Pop and Rock Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      With His New Album, 'Far In,' Helado Negro Confronts Earthly Anxieties

      by

      The Ecuadorean American musician’s new album, “Far In,” is filled with celestial lullabies that confront earthly anxieties.The end is weighing heavy on Helado Negro. Some of his unease stems from traditional concerns, like aging (the musician, born Roberto Carlos Lange, turned 41 this year). But some is a consequence of looming global catastrophes: the existential dread of climate change, the seemingly unending nature of the pandemic. “I know the world has always been in some kind of constant conflict and flux,” he said. “But it feels even heavier now.”Since 2009, Lange has crafted ambling, dreamlike music. Over six studio albums and five EPs, he has collaged lunar synths, tape loops and field recordings into gentle experimental compositions that meditate on immigrant identity, healing and tranquillity. In 2019, he received grants from United States Artists and the Foundation for Contemporary Artists, highlighting his immersive, multidisciplinary approach to performance, sound and visual art. “Far In,” his first album for the stalwart indie label 4AD, will bring his subtle hymns to what may be his largest audience yet on Friday.Chatting over a video call from Asheville, N.C. — where Lange and his wife, the artist Kristi Sword, moved this past summer after over a decade in Brooklyn — he offered a tour of his new home, the outside of which is painted sky blue. “I’ve been living in small apartments for 15 years,” Lange explained, as studio equipment rolled by: vintage synthesizers, an antique piano — the foundations of Helado Negro’s soothing, celestial lullabies.Lange’s first full-length album as Helado Negro, “Awe Owe,” blended some of the sounds of his South Florida upbringing into warm bilingual jams, weaving whimsical freak folk into mellow beats and melting marimbas. Since then, Lange, who is the son of Ecuadorean immigrants, has gone more electronic: The albums “Invisible Life” (2013) and “Double Youth” (2014) stitched robotic synths and tender melodies into looping, wandering flurries, not unlike Lange in conversation — he often interrupts one idea for another. On Twitter, he described the songs on “Far In” as “mind meanderings drawn in sound.”“I feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt expressing through music,” Lange said of his new album, “Far In.”Jacob Biba for The New York TimesLange has spent his whole life daydreaming through film and music. When he was in middle school in the early ’90s, his older brother returned from a high school trip to Europe with a collection of techno, acid jazz and jungle compilations that jump started his obsession with electronic music. Once he got to high school, he would visit a record store in South Beach to buy Aphex Twin and Tortoise CDs for relatives in Georgia.That early exposure to electronic music “really flipped my brain,” Lange said. It led him to underground basement parties hosted by a pirate radio station in Miami, where he was hypnotized by ragga D.J.s and M.C.s. He started making beats and playing the guitar, recording himself on his brother’s computer, which had an early edition of Pro Tools.Lange eventually ended up in Georgia to study computer art and animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he took a class with a professor who introduced him to sound installation. “It just tweaked my brain even more,” he explained. “I was just like, ‘What is this? I want to make stuff like this.’”Lange’s profile rose in 2015 and 2016 with the release of the tracks “Young, Latin and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin,” smooth anthems of affirmation for many Latino listeners contending with xenophobia and racism during Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and early days in office. On tour, after long and demanding performances, fans approached him and shared their own experiences. “It meant a lot to me,” Lange said. “A lot of it was really beautiful, but really hard.”On “Far In,” these themes are a little less literal. “I’m going to hold back from sharing a lot of my own traumas,” he said. “There’s an aspect of sharing experiences and, depending on how intense they are, some of them can make people complicit in your misery.”Lange was partially inspired by the 1991 science-fiction epic “Until the End of the World,” which almost became the title of the project. “I have a good relationship with movies that don’t hold your hand so much,” he said. “That’s why I like that Wim Wenders movie. It starts somewhere and it ends somewhere else.”Ed Horrox, the 4AD executive who signed Helado Negro to the label, said that Lange has a powerful ability to forge connections: “Whether it’s in person, whether it’s on a Zoom call, whether it’s a bloody three-line text,” he said in a video chat, “he’s got a knack for sharing warmth and positivity.” Horrox first found Lange’s work while searching for music to play on his London-based radio show, “Happy Death,” and followed him through the years. The response to Lange’s arrival on 4AD from listeners proclaiming him “my favorite artist” was “quite overwhelming,” Horrox said.The “Far In” standout “Outside the Outside” is a soft-focus disco groove with laser synths and thumping bass that’s an ode to the small pleasures of diasporic life: Its video is a montage of camcorder footage of house parties his family threw in the 1980s, when they would stay up dancing to salsa or merengue. “I used to wake up and it would be 7 in the morning and people would still be downstairs drinking,” Lange said with a laugh.“La Naranja,” a prayer for the apocalypse, arrives near the end of the album. “Y sé que sólo tú y yo/Podemos salvar el mundo,” Lange sings with a sunny glow. “And I know that only you and I/Can save the world.” “La Naranja” oozes radical hope, but many of the songs on “Far In” are also about confronting the end with a sense of presence, even with the knowledge that doom is near, like “Aguas Frías” and “Wind Conversations,” both inspired by the ecological drama of the Texas landscape. (Lange and Sword were in Marfa during the first months of the pandemic working on “Kite Symphony,” a multimedia project documenting the wind, sound and light of West Texas.)L’Rain, a Brooklyn-based experimentalist who played bass on three of the album’s songs, said softness surrounds Lange, both as a collaborator and vocalist. “It’s an intimacy that’s really immediate and really visceral,” she said in a phone interview. “When working with Roberto, on every level — from the way that he emails and the way he schedules rehearsals and talks to us about the music and asks us our opinions — you just feel respected and cared for,” she said.The intentions Lange set for the project have offered inner peace, too. “I feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt expressing through music,” he said. “Sound and music has always been that for me: It’s always been that great place to enter into. That’s the best way that I’ve found myself to be a part of that idea — of being present within.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      PinkPantheress’s Slivers of Dance-Pop Play With Memory Like a Toy

