Indie

On April 10 of this year, Ben McOsker announced that Load Records—after nearly a quarter-century of contorting brains—is closing up shop. To describe the underground rock and noise label’s run as stellar is a gross understatement. Few imprints that document the fringes of sound have released even half the amount of genre-defining albums that McOsker and his partner in crime Laura Mullen have: Lightning Bolt’s Ride the Skies, Sightings’ Absolutes, The USA IS A Monster’s Tasheyana Compost, Yellow Swans’ At All Ends—the list goes on. These aren’t just amazing records, they’re seeds that filtered out into the world and helped spawn a global noise movement that came to a screeching climax in the ’00s. To put Load’s legacy in its proper context, you’d have to reach back to the glory years of Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile for an apt comparison—though, truth be told, neither label ever ventured as far out sonically as Load.Founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993, Load served as the primary outlet for the unique mix of local greaser punks and art-school transplants inhabiting the city’s sprawling underground. Lightning Bolt are the most popular of the Providence outfits, but Load also released critical titles from Olneyville Sound System, Thee Hydrogen Terrors, Pleasurehorse, Kites, Prurient, and The Human Beast. McOsker and Mullen also looked far beyond the city’s limits: By the mid-’00s, they were unleashing music from artists as far flung as New York City (Sightings, Excepter, The USA IS A Monster), Ohio (Sword Heaven, Homostupids), San Francisco (Total Shutdown, The Hospitals), and Norway (Noxagt, Ultralyd).Beyond its consistently excellent output, Load pushed the limits of what an independent record label could get away with while continuing to remain commercially viable. Most imprints—however freaky, cacophonous, and anarchic—that get a taste of success tend to begin playing it safe, opting to release records that rarely venture beyond what’s already proven to be popular. But, possessing a deep love for trickster spirit-like unpredictability, Load actually got stranger the more units it sold. How else do you explain the existence of the Hawd Gankstuh Rappuhs MCs (Wid Ghatz)’s Wake Up and Smell the Piss, a descent into perverted, excrement-obsessed, lo-fi noise-hop that probably sold no more than a dozen copies? This record even confused Load’s most hardcore fans.But by unleashing such wildly uncommercial music alongside proven sellers like Lightning Bolt, Load helped give a much larger platform to genius musicians who are way too left field and individualistic for even the indie rock marketplace. For that, Load deserves some kind of cultural service award. Thank you, Ben and Laura!Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

A new crop of rising stars from Long Beach, California, including Vince Staples and O.T. Genasis, have brought renewed attention to the second largest city in Los Angeles County. But Snoop Dogg’s rise to superstardom in the early ‘90s made LBC a hotbed for the West Coast rap explosion, making Snoop associates like Warren G and Daz Dillinger famous as well. And over the last 25 years, Long Beach’s contribution to hip hop has been diverse, from vocalists who combine rapping with singing like Nate Dogg and RBX to the producer BattleCat, Rage Against The Machine’s rap/rock trailblazer Zach de la Rocha, hitmakers like Domino, and respected lyricsts like Crooked I. And modern Long Beach rappers like Joey Fatts and TayF3rd continue to expand the city’s musical identify beyond its storied gangsta rap history. -- Al Shipley

With anticipation for her upcoming sophomore effort, Melodrama, at a fever pitch, Lorde has retreated back to her favorite place of solace—as an acute observer of everyone else. Even the title of her new Spotify playlist, Homemade Dynamite, feels a bit like a cheeky inside joke pulled from some faded memory. While the 20-year old artist is best known for layering her timeless, soulful voice over a nu-goth aesthetic, Lordes other essential quality is that shes unwaveringly sympathetic towards her listeners. While most of the songs on Homemade Dynamite could soundtrack a night at the club, Lorde takes the entire evening into consideration with the same meticulous attention to detail heard on her 2013 debut album, Pure Heroine. Similar to the compassionate but authoritative friend everyone should have, Lorde has already anticipated that you’ll need something to perk you up (Amine and Kehlani), something to help soothe your feelings at 3 a.m. (Bon Iver and Weyes Blood), and something to tell you that you are a million bucks the morning after (Santigold). Under Lorde’s curation, Future’s “Mask Off” and your dad’s favorite Paul Simon song, “Graceland,” feel cut from the same cloth; they are two tales of escapism designed to reach all corners of her audience. These selections are indicative not only of Lordes desire to address the extraordinary moments of relatively mundane affairs, but also affirm the experiences of her listeners in the process. Depending on which side of middle age you’re on, ordinary experiences are either aspirational or nostalgic. Lorde’s universal appeal derives from the fact that she consistently accounts for both.

