Artists

Back in 1984, when he was the Aussie post-punk poster boy for heroin chic, no one would’ve expected Nick Cave to last another decade, let alone more than three. Nevertheless, Cave has not only survived but thrived, making remarkably productive use of his time both as frontman for The Bad Seeds and with his many other musical and literary endeavors. A new compilation has arrived, Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (1984-2014), ahead of his band’s North American tour later this month. It’s a valuable primer on the singer’s history with the quasi-supergroup he initially formed in London in 1983 with members of Einstürzende Neubauten, Magazine, Foetus, and Cave’s original cadre of degenerates, The Birthday Party.But even though the compilation is curated by Cave with help from his longtime foil Mick Harvey, it only tells one part of the saga. A fuller picture requires digging deeper into the music he made inside and around the edges of The Bad Seeds’ mighty oeuvre—this includes key Birthday Party tracks that anticipate his trajectory, as well as the many covers he’s recorded of such heroes as Lou Reed, Serge Gainsbourg, and Leonard Cohen, all of which bear Cave’s thumbprint just as dramatically as any of his originals do. He’s also been an eager collaborator and musical partner for a wide array of fellow mavericks, including the veteran UK cult group Current 93, Marianne Faithfull, and his ex-girlfriend Anita Lane, with whom he and a few of The Bad Seeds cut a majestic version of the Sister Sledge hit “Lost In Music.”Another early song recorded with Lane, Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld, “A Prison in the Desert” comes from the soundtrack of John Hillcoat’s 1988 drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead and anticipated Cave’s latter-day career as a prolific film composer with his trusty partner Warren Ellis. And of course, there’s Grinderman, the ferocious Bad Seeds side project that helped rejuvenate the mother ship with its rude demonstrations of middle-aged lust and the savage wit that’s as fundamental to Cave’s artistry as any of his melancholy qualities. Some similarly indispensable studio and live tracks from The Bad Seeds that are sorely missed on Lovely Creatures complete our alternate history of this surprisingly hardy alt-rock icon.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Released in conjunction with a trio of new digital singles—including “No Frauds,” her half-hearted response to Remy Ma’s ferocious “shETHER” diss—Nicki Minaj’s “Queens Got Da Crown” playlist is an admirable survey of her borough’s vaunted rap lineage. Nicki’s selections lean towards rap’s clubby mainstream, so instead of Nas’ “The World Is Yours,” we get “Hate Me Now.” Some historical figures like MC Shan aren’t included at all, but pioneering group Salt-N-Pepa gets three tracks. (Perhaps the least known artist here is Stack Bundles, who was murdered in 2007.) Overall, the playlist is inelegantly sequenced, with each artist’s picks bunched together. But give Nicki credit for revealing Queens’ deep hip-hop roots to her younger teen followers, especially the ones who may be more familiar with her “Super Bass” megahits instead of her “I Get Crazy” mixtape origins. The only act who doesn’t hail from Queens here is JAY Z; his “Can I Get A…” presumably merits inclusion because, uh, he owns TIDAL.(Note: Nicki’s playlist includes a remix of Mya and JAY Z’s “Best of Me” that’s featured on the Backstage soundtrack, which is a TIDAL exclusive. We substituted it with the original “Best of Me” from Mya’s 2000 album Fear of Flying.)

