Essentials

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!When the Boston Red Sox need a late-in-the-game lift, they turn to one song: The Dropkick Murphys pugilistic 2005 track "Im Shipping Up to Boston," a reworking of lyrics lifted from Woody Guthries archive that showcases the bands Celtic-punk brawn and lead singer Ken Caseys strangled yawp. Whether or not the tune results in a team victory, it unfailingly livens up the Fenway Park crowd, who lustily yell "I lost my leg!" along with Casey while fiddles whirl and drums crash.The Murphys—who began as a dare back in 1996, according to Casey—have been embraced by not just the Red Sox, but by other New England-based sports teams. It’s a testament to the way they perfectly encapsulate an ideal of Boston: Think punk rock sing-alongs in memorabilia-festooned bars where the jukebox can veer from Rancid to Tommy Makem in the blink of an eye. Their blend of punks fighting spirit and traditional Irish folks storytelling fits in nicely with their hometowns cradle-of-revolution status and large population affiliated with the Emerald Isle—not to mention its passion for sports. Their annual run of St. Patricks Day shows in Boston—which in 2017 includes four small-venue gigs and a headlining stint at Boston Universitys hockey arena—illustrates just how well-suited the band and their hometown are to one another."What we run on is the fire in our bellies," Casey told The Boston Globe in 1999, before the band was about to embark on its first Warped Tour. "If its more about music and less about the passion, thats when no one wants to listen to you anymore." 11 Short Stories of Pain & Glory, the bands most recent album from 2017, shows that the fire in their bellies still burns. Some lyrics depict people affected by the opioid epidemic that has claimed many of the band members friends and loved ones, while a stirring cover of the old Rodgers & Hammerstein chestnut "Youll Never Walk Alone" joins their versions of "Amazing Grace" and the Irish famine ballad "Fields of Athenry" as songs that bridge the gap between the Fleadh Cheoil and the sweaty bar with gusto.

Jason Gubbels, who has done an admirable job as the world critic over at Rhapsody, highlights the work from one of Jamaicas greatest and generally overlooked producers, King Jammy. As Jason points out, King Jammy has played a great influence on at least two eras of reggae. He was the dub master at King Tubbys studio during the 70s, and then later basically invented dancehall in 1985 with his single for Wayne Smith, "Under Me Sleng Teng." This is a very enjoyable playlist featuring everyone from Black Uhuru to Shabba Ranks.

Erykah Badu is this generations queen of soul. Her music is the sound of apocalyptic premonitions, bedroom recriminations, African headwraps, Rhodes keyboards, political claptrap, Nag Champa ashes, and dusty, broken breaks. It’s an oeuvre that is hypnotic, sensual and, above all else, iconic. It’s safe to say that Erykah from Dallas is an emancipation artist: She’s liberated the funk from soul, soul from the past, history from herself, and her audience from their seats. It’s a loopy, wrinkle-in-time logic: One of the foundational figures of R&B’s current futurist, post-everything heatwave is a woman who was considered a nostalgist when she first appeared 20 years ago.And if those mathematics are confusing, swiggle this: What artist, of any genre, has remained as consistently unpredictable or this fearlessly unremitting in her will to constantly redefine her sound for as long as Ms. Badu? If R&B is the lingua franca of modern music, then Erykah was the one who tagged the Rosetta Stone.But what are Erykah’s musical foundations? Luckily, that’s an immensely answerable question. She has always been generous in citing her various influences, and we’ve scoured various interviews, DJ sets, mixtapes, live setlists, and sample databases to compile a list of the tracks that made Erykah, Erykah. If you want to hear her best work, check out our Erykah essentials playlist here; if you’re looking to understand how she got here, this is the place to start.There are at least a few basic sensibilities at play in Erykah’s music. Funk is at the forefront, in various permutations, from the genre’s godfather, James Brown, to his various global descendents: Fela in Lagos, Maurice Washington in Chicago, Prince in Minneapolis, Zapp in Cincinnati, and Thundercat in Los Angeles. Brown’s “King Heroin,” which Erykah included on her phenomenal FEEL BETTER, WORLD! mixtape, features the godfather at his most pensive and mournful, calling for a “revolution of the mind”—another liberation of sorts—over a slinking, understated backdrop.There’s a similar sadness running through Fela’s “Army Arrangement,” which Erykah selected as part one of her favorite Fela tracks in an interview with OkayAfrica. The track was recorded in 1985, as Fela was facing concurrent five-year sentences for trumped-up currency-smuggling charges. After he was imprisoned in Nigeria, his record label gave the masters to Bill Laswell, who chopped up the track’s 30-minute length into something more approachable for Western audiences. "Listening to it was worse than being in prison," Fela quipped. Luckily, the full original version has been restored, and you can hear echos of the track’s loping, hypnotic funk throughout Erykah’s own work.But while funk may be the spoken undercurrent, it’s hardly the only note. Her take on interplanetary psychedelia is also present here. For her BEATS BEES LIKE FOR B-BOYS AND B-GIRLS mixtape, which premiered in 2016 on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show, Badu chose Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War.” Sun Ra, an afrofuturist pioneer, was perhaps most famous for claiming that he was an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace. “Nuclear War” is the apocalypse as a shuttling, chanted, obscene zen koan. This 11th-hour spiritualism is refracted through Erykah’s own shambolic, shamanistic 2008 masterpiece, New Amerykah Part One, an album that alchemizes the dread and loathing of George W. Bush’s second term. That album also famously sampled Eddie Kendricks’ moody “My People...Hold On,” a track that skirts the boundaries of funk, jazz, psych, and soul to craft an an ode to perseverance and defiance.And while the almost all of the selections here are culled from artists of the African diaspora, the exceptions are notable. For a Complex interview in 2015, she revealed that Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon taught her the value of “evolving through experimentation.” It echoed what she told Rolling Stone in a 2011 retrospective of the album, where she relayed being turned onto the Floyd in 1995 by Andre 3000. In that aforementioned Complex interview, she also names Joni Mitchell’s Blue as one of her favorite albums, saying that the Laurel Canyon icon has “one of the most soothing voices I’ve ever heard. The music is haunting.”There’s an underlying tenderness and intimacy in Mitchells work that informs both singers’ work, regardless of which genre the songs work within. It’s the same delicacy that informs many of her soul picks, from Stevie Wonder’s phosphorescent “Visions” to J Dilla’s ethereal “Bye.,” which chopped The Isley Brothers’ “Don’t Say Goodnight” to haunting effect. While no one one-ups Dilla, Erykah did her own impressive interpolation of the Isleys’ version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” for her 2016 hit collaboration with Andre 3000, “Hello”—a track that conveys the tenderness and warmth of those old friends and lovers.And, in many ways, that yin-yang dynamic—the balancing of intimacy, poetry, and grace with power, prose, and rhythm—sums up Erykah. She’s not only one of pop music’s most powerful artists, but one whose work channels the brightest and boldest impulses of the best popular music of the past five decades.

