Artists

The despair in our world is not enough for Bruce Springsteen—he’s spent his entire career constructing heartbreaking narratives and fateful losses in parallel worlds, and each song is a complete, grim universe in itself. In the tempestuous “Lost in the Flood,” a soldier drives a racecar directly into a hurricane and evaporates into a tableau of detritus in which oil and blood are indistinguishable. In the dour and menacing songs of Nebraska, he sings about the never-ending crisis of faith that plagues the working man: “Reason to Believe” sees a bystander staring despairingly at a dead dog, trying to will it back to life; in “Atlantic City,” a phantom protagonist becomes involved with organized crime, knowing full well that it will kill him. In Springsteen’s vast repertoire of harrowing misfortune, it is often the living who are dead, and yet his faith in the possibility of emancipation is soothing.

Todd Rundgren certainly deserves an album guide. After peaking in the early 70s with his pop-rock classic Something/Anything?, he embarked on a journey that involved dozens of albums, side projects, and little of the AM gold clarity that marked his best-known work. Hes had a career similar to Prince -- using increasingly accessible technology and distribution methods to flood the market with product -- but without the Purple Ones killer catalog to sustain popular interest. So thank UK magazine Dummy for creating a sympathetic primer to Rundgrens boundless creativity. Its made in honor of Rundgrens Runddans, a collaboration with Sereena-Maneeshs Emil Nikolaisen and Ibiza disco revivalist Lindstrøm that was released last May.

Superstar producer Hudson Mohawke started out playing a British variation of the beat music that Flying Lotus and his camp started up in the L.A. scene in the middle of last decade (the first time I saw him was at a Brainfeeder party), but he quickly grew out of that. He helped bring the electronic genre know as trap to the mainstream and has also been a guest producer for Kanye West. Laurent does a nice job highlighting some of the high points of his career, though its a more idiosyncratic list. The blurping, steel drum electro of "Allhot" is a beautiful thing.

At the risk of sounding horribly reductive (and perhaps a bit factually vague), Sun Ra was a nut. He claimed he was born on Saturn (Wikipedia puts his birthplace at Birmingham, Alabama), developed his own brand of cosmic mysticism (later dubbed afro-futurism and adopted by everyone from George Clinton to Janelle Monae) and made a headdress and flowing robe a cornerstone of his wardrobe. He also released dozens of albums, all of which were idiosyncratic and none of which was particularly canonical, so Jason Heller’s attempt to provide a beginner’s guide are valiant and valuable. The playlist itself is understandably all over the map, but it provides a nice glance at the many stylistic shifts Sun Ra would make.

Springsteen believes deeply in the power of faith and overcoming, and many of his songs embody these messages. Built on the ruins of unspeakable tragedies, much of his music sees heroic protagonists escaping desolate conditions, leaving bad relationships, and coming to terms with the despair of their everyday lives. In the timeless, anthemic “No Surrender,” a duo of protagonists remind each other to give themselves up to the thrill of being alive and feelin’ it, to bailing out of school with virtue in their hearts and rock n’ roll at the foreground. His late-career powerhouse “We Take Care of Our Own” holds a fist up in national solidarity, submitting that nobody fights alone when they’re on American soil. For The Boss, unbounded optimism and raging passion are the formula for overcoming the overwhelming suffering embedded in contemporary life.

