Five Years After "Blonde" - Did Frank Ocean Make Pop Music Boring?
Plus Halsey meets NIN, Sylvie, Breeze, Baby Keem, Binki, and Dee-Parts
Hi welcome to the Unskippables! Five new(ish) tracks you need to know, and one throwback to put on that playlist for your boo to make you seem ~Deep Into Music.
Five years ago this week, Frank Ocean dropped Blonde, his hugely influential minimal 2nd full-length. With a notable lack of drums and frequent smatterings of demo-like guitar, Frank’s vocals were nakedly front and center, feeling even more intimate and off-the-cuff than his mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra, or his breakthrough LP, Channel Orange.
While the minimal sonics of Blonde made it bracing and immediate, its stripped back legacy has rendered much of major label pop in its wake inert - using his signifiers as shorthand for “meaningfulness” with no meaning in the middle.
As refreshing as Blonde’s ambitions for nudity felt, his blueprint for “realness” still imbues every New Music Friday with inarticulate and unsatisfying imitators, like strip mall restauranteurs trying to tackle molecular gastronomy.
On to this week’s best tracks — you can follow along on our playlist on Spotify and Apple Music, which will update every week along with the newsletter.
THE UNSKIPPABLES #4
Sylvie - Falls On Me
I’m truly hoping this ends the Stevie Nicks Supremacy era of indie pop and starts the Karen Carpenter Supremacy period we all deserve. This song, from the band’s upcoming EP on Terrible, is mauve-tinted and in the pocket a la 1978 AOR, but thanks to an unflappably cool chord progression and Marina Allen’s delivery, lines like “Autumn leaves are falling like a rain / and it falls on me once again” hit home. Casual swoops of lap steel and horns seal the deal for this slice of laid-back luxe.
Halsey - You asked for this
Honestly, I could pull any track from this Atticus Ross/Trent Reznor-produced album this week, just because it’s thrilling to hear the textures of the recent (underrated!) Nine Inch Nails EPs all over Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. Ross and Reznor give every song a threatening edge, almost pushing Halsey into the late 90’s territory of Failure/Autolux with stomping beats and an opaque mix of synths, guitars, and op-amp clipping. Halsey, to their credit, steps up with an attitude that matches the brawny instrumentals, unafraid to embrace a stalking strut across the entire record.
Breeze feat. Cadence Weapon - Come Around
A lovely take on Happy Mondays-inspired baggy jams from Toronto (the Manchester of Canada? Who’s to say). An underlying buzzing guitar and guest verse from Cadence Weapon add flair that make this more than a throwback, but the whole affair has a confident, grounded swagger that’s nothing if not timeless.
Binki - Landline
This is the most convincing overlap of TikTok-friendly rhymes with Ariel Pink gossamer lavender smog you’ll hear today. RIYL chorus pedals, an oddly specific bite on Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz flow.
Baby Keem feat. Kendrick Lamar - family ties
Having only known Baby Keem from his 2019 track “Orange Soda,” it’s a little odd hearing his youthful voice on a full-scale production alongside an inimitable voice like Kendrick Lamar. Keem’s flow is lean and scrappy, still sounding like its yet to shed its baby fat, laid on top of a looped horn hook and equally lithe trap hi hats. The track feels less woozy than his initial tracks, but shares the underweight nervousness of the songs that broke him. The second half of the track, anchored by Kendrick’s guest verse, shifts gears considerably, leaning on bouncing triplets for a more assured, grown bounce that ends the track on a triumphant note.
~The Throwback
Dee-Parts - Can’t Keep Up
For the last year I’ve been a loud advocate for Boston’s Sweeping Promises, who released a truly excellent LP of Kleenex-meets-Au Pairs post-punk. Unlike their paint-by-numbers peers, the songs didn’t feel like a throwback, thanks to the immediate instrumental takes and, perhaps most importantly, Lira Mondal’s voice and earnest yet driving melodies.
What I didn’t know until recently was Sweeping Promises came out of a previous project, Dee-Parts, who exchange SP’s fist pumping for something slightly more twee and yearning. Instead of rising above chaos, Mondal’s voice finds a slightly more generous melodic pocket nestled against C86 guitars and drum machines. You can buy their full discography on Bandcamp - cassettes, appropriately, are all sold out.