Twigs goes for a much more minimal approach of closely sculpted vocal passages with a tone poetry of electronic garnish. Her own voice drives the songs forward in subtle and strong movements, typically slow, precise and methodical, almost lurching. On “mary magdalene,” for instance, her “come just a little bit closer to me” is hung in the air by a playful stop-start. Additionally aesthetic development is part of her practice here. The outro to “fallen alien” is a Kanye-sized electro-adjacent victory lap, fossilizing the track with a mutated reiteration of its phrases. On “daybed” there is a slow and constant march of a vocal, slowly yielding an angelic profile always on the verge of evolution. 

Here’s an ambitious and moody piece, held together by an alluring, humid gothic atmosphere (most easily heard in the opening of “mirrored heart”) that allows her movements to simmer. It’s a visceral delirium. 

Its theming is more direct than her previous work and no less enlightening and uncomfortable. On “home with you” she’s in the process of peeling back the layers of her devotion on a sweeping chorus which alights pure, tender, selfless consideration (this is mostly contained in the very sound of this highlight). She recognizes neglect on the part of another (or others?), yet what she’s willing to give is disturbingly abundant. Twigs translates her tempered progressions into the most recognizably R&B performance on the album with “holy terrain,” and her forceful depressions are easily banger material. This track stands out as well in that two perspectives of a universalized relationship share their insecurities with its dynamic, in the process debasing themselves (Twigs may be easily taken advantage of as her “fruits are for taking”;  Future is desperate to display his worth and has to “throw gold on [her] just to fall asleep”). It relates to theme of the harmful idealizing of women which runs throughout the project. 

“mary magdalene” is the centerpiece of the major idealized woman theme. She presents an ambiguous glee, at one point relishing the power “a woman’s touch” has while identifying the expectation that she selflessly devote herself to lifting a man higher. She combines her perspective with that of the idealized figure, and it’s an evocative mutation. 

“Cellophane” is the most plainly gorgeous and emotionally raw track which consolidates major themes into a sense of melted longing. Coupled with its dissonance of cold electronics and her warm crystal vocal, it’s a bona-fide sculpture. 

We stan the boundless enchantment of Hounds of Love, and like that one The Sensual World is one of the best packages of music we’ve ever heard. This one takes a decidedly more streamlined approach, and makes up for that sense of direction with wild, innovative ideas realized with turns of disarming beauty, indescribable heights alike to the earmarks of her definitive work a few years before.

Tracks move intuitively. Bouts of choppy abruptness eventually become tight structures of clashing cycles. “Heads We’re Dancing” has a malleable texture, almost loose (not to mention its bonkers story), but its progression of sounds and peculiar repetition make a simple sense. This goes for every other track, not short on surprises but ever turning toward the correct next step. What really makes this piece a microcosm for the album is that it completely earns its cinematic drop-off. 

“Rocket’s Tail (For Rocket)” consolidates some of her new sounds and proceeds to go nuts in a pretty uncomplicated way. This white-knuckle burn is critical and powerful (and my favorite track on the album if anyone’s asking). 

Sometimes it’s the perfect piano-led pop grooves of “Reaching Out” and “This Woman’s Work” that are really what’s special, but then there are the tracks which forge new aesthetics. I’d believe it if Grimes, Laurel Halo, FKA Twigs, and probably a number of other vital auteurs studied this album closely. The synthetic swell on “This Woman’s Work” wouldn’t sound a bit out of place in Sophie’s catalogue. 

There are tangible storybook turns in sound, smooth introductions of new worlds, purposeful beats and distant pictures. “Deeper Understanding” represents an evolution in Bush’s wordless ethereal vocal waves, this time with an eerie perfection that’s not enough like a robot and too much like a spirit. Bush is clairvoyant. 

This album is pop in its lush production and Bush’s ecstatic command as a singer, a swaying queen. But she can also do the strange, disembodied storyteller from behind the wind’s walls. Everything is huge, conceptual, and utterly, sickeningly expansive. It may be a product, but its boundless, effortless sound sends it above itself. I find myself incredulous at its goodness. 

“Running Up That Hill” and “Hounds of Love” are a one-two punch of sweeping beauty, seismic turns and exhalations. The former’s perfect chorus can hardly be held back as Bush longs for power in an oppressive relationship. The latter creates a dust-shattering upfulness (it’s the kind of thing that truly, if for just a minute, replaces malaise), expanding on eager strings and vocals happily swinging around while she begs for help with her emotional growth. I can’t do Bush’s winding performances much justice as she digs in. 

