When is music like an icy pavement

Filter by gender:. At Abbey Road …. Back to Back Hits: …. Back to Back: MC Ha…. Bargrooves: Over Ice. Bargrooves: Over Ic…. Best of Vanilla Ice…. Lyrics: Jadakiss Different Respect feat. Vanilla Bean 23 C. Godzilla Eminem. Shyrley Cook Thugless. Let It Rip Itst3ddy and Flatout. Penguin Blues NiCH. Franky Rose Gold Blend. Ruby Central Cee. Wasted Lil Wayne. Dirty Letter Ice Cream Maxx ReallyReal.

Dusty Kazo Hyjaki. Why are children crying? These dizzyingly ambitious capers are where Black Country, New Road come into their own: wordy, abrasive, rhapsodic, absurd. Instead of pursuing relatability, this comic autofiction creates a haven for unfiltered pretension and paranoia—somewhere to write from and about privilege without insincere self-flagellation, but without quite being a dick about it, either.

For the tirelessly articulate, to be lost for words is the greatest freedom of all. Buy: Rough Trade. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. The early music of Fiona Apple was so much about grand betrayals by inadequate men and the patriarchal world. Did it teach you to hate yourself? Did it teach you to bury your pain, to let it calcify, to build a gate around your heart that quiets the reaches of your one and only voice?

Fetch the bolt cutters. No music has ever sounded quite like it. For 15 years, the name Flying Lotus—and that of his influential label, Brainfeeder—has been synonymous with a new and uniquely Californian genre: the Los Angeles beat scene. Steven Ellison called his breakthrough album as Flying Lotus Los Angeles, and his music still has a strong metaphorical connection to the city. As Doreen St. Frank Ocean is the hinge artist of our time, the true voice of a generation because he takes long silences.

Elusive and independent, he weaves from genre to genre, sometimes shifting gears to obliterate category altogether, as he cruises past the conventions the culture still fears to let go. On Blonde, the languid guitar of surf rock coexists with soft doo-wop melodies; Frank the rapper—who is heady and occasionally, knowingly vulgar—coincides with Frank the singer, who is plaintive and longing.

People theorized that we needed anthems to get us through the dark night. Big choruses, hooks as wide as highway signs, regular percussion that could gird us from chaos. But our mood was languorous; jingoism was the problem in the first place. We wanted the blurred, the softened, the existential. Blonde is one synonym for American. Future might as well own the trademark. He's now the de facto leader of the new vanguard in hip-hop.

In , Stephen Kearse wrote about how Future rewrote rap in his image:. This ability to flip single words and sparse phrases into full-fledged vibes kept him in constant demand as a collaborator.

For half the decade, he was the premier hook-maker and muse to the stars. Ace Hood woke up in a new Bugatti. Lil Wayne blissed out to good kush and alcohol. For much of this decade, Future has been the wind in sails and the current beneath the ships. He has birthed mantras and moments, artists and waves.

But the tabloid stuff and the unfortunate statements obscure the fact that when it comes time to release a Grimes album she has, so far, always delivered. Yes, Grimes always wanted to be a pop star, but on her own creative terms. In a retrospective review of that record, Nate Patrin wrote :. The murders of Tupac and Biggie left a hole in hip-hop that JAY-Z has filled ever since, molding the genre in his image.

From his cold-blooded early tales of drug dealing to his glossy anthems of excess to his more recent self-analysis raps, he has amassed one of the deepest catalogs in hip-hop history. At this point, at age 51, his only competition is himself.

A king without a fully formed crown, the Jay-Z of was still looking for a mid-career masterpiece to transition him seamlessly from the block to the boardroom.

The Blueprint still holds up as the album we needed before we knew we would need it. A love letter to reinvention, an ode to being rebuilt as a newer and stronger machine. A flag of our own making, stuck in fragile ground.

This is not a wholly patriotic statement, rather, what it can feel like to wrestle power back from overwhelming anxiety. I find this in hip-hop more than anywhere else, even now. It could be due to the idea that so many rappers are making music to legitimize their lives, or become less feared in a country that has always used its fear of them to justify their death.

