is the debut studio album by hip hop trio de la Soul and was released on March 3, 1989. It marked the first of three full-length collaborations with producer Prince Paul, which would become the critical and commercial peak of both parties. Critically, as well as commercially, the album was a success. It contains the singles, "Me Myself and I", "The Magic Number, " "Buddy, " and "Eye Know". The album title came from the Johnny Cash song "Five Feet High and Rising". It is listed on Rolling Stone's 200 Essential Rock Records and The Source's 100 Best Rap Albums. When Village Voice held it's annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 1989, 3 Feet High and Rising was ranked #1. It was also listed on the Rolling Stone's The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Released amid the 1989 boom in gangsta rap, which gravitated towards hardcore, confrontational, violent lyrics, de la Soul's uniquely positive style made them an oddity beginning with the first single, "Me, Myself and I". Their positivity meant many observers labeled them a "hippie" group, based on their declaration of the "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" (Da. Inner. Soul. Yall). Sampling artists as diverse as Hall & Oates, Steely Dan and The Turtles, 3 Feet High and Rising is often viewed as the stylistic beginning of 1990s alternative hip hop (and especially jazz rap).
Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) [LP]
Vinyl: $30.01 Buy
SOS is the second studio album from GRAMMY award winning singer SZA, and the follow up to 2017’s major label debut album Ctrl. The genre-blending album contains elements of pop, R&B, soft-rock, gospel, and hip-hop. SOS features guest appearances from Travis Scott, Don Toliver, Phoebe Bridgers, and the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard. SZA worked with a variety of hitmaking producers including Ctrl collaborators ThankGod4Cody and Carter Lang, along with Jeff Bhasker, Rob Bisel, Benny Blanco, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Emile Haynie, Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, Jay Versace, and more.
Michael Nau is set to release his fifth full length record under Karma Chief Records on 12/8/2023. Since the mid 2000’s, he’s crafted a catalog of thoughtful, reflective songs as the frontman of indie-rock mainstays Cotton Jones, Page France, and Michael Nau & The Mighty Thread.
All 11 tracks come together to paint a beautiful picture. The lyrics invoke the listener’s imagination throughout. They’re introspective, but vague and open-ended. The indie rock backdrop shows signs of psych-soul influence with dry and punchy drums, lush synth lines, and tastefully verb-soaked vocal production. Sweeping string arrangements and French horn runs add cinematic motion to the waltz-y “Shiftshaping” (track 4). Slide guitar and a shuffling snare drum add some get-up-and-go to “Painting a Wall” (track 2). Nau’s vocal delivery falls somewhere between crooning to a crowd, telling stories to a loved one, and musing to himself.
The singer-songwriter’s relaxed attitude toward making records is discernible in the sound. A while back, veteran producer and engineer Adrien Olsen (The Killers, Lucy Dacus, Fruit Bats), approached him about recording in his Richmond, Virginia-based studio. For the first time in a while, Michael had some sessions on the calendar. He called a few old friends and put together a band. “I didn’t have much of a plan before Adrien reached out, so I wrote some songs specifically for the session,” Michael explained. “I was thinking about what would be fun to play with this specific group of guys."
The band consisted of several long-time collaborators and musicians who had participated in Nau’s various recording and touring efforts over the years. “It had been a while since I’d made music in a room with other people,” Michael shared. “We just sort of started playing and didn’t really talk about what was happening.” The combo’s newfound chemistry was a primary source of inspiration and, with the help of Olsen, ultimately led to an album’s-worth of music.
Nau and the band spent five days at Montrose Recording and left with a plan to return and finish up a few months later. “After the first session, I took a copy of the recordings with me to overdub a few things at my spot,” Michael shared. While he was working through it, he found a bunch of beautiful moments of jamming in between the takes. “I grabbed a bunch of the pieces and tried to work them in. Then, I dumped the whole thing onto a cassette as one long stream of songs.” With the record mostly complete, the final session at Montrose would consist of some simple overdubs and finishing touches.
