A hastily convened supergroup who combine the power and fury of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill, Prophets of Rage failed, sadly, in their pre-election mission to prevent the end of America as we know it. Still, Chuck D and Tom Morello’s intrepid crew—who continue to pulverize audiences in Europe this summer before hitting Riot Fest in Chicago—have done something that many people may have thought impossible. They’ve made a very convincing argument in favor of the most vilified musical genre of the last 25 years: rap metal.Of course, the two preeminent styles favored by this nation’s youthful miscreants have had a complicated relationship ever since their earliest flirtations, like when Rick Rubin and The Bomb Squad deployed slashing guitar riffs and big John Bonham beats in an array of seminal hip-hop tracks. With the success of Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” in 1986, the door was kicked wide open, though it really was Anthrax and Public Enemy’s matchup on “Bring Tha Noize” that formed the blueprint five years later. Then Ice-T went to war with Warner over Body Count and things couldn’t get any more aggro if you tried.And try they did, on projects like the high-concept/higher-testosterone soundtrack for 1993’s Judgment Night, in which MCs faced off against a gallery of grunge and thrash acts like Slayer and Biohazard. The results inevitably were hit-and-miss, but Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park absorbed the lessons well. By the end of the decade, the cumulative effect on the new—or nu—rap metal hordes was akin to a back-alley bludgeoning.Inevitably, the formula got stale and the parties retreated to their respective corners in the wake of rap metal’s commercial zenith in 2004, JAY Z and Linkin Park’s fittingly titled Collision Course. Yet many of the style’s foremost progenitors remain in good health today. True, many have shifted tactics—you’ll hear more EDM in Linkin Park’s new album, One More Light—but the California chart-toppers were still asking Rakim to drop by the studio as recently as three years ago. In another sign of rap metal’s refusal to lay down and die, Cash Money Records signed Limp Bizkit, but alas, the band’s would-be comeback album is still in limbo four years after the release of “Ready To Go,” a shockingly OK team-up with Lil Wayne, a man who may be more metal than 18 Cannibal Corpses put together. Prophets of Rage are planning to release an album of new material in September.For some listeners, the music will remain dude-bro bombast at its most egregious. But at its best, there’s always been something compelling—even noble, in a quiet-emotional-moment-in-a-Michael-Bay-movie kind of way—about the alchemy that’s created when musicians from different paths join together in the common pursuit of getting as loud, hard, and gnarly as possible. Let the bludgeoning begin again.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

For all the alluring and disturbing images that David Lynch has presented to movie audiences over the last 40 years, the filmmaker has always been just as particular about how his films sound as how they look. This has been obvious to listeners since they were enveloped by the harrowing soundscape that Lynch and Alan Splet created for 1977’s Eraserhead, the two men spending months concocting a mind-bending array of noises and drones in a garage. The same process yielded a catchy, if eerie, ditty called “In Heaven (Everything Is Fine).” As sung by the chipmunk-cheeked figure known as the “Girl in the Radiator,” Lynch’s song provides the film with an even more startling and disorienting bolt of lightning, even with the gloom already surrounding it.Lynch would toy with the idea of extremes again and again in the soundtracks of his films and TV shows that followed, including Twin Peaks, his landmark work in WTF TV whose reboot has just arrived to the world. The new show finds him teaming up with Angelo Badalamenti again, his go-to composer since 1986’s Blue Velvet, and another master of generating unease by aural means. Together, their musical approach consistently emphasizes themes of flux and decay that start as sumptuous or sickly sweet and disintegrate into doomy ambient passages or something more psychologically assaulting.Likewise, Lynch’s song choices have been just as daring and confounding. The filmmaker’s fondness for keeping the time periods of his stories ambiguous is reflected in his continual juxtaposition of ‘50s pop, early rock ‘n’ roll, ‘60s girl-group ballads, and lounge music with discordant blasts of industrial and