Nicolas Jaar has commitment issues. His music slithers between psych-speckled post-rock, world-building ambient, minimalist techno, hip-hop-inflected house, and reconstituted pop. Sometimes it’s slinky and sexy, other times it maps out a cavernous space that is icy and foreboding. As an artist, Jaar can be thought of as an arch conceptualist or a sharp-eyed technician, a festival-headlining electronic music god or a museum-dwelling avant garde knob twiddler.He’s all these things, of course. Regardless of the medium, the most interesting artists are the ones who spend their careers negotiating contradictions. Jaar is no different. He’s the NYC club kid, the omnivorous intellectual, and a product of South America’s political unrest. His tireless pursuit of Born in 1990, Jarr came up in the late-’00s NYC house scene, playing Brooklyn’s Marcy hotel parties. Gadi Mizrahi, who hosted the parties as one half of the legendary NYC house duo Wolf & Lamb, heard Jaar’s early compositions — which veered toward experimental atmospherics — and suggested that he add a 4/4 house beat beneath them. Within two years, Jaar had become one of the hottest DJs in NYC’s house scene, releasing his first EP (The Student) and starting his record label (Other People). At the end of this hot streak, he turned 20.Making a playlist of Jaar’s best music is difficult, to say the least. Figuring out how to sequence the euphoric house of his A.A.L. project with the austere techno of his Nymph EPs is a fool’s errand, while blending the Southwestern inflected psych twang of Darkside’s “Golden Arrow” with the sorrowful piano tones of his 2013 Leonard Cohen cover, “Avalanche,” is near-fucking-impossible.And what does one do with Pomegranates? The 2015 release was intended as a soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 Soviet-times movie The Color of Pomegranates, and combines scraps of electronic debris to approximate noisy ambient music. The music at the beginning of the collection is largely abstract sound design — the whizzing harmonics of opener “Garden of Eden” gives way to the clattering, gear-crunching ambience of “Construction” — but this leads to some of Jaar’s most beautiful music: the twinkling, near-East melodies of “Tourists,” the pastoral sheen of “Shame,” and the haunting piano ballad “Muse.”It all makes a little more sense if you’ve seen the movie. Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates is considered one of that era’s definitive underground films. In it, as well as its predecessor, 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Parajanov bucked the state-sanctioned aesthetic of social realism — a stylistically rigid movement that celebrated the nobility of the proletariat — for an hallucinatory style that veered between esoteric, Freudian examinations of a vast innerspace and oblique, symbolist critiques of Soviet politics and society. Upon release, Parajanov’s films were generally panned by native critics and banned by the censors, and Parajanov himself was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Siberia (ostensibly for his homosexuality).In many ways, Parajanov’s sideways agitprop is a fitting corollary to Jaar’s own work, but Jaar has definitely had an easier go of it. By the time Pomegranates was released in 2015, Jaar was one of the most celebrated producers and DJs in the world. He had a teaching gig at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His collaborative side-project Darkside had released their critically acclaimed debut, 2013’s Psychic, and became a touring powerhouse, treating audiences worldwide to their loose, spaghetti techno. And Jaar formed an interdisciplinary arts collective called Clown & Sunset Aesthetics that performed inside a geodesic dome at MOMA’s PS1 contemporary art museum. His 2012 BBC Essential Mix was named Radio 1’s Essential Mix Of The Year, while his 2011 debut, Space is Only Noise, was named album of the year by Resident Advisor, Mixmag, and Crack Mag.But Jaar’s breakout composition was 2010’s “Mi Mujer,” which remains his most streamed track on Spotify. It was a song that was never intended to come out — Jaar had laid down the Spanish language vocals of his mother, somewhere between a tribute and a joke — but Jaar released it after bemoaning the appropriation of Latin music samples in electronic music.This is not the only time that Jaar’s family showed up in his work, nor the only time that he has engaged with the issues surrounding the Latin American diaspora. Jaar is from New York, but his family is Chilean. His father, the celebrated multimedia artist Alfredo Jaar, was born in the Chilean capitol of Santiago in 1956. Alfrado’s family soon moved to Mozambique, but they were devoutly liberal, and when the socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected in 1972, the family returned to Santiago. Unfortunately, Allende’s reign was short lived, and the following year, when Alfredo was 17, Allende was assassinated as Augusto Pinochet rose to power in a bloody coup.Much has been written about Pinochet and Allende, particularly of the CIA’s involvement, but the net of it was that 3,000 were killed and many more “disappeared,” tortured, or imprisoned by the Pinochet-backed Chilean death squad the Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte). Jaar’s family stuck it out in Chile for nearly a decade after Pinochet took power before moving to New York in 1982. Pinochet himself held onto power until March 11th, 1990, when he was disposed following a country-wide referendum. At this time, Nicolas Jaar was 3 months old.Nicolas Jaar has never been an explicitly political artist, but this particularly gruesome chapter of history shows up in his work, particularly on Sirens, from 2016. That album is both his most personal and political work to date. If Pomegranates and the Nymph EPs found him exploring particular strains of his music — musique concrète and fractured techno, respectively — then Sirens is a synthesis, blending the warbling post-rock wanderings of his Darkside project with the textural elements of Pomegranates and the conceptual, cinematic framework of Space, while adding a veneer of pop to give the songs more structure. The collection also, perhaps tellingly, abandoned sampling, and was solely constructed with live instrumentation and Jaar’s voice. “The Governor” and “Three Sides of Nazareth” have a presence that’s lacking in his other work — in particular, the cowpoke vocals and driving baseline of “Governor,” which are juxtaposed with the swirling, subterranean sound effects.The spectre of violence and political unrest hangs over all of Sirens, but the most pointedly political track is “No.” It contains one of the albums few samples — a clip of Andes folk music — and its title references the 1988 referendum that would eventually bring down Pinochet (the choice was, effectively, “yes, he stays” or “no, he leaves”). Speaking to Pitchfork, Jaar noted, “What interested me a lot was that, in 1988, there was a referendum that asked the Chilean people: ‘Do you want Pinochet to stay for eight more years?’ That simple, yes or no. So the resistance—which was artists, leftists, activists—created a campaign for the ‘no.’ They effectively turned a negative message into a positive message, which seems like the most elemental change that you can do.”The track ends with a snippet of sampled dialogue between Nicolas and Alfredo Jaar taken from when the former was a child. It can be translated as such:“Alfredo: Stay against the wall. Put yourself against the wall. Go there and tell others. The one you like, tell a nice story.Nico: Once upon a time there was a little bird that was flying. And there, there was a man with a very big gun and did like this (gunshot).”It’s tempting to view Sirens as a culmination (or synthesis) of Jaar’s approach — the marriage of the personal and political; narratives built from scraps of memories and noise — but 2012 – 2017, his 2018 release under the moniker A.A.L. (Against All Logic), displays yet another side of Jaar. The tracks are hedonistic, transcendent, and eerily (for Jaar) coherent. “Rave On U” builds off clomping high-hats and smeared synth textures for a banger, while “Cityfade” comes outfitted with gospel handclaps, a streaking piano line, and a submerged children’s choir, and is his most accessible work to date. “I Never Dream,” meanwhile, is pure dancefloor euphoria, building off shuffling rhythms and lightly processed female soul vocal for a finish that’s as pretty and blissful as anything Jaar or any of his contemporaries have ever made.When building a playlist, the curator always tries to find the center of an artist or a genre. With Jaar, that’s nearly impossible; his work is endlessly digressive and varied. There are strains of ideas and sounds that appear and reappear, but putting a finger on one feels impossibly reductive. The journey may be bumpy, but it also includes some of the most important and idiosyncratic music created this decade.