The Blueprint was a brave and immensely sad album, at a time when both of those things were equally felt, and equally needed. Joanna Newsom is a singular voice in contemporary music whose lush, sprawling compositions draw upon Baroque epics and folk traditionals.

As Laura Snapes wrote in her review of Divers :. The first half in particular veers between baroque poise, jaunty blues, and rococo beauty, as if searching for answers in disparate places. But the saxophonist and bandleader hardly came out of nowhere: Raised in Inglewood, California, he spent more than a decade making his name in and around Los Angeles, playing with the likes of Raphael Saadiq, Lauryn Hill, and Chaka Khan, as well as with a tight crew of local jazz aces.

As Jeff Weiss wrote in a interview piece:. He looks like Sun Ra reborn as a lineman: hulking but gentle, capable of thunderous cosmic wrath and meditative calm. His massive frame is swaddled in a long black tunic, medallions dangle from his neck, and a kaleidoscopic wooden skullcap protects a thick shrub of hair.

The Inglewood native speaks softly and carries a big stick. His regular voice is as serene as his tenor sax is a roaring cataract. Washington also rarely leaves the block without an ornate wooden shark cane. It matches perfectly with the array of spiked panther rings on his right hand—one of which accidentally stabs me as we exchange greetings. In concert, his saxophone peals rumble out of an extra-sensory, multi-dimensional vale. Legendary jazz fusion bassist Stanley Clarke called him the heir to the astral master, Pharaoh Sanders.

His music is a healing psychedelic balm in a time of bleary chaos. As an artist, a producer on some of the greatest rap releases of the past two decades, and a cultural figure, West has leaned into his singular perfectionism while at the same time continually getting in his own way.

To be clear, Kanye West is not Michael Jackson. The balance is tenuous, but right now it's working to his advantage. And, about a decade into his career, the hardworking perfectionist has gained the talent on the mic and in the control room to make a startlingly strong case for just that. The Knife always laced their electro-pop with agitprop and performance art, spurning awards shows and often appearing masked in photos and onstage.

Olof and Karin Dreijer have gone to great lengths to come off like they are something other than human. On stage, they were silhouettes glowing behind a translucent screen. They gave interviews and accepted awards in disguise—moving through a terrifying cycle of bird masks, Dystopian Blue Man Group masks, primate-inspired face paint, and of course who could forget the infamous melting flesh mask?

And on the steely, electro-nightmare Silent Shout— their first great record—they found new ways to viscerally integrate these ideas into their sound, warping and pitch-shifting vocals until they grew androgynous and post-human. Somewhere in the past seven years, the Knife reached that Lynchian status where everything they do is their own, adjectivally specific kind of creepy.

Instigating the riot grrrl movement with the paradigm-shifting Bikini Kill in the early s, Kathleen Hanna helped claw out room for feminist and queer counterculture.

With later projects, like multimedia trio Le Tigre and her solo project-turned-band the Julie Ruin, she continued her mission of making culture a more defiantly feminist space. Bikini Kill thought that if all girls started bands, the world would actually change. They were right: When girls make work to narrate their lives, they embolden each other and demand to be heard; they begin to infiltrate and subvert every crevice of existence; they no longer keep the truth of female experience trapped like secrets inside of their bodies and minds.

The world is progressing with the unleashing of those truths. The Singles remains one of our most potent catalysts for that revolution. Rap is always in search of the next greatest MC after the last great one, and from the beginning of his career, Kendrick Lamar immediately occupied the role. Since dropping his debut Section.

This split personality has allowed him to be as experimental as he wants to be while acting as a bridge between two worlds and taking the genre to newer heights, like becoming the first rapper to win a Pulitzer Prize. As Tom Breihan wrote in Kendrick Lamar is a weird kid, and rap music could always use more weird kids. The year-old is a Compton native with a budding and mysterious Dr. Instead, Lamar is very much a product of the late blog-rap era—an introverted loner type who's willing to talk tough but is more interested in taking a Mag-Lite to his own personal failings and what he sees as the flaws of his generation.