Ultimately, sadcore is more about a feeling than a specific sound, and, as you probably guessed from the name, that feeling is not exactly a bright, uplifting one. Some trace its origins back to the gloomy glower of British bands like The Smiths or even The Cure, but sadcore didn’t really cohere as a genre (movement would imply too much action on the part of its melancholia-afflicted practitioners) until U.S. indie bands like Galaxie 500 came along in the late ‘80s. Though virtually none of the artists to whom the tag has been applied would ever actually own up to coming under the sadcore banner, over the years the description has been applied to everything from the lacerating self-effacement of alt-rock heroes American Music Club to the muted musings of Cat Power. But whichever way you slice it, sadcore is the sound indie obsessives turn to when the sunny side of things doesn’t strike you quite right.

For all his antics, gags, and occasional pantslessness, Mac DeMarco has always been a sensitive soul. Of course, this isn’t news to anyone who’s ventured past his wild-goofball stage persona and dived into the dreamily intimate and playfully askew pop songs that fill all of the Canuck’s releases. DeMarco’s first full-length album in three years, This Old Dog, may be his richest and smoothest to date, showcasing his growing love for vintage synths and his increasing skill in using them to enhance the shine and shimmer of his deceptively casual melodies.The candor he displays in many new songs—in which he reflects on a fraught relationship with his father—is one element that evokes his ‘70s singer/songwriter heroes, a pantheon that includes James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Harry Nilsson. Yet the music’s effervescence and spirit of playfulness demonstrate his deep devotion to mavericks like Jonathan Richman and Yellow Magic Orchestra just as clearly. All the while, he inches closer to his long-stated ambition to make an album as strong as his favorites, with Neil Young’s Harvest and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band as a couple he often cites.Any way you slice it, This Old Dog is a shockingly mature effort for a guy who remains famous for interrupting a gig to stick a drumstick up his butt. Several key Mac tracks show how he got here, along with songs by the icons who inspired him and some from friends and collaborators like Ariel Pink and Walter TV.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

They reimagined not only how the genre sounded, but how it felt. They changed the rhythm, and, by embracing compositional pastiche and kitschy psychedelic, they crafted music that was deeply cerebral and personal. And while they both heavily sampled jazz and soul — the dominant source for the boom bap era producers who served as their shared stylistic avatars — their palette was more expansive and worldly, privileging obscurity over nostalgia, grainy textures over raw masculine presence.You can hear echoes of their work in some of today’s most critically lauded and commercially successful music, from the space jazz symphonies of Flying Lotus to the pan-African milieu of Kendrick Lamar, the refactored soul of Frank Ocean or the jittery, jump-cut flow of Kanye’s Life of Pablo. For this playlist, we’ve collected their best.

A kick drum? A tambourine? Foot stomps and spoons? One very tired Razeem? It’s impossible to imagine what hip-hop, house, and techno might have used for a rhythmic foundation block if not for the 808 beat.That’s why the impact that inventor Ikutaro Kakehashi had on the last four decades of music is incalculable. The news of the Osaka-born engineer and Roland founder’s death on April 1 at the age of 87 has prompted a deluge of grateful tributes from just about every music maker who benefited from his innovations, most prominently with Roland’s most iconic drum machine, the TR-808. One of the earliest programmable models, its sound was initially criticized as too synthetic when it was introduced in 1980. But with its tight snare and booming bass, Kakehashi’s contraption proved to be more adaptable than anyone could’ve dreamed.Since the fine 2015 documentary 808 tells you everything you could want to know on the subject (and way more), we’d prefer to let the music do the talking with a set that includes many of the most famous uses of the 808 (and its successor the TR-909) by early adopters like Arthur Baker as well as such present-day devotees as Kanye West, who transformed the beat into the sonic epitome of emotional desolation on 808s And Heartbreak. Roland developer Tommy Snyder said it best in his farewell: “He was a super funny, wonderful and gifted human being, and his contributions to the musical instrument world and music touched millions of people worldwide.” To which we can only add: let the rhythm hit ‘em forever more.

