gristly beats & tower records pop

Everything But The Girl, Blawan, Slic, Mo Troper, Sophie Meiers

Hello! Back again after another moving-induced break. Hope your lives have been swell.

As the Coachella dust settled on Frank Ocean’s dismantled ice rink, two pieces from The Discourse stood out as excellent reads on what ‘Chella meant this year: one from Chris Richards on the increasingly visible loneliness of pop stardom onstage, and an absolute barnburner from Jeff Weiss who looks at Frank’s performance, but also tempts the wrath of K-pop stans with the best distillation of Blackpink I’ve ever read:

What if the Spice Girls had been spawned in the mid-2010s by a vertically integrated consulting firm? There is something hypnotically transfixing about them, as if every visual, graphic, dance shimmy, and autocorrected note has been focus-grouped to ensure Maximum Fun. There is not a single original idea, but it is an immaculate synthesis. They can precisely match the sum of all previous human creativity but cannot provide a note more.

We also got three excellent slices of 2000s nostalgia:

• Park That Car, Click That Link – a delightful oral history of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl” on Billboard

• “A lube-slick dildo floating through the Crab Nebula” – Tom Breihan on “Lollipop” for the Number Ones is all hits!

• “My Metrocard” Still Deeply Underrated – Edwina Hay pulled out miniDV footage of Le Tigre playing at Warsaw in 2002 and the giddy energy captured rules hard

And just four great links, for funsies:

• AI Making Music Worse - with Drake, and from Adam Faze, without Drake

• Imperial Piss Solvent – I honestly couldn’t believe this video of a dude yelling about pissing his pants wasn’t a parody? Take these kids’ Fall records away.

• What’s In Your Bag(lady) – An excellent profile and photo set with Erykah Badu from Elena Bergeron for SSENSE

Anyways, sorry for the break and without further delay, here are your best songs of the week. As always, you can follow along on our playlists on Spotify and Apple Music, which update every Tuesday along with the newsletter.

Blawan – Toast

“Toast,” the opening track from Blawan’s upcoming Dismantled Into Juice EP, starts with a distressed, dirty tom groove, and only gets nastier as the arrangement blooms into further sonic grease. It’s cut from the same cloth as his excellent 2021 jam “Under Belly” – part club-ready bass, part Donuts/FlyLo wobble where everything is a little wrong, but just enough to seem incredibly right.

Everything But The Girl – Run A Red Light

What I love most about Fuse, Everything But The Girl’s first new album in over twenty years, is that everything feels plucked from time, as if the album was released right after their last album from 1999. Every track has the absolute confidence of the 18.99 CD era, as if they’re unfolding to an audience listening to the album all the way through after buying it at Tower Records. Dressed in crisp, simple tones, Fuse feels fresh *because* of how unbothered the record seems with whatever else is happening in music in 2023.

Slic x OCTOGON – Half Moon

This song made me think hard about what it means to call a pop song minimal, mostly because my friend Cami (aka Slic) asked me what exactly I meant when I DM’ed them about loving “Half Moon’s” (yes) minimalism. In this track, a collab with NYC pop duo OCTOGON, it means less about the arrangement and more how every choice asks the listener to connect the dots: sinewy melody implying a chord progression that never lands, a structure that dodges a big chorus, and a nervy sense of space that feels like a room slowly shifting shape around you. It’s not less-is-more, but it’s not less-is-less – it’s less-as-invitation.

sophie meiers - okay w/ that

“okay w/ that” is so-bummed-out-it’s-fine synthpop that casts bedroom depression in bright, consonant synths. The song’s driving brilliance and emotional clarity balance perfectly – like Hyperpop For The Painfully Alone? Is that anything?

Mo Troper – For You To Sing

Mo Troper’s album MTV from last year was one of my favorites of 2022, so I was thrilled to hear his latest single drop last week. Allegedly built up from 70 different tracks, “For You To Sing” brings an ELO-like theatricality to Troper’s incredible power pop skills, especially when it hits the multitracked solo halfway through, packed in alongside a stunning amount of detail over the song’s 1:36 runtime.

throwbaaaaack

Diana Ross – Mirror Mirror (live on the Tonight Show 1980)

There are so many great moments in this live clip from 1980 – Diana’s desk-side costume change, her hair flip/spoken word intro combo to start the song, the bald dude shredding so hard he gets a glare from Diana, her exit through the curtain…all in an offhand performance! It helps that the band hits the song 10x harder than the slightly tepid recorded version from her album Why Do Fools Fall In Love – but it’s the plethora of tiny joyful details that had me watching this clip over and over again this week.