Ten Years Since the Crash
August 25th lands differently. Ten years ago today, Aaliyah boarded a plane in the Bahamas and didn’t come off it. She was twenty-two. Three studio albums, a film career just warming up, a presence that nobody since has come close to replicating—not Ciara, not any of them—because what made her singular wasn’t just the Timbaland production or the choreography. It was the specific combination of cool and warmth you almost never get in the same person at the same time.
Ultimate arrived this week as the anniversary collection, and it does what a best-of should: it reminds you that even the deep cuts shine. "Are You That Somebody," "Try Again," "More Than a Woman"—diamonds that keep radiating. But what hits harder than any individual track is the shape of a career cut off at its beginning. Three albums is a setup, not a body of work. We never found out what came next.
The rest of the week’s listening was good enough to almost distract me from that. Thursday’s No Devolución is a different animal from what post-hardcore usually delivers—no wall-of-guitars rage, no screaming through teeth. These are slow, interior songs from a band that’s been at it for over a decade and knows how to make words land. It listens like a film with a muted color palette: quiet, bruising, hard to shake.
The Weeknd released his second mixtape, also called Thursday, and while it’s still thick with that same sex-and-narcotics atmosphere he built on House of Balloons—woozy production, falsetto that sounds like it’s coming from the next room at 4am—it doesn’t hit the same peaks. The rhythmic hooks that made the first tape feel like a discovery are sparser here. Still worth the listen. Just not a revelation twice.
And then there’s Netsky. I came into his self-titled debut knowing essentially nothing about drum ’n’ bass and came out the other side completely unable to leave it alone. The Belgian was twenty-one when he made it, which is vaguely offensive in retrospect. The melancholy in those tracks isn’t performed—it sits in the structure, in the way the bass drops against the tempo, in the vocals that float over the top like something half-remembered. I’ve started thinking of it as mine in a possessive way that’s probably embarrassing. His debut album has become something like the soundtrack of my own interior, and I don’t know what to do with that except keep listening.
Toddla T’s Watch Me Dance closes things out on a looser, more sociable note—a UK producer with a taste for hip-hop, reggae, soul, and funk all bleeding into each other, with contributions from Grandmaster Flash and Róisín Murphy among others. Good pre-party music. The kind of record that works best when you’re already moving toward the door.