Cool things can happen when you turn a listicle into a playlist. Take Spin’s ranking of every Gn’R tune: As rock criticism, I wholeheartedly disagree. All 10 jams comprising the mighty Appetite of Destruction have to crack the top 15—yet only five do. In terms of listener experience, however, this anti-intuitive move pays dividends. With the ranking frontloaded with cuts off their other albums, the playlist winds up accentuating GnR’s under-appreciated diversity. For a bunch of Sunset Strip sleazeballs they covered a lot of terrain, from psychedelia to folk balladry and industrial. Only diehards will plow through the entirety of this admittedly immense playlist, but don’t be surprised if you come away with a markedly different perspective of these infamous rockers.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Joey Bada$$ emerged from Brooklyn in 2012 as part of a wave of New York teenagers—a.k.a. the Pro Era collective—who were reviving traditional hip-hop values. On his debut mixtape, 1999, he constructs songs with dense lyrical arrangements and beats from sampled loops and drum patterns. He raps about rocking stage shows and battling kids in other ciphers, two themes that haven’t been in vogue in mainstream rap since the mid-‘90s. A few of Joey’s song titles even pay subtle homage to old-school fare like Souls Of Mischief’s “93 ‘Til Infinity” (“95 Till Infinity”) and the illuminati fad (“Killuminati”).The narrative around Joey Bada$$ began to shift when his 2015 retail debut B4.DA.$$ (Before Da Money) debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard top 200 album chart, forcing rap fans who dismissed him as a niche backpacker to pay attention. (A widely circulated Instagram photo of Malia Obama rocking a Pro Era T-shirt also helped.) Then, last year, he released “Devastated,” an empowerment anthem filled with chorus and echo that foregrounds his singing while relegating ‘90s homage to the background. (There’s a brief flicker of the melody from OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.”)Bada$$ will never be confused with Wiz Khalifa, who forever reduces his bars in favor of a catchy hook. Joey’s new album, All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, shows how he’s managed to transform into something more contemporary—sharply assessing the political landscape on “Land of the Free” and trading bars with Schoolboy Q on “Rockabye Baby”—without losing the qualities that made him a star. The songs collected here chart his evolution.