Phil Spector may be a homicidal madman with a skyscraping afro, yet he also is responsible for creating one of pop’s most iconic production styles: the wall of sound. Simple in effect yet complex in process, it entails the deliciously gratuitous spilling and layering of instruments (forget doubling — think tripling) until no single one is distinguishable from any other. The results are titanic, textural, and stunningly atmospheric pop songs that feel as though they’ve been bestowed upon mere mortals by the angels. Critics tend to believe that Spector’s wall reached it highest point on (Ike and) Tina Turner’s 1966 masterwork River Deep — Mountain High, but don’t overlook Dion’s Born to Be With You from 1975; in my opinion, its majestic power is unrivalled. Spector inspired a slew of badasses throughout the ’60s and ’70s. In addition to Beach Boy genius Brian Wilson and a young Bruce Springsteen on Born to Run, soul visionaries Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield erected their own unique walls of sound from the lushest of strings.Like Spector, these artists worked with large ensembles. The same cannot be said of The Byrds, Pink Floyd, and the minimalism-inspired Velvet Underground. Instead of leaning heavily on orchestral instrumentation, these mid-’60s pioneers built walls of sound, oftentimes spacey and reverb-drenched, from the distortion, fuzz, and feedback generally associated with rock-based instrumentation. Though it took several decades for their innovations to coalesce into an identifiable aesthetic, they certainly have influenced a great deal of the shoegaze, noise pop, and dream pop outfits to have emerged since the late ’80s. My Bloody Valentine’s absolutely hulking Loveless record, from 1991, has to be the modern era’s most startling expression of wall of sound tactics, though The Jesus and Mary Chain’s buzzing Psychocandy isn’t far behind. My personal favorite is The Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic, which is like the perfect meeting point between Syd Barrett-era Floyd and The Beach Boys at their most psychedelic.

The age of the rock ‘n’ roll shaman is nearly gone. As far as frontman archetypes go, David Bowie’s cool and detached postmodernism won and Jim Morrison’s fiery and passionate romanticism lost. The idea of rock as something sacred and visionary has gradually gone out of fashion. This makes a singer like Mark Lanegan, who just released his 10th full-length, Gargoyle, a dead man walking. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.Ever since the longtime cult artist was a young underground rocker—one clearly inspired by Morrison and haunted punk-bluesman Jeffrey Lee Pierce, whose performances were regularly described as séances and possessions—Lanegan and his dark, cavernous, graveyard groan have been evoking spirit images of archaic apparitions and the underworld. In particular, the singer’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (which predates Nirvana’s) sounds like a transmission from hell. Meanwhile, his lyrics come littered with Jungian imagery and references to religion and altered states of consciousness: In the 2004 single “Hit The City,” a sublimely ominous rocker featuring PJ Harvey on backing vocals, he sings about darkness, the promised land, ghosts, and kingdom come—that’s some grade A esoterica.Shamans are loners, people who participate in village life yet largely live outside of it, and that’s Lanegan to a tee. While he spent a good deal of his early years with Screaming Trees—a Pacific Northwest band who were always more in tune with the otherworldliness of ’80s psychedelia than sweaty dude-grunge—he started his solo career way back in 1990 with The Winding Sheet. Since then, the 6’ 2” brooder has cut a labyrinthine path: In addition to a slew of solo gems blending mountain folk balladry, gothic-tinged blues rock, dream pop, and even electronic, he’s racked up short-lived collaborations with stoner rock gods Queens of the Stone Age, Scottish chanteuse Isobel Campbell, fellow alt-rock icon Greg Dulli, avant-garde guitarist Duke Garwood, and electronic producer Moby. Lanegan loves working with other musicians, he just never sticks around for very long. Perhaps that’s because the vocalist, like any shaman, ultimately feels more at home in the spirit world than our own.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Mary J. Blige’s new album, Strength of a Woman, is unapologetically devoted to heartbreak. Chronicling the strains and inevitable tears in a relationship, the album is inspired by the recent end of her 13-year marriage. For fans who’ve followed her career for the past quarter-century—yes, it’s been that long—Strength of a Woman feels like a return to vintage Mary, or as she once called her former self, “sad Mary.”During those early years, she struggled with fame, substance abuse, and bad affairs, but made some of the best soul music in recent times, including the classic album, 1994’s My Life. But in the past decade or so, especially after 2005’s The Breakthrough, she’s recorded a sometimes-gratifying, often uneasy mix of self-help anthems and earnest attempts at recapturing the pop zeitgeist, regardless of her collaborators. Her last album, 2014’s The London Sessions, found her working with au courant chart-toppers like Sam Smith, Disclosure, and Emeli Sandé. For 2011’s My Life II... The Journey Continues (Act 1), she assembled a grab bag, including a cameo by Drake, a nostalgic look back at her Bronx B-girl days with Nas, and motivational tunes like “The Living Proof.”Strength of a Woman is remarkably consistent. It indulges our desire to relive the vintage, somewhat mythical, Queen-of-Hip-Hop-Soul sound that she did so well early on in her career. Many of its tracks find her riffing over classic soul arrangements, just like when she used to cover quiet-storm chestnuts like “I’m Goin’ Down.” As this playlist demonstrates, she included a few breakup testimonials in every album, though they didn’t have as much purpose and artistic flair as now. Sad Mary never really went away.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.