As the artist born Elizabeth Grant evolved from moody torch singer into ambitious, idiosyncratic songwriter, her alter ego—beautiful, conflicted, eternally problematic—has remained one of the most fascinating, frustratingly dense , and elusive personas in popular music. But on Norman Fucking Rockwell! Trading much of her hardboiled trap-pop and trip-hop malaise for baroque piano ballads and dazzling folk—equal parts Brill Building precision, windswept Laurel Canyon, and parlances—Lana has begun a dynamic second act in profundity.

Where her elegant wordplay once made her the Patron Saint of Internet Feelings, she now sounds like a millennial troubadour—singing tales of beloved bartenders and broken men, of fast cars and all of the senses, of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. The stakes have never been higher. But by the time the group performed its triumphant farewell show nine years later, it had become one of the defining bands of the 21st century.

Since reforming in , they have confirmed their bona fides as keepers of the indie-rock flame, continuing to expand their catalog of wryly relatable songs about aging, disappointment, and fidelity to the thing you love.

So even though a new album was always planned since the band officially reformed 20 months ago, the intervening hit-filled gigs could feel odd. Yes, they sounded great, and all the members looked excited to be playing together again, but the context was tweaked.

LCD Soundsystem were no longer on the cusp of a cultish zeitgeist. He sprinted ahead of a music industry still struggling to transition to streaming by dropping a spate of mixtapes, each one more virtuosic than the last; guest verses for everyone from OutKast to Enrique Iglesias; and chart-chomping singles.

This age of abundance cleared a path for other hip-hop eccentrics, including Tyler, the Creator and Young Thug. Using the mixtape market as a free-for-all training ground, Wayne expanded his persona, voice, and talent while presumptively killing off thousands of wannabe MCs hoping to charge five bucks for some garbage CD-R.

For that alone, he deserves thanks. Wayne set the definition for a Web 2. Born Daniel Dumile in London but raised in New York, the enigmatic rapper and producer had one of the greatest comeback stories in hip-hop, reinventing himself with a new persona after label woes and personal tragedy drove him out of music.

That persona, modeled after the Marvel comics villain Dr. Doom and obscured by a menacing metal face mask, allowed him to remain one step removed from the music industry, the press, and even his fans, to the point that when the world first learned last week that he had passed away , he had already been dead for months.

As Rawiya Kameir put it in In , as hip-hop was becoming a billion-dollar industry staked on authenticity, Missy exploded the concept of character.

Growing up in Virginia, removed from the centers of rap and pop, gave her the freedom to do what made sense to her. She regularly juxtaposed the naturalism in her lyrics with the fantastical brick-by-brick world-building of her videos, which articulated mad-cap, space- and anime-inspired visions of not only the future, but of alternate dimensions.

She often did the same within her songs, eschewing dense wordplay in favor of booming soundscapes that, for example, grounded a droning synth with the warm sound of a tabla. For Nicki Minaj to abolish expectations for women in rap, she had to create space where there was none. The burn is that her accomplishments—including her first No. As Briana Younger wrote in To reign over the charts, the critics, and the streets, a hip-hop star with pop ambitions must be everything to everyone while holding on tight to their identity.

This balancing act is especially unforgiving for women, and Nicki Minaj has contended with these double standards and sky-high expectations for over a decade. But with Queen, Nicki jettisons all the industry madness, drowns out the noise, and creates rap the way she believes it should sound. Throughout their year recording career, Andre and Big Boi simply never dwelled in the present. Their music had no fixed boundaries but a distinct Atlanta style and drawl; their albums were abstract splashes that resist definition.

A decade and a half after their last album, the rest of the world is still catching up. As kris ex wrote in a Sunday Review of Stankonia :. Identity and location—and defining and observing the two on their own terms—have always been key with OutKast.

