The Most Alive Thing I Heard That Year

There are albums you approach and albums that come at you. Matangi was always the second kind. M.I.A.’s fourth record arrived in November 2013 like something with teeth—compressed aggression and devotional noise, the Hindu goddess of the arts processed through a laptop that had been dropped in a swamp. You wanted to clear the furniture before pressing play. Not because it was loud, exactly, but because it moved in unexpected directions and you didn’t want to be standing in the wrong place when it hit.

I’d been following Maya Arulpragasam since Arular—since the era when she seemed like she might be the most interesting person in pop music, which she might actually have been. Matangi felt like a doubling down on that claim. Where MAYA was deliberately abrasive, this was something stranger: spiritual and filthy at once, trance rhythms under club noise under what might have been ancient Sanskrit, everything insisting that none of these things were in contradiction.

The title comes from the goddess herself—Matangi, the tantric aspect of Saraswati, patroness of polluted things and outcaste wisdom. M.I.A. had been in the tabloids that year for various controversies, and there was something almost too on-the-nose about choosing this particular deity. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Whether it was the album of the year in 2013 is a question I still can’t settle cleanly. It was the most alive thing I heard that year, which isn’t quite the same thing, but might matter more.