The Berlin duo’s debut album balances club music’s repetitive cadences with all-out chaos—an end-of-the-world soundtrack shot through with fierce, defiant rage.
The impulse to cast off cultural standards dictating how music should sound dominates IRISIRI, which seems most interested in articulating femininity outside the constraints of patriarchal expectations.
On her fourth album, Elysia Crampton continues staking out an anti-colonialist conception of time. It blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns while conjuring a sense of profound loneliness.
The experimental songwriter abandons the conceptual rigor of her recent albums, collaborating with a handful of jazz musicians on a loose, ambiguous EP where repetition induces a state of déjà vu.
If Holter’s preceding records were novellas, Aviary feels more like a meticulously organized compilation of mind-altering field notes in which a single page can be a world, and its depth is stunning.
Where Bloodroot bristled with bright, dissonant clusters, Ultraviolet is consonant and warm, with steady rhythms and reassuring harmonies. It is a spring rain rather than a freak hailstorm.
cc is a brilliant work of labyrinthine twists and turns—of production trickery, degraded melody, and abstraction. But it is one where emotion always trumps musical craft.
Tirzah Mastin’s debut album Devotion is a compelling vision of what imperfect pop music can be—joyful in both sound and feeling precisely because both seem so out-of-step and asymmetrical.