Their voices spat out harsh rhymes and stretched out melodic moments, but they also spoke about things widely and deeply, respecting and commenting on everything going on in hip-hop, largely by ignoring everything going on in hip-hop.

Those are weighty statements, but OutKast was OutKast—singular, inimitable, and unpredictable. Since originating in Oxfordshire, England, more than 35 years ago, Radiohead have garnered a well-deserved reputation as a rock band that prophesies the doom-laden potential of modern technology with sad and startling accuracy.

They are restless innovators, never satisfied with a single sound, always stretching out the possibilities of what a rock band can do. With OK Computer, Radiohead made their grand artistic statement and savvily got it to sell—all while pointing out the absurdities of the system they were skillfully manipulating. It was a moment unlike any other, when making a record that at once epitomized and subverted the rock-album ideal would lead to it being crowned the best album ever.

They were all stacked with singles—often to a tee, forsaking clear conceptual voice for chart placement. As Jayson Greene wrote in a piece about her influence as a vocalist:. It is indisputably the aspect of her art that gets the least critical attention.

Even-toned, husky but nasal, tinged with island breezes but essentially free of regional markers—that describes a whole lot of pop songs now, by a whole lot of people. Throughout her career, Robyn has thrived by rejecting the pop music machine. Her genius was too great and too peculiar for the frothy Max Martin ditties of her youth, despite her early success with them. She had the prescience around the turn of the century to reject a deal with Jive Records, embrace her edgier club influences, and start her own imprint.

She cuts a powerful, needed figure in pop music, reasserting the autonomy of women in a genre that labors to keep them disposable. Born from the riot grrrl scene in Olympia, Washington, Sleater-Kinney had an original seven-album run that redefined what punk success might look like: a bigger, more classic rock-indebted sound, but just as fiercely independent and politically minded. When S-K ended their nearly decade-long hiatus in the mids, they returned to an indie rock landscape made somewhat in their image, and for a time picked right back up where they left off.

As Jenn Pelly wrote in her review of the box set Start Together :. From to , Sleater-Kinney seemed to have it all. Tucker is perhaps the first punk singer to attempt such a thing while worshipping the enormity of, say, Aretha Franklin, channeling lessons from the Queen of Soul into her own singing, holding onto moments for dear life and then projecting them to the heavens, becoming Queen of Rock. The album is a document of the struggle of a Black woman, and Black women, in , as Solange confronts painful indignities and situates them historically.

From the very beginning, SOPHIE came bearing something radical and new: a sound that had not been heard before, and a vision that peered up out of the present moment, periscope-like, in search of the unknown. But this artist was not afflicted with that myopia. Across a string of singles, a handful of collaborations, and one staggering album, the music of the Scottish-born producer combined pop instincts, uncompromisingly experimental musical ideas, formidable programming chops, and a self-presentation that was at once mischievous and movingly guileless.

The result was a body of work that was essentially hopeful, like a roadmap to a better world in which to be vulnerable was, ironically, synonymous with becoming indestructible.

With six intermittently stellar albums, the band has long outlasted those early associations, but their debut Is This It retains a privileged place in their catalog. Two decades removed from the hype, it still stuns. Though , when Is This It came out 15 years ago this weekend , was an odd moment for a rock band to drop a minimalist album into a sea of rap-rock and nu-metal, felt like an equally bizarre year to listen to the Strokes.

In , the Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens self-produced an album-length ode to his native state of Michigan, murmuring short stories over eccentric folk-pop that sounded at once ramshackle and baroque. Since then, he has become a mainstay in the indie landscape and beyond by both refining and subverting his signature sound and his golden voice.

As Ryan Dombal wrote in a interview feature:. But in a different context, those same words can take on an odd profundity. For the last 15 years, Stevens has mixed his own life history with fantastical images and stories of the ages—from the Bible, from Greek mythology, from American fables—inventing a new sort of 21st-century folklore along the way.