But somehow, in the months between, he lost the overdubs. “Going into the second session, all I had was the cassette,” Michael explained. The band got back together and performed another batch of songs. At the end of their second session, they had enough music to pick and choose from for the new full-length. “The songs, as they appear on the album, are basically how they were recorded as a live band.” Grab a copy of Accompany on 12/08/2023 and keep an eye out for tour dates in the coming months.
Toro y Moi’s Sandhills is both a tender love letter to Chaz Bear’s hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, and a poignant, bittersweet acceptance that one can never really go back home. Recalling Sufjan’s Seven Swans or Karen O’s soundtrack work for Where The Wild Things Are, these loping folk-pop songs are themselves a sort of Saturn return, reminiscent of Bear’s first handmade CD-Rs as Toro y Moi. Bear gave them out to friends in the earliest days of the moniker, the releases stuffed in the Case Logic visor of their cars, and each listen brings a little more of that detail to life: the mall after which Sandhills is named; the teenaged friends spending aimless hours there, full of big ennui and bigger dreams; the late-capitalist decline and empty big box stores of Sandhills today.
But Here We Are is the new album from Foo Fighters, and marks the bands return after a year of staggering losses, personal introspection and bittersweet remembrances. A brutally honest and emotionally raw response to everything Foo Fighters have endured recently, But Here We Are is a testament to the healing powers of music, friendship and family. Courageous, damaged and unflinchingly authentic, the album opens with “Rescued,” the first of 10 songs that run the emotional gamut from rage and sorrow to serenity and acceptance, and myriad points in between.
But Here We Are is in nearly equal measure the 11th Foo Fighters album and the first chapter of the band’s new life. Sonically channeling the naiveté of Foo Fighters’ 1995 debut, informed by decades of maturity and depth, But Here We Are is the sound of brothers finding refuge in the music that brought them together in the first place 28 years ago, a process that was as therapeutic as it was about a continuation of life.
SPELLLING, the moniker of the Bay Area experimental pop mastermind Chrystia Cabral, returns with SPELLLING & the Mystery School, a collection of richly envisioned new versions of songs from throughout her critically-acclaimed discography, out August 25 via Sacred Bones. Recorded with her touring band (est. 2021), these reimagined studio tracks follow Cabral’s spellbinding career — from her 2017 breakthrough debut Pantheon Of Me, to 2018’s multidimensional synth-based project Mazy Fly, and her expansive third album, 2021’s The Turning Wheel, breathing new life into the extravagant orchestrations she’s written and produced entirely herself.
The duo of Dylan Brady and Laura Les, 100 gecs, announces that the band’s highly-anticipated sophomore album, 10,000 gecs, will arrive on March 17th, 2023. Following their breakout debut album, 1,000 gecs, the anticipation of their next body of work has been high and the band’s teases have been plentiful. The forthcoming album is set to include previously released singles “mememe” which was described in the story as "an ebullient carnival of ska-inflected verses that bounce off a chorus of thrash guitars and a squiggling synth line" along with the 90’s Alt Rock-inspired “Doritos & Fritos,” which The Fader noted as "unlike any other Gecs track before it.”
For those yet initiated: 100 gecs planted their flag on the proverbial pop culture moon with their 2019 debut album 1000 gecs, which was heralded by The New Yorker as, “an impressively precise maximalist exercise with no rules” and “utterly unhinged in the best way possible” by GQ. The innovative project captured the hearts of fans and critics alike - selling out all of their live shows to date along with The New York Times calling it, “some of the savviest pop music of the year,” and Rolling Stone dubbing it “one of 2019’s most exciting debuts.” In just a few months following the release of 1,000 gecs, the band went from playing their first concert from inside the video game Minecraft to selling out shows across the country, proving that their rabid, rapidly multiplying fanbase doesn't only exist in the far corners of the internet. After their world tour was postponed in the summer of 2020, Brady and Les kept rolling with the release of 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues, a rework of the original album featuring collaborations from the likes of A. G. Cook, Fall Out Boy, Charli XCX, Rico Nasty, as well as crowd sourced contributions by fans. The transformative release was described by The NME as a “brain-melting, genre-crushing vision of pop’s future.” Their subsequent international touring over the past two years has sent the unlikely wizard-cloaked pied pipers jumping from sold-out show to sold-out show, seemingly two steps ahead of the zeitgeist, not to mention having a blast while doing it.
Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd is the ninth studio album from acclaimed singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey, comprising 16 tracks and interludes with features including Father John Misty, Tommy Genesis, Jon Batiste, Bleachers and more. It follows the prolific artist's 2021 albums Chemtrails Over The Country Club and Blue Banisters.
Over the course of his career, Sufjan Stevens has blurred distinctions between the major and the minor, between the details that color our existence and the big events that frame our lives. He has turned historical footnotes of States into kaleidoscopic pop, and rendered the immeasurable grief of loss with intimacy and grace.
His new album Javelin—Sufjan’s first solo album of songs since 2020’s The Ascension and his first in full solo singer-songwriter mode since 2015’s Carrie & Lowell—bridges all these approaches. Sufjan uses the quietness of a solitary confession to ask universal questions in songs we can share communally. Accompanying the CD and LP formats of the album is a 48-page book of art and essays. With a series of meticulous collages, cut-up catalog fantasies, puff-paint word clouds, and iterative color fields, Sufjan builds order from seeming chaos and vice versa. And toward the middle of it all are 10 short essays by Sufjan, another window into the process that informed Javelin.
Gearing up for another pivotal creative chapter, GRAMMY® Award-winning UK singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer James Blake has released “Big Hammer,” the debut single from his forthcoming, sixth studio album Playing Robots Into Heaven which will be released on September 8, 2023. Playing Robots Into Heaven follows the critically acclaimed Friends That Break Your Heart and will see James return to the electronic roots of his Hessle, Hemlock and R&S records days. It will also nod to his latest creation, the CMYK event series with Ronda INTL which kicked off in Los Angeles last March and will be venturing to London on July 6th.

On June 15, we will release the new song "Can I Talk My Shit?," by Vagabon, the moniker of Lætitia Tamko. We will also announces her new album, Sorry I Haven’t Called, which is out September 15th via Nonesuch Records, and a fall tour that includes a headline run in the US, and EU dates with Arlo Parks and Weyes Blood. The album, co-produced by Tamko and Rostam (Vampire Weekend, Haim, Clairo), finds Tamko reinventing herself once again and features the most playful and adventurous music of her career.
“I didn't feel like being introspective,” says Laetitia Tamko of her new album Sorry I Haven’t Called. “I just wanted to have fun.” Following her intimate 2017 debut Infinite Worlds, the New York artist favored expansive and evocative electronic textures in her breakthrough 2019 self-titled follow-up. But her latest LP feels like a wholly new era for Tamko, one that’s transformational and uncompromising. Across 12 vibrant tracks she wrote and produced primarily in Germany, she channels dance music and effervescent pop through her own confident sensibilities. These conservational songs are alive and unselfconscious, a document of an artist fully embracing her vision and reclaiming her joy.
Tamko’s lyrics on Sorry I Haven’t Called are uniformly playful and inviting. The first words she sings on the album are, “Can I talk my shit? / I got way too high for this.” It’s a statement of purpose for the rest of the album that this is an unapologetic artist. “This whole record is how I talk to my friends and how to talk to my lovers,” says Tamko. “I think honesty and conversational songwriting can become poetry. There’s beauty in plainly speaking without metaphors and without flowery imagery.”
L’Rain’s I Killed Your Dog takes the universal pop theme of love as its starting point and inspects it through the form of a conversation — bold, bratty and even a touch diabolical – with her younger self. In the process of over-writing themes of grief and identity that informed her previous work, I Killed Your Dog considers what it means to hurt the people you love the most, and untangles her relationship with femininity and the formal musical conventions that others have placed on her.
The Loveliest Time is the follow-up to 2022’s The Loneliest Time, which continues in Jepsen’s tradition of coupled releases — but this time they’re not so much B-sides as they are a second chapter. While The Loneliest Time was born from a period of isolation and self-discovery, The Loveliest Time is a celebration of that growth. Featuring shimmering lead single Shy Boy, The Loveliest Time is Jepsen at her most experimental and intimate to date. Available on Milky White LP.