Lust$ickPuppy
Given a choice, Lust$ickpuppy would prefer you call their music digital hardcore over hyperpop. They don’t harbor any ill will toward hyperpop—it’s just that, “something about roping everything into that feels a little bit reductive.” And if there’s one thing Lust$ickpuppy is not, it’s reductive. Their maxmilist sound draws on trauma, carnal rage, and the refusal to be carelessly defined. Their persona has gone from kink-puppy to Suessian school girl character to their current icarnation of yellow, smiley-faced Juggalo.
That smiley-face paint seems to embody much of who Lust$ickPuppy is: Friendly invitation, safety, deranged, polite, bottled fury, a coded fuck off. “The facepaint is how it feels to move through life, feeling shitty, but not be allowed to express that,” they say. “I think a lot of people that connect with my music understand that feeling.” Entirely self-written and self-produced, their new album Carousel From Hell tries to break free of bad cycles. “Exes” mutates carousel organs into unrecognizable shrieks, while on “Empathy Reserved,” Lust$ickPuppy spirals and screams “Oh my god, here we go again.”
“There’s themes of sexual identity, acceptance of sexual trauma, moving beyond that, loving yourself,” they say. “But also being very real and honest about what those levels of trauma have done to me as a person. I do have some topics that I’m super passionate about and will always be represented in my music, but I don’t stay to those topics. Life is fun, too. I wanna turn around and be a bad bitch, too. It’s that deep, and it’s also not that deep at the same time.”
—Blake Gillespie
Lip Critic
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Lip Critic’s story began as a happy accident. Bret Kaser and Connor Kleitz were getting ready to watch their college friends Ilan Natter and Daniel Eberle’s band when they were unexpectedly asked to fill in last-minute for a missing bassist. The New York-based band’s chaotic first gig would foreshadow their Partisan debut Hex Dealer, which balances Kaser and Kleitz’s dance music backgrounds with Eberle and Natter’s lifelong love of hardcore.. “It’s always a good idea [to not conform to genre] because it means that you’ll only be guided by your internal compass,” Kaser says. “I do think there’s an insecurity in certain music scenes about acting outside of what people are expecting.”
The two underlying constants of Lip Critic’s music are energy and heaviness. Their live shows go completely off-script from their recorded material, with songs becoming jumping-off points for scattershot real-time remixes in sets that clock in at barely half an hour. It’s a place where raving and moshing collide—a potency underlined by the fact that the group has two drummers. As Kaser explains: “Danny and Ilan both bring this understanding of band culture and live musicianship I feel is missing from club music. You’re getting to see these two musicians play off of each other, but you’re also getting huge 808 sounds, chopped vocals, and these things you couldn’t get with a regular band.”
The lyrical content of Hex Dealeris is the perfect match for the wild sonic left turns found throughout the album. Kaser embodies a cult-like figure who is surrounded by paranoia and conspiracy—including a woman who is convinced that her son and the mailman are going to kill her. It not only reflects Lip Critic’s wicked sense of humor but, as Kaser mentions, “it feels like a very ‘American’ record in hindsight.”
—Matty Pywell
Esy Tadesse
Born in Addis Ababa but based in Los Angeles, guitarist Etsegenet Mekonnen is the modern embodiment of Ethiopian jazz. As the lone woman in a private music college—and the only female guitarist in her home country—Mekonnen forged her own path, graduating with second-place honors. Those achievements fueled her thirst for musical knowledge, eventually earning her a scholarship to study in the USA. “This journey culminates in the album I have been tirelessly working on,” says Mekonnen. “The passion to create my own rendition of an Ethio-Jazz record burned within me.” On Ahadu, Mekonnen’s debut album as Esy Tadesse, the composer and musician teamed up with her husband, the Grammy-winning producer Kibrom Birhane—a fellow Ethiopian artist living in the City of Angels. (Watching them play together in a 2021 live stream, it’s clear the pair have effortless chemistry.)
