Essentials

Regardless of what you think qualitatively about Drake’s music, or his progression as an artist, his impact on culture is undeniable. He’s a pop idol in a classical, pre-pomo sense; his fans not only devour his music, they model their ideas about fashion, art, and even sports around the Toronto emcee. In ranking the songs that defined the “Drake era,” the Fader staff make note that “this is not a “Best Of” or a ranking of any sort, but an acknowledgement of the songs that represent Drake’s expanding influence in music, culture, and our lives.” It’s a subtle but interesting distinction, but nonetheless interesting: they’re not pulling their favorite songs, or even his most popular songs, but tracks that capture the Drake zeitgeist.

When it comes to classic rockers who are revered by punks, alt-rockers, and indie brats, Bruce Springsteen may not possess the lofty stature of Neil Young, but the guy’s also no slouch. His influence tears across the first decade and a half of the 21st century like a ’69 Chevy with a 396. Adam Granduciel’s The War on Drugs--whose 2017 release, A Deeper Understanding, frequently nicks the gauzy, hushed heartache and mechanistic throb of Tunnel of Love—is just the latest in a long line of current artists who worship the Jersey legend. In addition to The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn (who has penned more than a few American anthems soaked in the Boss’ doomed romanticism and epic piano runs), The Killers dropped an entire album, 2006’s Sam’s Town, documenting the Vegas act’s collision of post-punk propulsion with gruff protestations and engine-roaring dynamics strung out on Born to Run. And, of course, the Arcade Fire (who actually pal around with their hero) slipped a whole mess of Springsteenisms—including the “Dancing in the Dark”-style pulse powering “Keep the Car Running”—into their 2007 blockbuster Neon Bible.Rewind to the pre-2000s (back when alterna-types generally were gloomier and harbored far deeper suspicions of mainstream rockers), and Springsteen’s influence admittedly was less pervasive. Not only that, those artists who were inspired by him rarely wore it on their sleeves like their post-Y2K counterparts. Where a tune like The War on Drugs’ “Up All Night” actually sounds like the Boss, The Replacements’ heartland ballad “Here Comes a Regular” evokes more of a spiritual connection in its evocation of small-town drinking buddies and dive bar fatalism. Paul Westerberg’s protagonist, broken yet restless, sounds as if he walked right out of the grooves of The River.Yet an even more interesting example is U2 and The Joshua Tree: There’s virtually nothing on the album that sounds overtly like Springsteen (though “In God’s Country” definitely reads like one of his song titles), yet the case can be made that the band’s fusion of anthemic rock, arena-sized yearning, and self-consciously grandiose lyrics drenched in American imagery could have only arrived in a post-Born in the U.S.A. pop market. (It should be noted Springsteen delivered U2’s Rock Hall induction speech in 2005.)The Clash also channel the Boss without nicking anything in particular from his music. This is especially true of London Calling, a record oozing the same sweaty belief in rock ’n’ roll redemption that Springsteen pumped out all throughout the ’70s. Of course, punks weren’t supposed to dig classic rockers, but the late Joe Strummer was having none of that. “His music is great on a dark and rainy morning in England,” he wrote to rock documentary filmmaker Mark Hagen in 1997. “Just when you need some spirit and some proof that the big wide world exists, the D.J. puts on ‘Racing in the Streets’ and life seems worth living again—life seems to be in cinemascope again.” All hail the Boss!

On paper, it might not seem like Ariel Pink has achieved anything drastic or revelatory with his lo-fi take on pop music. He’s certainly not the first songwriter to record smeared demo tapes on cheap equipment, or to reinvent AM-radio sounds from the ‘70s and ‘80s for the new millennium, or to tackle sexuality and gender fluidity with a theatrical flair. But it’s the way Pink combines these impulses—infusing his melodies with a terrifying, intensely antisocial sense of longing, and imbuing his ironic sense of humor with legitimate emotional release—that makes his music so insular and universal all at once. The man also has an innate ability for crafting snappy, gratifying songs that worm their way into your head, taking a little bit from every era in musical history while remaining unequivocally on his own trip.Whether he’s updating the vulgar antics of Frank Zappa and Ween for the 21st century, reinterpreting yacht-rock staples like Hall & Oates and Michael McDonald as gothy lords of the underworld, or evoking a Rocky Horror-like delight in sexual freedom and deviance, Ariel Pink is a truly unique voice in pop music, an experimental wizard as avant-garde as he is accessible. Hit play on our mix above to hear just what makes him tick.