      by

      The British singer and producer’s debut release, “To Hell With It,” is full of familiar samples, rendered hazily.Some of the most striking music suffusing TikTok this year has come from PinkPantheress, a British singer and producer who sounds like she’s flirting and aching all at once. Snippets of her songs “Break It Off” and, especially, “Just for Me” have been an optimal melancholic soundtrack for the perpetual tug of war between romanticization and mopiness that dominates a certain corner of online teenage life.Part of main-character sadness is hearing yourself in the culture you’re surrounding yourself with — and sometimes, meshing what’s in your heart with what’s in your ear. That’s how PinkPantheress works: She sounds as if she’s listening and performing all at once, like you are hearing her singing along to whatever’s bumping out of her speakers. Plenty of her songs are based on deeply familiar source material. “Break It Off” functions as an extension of Adam F’s “Circles,” a foundational drum-and-bass song from the mid-’90s. “Pain” rides a bed lifted from a karaoke version of Sweet Female Attitude’s “Flowers,” a pop U.K. garage anthem from 2000.At what point does an experience become a memory? And at what point does a memory become history, fixed in place? We often think of sampling as a choice emanating from a steady, long-in-the-rearview position, but it can function in liminal spaces, too.“Break It Off” and “Just for Me” are both elegant in their own right, and also encapsulate the enthusiasm and thrill of listening to someone else’s elegant song, one that rousts you from your shell and thrusts you into your own joy or sadness, or both at the same time.This layered approach makes PinkPantheress’s debut album, the warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy “To Hell With It,” so striking. It’s short, controlled and lived-in.The press materials refer to “To Hell With It,” which includes 10 songs and totals less than 19 minutes, as a mixtape — often, that’s a head fake designed to avoid the pressure and scrutiny still associated with the term “album,” which is an increasingly outmoded concept anyway. But in PinkPantheress’s case, using the term mixtape invokes one of the classic uses of the phrase, a collection of rapping over other people’s beats. In other words, a way of testing yourself against the context of the recent past. The brevity of the songs underscores that — they are immediate and flexible.But unlike, say, the sometimes bombastic sample choices that appear in mainstream pop, hip-hop and reggaeton, which are so grand and smoothly polished that they become obstacles to creativity, PinkPantheress’s relationship to her source material is at the level of hazy tribute. “I Must Apologise” reimagines the woozy jangle of Crystal Waters’s “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).” “Passion” opens with a light acoustic guitar that recalls the intro of Craig David’s pop-garage smash “7 Days.” “Last Valentines” incorporates bits from Linkin Park’s “Forgotten.” They’re suggestive, but not delineative.Which leaves plenty of room for PinkPantheress, a pop singer with light R&B contours, to hone her vocal approach. Lost in the conversation around her relationship to yesteryear is the way even her singing encapsulates the tension of memory.Her writing is diaristic in the sense that it doesn’t always hew to a clean syllabic structure — sometimes she’s cramming words to make them fit, and sometimes she’s lingering over them as if humbled. The key juxtaposition in her music is how the lightly detached sweetness in her tone masks the sweaty anxiety of her words. Take “Just for Me,” which verges on saccharine while spooky obsession hovers just beneath the surface:I followed you today I was in my carI wanted to come and see you from afarIf you turned around and saw me I would dieI’d pretend I was a person driving byOn “All My Friends Know,” she sings about what happens after a relationship ends, but you can’t quite tell everyone yet, especially your mother: “She knows that I’m so fond of you/So she can’t ignore how everyday/She knocks but I don’t answer my door.”Most of “To Hell With It” is about this sort of romantic anxiety, the sort that often exists in your head to fill the space left behind by a failed love. But PinkPantheress also applies the same clarity to her family on “Passion,” a song about a broken-down family: “I called my dad, he told me, ‘There’s no room for me’/Down at the house that we had when we were living as a three.”PinkPantheress self-produced her earlier songs, which were teased as snippets on TikTok and released on SoundCloud. Those older tracks have been mixed and mastered for this release and sound crisper. On some new songs, though, like “Reason” and “All My Friends Know,” the balance is slightly off: She sounds more firmly embedded in the music, not quite riding atop it. It’s a light disruption of her mode of simultaneous performance and listening.But in the same way that TikTok provided an optimal milieu for PinkPantheress to try out this style, the app, which accelerates all culture consumption, has begun to reabsorb her, too. She herself has become source material of recent nostalgia for others — recently, “Just for Me” was sampled by the melodic drill rapper Central Cee, first on TikTok, and later on a full song, “Obsessed With You.” She’s someone else’s memory now.PinkPantheress“To Hell With It”(Elektra/Parlophone) More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      glaive and Hyperpop’s Breakthrough Moment

