Six Records the Brain Needed
K.I.Z.’s new album is called Urlaub fürs Gehirn—Vacation for the Brain—which is either the most or least accurate title in their catalog, depending on how you define vacation. The Berlin rap collective (Tarek, Maxim, Nico, and DJ Craft, operating under the full name Kannibalen in Zivil, Cannibals in Civilian Clothes) make music that is specifically, deliberately, artfully unpleasant. Grotesque humor, political sharpness, occasional bursts of weird tenderness between the violence. Abteilungsleiter der Liebe—Department Head of Love—is the album’s strange romantic detour; In deiner Mutter is exactly what it sounds like. K.I.Z. fucks you verbally. This was not a surprise.
Austra’s Feel It Break is the kind of debut that makes you wonder what other debuts were doing with their time. Katie Stelmanis has a near-operatic voice that she drops into minimal synth arrangements with the calm of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing—landing somewhere between Fever Ray and Bat for Lashes, cool and precise and slightly unnerving. Producer Damian Taylor, who has worked with Björk and UNKLE, gives the whole thing a finish that feels considered rather than assembled. An ambitious record, and the ambition is earned.
Chiddy Bang’s Peanut Butter and Swelly is the mixtape I want coming out of a car window in June. The Philadelphia duo build tracks out of indie and electro samples, Chiddy’s flow drawing on Grime as much as American hip-hop, the whole thing moving with the kind of energy that makes you want to be outside wherever you’re listening to it. Ideal for the park, the pool, or the slow warmup into a Friday night.
SebastiAn has never been the fastest member of the Ed Banger roster—the Paris label that also gave us Justice and Mr. Oizo—but his debut LP Total suggests he might be the most considered. Love Motion with Mayer Hawthorne is worth the whole record on its own, though older tracks like Ross Ross Ross confirm he’d been quietly building toward this for years. The basement phase is over.
Four Tet’s Rounds came out in 2003 and I keep returning to it. Kieran Hebden builds acoustic-electronic environments that feel less like songs than like weather—you don’t so much listen as find yourself inside them. What LSD does through chemistry, this record does through arrangement. The goosebumps are structural. They’re built in.
And then there’s Mirrored by Battles. Two things push my pulse to 180: excessive exercise and this album. Math rock that doesn’t apologize for the math—electronic elements woven through, experimental rhythms, the whole thing pitched slightly off the beat in a way that eventually becomes its own pulse. No great vocalist required. The music is already saying everything, at full volume.