Fans of the Ethiopiques compilation series or the label Awesome Tapes From Africa will love Ahadu. In less than 30 minutes, the album’s 10 largely instrumental songs slither gracefully, as Mekonnen’s Ethiopian Qignit [scales] wind through airy flutes, chunky beats, and honeyed vocals. Her playing, singing, and writing are uniformly gorgeous, while Birghane’s production flourishes—drawing on influences like John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders—elegantly bring these songs into the present. “Creating a guitar-driven Ethio-Jazz album from a female perspective was a fresh and innovative approach that we were excited to bring to life,” says Mekonnen. “As a singer-songwriter, I was keen on incorporating vocals, adding a personal touch to the genre.”
—Jesse Locke
Halima
The experimental R&B artist Halima grew up between Lagos and London, but was always cautious about incorporating her heritage into her music. It wasn’t her fault: She was justifiably worried she’d be mislabeled an Afrobeats artist by Western audiences with their limited understanding of Nigerian music. But while she was working on her latest EP, her co-producer Ben Shirken came across the name Exu, a Yoruba deity. Due to a mistranslation into English, says Halima (who now lives in Brooklyn), the deity is often falsely associated with the devil. But they actually represent change—“an excavation process you endure to get to a better version of yourself.”
The notion resonated with Halima. At the time, she was confronting a lot of “limiting beliefs about my ethnicity, my gender expression, my sexuality,” she says. “When that happens, it shakes your whole foundation.” The self-discovery continued throughout the songwriting process, as she pushed herself to make her music less accessible. “When I showed Ben the EP I made before this one he said, ‘This is cool but I can hear you pandering,’” she recalls. “I had to sit with that and think about how much I love to create versus how much I love to share. I shouldn’t be making something with the intention of people liking it. I went through an ego death that gave me the freedom to explore sounds that I knew weren’t going to be so easily digestible.”
The resulting music grates, twists, and rattles, perfectly capturing the revelatory—at times harrowing—process of reinvention. And yet Halima never completely eschews the melodic hooks or honeyed vocals that defined her previous work. On “Ways,” her vocals are layered to create an airy call-and-response. “Overdue” builds from a pulsing bassline to a vibrant cacophony of drums, synth, and vocal blips. And “Awaken” ends with the phrase: “The water in me honors the water in you.” As Halima explains, “I was having a difficult time mourning the version of myself that no longer exists after a breakup, because there was so much tied to that time and person. That phrase helped me let go, because I realized that we’re all connected. I started to understand that the person I was becoming didn’t erase who I was. This project was [ultimately] about understanding the realm of the infinite—everything that exists outside of your body, outside of the physical.”
—Vrinda Jagota
James Massiah
Vinyl LP, T-Shirt/Shirt
James Massiah is a DJ and “dub poet” who has written stanzas and spoken-word verses for everyone from Massive Attack to the King of England. He also makes sparse, irresistible dance music, self-produced beats accompanied by softly delivered bars about late-night trysts and failed romances. “It’s like the way that I write poems,” he says. “I don’t labor over poems. I sit down, or I stand up, wherever I am, and I just get it out.” His two EPs to date—separated by no less than five years—are both named for films written by Quentin Tarantino: 2019’s Natural Born Killers and the upcoming True Romance. “Those two films take these two tearaways and put them in compromised situations and it’s up to them to fend for themselves, for each other, against the backdrop of car chases, violence, gangs, pimps, dealers,” Massiah explains. “I love those worlds underworlds, nightlife. I like to think of myself as telling a similar story, in a different day and age.”
Like Tarantino, Massiah crams his work with references: To films, drugs, books, grime beats and dancehall rhythms. “It clicked for me when I discovered on YouTube you can slow down the speed of a track,” he says. “I was slowing down grime songs—“Shank Riddim,” “Creeper,” old Roadside G’s and Dizzee Rascal freestyles—to like 100 bpm, and it sounds exactly like dancehall.” Such sorcery provides the Massiah formula: Simple, yet overflowing with knowledge of what’s come before it; slow, but impossible to hear without dancing; and hardly prolific, but brilliant—if you can find him.