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe singer glaive, just 16 years old, has become the biggest breakout star from the world of hyperpop. An intuitive songwriter with a springy voice and a direct line to a wellspring of raw emotion, he’s a true talent looming in a scene that isn’t anti-pop so much as meta-pop, chaotic and a little indifferent.Hyperpop is a loose scene at best — it has a home on the Spotify playlist that de facto gave it its name, but many of its performers are ambivalent about the moniker, and the music lumped under the umbrella varies widely. But with the recent success of 100 gecs, the duo that is something like the genre’s spiritual elders, and the long shadow of the PC Music collective, the style is inching closer to widespread embrace.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about glaive’s rapid ascent, how hyperpop is and isn’t a traditional scene, and what the future might hold for a singer and sound that are figuring it out in real time.Guest:Alex Robert Ross, editorial director of The FaderConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      The War on Drugs Can’t Stop Searching for Answers in the Music

      by

      Fatherhood reshaped the frontman Adam Granduciel’s world, and a collaborative spirit animated the band on its fifth album, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore.”The first time Adam Granduciel hinted at a possible career change, he tossed it off as a humorous aside. “Basically my whole family are educators,” he said in a video interview last month from his Los Angeles home. “Perhaps it is also my destiny. Who knows?”The second time — a week later, calling from a parked car outside the warehouse where he had been rehearsing with his bandmates — he dug deeper. Casually dressed in a black tee and backward cap, squinting into the California sunshine, he wearily, ambivalently talked through some recent misgivings about his life as a working musician: “I just wonder, how many more records am I going to make? Like, is this the last record?” It was a thought exercise more than a declaration of intent, but striking to hear from a presumed lifer at the top of his game.By conventional measures, Granduciel — the 42-year-old frontman and primary creative force behind the War on Drugs, a once-scrappy indie band that he started in Philadelphia in 2005 — is a modern-day rock star. During a period in which rock has shifted toward the margins of popular music, his group has reached improbable heights with meticulously crafted, guitar-forward songs, over time trading their textural, rootsy soundscapes for something more structured and straight-ahead. In the process, it’s landed multiple records in the top quarter of the Billboard 200, signed to a major label and won a Grammy, for the 2017 album “A Deeper Understanding.” Come January, the band will headline Madison Square Garden — these days, a privilege largely reserved for pop singers and legacy acts.Considering that upcoming notch in his belt, a bemused Granduciel invoked fate: “Even from early on, people would always say that our music belonged in bigger places. So that’s like, the ultimate big place.”But for all his achievements, Granduciel remains far more motivated by his craft than by external validation. A notoriously obsessive creative, he’s keener to tinker in the privacy of the studio than to bask in the spotlight. And lately, he’s been preoccupied by something even more important than music-making: his 2-year-old son, Bruce.Hence, the misgivings. “My dad was pretty much home every day. He’d go to work and come home, and I would like to deliver that same consistency,” Granduciel said. He’s been thinking about how to balance the obligations of parenting with the demands of making records and touring. Bruce’s car seat was visible in the Zoom frame as his father wondered aloud, “What am I going to pass down?”The topic of inheritance surfaces on the War on Drugs’ fifth album, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” due Oct. 29. “Workin’ my whole life/To follow my father’s dream/Then watch it fade away,” Granduciel sings on “Old Skin,” a somber piano ballad that U-turns into a full-band stomper, adding oomph to the singer’s existential musings. He picks the thread back up on the winding “Rings Around My Father’s Eyes,” singing about filial bonds and the passage of time.Like his previous albums, “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” makes legible Granduciel’s love for 1970s and ’80s rock — the searching, synth-varnished sort made by his heroes Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan — though his ambitions are far bigger than merely evoking his influences, and he chafes at the suggestion that his music is “retro.”