In July 2017, New Jersey native Nicole Atkins released Goodnight Rhonda Lee, her fourth serving of lush orchestro-soul and regal R&B. But on her best-of-2017 list, she indulges her love of dark, heavy rock and oddball art-pop:1. St. Vincent, MasseductionI’ve always loved Annie’s lyrics. Romantic and smart. Here, she is at the height of her powers, like a female Prince. So glad she exists, because the world needs rock-star superheroes right now.2. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Murder of the UniverseI listened to this album so much this year I thought I was going insane. Kind of King Crimson in a space action movie, complete with a narrator to lead you through this journey.3. The Black Angels, Death SongI saw them perform this record live a few times this year and was blown away, as I usually am by The Black Angels. “Half Believin” breaks my heart.4. The Lemon Twigs, Brothers of DestructionThere are so many exciting and fun musical moments on this EP. Reminds me of the Kinks at times. These brothers are so young and have such a deep, musical understanding of history. I think they’re the most important band I’ve heard in a long time.5. JD McPherson, UNDIVIDED HEART & SOULJD McPherson has one of my favorite voices ever and, on this record, he takes pockets of songs to really unexpected places, turning older sounds into future sounds. Very original, while keeping you warm and fuzzy.6. Queen of the Stone Age, VillainsI put this on when I need to fuck the day.7. Mark Lanegan, GargoyleThis man could sing anything and I’d love it. Fortunately, his poetry is just haunting as his voice, and every record he releases reveals a deeper and more beautiful layer.8. Dion, Kickin’ Child: The Lost Album ’65There are so many melodies on the top of this record that put me in another world. It inspires me greatly.

9. King Krule, The Ooz

I’ve shazamed a lot of songs on this album this year, like, “Whoa, what is this?!” Completely original. It melds so many different types of music, but doesn’t sound gimmicky. He gives me the same feeling I had when I was young and Trent Reznor (who he sounds nothing like) came out—like, this person is gonna start an entire new sound that a lot of people are gonna follow.