metal. The latter category is especially prominent in his harder-edged films, like 1997’s Lost Highway, for which he enlisted the help of Trent Reznor and used songs by Marilyn Manson and Rammstein for typically nightmarish purposes.This love of extremes has also been fundamental to Lynch’s own musical projects, which have long been part of his career and have become much more prominent over the last decade as he shifts away from filmmaking to other artistic endeavors. Lynch has released two albums bearing his own name, collaborating with American singer Chrysta Bell, engineer John Neff, Polish composer Marek Zebrowski, and the likes of Karen O and Lykke Li.Even so, for many fans, it’s the haunting approximation of a sock-hop in hell in Twin Peaks that best represents the director’s aural aesthetic—a sound first developed by Lynch and Badalamenti for Into the Night, a 1990 album for singer Julee Cruise. As such, it makes for a fitting first stop in our tour of Lynch’s sonic world, a place that’s as intoxicating as it is straight-up terrifying.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Like so many great record companies, Greensleeves was a record shop before it was a label. Founded in the London neighborhood of Shepherd’s Bush by former accountant Chris Cracknell and a DJ from Norfolk named Chris Sedgwick, the shop spent two years building up a reputation as the place to find the tastiest island imports. Then in 1977, its owners made the shift to producing music in the UK themselves. The Greensleeves label made its debut with a 7-inch by Dr. Alimantado, a singer and toaster who was already finding favor with the city’s safety-pinned tastemakers thanks to DJ Don Letts and his punk-reggae parties at The Roxy. The arrival of Alimantado’s album The Best Dressed Chicken in Town—a high watermark for producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and for reggae in general—established Greensleeves as the real deal.Of the British labels that were instrumental in building a global audience for Jamaican music, Island and Trojan arguably retain greater name-brand cachet, partially because they arrived on the scene earlier than Cracknell and Sedgwick did. But Greensleeves may be the most influential due to the sheer gravity and diversity of its releases, as well as its ability to spread the hottest trends far and wide. Even before the label began, the store had a predilection for emergent sounds that had yet to enter the mainstream, its clientele largely turning up their noses at Bob Marley’s big sellers in favor of Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown. Greensleeves’ quest for freshness would reap the greatest dividends when Cracknell and Sedgwick made a fortuitous alliance with Henry “Junjo” Lawes, the producer and label owner who became the standard-bearer for dancehall in the 1980s. The ensuing cavalcade of new stars—Eek-A-Mouse, Barrington Levy, Yellowman, Beenie Man, Ninjaman—would all become part of the Greensleeves story.Whereas the rock audiences that Island cultivated with Marley were wary of Jamaica’s increasingly electronic sounds, Greensleeves devotees developed an insatiable appetite for the new riddims that arrived in the wake of landmark releases like Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng” in 1986, Shaggy’s “Oh Carolina” in 1993, and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go” in 2003. Another spin on producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden’s ubiquitous Diwali riddim—which yielded hits for Wonder, Elephant Man, and Bounty Killer too—Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” was another monster hit for the label.Acquired by New York’s VP Records in 2008 but still prominent and prolific, Greensleeves hits the big 40 this summer, celebrating with anniversary concerts in Paris, New York, and London. Given that their back catalog contains over 500 albums (with an impressively high ratio of winners), any salute to Greensleeves is bound to be a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of gesture. But surely a taste of riddim is better than no riddim at all.