As Harry Styles embarks on a solo career with an eagerly anticipated self-titled debut out May 12, we’ll see a new side of One Direction’s most famous member. As is usually the case when a boy-band member goes solo, his new music is more personal and idiosyncratic than the pop anthems the group cranked out over five albums in five years. But where Zayn left One Direction altogether and took a sharp left turn toward R&B, Harry’s solo work is more of an organic continuation of the One Direction sound, with influences from classic rock, power pop, and folk music.One Direction thrive on big choruses that bring everyone’s voice together in unison, while giving each member a turn at singing verses, but it’s undeniable that Styles is the most prominent voice in the mix. As far back as the band’s peppy debut hit “What Makes You Beautiful,” his deep, relaxed voice has always stood out among the other members’ more boyish vocals. As they ventured into bombastic arena rock on tracks like “Clouds” and “Diana,” his voice took on a gentle soaring quality.Over the course of One Direction’s run, the members of the band gradually took on a more active role in songwriting, with Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson taking the lead. But Harry Styles notched over a dozen songwriting credits in the group’s catalog, the best of which are included in the second half of this playlist. Styles occasionally put a personal stamp on their material—most famously with his thinly veiled lyrics aimed at Taylor Swift on “Perfect”—but he was also involved in some of the band’s most buoyant melodies, including the Tears For Fears homage “Stockholm Syndrome.”Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

The notion of writing a concept album about the contents of the Milky Way is a go-big-or-go-home kind of proposition for any songwriter. Many would blanch at the idea of even attempting such a monumental task, fearing the inevitable charges of gross pretentiousness or unseemly creative overreach.But for Sufjan Stevens, it seems like a perfectly organic (and celestial) extension of his work. Sure, he may have seemed more like your average winsome American singer/songwriter type at the beginning of the century, toting an acoustic guitar and performing songs that fit into the noble lineage of Cat Stevens, Nick Drake, and others who have a snug home on bastions of mellow playlists like SiriusXM’s The Coffee House. Yet time and again, he’s proven to be a maximalist at heart. He’s continually pursued much grander ambitions than most of his peers could ever consider, whether it means creating impossibly lush album-long tributes to American states (though he won’t be doing all 50, as he once promised in jest) or enlisting a string quartet to remake one of his earlier albums in classical form (on 2009’s Run Rabbit Run). He’s also revamped dozens of hoary old Christmas carols into bold new forms, doubled down on cover versions that may be more sonically extravagant than the originals (just hear his takes on Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man In Paris” and Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost”) and generally felt free to extend his sound palette and songs’ running times to extremes that may have daunted Emerson, Lake, and possibly even Palmer.All the while, Stevens has been similarly fearless and expansive when it comes to his lyrics, intermingling his references to and explorations of the Christian mysticism of his youth with more idiosyncratic mythologies that he constructs out of personal experiences (like the troubled family history he recounts in Carrie & Lowell, the 2015 masterpiece he named after his parents) or the strangest corners of America’s past (as in so many of his odes to Michigan and Illinois).So a project as cosmic as Planetarium seems right in the man’s wheelhouse. A new collaborative album that simultaneously evokes the most epic-scaled works of Holst and Wagner, spacy ‘70s FM rock like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, and ambient techno, it began life six years ago as a theatrical piece by Stevens and three friends: his regular percussionist James McAllister, The National guitarist and resident arranger Bryce Dessner, and avant-classical composer Nico Muhly. After a few years of tweaking and revamping the songs, the voyagers have finally released the results on a suitably mind-expanding set on 4AD and will perform them in a new series of performances in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Oakland in July 2017.Cleary, Stevens is a man who’s unafraid to express big ideas. Thankfully, his ability to achieve his ambitions means they don’t come off as hubris—instead, listeners have been grateful for his courage. Here’s a playlist that demonstrates how the celestial-minded songs of Planetarium suits the scale of the most sumptuous, adventurous and epically scaled music he’s already made.

Though synth-punk has birthed a dizzying assortment of mutant offspring, its basic aesthetic thrust sits upon a tension between rock and roll rebellion all hot ’n’ sweaty and the cold, dehumanizing pulse of the technological society. Its story begins with one band: Suicide, an eccentric and oftentimes terrifying duo founded in New York City in the early ’70s by Martin Rev and the late Alan Vega, a singer who sounded like a serial killer obsessed with Elvis’ Sun sides. In the coming decades, synth-punk would be blended with the bleak dystopianism of industrial music thanks to Brits like Cabaret Voltaire and The Normal, while Six Finger Satellite and Brainiac dragged the genre into the post-hardcore era by grafting it to noise-rock’s frantic, pummeling attack.