“The Big Sky” runs with this riff and soars, entirely unburdened and shooting off into choral soul swells and topped with a post-punk freakout. But the track is most successful maybe in carrying its image, wherein a neglected lover gazes at infinite possibilities and at one especially rapturous moment tunes out the emotionally bankrupt person holding her back: “What was the question? I was looking at the big sky.” “Cloudbusting” matches it with its telling of the plight of psychoanalyst figure Wilhelm Reich, concentrating an impression of his ambition as an opener of clouds into the workings of a house music queen, even as violins work out organic sublimity: “Every time it rains/ you’re here in my head.” 

These tracks duly represent Bush’s artistic command, her ability to write songs that are held down by nothing, where in fact her preoccupations with iterations of love good and bad are just an aspect of her gale force. And so they open an odyssey of powerful concepts. There the time she gives into weakness on “And Dream of Sheep.” “Watching You Without Me” is too close to home (there’s a sense that

No feelings are off limits) and represents one of the album’s greatest tricks: pulling out eruptions of latent, wordless beauty. This happens on “Hello Earth” as a kind of environmental refrain to a guttural chorus on an ancient spaceship. 

Thankfully Bush has crystallized these encompassing scenes.

“Once upon a time

That’s the moral of the story”

Excess is the game here, as Wayne grips onto his gold for as long as he can before his life runs out, which sounds like it’ll be any minute. “Dreams” is a goofy brag but implies that nothing can stay. And the track’s breakdown into a ramshackle R&B swell (“I had a dream I was a foooool”), left after a series of frantic changes, captures it perfectly. Wayne is restless. For the most part, his presence on a track is a series of imprint flows, one remarkable mouthful after another. Precise without being robotic. With its short tracks, the colors shift constantly, and even when a concept or sound is just sort of there rather than complete and alive (I can’t describe “Get Outta My Head” in any more detail than “it’s like XXXTentacion’s edgier aesthetics concentrated”), Wayne offers some pocket of experimentation that’s at least interesting (his first verse on the aforementioned track is ugly, popping with dark cartoon imagery). In other words, the listening experience never drops straight down. The “Funerals” and “Mahoganys” and “Hardens” of the album are the sort of obvious masterpieces, but in the treasure room (dapples of rubies, diamonds and gold), all trinkets coexist. 

“Pussy Monster” (you can start from any track) is a midway between noodling and flirting; its naturalistic structure forms a believable late night night club alleyway story. It’s the culmination of moments like these which display Wayne as a bard, sharing his imagine epic. He sees power in stories, and so when he calls himself “the greatest rapper alive,” it’s an attempt at speaking things into existence. 

The heights of escapism give life to the work — which is undeniably great — and discredit it. “A Milli” sees Wayne rapping in tongues, in complete fealty to his form, forging a touchstone of style and ability (“I will smith”). “Got Money” constructs a pop-up parade, a wonderful, hedonistic height of pop rap, and Wayne’s sloppy presence is just one example of his life-affirming abandon. With his recognition that the hooks and fanfare are his album, Wayne does no less than form perfect harmony with them and as a result nothing feels incidental. In “Let the best build,” he shows off his prowess in verses, then sings along to the bass drum, giving himself over to it. Improvised and systemic rhythms maintain equal stock. It’s a sensory load; Wayne is the kind of artist to give and take from his instrumentals in a bouncing smorgasbord, to push eyes towards eyebrows.

And the songs are ambitious. “Mrs. Officer” builds on a series of sunny fancies, a winsome bassline holding it together. “Lollipop” simmers from beginning to end. “La La” is a jagged statement, a rappers’ paradise amid pop bangers. “Tie My Hands” actually means to soundtrack New Orleans post-Katrina.

But when he sings a pun referencing the famous assault on Rodney King by police (Why?) or in the hook of “Lollipop” seems to thank his status and drunkenness for the head he receives (“shawty wanna thug; bottles in the club”), seemingly unaware of anything he’s saying, it’s time to come back to Earth. And man is it a drop. 

But to end on a positive note, because I love it:

“I’m rare/

like Mr. Clean with hair.” 

Arrangements that ring of obscurity (they can be read as choppy, but I think it’s more so hazy) usher in moments of surprising beauty, around certain corners truly moving sounds. Here she’s a complete ghostly presence lilting in her own small world, which lightly melds with reality. Initially the album threatened to be overly sheer and the songs were hard to pin down, but over time its quirks seemed like simple, effective, natural conclusions. For instance there’s “Symphonia IX,” a vocal lost in time accompanied by floating dark matter; at first it seemed a bit nondescript but it easily grew on me, enveloping and eventually undeniable. 