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Ella Yelich-O’Connor expresses her passion for music in many of the ways typical of teenagers and just-turned-twenty-somethings the world over. She’s forever making new discoveries that prompt her to widen her tastes and pledge undying loyalty to artists she may have barely heard of a few days before. She consumes music voraciously and is eager to share all that excites her in every public platform at her disposal. Her playlists—which have cool mixtape-ready names like “Homemade Dynamite”—are roughly split between sure-fire party starters and more melancholy fare for early-morning journaling sessions. Her Twitter and Instagram feeds are full of shoutouts to the artists she loves and messages quoting the lyrics that have just become her new words to live by. But the difference here—what with her being Lorde and not some adolescent rando—is that those artists tend to tweet a reply with an emoji-laden expression of right-back-atcha.Though her existence has changed immeasurably since “Royals” broke her wide in 2013, Lorde has not lost the unabashed fandom that’s proven to be one of her most endearing qualities. Indeed, she’s continued to be a rarity as a young artist who expresses a keen understanding of a remarkably diverse array of new and old sounds without sounding derivative of any of them in particular. Likewise, she’s figured out ways to retain her own sensibility across an array of cover renditions in the past four years, an impeccably chosen slate that ranges from songs by canonic rock acts (David Bowie, Replacements, Nirvana) to relative newbies (Bright Eyes, Bon Iver) to hip-hop and R&B (Jeremih, Kanye). And while many of the most dramatic moments of her sophomore album Melodrama do suggest the influence of a few of her most-cherished touchstones—single “Liability” is a close cousin to Kate Bush’s “The Man With the Child In His Eyes,” for instance—the connection between her own music and the stuff she loves is more a matter of shared energy and attitude. That’s true even of old favourites that—like any fan—she may be hideously embarrassed about now. Likely case in point: The Cult’s “Edie (Ciao Baby),” which the pre-Lorde once performed as a 12-year-old in her school band Extreme. (Alas, the band’s repertoire apparently did not include “More Than Words.”)As Melodrama arrives to usher in our summer of Lorde, we present a deep dive into the music of other artists that she’s performed and loved. Long may she want to tell us all about them.

So how come the greatest R&B girl groups of the 1990s are—to crib the line that En Vogue borrowed from Curtis Mayfield—still giving you something you can feel? That’s because girl groups have always been a high-drama proposition, whether in their original heyday in the early ‘60s or in this second golden age, which roughly spans the period between the launch of En Vogue in 1989 and the first solo Beyoncé single in 2002. (The death of TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes the same year may be a more tragic capper.) And that drama has more to do with the nature of these acts’ creation and the contradictions that result than anything in the songs.Consider the tension that inevitably arises between the typically male Svengalis who often assemble the acts—a lineage that runs from Berry Gordy with the Supremes to Denzil Foster and Thomas McElroy with En Vogue to Simon Cowell with Fifth Harmony—and the women who make them what they are. Though an act may start with all the partners united in the quest for chart domination, the best often achieve greatness because of a messy internal clash of competing imperatives and ambitions. As so the usual prefab male fantasies presenting women as sweet, pliant, and/or sexy get complicated by more strident and authentic expressions of power, autonomy, and the general not-taking-of-shit. In other words, there may be a whole lot going on beneath the slinky surface of even the most buttery ballad by Brownstone or the tastiest jam by Jade.Then there’s the musical ingenuity that so often came into play as the R&B and gospel elements that had been fundamental to Gordy’s formula for Motown’s girl groups were realigned with the “hip-hop soul” that Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs cooked up with Mary J. Blige at the decade’s dawn. Indeed, cameos by MCs became another staple of the genre, whether it was Jay-Z with Changing Faces, Biggie Smalls with Total, or Missy Elliott with 702 on the mighty “Steelo.”But like every golden age, the one for R&B girl groups sadly had an expiry date. Beyoncé and Rihanna gave the solo diva such preeminence in the 21st century that Fifth Harmony’s superb 2016 single “Work From Home” was the first major hit by a girl group in a decade. Now TLC—whose troubled post-Lopes career has been thoroughly documented on several reality-TV shows—is back with a Kickstarter-funded self-titled album that they say will be their last. In their honor, we have ensured that this playlist of essential ‘90s R&B girl-group tracks is entirely scrubs-free.