“He’s using elements of nostalgia to create a very emotional type of music,” said Shawn Everett, who co-produced the record alongside Granduciel after earning his trust as a recording engineer on “A Deeper Understanding.”“I think I need this life to actually be content,” Granduciel said.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe emotional contours of Granduciel’s music have become clearer as his songwriting, over the years, has grown more direct and accessible. As on previous records, strife is etched into the lyrics — but now, with Granduciel’s voice summoned to the front of the mix, it’s more resonant. He still leans heavily on a few preferred signifiers — roads, rivers, wind, darkness — but deploys a more conspicuous first person and draws more readily from personal experience than he did early on in the band’s career.“I tend to write from the place that gives me the most inspiration, which is just feeling melancholy,” Granduciel said, noting his lifelong struggle with depression. “For the most part, I’m still in the process of learning how to be happy.”“I Don’t Live Here Anymore” is not, however, an album of downers. “Harmonia’s Dream,” named for the cult-favorite krautrock group, hurtles like a flat-out race against self-doubt (“Am I losing my faith?/We’re gonna lose it in time!”). And with its seismic chorus, booming percussion, gospel-y harmonies and life-affirming thesis, the title track has the makings of one achievement that the band has not yet nabbed: a hit single.“It’s kind of a pop song,” noted Jess Wolfe of the folk-pop group Lucius in a phone call from Nashville. Along with her bandmate Holly Laessig, she sang backup on the track. “I remember feeling like it was ringing in my head for days” after leaving the studio, she added.Baby Bruce (named for Springsteen) had a profound impact on “I Don’t Live Here Anymore,” logistically as well as thematically. While working on previous records, Granduciel sometimes languished in the studio into the small hours of the morning. During sessions after his son was born, he made a point of being home for 5 p.m. bath time, and tried to wrap up work by 9 or 10 to be fresh for the morning parenting shift. He grinned while describing his daily routine with Bruce: They sit together on the stoop, he drinks coffee and Bruce has his breakfast.If that sounds like the antithesis of a rock-star lifestyle, Granduciel doesn’t mind. He feels “zero connection” to fame, and emphasized the normalcy and anonymity of his day-to-day life. Still, Granduciel’s proximity to celebrity was apparent when, in the week in between our conversations, he briefly became a tabloid item amid reports that he and Bruce’s mother, the actress Krysten Ritter, had split. (He denied these and declined to elaborate.)Cutting back on studio time made Granduciel fear that he wasn’t “going deep” enough on the record. It helped that he could compare notes with Everett, also a new father, and a fellow workhorse whom he initially sought out after reading about the “extreme recording techniques” (Everett’s description) that he used while making “Sound & Color,” Alabama Shakes’ album from 2015.Throughout our conversations, Granduciel — seemingly aware of his reputation as a sovereign bandleader, and perhaps eager to decenter himself — pointedly called out the contributions of his various collaborators. Robbie Bennett, who has played piano with the band since 2010, wrote the hook for “I Don’t Live Here Anymore”; Anthony LaMarca, who plays guitar in the touring lineup, was responsible for “iconic drum fills” that gave the record’s earliest demos body. Remote recording, necessitated by the pandemic, allowed Granduciel’s bandmates to work and brainstorm on their own schedules, producing what he called “spirited” results.Though increasingly comfortable with his leadership skills, Granduciel seems uninterested in climbing past middle management. He has a record label of his own — Super High Quality Records, on which he released a live album last year — but no plans to use it for anything other than one-off side projects. “I Don’t Live Here Anymore” fulfills his two-record contract with Atlantic, and while he hasn’t re-signed with the label yet, he would if asked. “I’ve always been a good employee,” he said. “I don’t really have an interest in being the record-maker and the business all in one.”And despite Granduciel’s musings on setting his guitar down and walking away, he said he feels called to the music: “I think I need this life to actually be content.”He turned, as he often does, to one of his rock forebears. “It’s like Robbie Robertson said,” he said, quoting the Band’s frontman. “‘It’s a goddamn impossible way of life.’” More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Drake’s ‘Certified Lover Boy’ Spends a Fourth Week at No. 1