10. Mavis Staples, If All I Was Was Black

It’s powerful and raw and amazing and timely. I’m just getting acquainted with it, because it just came out and it’s on repeat.

Some bands are predominantly studio entities who take their music on the road out of promotional obligation; I’ve always felt that Mogwai is a live band who happens to make albums. And despite having never seen them live (they ended up canceling the Chicago show I had tickets for a few years ago), I’ve found their generous offerings of live tracks over the years to be a fine substitute. These selections really glorify Mogwai’s post-rock essence, allowing the band to be heard in their element as a cohesive, refined unit that flows, climaxes, and recedes together. These tracks showcase the band’s uncanny ability to instantly switch from glacial drones to gnarled, meteoric guitar lines that tower above the mix. Their agility is amazing to me, as is their ability to collectively commit to a dynamic or timbre within a split second. As a member of a noise-rock band myself, these are things I aspire to do with my own group, and Mogwai is one of the ensembles I always turn to for sonic advice.Their earlier, more guitar-centric music is clearly on display here, with excellent and moving performances of “Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home” and “Cody.” Unfortunately, their unbelievable live LP, Special Moves, which has great performances of later tracks “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead” and “I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School,” isn’t available in its entirety on Spotify, but I highly recommend seeking it out elsewhere. Government Commissions (BBC Sessions 1996-2003), however, is well-represented in this playlist, and it contains some breathtaking moments, from the reverb washes of “Superheroes of BMX” to the slow-burn intensity of “Hunted By a Freak.” Many of the other tracks here are from EPs and reissues. Mogwai has really done their fans a service by releasing so much live material over the years; to submit yourself to it is to experience the true nature of their music.