In his 40-plus years fronting The Fall, Mark E. Smith did little to dispel his reputation as rock n rolls most cantankerous character. There was the routine sacking of bandmates, the onstage fisticuffs, the arrests, the infamous interview slag-fests, the take-no-prisoners autobiography, the seeming ambivalence to losing teeth. And this is to say nothing of the thirtysomething albums he released with The Fall, a fearsome, oft-impenetrable body of work overflowing with relentless rants and scathing social critique set against an ever-shifting avant-punk backdrop.That reputation now transcends from the realm of the anecdotal to the mythical with the news that Smith has stumbled off to the great pub in the sky, having passed away on January 24 at age 60 (after chronic respiratory issues led to a raft of gig cancellations over the course of 2017). But while Smiths notoriety is certainly justified, there are plenty of grass blades sprouting out of the cracks in The Falls cold-concrete terrain——songs where Smiths sardonic sense of humor comes to the fore ("15 Ways"), where his bark calms into a croon ("Popcorn Double Feature"), where he faithfully reinterprets 60s-rocks nuggets (The Moves "I Can Hear the Grass Grow," The Kinks "Victoria"), where he bends The Falls sound into something resembling synth-pop ("C.R.E.E.P."), where he steps onto the dance floor (with Mouse on Mars as Von Südenfed), where he gives reggae ("Kurious Oranj") and disco (Sister Sledges "Lost in Music") a go, and where he provides episode recaps of Gossip Girl ("Nate Will Not Return"). In the wonderful and frightening world of The Fall, these are the tracks that comprise the former.

Dinosaur Jr.’s guitar assaults are forces of nature. Standing tall before his four amp setup—which includes two Marshall full-stacks—J Mascis achieves a distinct and rich sound, one that brilliantly blends melodic and textural playing. His primary guitar is a 1963 sunburst Fender Jazzmaster that sports replaced covers, pickups, and knobs in addition to a switched-out bridge. Secondarily he jams a 1965 Jazzmaster, also sunburst, but with original knobs and pickups. His pedalboard is another story altogether, utilizing everything from Electro-Harmonix’s Big Muff and POG2 Polyphonic Octave pieces to a KR Mega Vibe Vibrato Pedal. This is all to say that while Dinosaur Jr. may appear to have been shredding with the greatest of ease for over 25 years, Mascis’ full, dynamic sound is the product of years of fine-tuning a vast array of meticulously selected components.

By the early 90s, Brian Eno’s cachet was at its apex. I caught up to him the year he did more than produce U2’s best album, Zooropa: I discovered Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger, found a Nice Price cassette version of Another Green World, and bought James’ Laid. Then Roxy Music beckoned. Eno was right, as usual: Roxy recorded its best music upon his departure. Through four wonderful vocal albums—unmatched in their admixture of formal invention and gonzo humor—and a beguiling series of collaborations with Robert Fripp, Cluster, Harold Budd, John Cale, and others, Eno has approached rock with a dilettante’s amateurish glee and a sophisticate’s subtlety, bound only by the limits of his curiosity.So vast as to seem forbidding, his catalog is full of unexpected diversions, uneven by definition. I rank his 1990 Cale collaborationWrong Way Up with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Before and After Science but find the Jon Hassell co-recording Fourth World, Volume 1: Possible Musics a vaporous bore, while Discreet Music and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks are never far away from my stereo, notably around bedtime.I’m happy with my list: a compulsive miscellany. The songs include the collaborations mentioned above, plus a couple excellent ones from David Bowie’s Outside and a standout from his second Karl Hyde project. The differences between “songs” and “collaborations” is elastic though.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Though electronic music nostalgia continues unabated, its a little difficult to swallow that Exit Planet Dust is 21. Upon its release in 1995, it sounded like the future. Listening to it in 2015, it shows its age. The breaks, in particular, sound dated, a relic of an era that were a little more forgiving to snares, while the sound affects, with their channel-panning flares, sound quant and a little contrived. With that said, the Chemical Brothers remain the innovators of modern popular electronic music. They were the among the first ones to successfully shoehorn the freeform, experimental trax-sound of early electronic into the pop format. And whats surprising listening to Nate Patrins playlist is just how good some of their later work is ("Escape Velocity" in particular).