      by

      The Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2, while the music industry turns its attention to the numbers for Adele’s comeback single.Drake returns to No. 1 on this week’s Billboard album chart, while the Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2 and the music industry keeps a close eye on the numbers for a song that will impact next week’s chart: Adele’s comeback single.Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” which arrived at No. 1 last month with blockbuster streaming numbers after nearly a year of teases and false starts, notched its fourth week at the top. In its sixth week out, “Certified” had the equivalent of 94,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Virtually all of that number is attributed to streaming, with nearly 126 million clicks online.After six weeks out, Drake’s album has racked up nearly 1.4 million equivalent sales, including 1.7 billion streams — a huge showing, but cooler than the release of the rapper’s last studio album, “Scorpion,” in 2018, which in its first six weeks had 1.8 million sales and 1.9 billion streams.Toliver, a protégé of Travis Scott, opened in second place with “Life of a Don,” his second studio album. It had the equivalent of 68,000 sales, including 64 million streams.YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Sincerely, Kentrell” is in third place, Meek Mill’s “Expensive Pain” is No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. Last week’s No. 1, Taylor Swift’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” fell to No. 35.Attention is now shifting to the data rolling in for next week’s singles chart, with Adele’s song “Easy on Me” expected to arrive with huge numbers. Released late last week — in an unusual move, Adele tied its worldwide arrival to midnight British time, making it available in the United States on Thursday — it quickly attracted big streaming numbers. Spotify announced that the song had broken its record for the most-streamed track in a single day, and Amazon Music said it had gotten “the most first-day Alexa song requests” in that service’s history.On Monday, CBS announced “Adele One Night Only,” a two-hour special featuring a concert performance and an interview with Oprah Winfrey, coming on Nov. 14, five days before the release of “30,” Adele’s first album in six years. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Finneas, a Pop Star’s Secret Weapon, Strides Into the Spotlight