Is it weird that the Haim sisters seem to all love the same songs? Anyone with a sibling who shouldn’t go anywhere near a Bluetooth speaker knows that the sharing of DNA has virtually no correlation with musical taste. At least a little disparity should be par for the course for Este, Danielle, and Alana, too. But on the matter of musical taste—as with so many other areas for the harmony-loving trio—HAIM are far more in the tradition of the Osmonds and Hanson than Oasis and the Kinks, putting the lie to myths about sibling acts and the likelihood that their members may attack each other with drum cymbals.Indeed, the women of HAIM present a surprisingly unified front in the opportunities they’ve had to present their predilections to the world. In the four years since they broke through with the irresistibly hooky contents of Days Are Gone, the playlists they’ve either curated together or individually are very much on the same page, with the sisters expressing their solidarity through their shared love of ‘70s and ‘80s pop, soul and disco crowd-pleasers (with an emphasis on all the ladies they love), party-starting hip-hop, more introspective singer/songwriter fare, and vintage California sounds from either coastline. (Their hero Tom Petty may live in Malibu but he’s still pure Florida.) They sound just as snug in the same pocket when performing covers, a diverse array that ranges from Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” (performed with Stevie Nicks, no less) to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” to Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” to songs by pals-slash-inspirations such as Jenny Lewis and Julian Casablancas.Their savvy when it comes to mixing the old with the shiny and new is all over their second album Something to Tell You, too. To celebrate the arrival of what will surely be a summer soundtrack for the ages, we’ve got an extensive slate of HAIM-approved songs that you can enjoy with the relative of your choice.

The notion of writing a concept album about the contents of the Milky Way is a go-big-or-go-home kind of proposition for any songwriter. Many would blanch at the idea of even attempting such a monumental task, fearing the inevitable charges of gross pretentiousness or unseemly creative overreach.But for Sufjan Stevens, it seems like a perfectly organic (and celestial) extension of his work. Sure, he may have seemed more like your average winsome American singer/songwriter type at the beginning of the century, toting an acoustic guitar and performing songs that fit into the noble lineage of Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, and others who have a snug home on bastions of mellow playlists like SiriusXM’s The Coffee House. Yet time and again, he’s proven to be a maximalist at heart. He’s continually pursued much grander ambitions than most of his peers could ever consider, whether it means creating impossibly lush album-long tributes to American states (though he won’t be doing all 50, as he once promised in jest) or enlisting a string quartet to remake one of his earlier albums in classical form (on 2009’s Run Rabbit Run). He’s also revamped dozens of hoary old Christmas carols into bold new forms, doubled down on cover versions that may be more sonically extravagant than the originals (just hear his takes on Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man In Paris” and Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost”) and generally felt free to extend his sound palette and songs’ running times to extremes that may have daunted Emerson, Lake, and possibly even Palmer.All the while, Stevens has been similarly fearless and expansive when it comes to his lyrics, intermingling his references to and explorations of the Christian mysticism of his youth with more idiosyncratic mythologies that he constructs out of personal experiences (like the troubled family history he recounts in Carrie & Lowell, the 2015 masterpiece he named after his parents) or the strangest corners of America’s past (as in so many of his odes to Michigan and Illinois).So a project as cosmic as Planetarium seems right in the man’s wheelhouse. A new collaborative album that simultaneously evokes the most epic-scaled works of Holst and Wagner, spacy ‘70s FM rock like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, and ambient techno, it began life six years ago as a theatrical piece by Stevens and three friends: his regular percussionist James McAllister, The National guitarist and resident arranger Bryce Dessner, and avant-classical composer Nico Muhly. After a few years of tweaking and revamping the songs, the voyagers have finally released the results on a suitably mind-expanding set on 4AD and will perform them in a new series of performances in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Oakland in July 2017.Cleary, Stevens is a man who’s unafraid to express big ideas. Thankfully, his ability to achieve his ambitions means they don’t come off as hubris—instead, listeners have been grateful for his courage. Here’s a playlist that demonstrates how the celestial-minded songs of Planetarium suits the scale of the most sumptuous, adventurous and epically scaled music he’s already made.

