Influences

Justin Vernon’s 2016 full-length as Bon Iver, 22, A Million, isn’t just a career-jarring reboot of his sound; it’s a radical revision of the singer-songwriter template. Instead of the guitar-based meditations of previous efforts, the musician erects alien constructions from cyborg falsetto, Auto-Tune-smeared soul, baroque electronica, and bass drops splitting the difference between post-dubstep and modern R&B. Man and machine, nervous system and motherboard — their differences fall by the wayside with each successive cut. In hopes of deepening listeners’ appreciation of this profoundly mutant offering, I’ve put together a mix of key inspirations (Kanye West, Arthur Russell), peers exploring similar ideas (Frank Ocean, James Blake), and illuminating examples of sampled source material (Mahalia Jackson, Sharon Van Etten). Hopefully, you’ll find our playlist to be as deliciously novel and immersive as 22, A Million itself.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.The idea of psychedelic dance rock can be traced back to the late ’80s and early ’90s. This is when three bands in particular—Primal Scream, The Stone Roses, and the wildly eccentric Happy Mondays—started combining the neo-psychedelic jangle and reverb-stained textures of indie and New Wave with the euphorically funky grooves and ecstatic hedonism of the United Kingdom’s anarchic rave scene. Crafting a sound that both guitar freaks and club rats can appreciate, this trio of bands can be credited with setting the stage for a much larger marriage between rock and dance music that would wash over pop culture by the 21st century.In addition to featuring cuts from each of these pioneers, our playlist delivers a crash course in those artists who have proven gifted in submerging alt-rock and electronic-based dance music in trippy flavors and kaleidoscopic colors. Heavy on remixes accentuating groove, our mix includes prime cuts from Jagwar Ma, Caribou, Inspiral Carpets, Animal Collective, and LCD Soundsystem. We’ve even tossed in a few far-leftfield picks from exotic dreamers Peaking Lights and Golden Teacher, an absolutely killer project out of Glasgow that specializes in a brand of psychoactive tribalism that sounds as if it were recorded on Mars. Simply pressing play is sure to get you dosed.

The loss of Leonard Cohen is an incalculable one. But part of the reason he’ll be missed so much is also one of the reasons the world without him might be a bit less bleak than we expect. The power of his poetic vision was so strong that he ended up deeply influencing generation after generation of artists operating in every stylistic sector, from folk rock to post-punk. Countless singers have covered Cohen’s songs over the years (including some of the artists you’ll encounter here), but these are the people whose own work has been irrevocably imprinted with the inspiration of the man from Montreal. It might not always be immediately obvious, but it’s undeniably there, whether it’s in the devilish alt-rock antics of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the moody singer/songwriter style of Suzanne Vega, or even the grunge-era growl of Afghan Whigs and Nirvana (whose longing for “a Leonard Cohen afterlife” in “Pennyroyal Tea” takes on a whole new resonance in this context).