On October 18, 2017, Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip received more American-media attention in a single day than they had in their entire 30-year career. There was the front-page placement in The New York Times’ Arts section, an extended feature at Rolling Stone, and an essay on Vulture, to name a few. Sadly, the newsfeed blitz wasnt spurred by a new album release or some reissue that triggered an overdue reappraisal of the Hip’s back catalog—the band’s lead singer, Gord Downie, had passed away at age 53 from brain cancer, unleashing a tsunami-sized outpouring of tears across Canada that couldnt help but seep into newsrooms south of border.Of course, posthumous appreciation for unsung artists is a storied rock n roll tradition. But the sight of Downie’s photo in major U.S. publications was especially bittersweet, given that so much of the Hip’s history was tied up in their inability to translate their decades-long domination of Canadian rock radio into widespread stateside success. North of the border, the band are unimpeachable icons, with nine No. 1 albums, 16 Juno Awards, and six million records sold (in a country of 30 million people where sales of just 100,000 earns you a platinum disc). They’re the sort of band whose songs you know verbatim even if you’ve never owned one of their records—because when you grow up in Canada, an encyclopedic knowledge of The Tragically Hip catalog is just something you naturally acquire, like a regional accent, or an inferiority complex.Sure, their fist-pumped riffs made them the go-to band for backward-baseball-capped bros across the land, yet as Downie’s latent eccentricities came to the fore, he became a magnet for misfits as well. The Hips songs have been covered by pop stars and punk bands and name-checked in rap tracks; even the 6 God bows before the Gord. When Downie publicly revealed his cancer diagnosis in the spring of 2016, the Hip embarked on a final cross-Canada arena tour that summer, the final show of which—on August 20, in the band’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario—was broadcast live by national broadcaster the CBC, was attended by Prime Minister/super-fan Justin Trudeau, and sparked massive public-viewing tailgate parties from coast to coast. I half expect that date to eventually become a new statutory holiday up here.Trying to explain the Hip to Americans is something of a parlor game for Canadians, one whose goalposts have shifted over the years. Initially, they were sort of like Crazy Horse fronted by an extra-spastic Michael Stipe, or a Rolling Stones greased by Midnight Oil. Then they became more like a hoser Pearl Jam, and in their later years, a Canuck cousin to Wilco. (Lately, I’ve come to think of them as a proto-National.) And in terms of celebrity stature, Downie was effectively our Springsteen, but with the jean jacket and bandana replaced by a hockey jersey and toque. He was a rock star with blue-collar blood, whose intimate portraits of Canadian life could stir a patriotic fervor with a simple small-town namedrop.But Downie’s hyper-specific local references and invocations of obscure Canadian history were probably as impenetrable to casual American listeners as, say, Mike Skinner’s bloke-speak. The closest the Hip came to breaching the border was in 1995, when, at the insistence of host/fellow Ontarian Dan Aykroyd, the band appeared as the musical guests on Saturday Night Live—a performance watched with bated breath across the nation like parents at a child’s first piano recital. Alas, the Monday-morning sales spike wasn’t to be. Never quite angry and abrasive enough for the post-Nirvana age, but too cerebral for the Black Crowes blues-rock/jam-band set, the Hip would resign themselves to being the biggest band in Canada, and Canada only.It certainly didnt help that The Tragically Hip came up in a pre-internet age when being a Canadian musician made you tragically unhip, long before the web-boosted likes of Arcade Fire, Drake, Grimes, et al. cemented the countrys international cachet. But where that lack of American recognition always seemed to append the Hip’s considerable legacy with an asterisk, over the years, it’s become more a point of pride. In a country whose pop-cultural identity has historically been caught in a tug-of-war between our patronizing parents in the U.K. and our boorish big brother south of the border, the Hip’s contained domestic success affirmed that there is, in fact, an ineffable Canadian sensibility that exists independently of our superpower relations. And in Downie, we had a uniquely Canadian rock star—which is to say, someone too humble and self-effacing and peculiar to ever fully embrace the job.Downie always seemed uncomfortable with the flag-waving hysteria the Hip’s music inspired, and seemed eager to steer their music beyond the beer can–crushing bruisers of their early records. While his band epitomized mainstream Canadian rock, Downie had long sought solace among the country’s indie cognoscenti. He collaborated with Eric’s Trip alumnus Julie Doiron (among other Canadian avant-indie veterans) for a string of solo albums through the 2000s; cut an entire record with Toronto roots-rock rebels The Sadies; guested on hardcore dynamos Fucked Up’s 2014 album, Glass Boys; and tapped Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and The Stills’ Dave Hamelin to apply their sound-collage aesthetic to the album that would become his Tragically Hip swan song, Man Machine Poem.But his desire to challenge audiences went beyond mere music. After spending the past three decades making his fans proud to be Canadian, Downie spent his last year forcing them to grapple with what that really means, and confront the fact that the romanticized version of Canada that people like to associate with The Tragically Hip is a construct built on shaky—read: stolen—ground. Mere days after the Hip’s final show last August, with Canada still abuzz in a national love-in, Downie forcefully redirected the spotlight that had been fixed upon him onto the country’s heinous historical mistreatment of its Indigenous people. He announced a new solo album/graphic-novel project, Secret Path (also produced by Drew and Hamelin), based on the true story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old First Nations boy who escaped the notoriously abusive residential-school system only to die trying to find his way home.The conception and recording of Secret Path actually predated Downie’s cancer diagnosis by a couple of years, but when the album finally surfaced last fall, it felt like a suitably elegiac send-off for an artist long defined by his sense of compassion and generosity. Amazingly, as his condition worsened over the past year, Downie threw himself into the most ambitious recording project of his career. Just a week after his death, we saw the release of his Drew-produced double-LP Introduce Yerself, and like David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, it’s an album that will be inextricably intertwined with its creator’s passing. But its not the typically grim meditation on mortality we’ve come to expect from an ailing artist: Each of the record’s 23 songs were written about a specific person in his life. Its a suitably selfless final gesture from Downie, providing a portal into a personal life he had closely guarded.In the same spirit, here’s a playlist of 23 songs to introduce non-Canadian newcomers to Downies deep discography. While it includes some Hip hits, these aren’t necessarily the band’s most popular songs. Rather, they’re ones that mostly venture beyond the band’s bar-rock roots and don’t require an Encyclopedia Canadiana to decode. And they’re the ones that most directly communicate Downie’s singular combination of outsized passion, white-knuckled intensity, sly humor, absurdity… and grace, too.