      by

      He’s won eight Grammys alongside his sister, Billie Eilish, and worked with some of the genre’s biggest stars. Now the 24-year-old musician is arriving as a solo artist with “Optimist.”LOS ANGELES — There’s a ghoul hanging around Finneas’s house. A dark shadow spinning past the window of his otherwise sunny and calm music studio. “The way it moves, it catches your eye at the wrong time,” he said. It spooks him.You could be forgiven for thinking that Finneas, 24, the multi-instrumentalist who’s earned a global following — and eight Grammys — as the producer and songwriting collaborator of his teen-phenom sister Billie Eilish, is a little goth. As siblings, their work is often not just brooding but haunted, even deviant. Finneas’s debut studio album as a solo artist, released on Friday and entitled “Optimist” (“it’s aspirational,” he told me) features a track called “The Kids Are All Dying,” followed shortly by “Love Is Pain.” With his vocals at a ballad pitch, it is suffused with generational and personal anxiety, along with the gloss of romance.So it was with the ghoul — Halloween décor, put up by Finneas’s girlfriend, the social media personality Claudia Sulewski, while he was out of town. (He was mystified that it didn’t creep her out.) Finneas isn’t a prince of darkness, but he is forthcoming about his fears. Emotionally unfiltered, confessional: “It’s kind of how I am, on and off the microphone,” he said.The studio is where he works out those feelings. Except for the first track’s subtle violin and cello, he wrote, performed, arranged and produced “Optimist” entirely on his own, playing all the instruments (bass, guitar, piano, synths, and doing the drum programming and sound effects). “It was like, why you would build your own house if you were a carpenter,” he said, sitting barefoot and cross-legged on a rolling chair in his studio here recently, in ripped jeans and bed head. “Why would I hire someone else to do something I know how to do and can execute myself? And it’s also really fun.”Since he and Eilish broke through with her album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” in 2019, Finneas has been increasingly in-demand as a producer. One of those Grammys was for producer of the year, nonclassical; at 22 he was the youngest person ever to win in that category. He has recorded with Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello and a handful of other artists, many of them young women.Billie Eilish and Finneas took home armloads of Grammys for her 2019 album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”Amanda Edwards/Getty ImagesCabello said she wrote “Used to This,” widely understood to be about the beginnings of her relationship with the musician Shawn Mendes, in two days with Finneas. “It felt like just downloading with a friend,” she said in an email. “He is so detail-oriented in his own music, and his lyrics are so about the small little things, like my favorite poetry, that he really influenced where the writing went.”After the session, Finneas “wrote me a long text explaining his production choices,” she said. He added atmospheric touches like the whoosh of a trolley before the song mentions San Francisco, “tequila glasses clinking, the guitar solo when I say the ‘calluses on your fingers’ line,” Cabello wrote. “He really is like a painter or a poet, and he captures these huge feelings by focusing in on the little details.”Tove Lo, the Swedish singer-songwriter, worked on two tracks with Finneas in 2019. One was the hedonist pop ditty “Bikini Porn,” another an introspective, off-kilter ode. “I find him really good at finding the ‘nerve’” of a song, she wrote in an email. He’s “not so focused on the format, but what feeling you want to feel next in the song. He’s also not afraid to go somewhere unexpected without losing the sentiment of it all.”She added that Finneas’s work with his sister gave her confidence that her own perspective would be heard in the studio. “It was such a chill energy, and I felt very comfortable throwing out any idea that popped into my head without thinking it over too much first,” she said.Like his sister, Finneas — born Finneas Baird O’Connell — began playing music as a kid, encouraged by his parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, workaday actors who home-schooled their children, prioritizing a creative family life. “For my third birthday, I asked for a hi-hat cymbal and a conductor’s baton,” Finneas said. His parents delivered. “And we were in the middle floor of a triplex.” (Sorry, neighbors.)“It’s just me on this album,” Finneas said. “There’s no one else sharing the oxygen.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHe fell in love with songwriting when he was about 12, and his mom, a singer and guitarist herself, offered a kind of songwriting boot camp. As an exercise, she had the kids write from a different person’s perspective — a TV character, say. “I definitely think that sculpted us both, and especially him,” Eilish said in a phone interview. “Songwriting is about truth and honesty, but it’s also storytelling.”As a teenager, Finneas taught himself production. Now, there’s an infrastructure to learn studio skills from home, and 5-year-olds are making beats on TikTok. But back then, in the woolly days of 2014, Finneas said, his biggest resource was “guys on YouTube who run worship bands in church.”Though he described himself as “areligious,” at 16 and 17, he was staying up all night in his bedroom at his parents’ house in Los Angeles, learning how to record a bass line or comp a vocal in Logic, the audio software, from Christian rockers. His first band, the Slightlys, played a couple of local shows with the Warped Tour; he and his sister had also spent years singing in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus — “harmony school,” Finneas called it. That was the extent of his formal musical training. By 2016, he and Eilish had their first viral hit, “Ocean Eyes.”They have what he called a “creatively monogamous relationship.” He also co-wrote and produced her sophomore album, released this summer, and tours with her. She says he is her best friend.Road tripping home from an event in Temecula, Calif., this spring in the family minivan, the whole clan heard “Optimist” for the first time. “We stopped and got burgers” — vegan burgers — “and he played us his album,” Eilish said. “We listened to it twice, and it was very touching — I love it. Finneas is the most talented person I know.”“It’s funny to me that he made an album with only a few songs,” she added (there are 13 songs!) “because the dude writes so much. And everything he writes, it’s so good, it’s, like, really upsetting to me. Because I am not a fast writer and I am not an easy writer. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and he makes it look so, so easy. It’s infuriating.”Finneas, Peaches and Eilish’s preferred microphone.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAn old mic that Eilish records with stands at attention in Finneas’ home studio; some smiley Murakami pillows followed him from his childhood bedroom, where he and Eilish made their breakthrough album. The studio is not otherwise very ornamented — a pile of platinum album plaques loll, unhung, in the bathroom. A fountain in the courtyard outside burbles audibly; Finneas purposefully didn’t seal off the studio from outside sound (the burbling is there, very faintly, on many of his songs, he said). He recorded about half of “Optimist” at home, before a burst pipe flooded the space and forced him into a rental studio. No biggie: his Gen Z-laptop-producer ethos is that “you can make stuff anywhere.”Outside of touring, he’s fairly domestic: Sulewski, his girlfriend of three years, YouTubes their seemingly wholesome relationship (they once spent two hours making a gingerbread house).“I definitely don’t think your best work requires tension or struggle,” he said. “I’ve made heartbreaking songs that I love as a very happy person.”His dotes on his pit bull, Peaches, for whom he named a non-lyrical, piano-only étude on his album — the sort of track that might get cut if there was another artist to answer to. “When I’m producing for other people, including Billie, no matter how much say I have, I care the most that it’s theirs, and they feel ownership, and they love it, you know?” he said. “And so, it’s really fulfilling to make something exactly how I want it to be and then put it out and live with it. It’s just me on this album. There’s no one else sharing the oxygen.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Adele Returns With Power and Restraint, and 11 More New Songs