Apart from being the best album of the year, The Life of Pablo is an encyclopedia of contemporary culture. More than any other album in 2016, it is about bourgeois subjectivity. It’s about religion, sex, family, friends. It’s about medication, entrepreneurship, loneliness, and fame. But more than anything, it’s about what it means to be human today. Over the course of the album’s 20 tracks, Kanye explores the far reaches of his conscious mind, ever teetering between faith and despair, confidence and suffering. It has become popular to dismiss Kanye as crazy when taking into account his social media presence and public antics; however, an analysis of The Life of Pablo’s contents show him not only as sane, but vulnerable, in-touch, and acutely reflective.Part of its vast cultural reach is the fact that The Life of Pablo is infused with with a heavy dose of popular music history, from Nina Simone to Desiigner. Its author’s impressive use of Arthur Russell’s “Answers Me” anchors one of the greatest beats on the album (“30 Hours”), while his rhythmic and thematic interpolation of “Jumpman” by Drake and Future is the lifeblood of “Facts (Charlie Heat Version),” a song completed by Kanye’s imitation of Future’s vocables and his use of sound bytes from Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. These references aren’t merely references—they’re so thoroughly woven into the music of The Life of Pablo that they could not be extricated without compromising the totality of the album. In this sense, the album is a monumental achievement.It’s difficult to excerpt any single song or reference as exemplary from an album that nods to everything from Lexapro to Albert Einstein, so the goal of this playlist is to highlight a few great songs on the album and to intersperse them with some of its most interesting samples and musical references.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!There may be no other contemporary player who’s logged as many miles, taken as many left turns, or made as many friends on his musical journey than Thundercat. The artist more prosaically known as Stephen Bruner began playing bass at age 15, absorbing the lessons of jazz fusion greats like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius. He soon joined his older brother Ronald Jr. as a member of Suicidal Tendencies, serving the L.A. thrash-funk-metal institution for the better part of a decade, while still making time to tour with Snoop Dogg and build a rep as a session musician for the likes of Erykah Badu and Bilal. Even after Thundercat established his own flair for spaced-out, vanguard R&B with his debut solo album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, he continued collaborations with Flying Lotus on the Brainfeeder label and forged a new one with Kendrick Lamar. He and brother Ron were also a part of Kamasi Washington’s formidable group for The Epic.The influence of these past hookups are easy to hear in the astonishingly diverse sounds of Thundercat’s new album, Drunk. Yet the album contains fresh surprises, too. Appearances by Lamar and newbies Wiz Khalifa and Pharrell may not be so shocking, but who could’ve known that Thundercat’s allegiance to yacht rock was so fervent that he’d enlist Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins for cameos on the ultra-smooth “Show You The Way”? The album’s crackpot humor and abundance of short, weird tracks are equally suggestive of his devotion to Frank Zappa, and at some shows he’s performed a cover of “For Love (I Come Your Friend)” by George Duke, the R&B maverick who was one of Zappa’s best musical foils.Drunk could only be a product of Thundercat’s vast and vivid musical universe, one that we explore here via songs he’s either created or helped craft, plus equally vibrant tracks by other artists he’s covered, sampled, and loved.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Visible Cloaks’ Reassemblage is the latest in a string of recent electronic music to investigate the ties between Eastern and Western forms of music, connecting commercial and spiritual art forms to create a mélange of plastic textures and heavenly auras. You can hear a similar—albeit more disturbing—collision in the Internet diaspora of vaporwave, or the constantly shifting configurations of Oneohtrix Point Never. But this meeting of schizophrenic digital assemblage and tranquil meditation stretches back into the ’80s as well, through the extraterrestrial world music of Jon Hassell.In widening the sonic palette of what constitutes easy listening, these artists lead the charge in finding new ways to zone out as we step further into the future, creating a liminal space where film scores, computer start-up sounds, and video game music can all mingle together in the otherworldly deep end. This playlist seeks to piece together the fractured influences of Reassemblage, and to illustrate the lush history of music that pushes the limits of what ambient means.

Ryan Adams’ latest record, Prisoner, contains a profoundly affecting and relatable story of personal overcoming that is beautifully filtered through a hard-hitting kaleidoscope of ‘70s and ‘80s sounds and techniques. Yet despite the ever-present ghosts of his influences, the album is an original, organic fulfillment of what he’s been aiming at for most of his career.The sonic ascent to Prisoner began with his 2014 self-titled album, a misty, midnight ride through his neon mind where echoing drums, glowing guitar riffs, and shadowy organs refract The Replacements and Tunnel of Love-era Springsteen. The following year’s 1989, a song-for-song cover of the Taylor Swift album, went even darker, gesturing toward The Smiths and Springsteen’s moodier moments—try to tell me Adams’ version of “Shake It Off” isn’t a luminous, slow-burn cousin to “I’m on Fire.”Prisoner completes the trajectory of these records. Many have called it a breakup album, which in many ways it is, but it’s also full of hope and power thanks to the strength it draws from Adams’ spiritual predecessors. The lightning-quick guitar outbursts of “Do You Still Love Me?” gesture back to Black Sabbath (Vol. 4 is an Adams favorite), Kiss, and AC/DC. The title track evokes the shiny jangle of Johnny Marr, while “Doomsday” imagines what would happen if The Cure had a harmonica player. “To Be Without You” harkens to the joyous, swaggering folk of The Grateful Dead, and “Outbound Train” is vintage Springsteen, complete with suspended chords and lyrics about cars, loneliness, and boredom.The album’s masterful closer resides at the top of the class of Adams’ grand finales, repeating its mantra of “we disappear” with production so crisp and transparent it sounds like Adams is actually disappearing. And yet, throughout the images of fading taillights and haunted houses, beyond The Smiths and Springsteen, Ryan Adams is doing his own thing. And he nails it.Click here to add to Spotify playlist!