The band has always displayed such an appetite for its own self-destruction, it’s incredible that Guns N’ Roses ever made it in the first place. Even the question of what to put on the cover of Appetite for Destruction—the debut album that turns 30 this summer—threatened to put them outta the race before they’d even gotten out of the gate. Axl Rose initially wanted a picture of the Challenger explosion on the cover, but Geffen 86’d that as fast as possible. Then the band wanted (and got) a lurid cartoon image—based on the same 1979 painting by cult comix and hot-rod art great Robert Williams that was the source for the album’s name—of a robot rapist menaced by a multi-armed contraption as a female victim lies slumped against a fence. When retailers said there was no effing way they’d rack that, Geffen hastily revised it, shifting the image to the inner sleeve, where it would mess with the minds of impressionable teens forever more. They replaced it with a cross-and-skulls image by Billy White Jr. representing each of the band members (hence the black top hat for the Slash skull on the bottom).Despite the label’s efforts and the band’s sweat and toil in the two years since its membership had coalesced out of some of L.A.’s scrappiest hard-rock acts, Appetite for Destruction debuted at No. 182 in its first week on the Billboard charts in August 29, 1987. A year later, however, the story was very different. Driven by the band’s relentless touring and the ubiquitous radio and video airplay for “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paradise City,” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” Appetite for Destruction would eventually rack up over 18 million in sales and become the all-time best-selling debut album.Thirty years later, it’s easy to hear how the music was more than just what they needed to surf past their troubles and penchant for self-sabotage (at least for a while). Part of what made GNR so thrilling was how they took a disc sander to all the glam and pop elements that prevailed in the hair-metal era of the ‘80s. Their sound was so much gnarlier, drawing from hardcore punk heroes like the Misfits, the primo biker metal of Motörhead, and—first and foremost—the bluesy, boozy rock of Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones. Just as crucial was the ability of producer Mike Clink to present it all with a minimum of clutter and maximum force.Yet at the same time, GNR were unafraid to provide some hooks or show off a more vulnerable side. Indeed, Rose had way more ballads ready to go after “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” but they decided to stick with only one for the debut. “November Rain,” the singer’s first full-bore expression of his love for Elton John-sized grandeur, was one of several early songs that had to wait for release on Use Your Illusion I and II, the 1991 double set whose bloat was a far cry from GNR’s ruthlessly action-packed debut.The live tracks that would surface on the stop-gap album Lies—which was the first time most folks heard Live… ?!*Q Like a Suicide, the demi-legendary self-released EP that came out the year before Appetite—and the unabashedly ragged ’87-’93 compilation served as further proof of just how exhilarating GNR were in their late-‘80s prime. The best of them are here along with early tracks by the proto-GNR band Hollywood Rose and songs by other bands whose impact on Rose and Slash was obvious even without the regrettable existence of The Spaghetti Incident? And at the heart of this playlist is Appetite for Destruction, still one of the most ferocious, most bad-ass, and most unabashedly rock ‘n’ roll rock ‘n’ roll albums ever made. So wake up, sleepyheads… it’s time to diiiieeeeee.