      by

      Hear new tracks by serpentwithfeet, Blackstarkids, Stromae and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Adele, ‘Easy on Me’Six years have passed since Adele released “25,” her diamond-certified third studio album. In that time, just about everything in the music business has changed: Streaming is firmly the default distribution option, sing-rapping and pop-punk are the most popular stylistic frameworks and TikTok has essentially stripped down songcraft for parts.But no one’s told Adele, who was a nuclear-class warhead vocalist then, and remains one now, and whose approach to making music hasn’t changed at all. “Easy on Me” is the first single from “30,” her fourth studio album, which will be released next month. It was shaped, she’s said, by the tumult in her personal life. Adele is a singer whose most joyous songs are laden with the same damp melancholy as her most wounded ones.Her true gift, though, is restraint — knowing just how patiently to dole out her voice, hovering over each syllable as if slowly laying cinder blocks, methodically robbing her targets of air. That’s captured in the song’s opening lines: “There ain’t no gold in this river/That I’ve been washing my hands in forever,” a straightforward record of a baptism that turns to drowning. Abetted by a piano, she continues apace, detailing a relationship to which she gave all, until she didn’t. It is a deft and almost soothing dismissal, made even more tense by the feeling that even at her most pointed, she’s holding a little something back. JON CARAMANICAFinneas, ‘Love Is Pain’For once, Finneas matches the glum, whispery insights of his sister, Billie Eilish, in a song that recognizes where real life falls short of romantic fantasy. It’s from his debut album, “Optimist,” released on Friday. Over plain piano chords, he sings about moments like “That hollow feeling in your chest/as you both wordlessly undress after a fight,” without any easy consolation. JON PARELESserpentwithfeet, ‘Down Nuh River’“Down Nuh River” is equal parts down-home and cryptic. It’s rooted in the task-oriented rhythms of work song and playground chant: “Go go go go on swim on down nuh river now/oh you tryna get me in trouble now.” The beat syncopates an octave-hopping bass line against a muffled thump and one-handed piano chords. But it’s not so simple: serpentwithfeet — Josiah Wise — keeps shifting and multiplying his layers of vocals and effects, hinting at hallucinations and revelations if someone will “swim to the deepest part/that’s where all the wishes are.” PARELESStromae, ‘Santé’Breaking an uncharacteristically long public silence, the Belgian songwriter, singer, rapper and producer Stromae (Paul van Haver) has reappeared with “Santé,” which celebrates everyday people — Rosa, Albert, Celine, Arlette — doing their jobs. The track feels electro-Andean, matching the strumming of a small guitar to one of Stromae’s irresistible whistling synthesizer hooks. PARELESJuls featuring Fireboy DML, ‘Intentionally’Juls’s beats possess a textured softness, like a satin slip dress. And frankly, that’s probably what you should be wearing when listening to “Intentionally,” a new track from the British-Ghanian producer and Fireboy DML. “Just love me intentionally/I don’t want no temporary,” purrs the Nigerian vocalist. The song, from Juls’s first studio album, is sweet, simple desire, a lilting promise of mutuality and tenderness. ISABELIA HERRERANikara Warren, ‘Run Ricky’“Run Ricky” is the lead single from “Black Wall Street,” the debut album from the young vibraphonist Nikara Warren. The track shows off her skills as an instrumentalist, bandleader and rapper, starting with an insinuating bass line from Parker McAllister and some light boom-bap from David Frazier Jr. on drums. Horns, keyboards, guitar and Warren’s vibraphone fill in around them, and she rattles off a rap about Ricky, a young Black artist felled by violence. “Damn Ricky, you should’ve done the impossible,” she says as the verse closes. But this doesn’t bring the tune to its climax; the group continues for another three minutes, Hailey Niswanger’s tenor saxophone and Stephen Fowler’s trumpet stay melded as the groove shifts, inflected with funk and then rock and then Afro-Cuban clave. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODos Santos, ‘Alma Cósmica’Like a spaghetti western from the ’60s, Dos Santos’s “Alma Cósmica” is a burst of narrative mystery. “¿Adónde voy? ¿De dónde soy?” wonders bandleader Alex Chavez. We may not know where he’s going or where he’s from, but the production keeps us going: a twanging guitar and an insistent shaker curl together, twisting into mutant chicha. HERRERAWalker Hayes, ‘U Gurl’Walker Hayes’s country hit “Fancy Like” is an advertisement masquerading as a song that has been now fully repurposed as an advertisement. It is a happenstance smash, and also lightly craven — lightly because Hayes never fully commits to the bit; at times he seems to be singing a parody of advertising jingles. He’s a little wry, but not so much that it derails the pitch. That tenor is deployed, too, on Hayes’s new single, “U Gurl,” a kind of faint caricature of hypermasculine country talk-singing: “So the way you walk is suggestive/strip-mall-town impressive/Girl, I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you exit.” It’s familiar text, delivered with a mildly arched eyebrow. And it’s effective — a “can you believe I’m doing this?” scorcher to follow the “can you believe we got away with that?” smash. CARAMANICABlackstarkids, ‘Piss Drunk Kids’#dreampop #hiphop #Y2K #Tumblr #skaterat #shoegaze #kawaii #emo. CARAMANICAEels, ‘Good Night on Earth’A fuzz-toned guitar riff and a snappy beat carry “Good Night on Earth,” a quintessential Eels song: hoarse, succinct, dry-eyed and well aware of life’s ironies. PARELESCamilo and Evaluna Montaner, ‘Índigo’The cheerfully, even relentlessly wholesome Colombian songwriter Camilo and his wife (as of 2020), Evaluna Montaner, have copiously documented their romance on social media as well as in songs. “Índigo” continues to merge those content streams in a breezy, hand-clapping, yacht-rock duet, all strumming guitars and close harmonies, that exults in amorous bliss — “I won without playing the lottery,” they sing — as the video flaunts a positive pregnancy test and a baby bump. PARELESEdward Simon, ‘Country’Not a note goes to waste in the translucent playing of Edward Simon, a Venezuelan pianist who is now the longest-serving member of the esteemed SFJAZZ Collective. He recorded “Solo Live” in Oakland, during a 2019 concert at the Piedmont Piano Company, on his 50th birthday. On “Country,” the album’s lone original, a rolling melody over a repeated pattern of farseeing chords gives way to a long, looping improvisation that culminates in chunky, rhythmic cross-talk between Simon’s left and right hands. RUSSONELLO More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Velvet Underground’ Review: And Me, I’m in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band