Although Paramore’s new album, After Laughter, marks the return of founding drummer Zac Farro, frontwoman Hayley Williams remains the only permanent member of the Tennessee pop-punk group since the band began, five albums ago. But even as Paramore have diversified their sound, Williams’ side work as a guest vocalist has cast an even wider net, as she’s played with acts who are heavier or more poppy than anything in Paramore’s catalog.Williams has experienced some of her greatest chart success as a hook singer, crooning the gentle melodies on Atlanta rapper B.o.B’s blockbuster single “Airplanes” and German producer Zedd’s EDM crossover hit “Stay The Night.” Her affection for indie and electronic music came out in a collaboration with Scottish synth-pop band CHVRCHES, and she’s embraced family-friendly pop stardom with high-profile collaborations, as on the cover of “Rainbow Connection” with Weezer for a Muppets tribute album.But most of Hayley Williams’ guest work has been with the kinds of punk and emo bands that Paramore came up with in their Warped Tour days. She’s added a much needed feminine perspective to songs by Say Anything and has dueted on multiple occasions with husband Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory. But most impressively, Williams has been able to hang with metalcore bands like The Chariot and Set Your Goals on blistering uptempo collaborations, and Zac Farro’s recent return to Paramore was foreshadowed by her appearance on “As U Wave” by Farro’s long running solo project HalfNoise.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

"I just wanna feel everything," Fiona Apple softly quivers on "Every Single Night." She repeats this line with just the slightest bit of hesitation, as if it were her biggest confession yet. And it is—those simple words boil down her entire existence: In moments when many of us would rather escape our skin, Fiona wants to soak up every granular sensation within it, even when, in her most brilliant poetry, "the pain comes in, like a second skeleton."There are few artists that can express such visceral emotion with such vivid eloquence—and even fewer who can deliver it all with a voice that carries the weight of every word as if it were the world. Because of this, we can forgive Fiona for only releasing four albums in the past 20 years. Still, that too-small catalog is overflowing with some of musics boldest, bloodiest imagery and rawest, most ruthless lyrics. Here, we highlight 10 of her fiercest lines—lines that could come from no one other than Fiona, a woman who knows the infinite beauty in feeling everything.1. "This mind, this body, and this voice cannot be stifled by your deviant ways / So dont forget what I told you / Dont come around / I got my own hell to raise"—"Sleep to Dream"The precocious teenagers introduction to the world is the best kiss-off ever.2. You fondle my trigger, then you blame my gun"—"Limp"In which she follows with another killer jab: "It wont be long til youll be lying limp in your own hands."3. "Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key"—"Werewolf"Perhaps the most important lesson, in music and in life.4. "Youll never see the courage I know / Its colors richness wont appear within your view."—"Never is a Promise"For every man who insists he understands.5. "How many times do I have to say / To get away / Get gone / Flip your shit past another lass humble dwelling"—"Get Gone"The second best kiss-off ever.6. "I think he let me down when he didnt disappoint me / He didnt always guess right, but he usually got my gist"—"Get Him Back"Every girl can perfectly understand this one…7. "All that loving mustve been lacking something / If I got bored trying to figure you out"—"Periphery"…and this one.8. "Do you just deal it out, or can you deal with all that I lay down?"—"To Your Love"The ultimate comeback.9. "My feel for you, boy / Is decaying in front of me / Like the carrion of a murdered prey"—"Carrion"Being dead to Fiona is worse than being actually dead.10. "My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will disprove your faith in man"—"Fast As You Can"Dont ever underestimate the power of a woman and her words.

Summing up the career of Beck Hansen is like trying to cram the entire history of music into a cookie jar. He’s a rock ‘n’ roll Renaissance man, a left-field weirdo turned superstar, a maestro of pop who’s color-blind when it comes to genre, and possibly the whitest musician ever who can still drop bars like he was born to rhyme. Beck’s path has been one long, twisting rabbit hole of sharp turns and aesthetic reinventions. And he’s amassed one of the most unique and utterly fun canons in recent pop history, one that breaks down the barriers between countless styles and scenes for the sake of reveling in the endless possibilities of music.As we sit on the eve of Beck’s 10 studio album Colors, we took the opportunity to revisit his many alternate personas, and examine the ways in which his various sonic detours seem to both contradict and complement one another simultaneously. Whether it’s in the hip-hop zaniness of Odelay, the wounded folk ballads of Sea Change, the tricked-out funk of Midnite Vultures, or the charged-up alt-rock of Guero, Beck always seems to find a way to fit his many musical whims into the same playful, surreal universe, pulling off each experiment with the visionary confidence of a pro. It’s anyone’s guess as to which direction he’ll choose next, but for now, join us as we unmask the Four Faces of Beck.