He was small-time next to fellow travelers MGMT and Animal Collective, but within a few years he would have no peers as he transformed into one of the great record makers of the era. But his own music is resolutely personal, the sound of one dude alone in the studio trying to get everything just right.

For Kevin Parker, perfectionism is a lonely thing. The repetition of phrases pairs well with the dubby, trance-like aspects of the music. As she charted an unprecedented path from teenage country prodigy to global pop sensation, Taylor Swift wrote her own narrative of self-possession.

From the earnest romance and heartbreak of her early albums to the spirited pop songs of Red and through her dramatic heel turn on Reputation and prolific recent collaborations with Aaron Dessner, her work is singularly perceptive while remaining keenly attuned to musical and cultural shifts—especially her own. Swift was trying to push her music outside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between pop and country.

Pop was just beginning to mingle its DNA with EDM; dubstep, a once varied and relatively new branch of dance music, had been reduced to the stomach-flip of the drop just as its popularity in America crested. It was as if she had finally found a musical backdrop sharp as her lyrics—the lakes and backroads of Tennessee and Georgia disappear, replaced with formations of jagged crystal, a perfect environment for a song about falling in love with someone you know will hurt you and leave you feeling empty as a canyon.

As Scott Plagenhoef wrote in a review of Goblin :. To his core fans, Tyler is accessible and approachable, and not just on record. He comes across as an everyday kid. He lives with his grandmother. He likes porn; he hates collard greens.

In short, he's made this record for alienated kids like himself. Across four beautifully crafted and thematically complex records, Ezra Koenig and company went from a jittery indie band obsessed with Afropop to festival headliners with no serious dip in quality. While Vampire Weekend have certainly benefited from our new music world of internet buzz, plenty of people have found reasons to hate the band from the first note, many of them having to do with their prep aesthetic and Ivy League educations—Oxford shirts, boat shoes, Columbia University.

But Vampire Weekend have a knack for grabbing those haters and winning them over. Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and yes, unpretentious—four guys who listened to some Afropop records, picked up a few nice ideas, and then set about making one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years.

Jack and Meg White summon the Holy Spirit and channel it through 16 perfectly concise songs of longing, with dirty, distorted electric guitar cranked to maximum amplification, crashing, bruised drums, and little else.

And whatever past form of the genre White Blood Cells invokes has been given a makeover and set loose to strut back alleys in its new clothes. Red and white clothes. As Stephen M. It was another in a series of impressive transformations. These days, 50 Cent is better known as a social media agitator than a chart-topper, but every villain has an origin story. As David Drake wrote in As they bounce from genre to genre—their intentionally overwhelming releases filled with pop anthems, thrashy singalongs, and ambient interludes—their music is equally confrontational and crowd-pleasing.

The dare to be too much. Led by frontman and lyricist Matty Healy, the quartet has made its name on an unruly brand of abundance throughout this decade: musically, referentially, emotionally, all of it. Did Healy pop pills, lick coke, and twirl a revolver before holding up a convenience store and getting shot in the torso—but ending up totally fine!

He did. Of course. To infinity. By the end of the aughts, New York rap was in a lull, having surrendered much of its luster and swagger to Southern MCs.

As Jeff Weiss put it in By contrast, Rocky was telegenic and chanting swag. What Rocky lacked in lyricism, he made up for in narcotic charisma.

Seeking street-cred, Drake announced plans to take Rocky on tour. Seeking swag-cred, Lloyd Banks and Jim Jones hopped on tracks with him. Hype metastasizes fastest in New York, and it's easy to conflate the need for a standard bearer with the desire for a savior.

Rocky was the chosen one. But they never made the same album twice and they could be surprisingly adventurous—their Virgin Suicides soundtrack and the Nigel Godrich-assisted Talkie Walkie are recognized classics, but the deeply weird Hz Legend sounds better than you remember.

They brought their cachet to artists long out of fashion: the leather-voiced Serge Gainsbourg, the antic electronic experimenters Perrey and Kingsley, the easy-listening maestro Burt Bacharach, the mellifluous synth wizard Tomita.

