Music

Spend enough time listening to Destroyer and the world will start to resemble a Dan Bejar song—when a bon vivant slips in an unexpected curse word; when a friend tries to place a melody by humming the guitar part; when a common phrase twists into a surrealist riddle via an AutoCorrect mishap. Since he first emerged in the mid-’90s, Bejar has reflected the world in these abstract and broken-sounding ways: “Sing the least poetic thing you can think of,” he recently said of his preferred method of songwriting, “and try to make it sound beautiful.” As cerebral as Bejar’s work can be, the state of mind with which his music is most commonly associated is drunkenness: the predilection to spew nonsense, the bravado in convincing the room you’re fine, even as you spill wine all over yourself. While...

Gil Scott-Heron’s final album, 2010’s I’m New Here, was a moving but unfinished statement from an important but overlooked artist. By the mid-’00s, the writer, poet, and singer had a long and storied career behind him, with more than a dozen albums of word-dense soul and R&B, two novels, and one phrase, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” taken from his song of the same name, that echoed through culture and became more famous than he would ever be. He was a crucial voice of protest who deeply influenced black music across genres—hip-hop especially—but he hadn’t done much in a while. His last LP had been released more than a decade earlier. In the years between, he’d had drug problems, which led to health problems and legal problems, including an extended stretch incarcerated at Rik...

Most producers in electronic music tend to work in a linear fashion: They start with a chosen style or set of ideas and move gradually forward with them, making incremental progress toward their larger vision. Not Beatrice Dillon. An unsuspecting listener presented with a half dozen of the London musician’s releases might easily assume they were the work of six different people. A 20-minute cassette with Germany’s Gunnar Wendel collected fragments of a noise performance; a pair of albums with composer Rupert Clervaux alternated percussive concision with freeform drift. Themed mixtapes—like a journey through Smithsonian Folkways’ archives or a guided tour of RVNG Intl.’s idiosyncratic catalog—comprise a surprising proportion of her discography. In the absence of anything like an identifiabl...

In 2011, Grimes was eager to say in an interview that she had “been studying pop stars.” Since emerging 10 years ago as a DIY ingénue out of Montreal’s freewheeling music scene, Claire Boucher has become known for her experimental production that often traded discernible lyrics for otherworldly and synthetic vocal textures. The words she sang didn’t figure into what made her music so fascinating—it was how she used her vocals to mimic whalesong or aliensong, a futurist reimagining of the transfixing voices of Enya and Mariah Carey, over irresistible melodies. Yes, Grimes always wanted to be a pop star, but on her own creative terms. Miss Anthropocene is Grimes’ fifth album and her first as that bona fide pop star—the result of widespread acclaim for both 2012’s Visions and 2015’s addictive...