All of us have our own personal soundtracks, the streams and playlists that run through our heads, especially in situations that demand a more deluxe treatment. For some, ideas about what that sound had to be was forged by obsessive viewings of the very coolest ‘80s cinema on worn and battered VHS tapes. Driven by sleek machine-made rhythms and slathered in washes of vintage synthesizers, it’s a sound that evokes the sight of neon lights reflected on rain-slicked city streets as you drive through the night in a black Maserati (though a Ford Focus will do if there’s nothing left at Hertz).That’s certainly the sound favored by Daniel Lopatin, the Brooklyn-based musician and producer better known as Oneohtrix Point Never. The sibling movie-director team of Josh and Benny Safdie tapped him to score their 2017 film Good Time, a grubby, thoroughly New York-y crime story that stars a plausibly messed-up Robert Pattinson as a small-time crook trying to take care of his mentally disabled brother during a long night of bad luck and worse decisions. While the film’s visual style evokes the grittiest ‘70s flicks of John Cassavetes, Lopatin’s music might’ve been perfect for a Michael Mann thriller. Indeed, the soundtrack demonstrates Lopatin’s love for Tangerine Dream, the German synth pioneers who famously scored Mann’s 1981 movie Thief and whose epic “Phaedra” was memorably repurposed for the Safdies’ 2014 drug-addict drama Heaven Knows What.Good Time is also part of a wider resurgence for the moody, menacing synth-rock sound that was de rigueur for movies of an earlier era. The electronic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre have become touchstones for a new generation of scorers, along with Vangelis’ sumptuous music for Blade Runner and Giorgio Moroder’s more propulsive accompaniment for Midnight Express, American Gigolo, and Scarface. Of course, the god of the form—partially because he was the rare filmmaker who created his own soundtracks—remains John Carpenter. Such was the worship and influence of his minimalist synth scores in recent years, Carpenter felt compelled to begin a full-fledged music career in his seventh decade, recording two albums for Sacred Bones.Lopatin’s hardly the only contemporary musician to believe that nothing sets a movie’s mood better than a synthesizer arpeggiator. Other new masters of the aesthetic include Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein (Stranger Things), Richard Vreeland a.k.a. Disasterpeace (It Follows), Cliff Martinez (Drive), and Jon Hopkins (Monsters). It’s been further explored by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, whose mesmerizing Drokk comprises their rejected score for the 2012 sci-fi thriller Dredd, and Zombie Zombie, a French electro-garage duo with a penchant for roughing up Carpenter themes in much the same way that Lopatin sandpapers the pristine surfaces of Tangerine Dream for Good Time.So even though it’ll never be 1985 again, there’s no better time for you to get behind the wheel of the hottest car you can find and drive into the night.

You may not be as excited as a lot of people are to have Kesha Rose Sebert back in action. But even the very worst of haters ought to give her a chance to make a second impression after what she’s been through.After she spent the first years of the decade establishing herself as pop’s preeminent hard-rocking, fast-talking, tik-tok-ing party girl, things came off the rails when her already rocky relationship with producer Dr. Luke took a toxic turn in 2014. The charges and counter-charges—including sexual assault and battery, unfair business practices, and much more from her side—put her in the starring role in a legal drama so ugly, it made the “Blurred Lines” case seems like 10 benign minutes in traffic court. Though that drama is hardly over, developments earlier this year freed her from the conditions that prevented her releasing any new music for three years.During that time, she did her best to convey her feelings through other people’s songs. Of course, that was far from ideal for a singer who’s long prided herself on being a songwriter, too— she clearly took far more satisfaction in her co-writing credits for Britney Spears and Big Time Rush than for any hook-up with Flo Rida. But at least Kesha’s choice of covers on recent tours—a smattering that ranges from Lesley Gore to Eagles of Death Metal—has proven she has a wider, more surprising set of musical tastes than was evident from the over-abundance of would-be club bangers on her two albums. Nor should the abundance of Bob Dylan tributes over the years—like her exquisite cover of “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” from 2012’s Chimes of Freedom tribute—be quite so surprising given the number of times she’s namedNashville Skyline as her favorite album.In fact, Kesha’s been eager to show off her affinities for classic rock, punk, and alt-rock since well before it all went sideways. When not citing The Damned as heroes, she was palling around with Alice Cooper and getting assists from The Strokes, The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and Iggy Pop. And while that fabled Flaming Lips/Kesha collaboration—nicknamed Lip$ha—may have been sucked into a legal void from which it has yet to escape, we still got a tantalizing taste thanks to her mind-bending appearance on The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends.So as for all those haters and doubters who didn’t miss her, I say: You don’t know what you were missing. To mark the arrival of her third album Rainbow, here’s a set of her most adventurous and most surprising songs, and many more she loves, which should demonstrate there was always more to her than she got credit for… though maybe that’s about to change.