Before Biggie, nearly every rapper was a specialist. But Biggie was the complete package. Even Pharcydes Fatlip confessed that he felt inadequate next to Biggie’s overall excellence on record and in video. The fault of rappers in the post-Biggie era was thinking they could compete with him.Puff Daddy maximized Biggie’s eclectic tastes on 1994s Ready to Die: massive radio hits ("Juicy," "Big Poppa," "One More Chance") coupled with murderously head-nodding odes to spitting on graves ("The What"), feeding artillery to canines ("Warning"), and the defining advantage of boxers over briefs ("Unbelievable").Whereas Hammer and Vanilla Ice mined the grooves of 70s and 80s rollerskating jams for massive sales at the beginning of the decade, Biggie sampled Mtumes syrupy "Juicy Fruit" while sticking up Isuzu jeeps on "Gimmie the Loot." Blunts were rolled next to bottles of Cristal, Army jackets were hung next to Coogi sweaters, and platinum plaques were offered up to Bed-Stuy.But Life After Death upped the ante—Biggie had mastered every rap style under the sun by the tender age of 24. Never before had an MC owned the radio ("Hypnotize," "Mo Money Mo Problems"), the mixtapes ("Kick in the Door"), the 96 Knicks ("I Got a Story to Tell"), and every part of the map ("Going Back to Cali," "Notorious Thugs"). Life After Death checked off every box over its two discs: storytelling, beefs, murder, mortality, paranoia, drugs, sex, and extravagance. To paraphrase Doug E. Fresh, any Biggie song you played, youd immediately think to yourself, "Yo... Did that really happen?"Biggie was one of the best rappers, but more crucially, he had one of the best ears. For Life After Death, he picked arguably the greatest collection of beats that had no place being together on any one album. RZAs Stax Records obsession on "Long Kiss Goodnight" was pitted against Puffys Diana Ross jack move for "Mo Money Mo Problems"; DJ Premiers whittling of Screamin Jay Hawkins ("Kick in the Door") and Les McCann ("Ten Crack Commandments") coexisted with Stevie Js glossier crates—Barbara Mason ("Another") and Liquid Liquid ("Nasty Boy").Biggie was right at home paying homage to Schoolly D, the dusted West Philly inventor of gangsta rap, and DMC, a graduate of St. John’s University. There was no sample source too funky (Zapp on "Going Back to Cali") nor too melancholy (Al Green on "My Downfall"), and no beat presented any challenge.Life After Death was released just two weeks after the unfortunate, premature death of this fearless rapper. For the 20th anniversary, its important to celebrate its greatest quality: Biggies otherworldly ability to make you like everything he liked.

I grew up on classical music, 80’s radio, and classic rock. Ive never been a fan of drama in my life, but I have always LOVED drama in music. I want music that elicits an emotional response, music that moves my body, puts me on the edge of my seat, stirs my rage, excites me, surrounds + encompasses me, asks something of me, takes me on a ride, or asks me to close my eyes and be fully present. I can’t have music on in the background while I am doing anything besides cooking or showering. Listening to music is a full body experience that pushes its way to the forefront of my awareness. Often even in movies or tv shows, if there’s a piece of music I really love playing in the background of a scene, I have to watch it multiple times because I completely miss the dialogue. Between this and spending so much time creating, rehearsing, or thinking about music, listening to it for pleasure isn’t historically something I’ve spent very much time doing. Working with my bandmate and artistic partner, Emilia Richeson, over the last year and a half has started shifting this relationship. She has SUCH GREAT TASTE in music and is incredibly skilled at crafting the ride I crave with her playlists for Pony Sweat - a fiercely non-competitive feminist dance aerobics practice geared towards eliciting those feelings of freedom so often only unearthed by bedroom dancing. I think this, combined with having birthed my first album has created space for more music in my life. So! Here are just a few of my greatest influences mixed with a few of my latest favorites. It’s a bit of a doozy, so settle in and get ready for the ride.

Seattle electronic duo ODESZA release their third album, A Moment Apart, on September 8, 2017. To celebrate its arrival, Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight put together this playlist for The Dowsers of tracks that are currently in their personal heavy rotation, some of which feature on their latest Soundcloud mix, NO.SLEEP.

Toronto trio Odonis Odonis weren’t kidding when they named their new record No Pop. The band’s fourth album (out Oct. 20 on Telephone Explosion Records in Canada and Felte worldwide) is a claustrophobic hellscape of industrialized shocks, black-light beats, and pure punk insolence. For his Dowsers playlist, band braintrust Dean Tzenos reveals the music that gets him in a dystopian state of mind. “Heres some tracks that we were spinning around the making of the new record. Some are from bands we played shows with, and others are just sick tracks that we would play in van.”—Dean Tzenos, Odonis OdonisYou can order No Pop here.