      by

      Todd Haynes’s documentary paints a jagged, revelatory portrait of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s.Sometime in the 1960s, John Cale, a classically trained Welsh violist with avant-garde leanings, met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college dropout from Long Island who dreamed of being a rock star. Their creative partnership, encouraged by Andy Warhol and enhanced by the mercurial presence of the German model, actress and singer Nico, was the volatile bedrock of the Velvet Underground, a commercially marginal band that altered the course of popular music.The Velvet Underground story is hardly obscure, and in outline it might fit fairly neatly in the standard music-documentary template. Early struggle gives way to (relative) triumph, and then the whole thing blows up in a squall of battling egos, substance abuse and self-destructive behavior. In the aftermath life goes on, solo careers are pursued, and the survivors — fans as much as artists — look back with mellow affection on the wild and heady past, brought alive by excavated television footage.“The Velvet Underground” has some of those elements, but it’s directed by Todd Haynes, a protean filmmaker who never met a genre he couldn’t deconstruct. While not as radical as “I’m Not There,” his 2007 Bob Dylan anti-biopic, this movie is similarly committed to a skeptical, inventive reading of recent cultural history. It’s not content to tell the story in the usual way, and it finds revelation in what might have seemed familiar.Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. And also to see — to feel, to experience — the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan.A lot of eloquent people are on hand to talk about what it was like. Cale and Maureen Tucker, the drummer, the two original Velvet Underground members who are still alive, share their memories, as do some of Reed’s old friends and surviving members of the Warhol circle.Their faces, shot in gentle, nostalgic, indirect light, share the screen with a rapid flow — a kinetic collage — of images. While those images sometimes document places, events and personalities — offering up Allen Ginsberg, Max’s Kansas City and a news clip about the downtown scene narrated by Barbara Walters — they serve more importantly to link the Velvets’ music to the experimental cinema of the time.From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Reed and Tucker in a split-screen frame from the film, which places the band in context of the aesthetic ferment of mid-60s Manhattan.Apple TV+Warhol was, along with everything else, a filmmaker, as was his associate Paul Morrissey. Haynes dedicates “The Velvet Underground” to the memory of Jonas Mekas, the great champion and gadfly of New York’s cinematic vanguard who died in 2019. In the film, Mekas marvels at the sheer abundance of artistic activity in the city in the early ’60s, and the constant blending and cross-pollination that was taking place. Traditional boundaries — between poetry and painting, high art and low, film and music, irony and earnestness — weren’t so much transgressed as shown to be irrelevant.It was a remarkable time, but not exactly a golden age. Haynes respects the art too much to idealize the artists, or to impose retrospective harmony on their dissonances. The overt cruelty and menace of the music — the droning and distortion behind lyrics about addiction, sadism and sexual exploitation — didn’t come from nowhere.The film critic Amy Taubin, who appeared in a Warhol film about “the most beautiful women in the world,” bluntly recalls that the Factory, Warhol’s headquarters, was a bad place for women, who were valued for their looks rather than their talents. An aspect of Warhol’s genius was a gift for using people, and often using them up. Reed, who died in 2013, is a posthumously beloved figure, but not many of his contemporaries would describe him as a nice person.And niceness was, in any case, antithetical to what the Velvet Underground was trying to do. “We hated that peace and love crap,” Tucker says. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the Velvets on the West Coast, elaborates on their hostility to the California counterculture: “We hated hippies.” Never a political band, it nonetheless articulated a powerful protest — against sentimentality, stupidity, false consciousness and positive thinking — that would sow the seeds of punk rock and later rebellions. Testimony to their influence is provided by the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw them live 60 or 70 times when he was a teenager in Boston, and whose enthusiasm is undimmed more than half a century later.Drop a needle on any Velvet Underground record — or queue up a playlist, if that’s how you roll — and what you hear will sound new, frightening and full of possibility, even on the thousandth listen. “The Velvet Underground” will show you where that perpetual novelty came from, and connect the sonic dots with other, contemporaneous artistic eruptions. As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.The Velvet UndergroundRated R. “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray” — you do the math. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More