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Controversy magnet Ronnie Radke and his bandmates in Falling In Reverse (who seem to change every few months) have made some of the densest, most outrageous, and devastatingly clever modern rock and art pop of the last decade—yet nobody outside of kids who attend the Warped Tour year in and year out pay them any mind.Some of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Radke. On top of boasting serious pop smarts, he’s cocky, moody, confrontational—let’s not forget he was fired from Escape the Fate in 2008—and at times misogynistic. As he sings in “Just Like You”: “I am aware that I am an asshole / I really dont care about all of that though / I got nothing to prove / But honestly Im just like you.” There’s also the fact that modern post-hardcore and metalcore bands aren’t given much space in outlets like Pitchfork,Rolling Stone, and Spin; it’s a black sheep subculture forever consigned to Alternative Press and Blabbermouth.Net.Falling In Reverse believe a rock album should be nothing less than an epic sonic experience, promoting a bigger-is-better philosophy preached by heroes like Queen, My Chemical Romance, and Andrew W.K. (Though, truth be told, Radke’s just as likely to name-check Katy Perry, Gwen Stefani, or Lady Gaga.) Their latest album, Coming Home, is no exception. Where 2015’s Just like You was a manic fusion of blink-182-style snot, glam pomp, chart pop, metallic crunch, and Eminem-influenced attitude, the more carefully paced Home clears room for post-dubstep spaciness and chilly, atmospheric synthesizers. For instance, the title track sounds like a cosmic collision between Muse’s “Madness,” Daft Punk’s “Give Life Back to Music,” and the ZAYN/Taylor Swift collab “I Dont Wanna Live Forever.”Of course, Falling In Reverse aren’t the only Warped cats suffusing their jams with electronic ether. Issues and I See Stars—with whom Radke has feuded—incorporate flickering EDM programming, while The Word Alive drench their brooding anthems in ambient-like textures and acts like Pvris and Tonight Alive incorporate electro-pop touches. Yet none of them can quite match Falling In Reverse when it comes to packing songs full of hook-laden brilliance. Radke, for all his faults and failings, is a tunesmith operating on a whole ’nother level.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Shakespeare once famously declared that brevity is the soul of wit, but simplicity has been the last thing on Kendrick Lamar’s mind for the majority of his career. His two previous albums, 2012’s ghetto uprising saga good kid, M.A.A.D. city and 2015’s political prog-rap opus To Pimp a Butterfly were sprawling, intricately detailed patchworks, suffused with symbolism and strung together with the kind of recurring characters and monologuing one would expect from the Bard himself. But DAMN. is a different story. Having already claimed the throne as one of (if not the) most talented rappers in the history of the game, DAMN. is the sound of a young artist at the peak of his abilities delivering his music straight, no chaser. Not to say that DAMN. isn’t as multilayered and critical as anything else K.Dot’s put his name on, but now more than ever it feels like Lamar’s focus is entirely on the songs rather than the cohesive effect of the project. Each song on DAMN. feels as if it is coming from a different universe, be it the ‘90s slow ride of “HUMBLE.” or the futurist R&B of “LOVE.” or the absolutely bipolar “XXX.,” which travels between Metro Boomin minimalism, Public Enemy fury, and smooth boom-bap consciousness in the span of four minutes. Though Lamar’s influences are vast and easily traceable (the bassy Afrofuturism of Flying Lotus, the beat-poetry prophecies of the Last Poets, the self-aware party-rap of OutKast), on DAMN. he synthesizes them effortlessly, letting his own musical voice shine through more clearly than ever before.All of which makes DAMN. an incredibly fun, engaging listen, and adds another notch to Lamar’s already impressive catalog. With small-time songwriters emerging from the woodworks on major tracks (Zacari?) and mind-boggling appearances from big-name rock stars (U2!?), DAMN. is packed to capacity with ideas and influences and collaborators—so take a listen to this playlist and start unpacking the latest from one of our generation’s greatest.

Philip is consistently one of my favorite music writers and he proves why with this excellent look at the artists and tracks that influenced a key track from Jamie XXs new collection, In Colour. Four Tet, Burial and Lone are all clear influences, but (relatively) obscure artists such as IVVVO and WK7 make this playlist enjoyable. Be sure to also read Philips excellent profile of Jamie XX in Pitchfork