Six Records for the Long Days
Joy Denalane’s Maureen is her third album, arriving five years after Born & Raised, and it sounds like the work of someone who’s stopped trying to prove anything. The "Queen of German Soul" tag sounds like marketing—it’s also just accurate. The ballads hit registers she’s always been best at, and the production underneath is warm and unhurried. Emotional without being demonstrative. It earns its feeling rather than announcing it.
DJ Mad—who first made his name spinning records for Hamburg hip-hop group Die Beginner—put out Hip Hop Mix100712, a summer mixtape that pulls from Nas, Gil Scott-Heron, Kid Cudi, and Big Boi without sounding like a playlist assembled by committee. Mixtapes are arguments about what hip-hop should feel like in a given season. This one makes a convincing case.
Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On from 1971 keeps coming back to me every few months and each time I find something new in it. Motown didn’t want to release it—Gaye was supposed to be a heartthrob, not a social critic. The Vietnam dread, the political rot, the death of his duet partner Tammi Terrell—all of it went in and came out the other side as something that barely sounds like it’s trying. It just breathes. Put it on if you haven’t listened in a while, and remember what a concept album sounds like when it isn’t announcing itself every thirty seconds.
The Anthology from A Tribe Called Quest is one of the few compilations that holds together as a listening experience rather than a shopping list. Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Jarobi White, Ali Shaheed Muhammad—jazz samples and New York cool in a configuration that still doesn’t sound dated. I’ve been putting this on since I was a teenager and it hasn’t worn out.
Monarchy are a London duo who won’t show their faces, working instead behind white masks—a gimmick that either becomes iconic or ages horribly, and the jury is still out. Their summer mix pulls remixes from Yuksek, Hercules and Love Affair, Kelis, and Fenech Soler with enough forward momentum that you stop caring about the masks entirely. Disco-adjacent, functional, gets the job done.
Then there’s Ladyhawke. Phillipa Brown released her debut Ladyhawke in 2008 and I haven’t found anything she’s done since that touches it. All synthesizers and early-80s atmosphere filtered through New Zealand air—Fleetwood Mac if Fleetwood Mac had grown up on Depeche Mode. I keep waiting for a follow-up that matches it. Still waiting.