Cool cant be trained and it cant be manufactured. Guys like Archy Marshall, a.k.a. gutterpunk angel King Krule, are simply born with it. Or in Marshall’s case, born into it: His mom, a screenprinter, outfitted Prince Be of PM Dawn for the “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” video; his uncle played in a ska band called the Top Cats; his godfather was in punk band The Ruts. Marshall grew up a school-ditching, music-loving rabble-rouser, immersed in London’s wildly progressive art world. No wonder then that he began writing songs and making beats as a teenager.Now 23, Marshall has applied his inherent cool to two King Krule LPs, both of which feature an inimitable postmodern pastiche of blues, dub, lounge, hip-hop, jazz, downtempo, and experimental noir. His latest, The OOZ, is an itchy, bleary smear of atmosphere and attitude, swinging on saxophone and laden with songs about marginalized Bohemian existence, sung in Marshalls tongue-swallowing Cockney twang.Before he anointed himself streetwise royalty, Marshall ran under a slew of other names, some of which he still adopts depending on his mood, including Zoo Kid, DJ JD Sports, Pimp Shrimp, and Edgar the Beatmaker. He’s collaborated with now-disbanded Manhattan rap crew RATKING and London soundscapers Mount Kimbie. He even recorded an album under his own birth name.Given his lifelong exposure to off-the-radar music, it’s no surprise that Marshall’s stated influences—and the less obvious ones—comprise a sonic roadmap through the global underground. From ’80s New York no wave to golden-era hip-hop to mid-century country crooners to Jamaican classics to of-the-moment indie agitators, King Krule has swallowed it all and spit out something wholly unique and utterly captivating. Here’s your tour through the Kingdom of Krule.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it is that composer Daniel Lopatin pulls off under the ever-shifting guise of Oneohtrix Point Never. From his early days of programming minimal, evocative vistas of synthesizer dystopia to his newer interests in the gnarly, Kornier sides of our culture, Lopatin has managed to reinterpret his own vision time and time again without losing the essential, prickly feeling one gets from listening to his music. At the heart of all the uncanny manipulation of sound is a concept of the individual — disenchanted yet wide-eyed, obsessed with the psychedelic while hopelessly plugged into the minutiae of the day-to-day, the kind of mind that is restless even when surrounded by the dewiest, most calming of new-age tones. It’s ambient music made for headbanging, both frustrated and perverted and drenched in a nostalgia that always manages to keep its gaze toward the future. For all of the formalist structure that Lopatin imposes over his own chopped-up aesthetic, what he taps into in his work reaches beyond the realm of critique; it is a spiritual music of the self, relentlessly undergoing transformation, and attempting to discern exactly what it is.

The Melvins—Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne, Dale Crover, and the hordes of badass musicians to have passed through their ranks—occupy space in no less than three major trees in the genre forest: heavy metal, alternative rock, and experimental music. Not bad for a band who began life not knowing if they were hardcore punks or headbanging heshers—so they opted to smash the two together and out popped sludge, doom, and grunge. This ability to upend genre, redraft borders, and confound expectations has been a constant throughout their discography (including their 2017 full-length, the crazy catchy A Walk With Love and Death). Where 1991’s “Boris” represents one of the defining moments in down-tuned dirge, the Dada-like “Moon Pie,” from 2000’s The Crybaby, helped lay the groundwork for all the weirdo cross-pollination that has occurred between metal, electronic music, and industrial since the turn of the century.Yet these accomplishments, however impressive, only represent half the story. When you ponder the sheer number of side projects and bands to have shared members with the Melvins, their stylistic reach becomes all the more staggering. King Buzzo has twiddled knobs for dark ambient composer Lustmord, jammed with Mexican art punks Les Butcherettes, and re-imagined Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me theme as a member of the wonderfully oddball Fantômas. Crover, meanwhile, pounded drums on a handful of Nirvana jams from the Bleach days, did some twangy shit-kicking with borderline insane outlaw Hank Williams III, and portrayed a young Neil Young in the “Harvest Moon” video (what?).Possibly even more impressive is the C.V. of former bassist Joe Preston. So vital to the genesis of 1992’s Lysol, one of the Melvins’ most far-out recordings, the cracked visionary helped invent drone metal with the mighty Earth, electronic avant-metal under the alias Thrones, and electronic noise-rock as a member of Men’s Recovery Project. Of course, I could rattle off a half dozen more names, yapping about Jared Warren and Karp (one of post-hardcore’s most eccentric outfits), as well as Steven McDonald and Redd Kross. (Their 1987 power pop/proto-grunge masterpiece Neurotica has aged so damn well.) But you get the picture: It’s the Melvins universe, and we’re just living in it. Crank this thing.

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).

It could be argued that Colemans greatest influence was beyond the borders of jazz. Generations of rock and experimental musicians have internalized the lessons of Coleman, understanding that oftentimes some of the most beautiful music first sounds ugly and random. You can hear Ornettes jagged, screeching stabs in everyone from the Grateful Dead to Television, but more than just a style or type of playing, Coleman taught musicians a new way to approach music -- an improvisational and at times confrontational method that was akin to a primal scream. Of course, Ornette could pull that off because he had chops, and the head-first style would later generate a lot of really bad noise, but weve tried to collect some of the better examples here. Some of these artist are explicitly indebted to Ornette. Thurston Moore has sited him as an influence; Nation of Ulysses named their song after him; and both the Grateful Dead and Lou Reed played with the man.