From Compton to Studio 54, By Way of Belgium

Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip assembled an 80-minute DJ mix—Bohannon, Jay-Z, Aphex Twin, Shit Robot—and put it out for free. That’s just an objectively generous Tuesday. It has the same quality that makes Hot Chip records work: things with no obvious right to sit next to each other finding an easy rhythm together, as if they always shared a neighborhood.

Straight Outta Compton doesn’t need a new argument made for it. It opened with You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge—statement and warning in one line—and everything that followed was consequence. Ice Cube and MC Ren wrote most of it; Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and DJ Yella built the architecture. August 8, 1988. The discomfort it produced hasn’t fully metabolized, which is probably the point.

Belgium sent Selah Sue, which felt late and overdue simultaneously. Her self-titled debut moves between pop, soul, hip-hop, and reggae without sounding like it’s covering its bases—more like someone whose actual taste happens to span all of that. She was twenty-two when it came out and her voice already had a smokiness that sounds earned. Comparisons to Nneka are lazy shorthand but not wrong.

The Studio 54 soundtrack is Diana Ross, The Miracles, Sylvester, Instant Funk, and a few dozen more things that make your body move before your brain has a say. Excessive drugs, a party that never technically ended, sex until something gives out—the music was the delivery system for all of it. Press play and your spine already knows what’s happening before the rest of you catches up.

Scott Matthew’s Gallantry’s Favorite Son occupies the same emotional frequency as Bon Iver but slower and lower. The Australian former Elva Snow vocalist has an androgynous voice and a spare arrangement—strings, acoustic guitar, a little percussion—and the sadness in the record feels genuine rather than performed. There’s a sliver of optimism buried in there, which somehow only sharpens everything around it.

Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm Remixed is the remix album that justifies the format. Kele Okereke and the rest remain one of the great British bands of the last two decades, and the record shows how much room lives inside "Blue Light" and "Helicopter" when you let other producers in. Not every track earns its place, but enough do. Let them live forever.