Pretty obscurity and nocturnal disco noise are perfect for her lyrics here, stream-of-consciousness that tries to capture some purity of little-spoken feeling. There’s a part in “vowels = space and time,” which sounds like the percolation of an ‘80s dance-pop hit, where she tries speaking for this person, little described except for Grimes’ stake in him: “I could be a better man.” Such moments of ambivalent clarity are touchstones as the album builds in weight and texture (the last batch of tracks starting with “Nightmusic” are hefty bliss and represent some of Grimes’ most potent songwriting). 

These pop loops are analogous to dance grooves, dependent on the interplay between repetition and variation as a separate machine of depth and drama. The scope of this project’s sound, along with doses of lyrical melodrama, is emphasized moment-to-moment in shifting forms; loose and occasionally haphazard structures give way to Grimes’ energy as a looming presence. She continues to fold pop into her aural image, which grows deeper into a sleeping, floating atmospheric palate. 

Loop interactions, the reification and development of ideas that crash into each other, reveal the best the album has to offer. “My name is dark” sounds truly nasty, destructive, and as the turbulent hook gets more and more worn and unhinged, even rusted, the bridge turns gears: the guitar strums which had been pasted to the background  (engaging in a drum pattern) come forth to reign things in. “Delete Forever” is a folk singer-songwriter approximation, which makes tender turns and depicts a grand scale. “IDORU’s” synthetic outdoorsy cycle serves a wonderful bounce. 

Not every diary entry lyric hits, but overall the project is haunting. Expressions like “I see everything” come from a low, lonely place and they echo. Grimes charts a widening distance from her fellow humans, culminating in the fantasy of “IDORU,” where, in some dream, a lover finally understands her, and will accept her, gloominess and all. 

Thematic companion movie: Lucio Fulci’s Aenigma

Each moment feels like a moving tapestry, the album’s strange colors (of blown-up punk rock, heavy electro, whatever else) contributing to some enigmatic whole. It sounds purposeful, and/or big for bigness’ sake: snares splash and create showers, rhythms resolve slowly, synths shoot from the atmosphere to the dirt (see: “The Powers That B”). A series of monoliths that are still hard to fathom. 

Ride’s never been more intoxicating and beckoning. On “Turned Off” (altogether a propulsive masterpiece) his flow roils and twists, then is shattered into place by the chorus into an underground anthem machine. It’s jagged bliss and larger than life. His voice has a narrative progression on “On GP,” in which he seems to open up; atmospheric guitars bath him and his implied surrounding. This constructed stage allows him to shine like the gross star he is. 

I’m Remembering Las Vegas, where Death Grips eventually migrated from California and which some of the sounds on this album vaguely remind me of: specifically lights pointed at a programmed fountain show against one of its gaudy buildings on The Strip at night. But then there’s images of the flea markets: a crucified Chucky doll over the doorway of a wooden guerrilla structure, unrelated to the shop’s product; the wireframe t-shirt box, exclusively selling ones printed with cartoon characters mean-mugging and dripping with heavy jewelry (currently trying to reconcile all of these things). 

It’s an album of standouts. These fluid tracks open up in ways that push them to some outer limit, all with a poppy sense of anticipation. Juke-y “Pop” eventually emphasizes the dancehall slap on every “3,” so that the song is restructured into a slouching death dance to look forward to. “Bass Rattle Stars Out the Sky” is a messy banger that could easily fill the space of an outside venue. The hook of “Hunger Games” is undeniable as it slides. “No Love” is “No Love.” 

“Come Up and Get Me” (wherein low synths are muted to a forcefully swinging effect) is special in offering a semi-clear storyline, where Ride holes up in an abandoned building evading a Nazi police force who he admits he can’t name. He’s an unreliable narrator who grazes in an underbelly and overflows with schizophrenic violence. This is the sucking-in point, and Ride’s words going forward spiral down, sometimes incomprehensible; ugly poetry (“feel me climbing under your stomach”) and antisocial shouts (“Fuck it!”). They’re what comes after being consumed by the corner pocket. 

It seems to work like this: You’re at the entrance of a cave, and Ride shouts for you to look away from whatever gross thing he’s doing. But you want to go further, and you want to join him, because if this sick beat is wrong then who would wanna be right? 

-taggedbypea

Its punk spirit comes in a warped vision for pop music: teenybopper singalongs in the context of dirt-caked, monster grooves that could reasonably scrape on forever.