They spun effortless good taste into a form as frothy, weightless, and melt-on-your-tongue easy to consume as meringue. Over the course of their two-decade career, the French duo expanded their dandelion-tuft pop sound across nine albums—among them groundbreaking film scores, Italian spoken-word collaborations, and a vinyl-only soundtrack to a museum exhibition. Amy Winehouse appeared like an apparition in , sounding nothing like her contemporary soul peers but rather a callback to the scratchy-voiced legends of bygone eras destined to haunt us from beyond.

Real-life trauma bled into her songwriting, often so brutally honest it hurt. It was this painful level of transparency that spawned a new era of marketable retro-soul acts both before and after her death in As Jess Harvell explained in That balance of closeness and distance, and her inimitable singing voice, helped her to resurrect the grandeur of 20th century American pop and country, as she refracted the sounds of greats like Elvis, Hank Williams, and Emmylou Harris through ever more idiosyncratic lenses.

Now she wants to be a pop star. She must really want to be a pop star. She finds nuance and enduring pleasure in her game of faces. In a review of that album, Jenn Pelly wrote :. It is the sonic equivalent of a burning Shepard Fairey painting and all its embers. The album places her alongside radical pop provocateurs like M.

But she insists that we raise our stakes. In , when she released the EP Stretch 1 , she seemed to defy all the rules of the club; her elastic beats moved and shifted shapes with a logic all their own.

Even the image that accompanied it—a bird-like creature with distended legs and translucent skin, courtesy of artist Jesse Kanda—seemed to suggest the birth of something new, quivering inside an amniotic sack of digital slime.

In , Arctic Monkeys burst out of what seemed like nowhere—actually Sheffield, England, and a then-emergent Myspace—with a clutch of catchy, vernacular garage-rock songs about debaucherous nights out. As it took shape, he christened his makeshift studio the Lunar Surface, after the theory that Stanley Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing on a soundstage.

Against the odds, the resulting LP finds the former street poet at his most visionary: material only he could write, performed with a charm and bravado that only he could pull off. He veers from croons to falsetto, splicing together hyperrealist satire, sham biography, and interstellar escapism. Glints of social commentary yield to the whims of his narrators—forgetful, distractible oddballs and drunk egomaniacs who have no right to be so captivating.

By the spring of , it was clear that Ariana Grande had the range. The Nickelodeon actress turned pop diva had three chart-topping albums, collaborations with superstars like Nicki Minaj, a Broadway credit, and a delicious scandal. But after a period of horrific tragedy, Grande retreated and reset, eventually emerging with music that pushed her artistry further as it asserted a magical trifecta of hope, joy, and a powerhouse voice. Making something joyful out of tragedy is no easy feat, but Ariana Grande has done it before.

After a homemade bomb killed 22 people during the Manchester stop of her Dangerous Woman tour last year, the singer organized a massive benefit concert for the victims in less than two weeks. As Mark Richardson wrote in his review of Wildflower :.

To listen to the Avalanches is to wrestle with time. The sample-rich music makes you think about where its pieces come from, what those fragments meant to you then, and what they mean to you embedded into the group's finished songs. Q: What did the Arctic wolf ask in the restaurant? A: "Are these lemmings fresh off the tundra? A: "You hang around while I go on ahead.

A: One crushes boats and the other brushes coats! Q: What kind of coffee were they serving when the Titanic hit an iceberg? A: Sanka! A Few Arctic Tips. You can't have your kayak and heat it too. Before you criticize someone in the Arctic, you should walk a mile in their shoes.

That way, when you criticize them and they get mad, you're a mile away across the ice - and they've got no kamiks! Shine a flashlight into one ear. If the beam shines out the other ear - do not venture outside alone!

One hour shoveling snow equals two hours on the Buttmaster. Arctic medical tip: If you're isolated in the Arctic and you have a bad toothache - just hit your thumb with a hammer. You'll forget all about the toothache.