BECK: THE ALT-ROCK HERO

It’s no accident that Beck’s rise to fame coincided with a cultural moment for freakdom; the ‘90s alternative boom made the perfect breeding ground for his slacker-friendly version of rock, and Beck did his homework on how to sound like a total dropout. Early winners like “Devils Haircut” and “Lord Only Knows” illustrated Beck’s uncanny ability to make classic country, boom-bap, and power pop feel like slightly different versions of the same thing, all fueled by a giddy and inextinguishable energy. His later forays into rock, such as the stomping “E-Pro” or his work on the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World soundtrack, turned the fuzz up even more, embodying a platonic ideal of distortion-heavy garage rock that felt both low-key and larger-than-life at the same time.

BECK: THE HIP-HOP NERD

Beck embodies white-boy rap at its most purely goofy, wearing his awkwardness like a superhero cape and casually dropping insane lines like “Mr. Microphone making all the damage felt/ Like a laser manifesto make a mannequin melt.” Though his earliest slam-dunks like “Loser” and “Where It’s At” prided themselves on their crate-digging underdog charm, Beck’s take on rap continued to evolve along with his sound. The party-starting recklessness of tracks like “Novacane” has gradually morphed into a sophisticated, stream-of-consciousness flow, heard best on paranoid songs like “Cellphone’s Dead” and “1000BPM.” That Beck is still able to integrate his peculiar raps into albums that predominantly operate in folk or rock zones is a testament to how natural an MC he truly is.

BECK: THE FOLK TROUBADOUR

The most traditional of all his incarnations, Folk Beck often signals a turn towards the melancholy from everyone’s favorite loser. Between aching songs like “End Of The Day,” “Ramshackle,” and “Nobody’s Fault But My Own,” Beck’s acoustic guitar numbers often capture him at his most solitary and introverted—and deep in the process of developing a surprisingly universal language of song compared to his usual grab-bag mashups. But Beck’s folk side isn’t all doom and gloom; psychedelic pieces like “Jack-Ass” and “Dead Melodies” are as wide-eyed as his most joyous work, and on primitive early cuts like “Asshole” and “He’s A Mighty Good Leader,” his music takes on an almost punk quality, ringing with out-of-key notes and slack-jawed apathy. As with Beck’s other manifestations, one gets the sense that even if Beck had pursued an entire career in folk music, it would have been just as rich and surprising as the Beck we ended up with.

BECK: THE DANCING KING

At the end of the day, Beck is a popsmith through and through, willing to use any means necessary to get a musical idea across and start moving some bodies. As time has gone on and Beck albums have begun to surface less frequently, he’s turned to the singles format to release some of his most upbeat and summery songs, such as the electro-clash sing-along “Timebomb,” or the bass-rattling silliness of “Wow.” But Beck’s knack for snappy rhythms and disco-ready beats is rarely as explicit as it is on his 1999 funk fantasy Midnite Vultures. Veering between banjo-laden soul hootenannies like “Sexx Laws,” slinky techno ravers like “Get Real Paid,” and slow-grinding anthems like “Debra,” it’s the musical equivalent of a dive off the mansion balcony into a pool filled with Kool-Aid, as relentlessly tasteless as it is incredible. And as with all Beck, it’s exactly in those kinds of clashes where the fun really starts.

Elliott Smith’s best album, Either/Or, is 20 years old now, and it’s safe to assume that a whole new generation who got hip to it through Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blond could use a primer on Smith’s music (“Seigfried” quotes Smith’s “A Fond Farewell,” and Smith is named as a contributor in the accompanying Boys Don’t Cry magazine/liner notes). But when you want to explore the music of Elliott Smith, you have to decide which road you want to head down.After moving to Portland, Oregon from Texas in his teens to live with his psychiatrist dad, Smith formed the rock band Heatmiser in the early ‘90s before going solo with a stark acoustic approach, creating wondrous worlds in dank houses. He played acoustic guitar perhaps more elegantly than anyone else in his era, mixing it with beautifully delivered yet emotionally messy vocals. The combination worked. His music became more layered and elaborate as recording locations shifted to L.A. and London, but his songs could always be reduced to voice and guitar. His music is often calming and church-like. Occasionally, it’s angry. It has a reputation for being sad.In some ways, Smith’s trajectory paralleled Kurt Cobain’s. They were both brilliant male feminist rockers from the Pacific Northwest. Both also abused drugs and committed suicide. And they’re both canonized today as scraggly fallen angels, which is like a cartoon version of who they really were. What’s most important is that, in both cases, the music transcends their tragic backstories. And with Smith, there’s more than enough—there are four sides to the story.VOICE AND GUITAR(See playlist at top right)Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyThis is how Elliott Smith started, and it’s where you should too. Voice and guitar were his building blocks: Early Smith albums were recorded on one microphone in a basement, and when your essential skills are of such high quality, that’s all you need. His lo-fi canon consists of Elliott Smith (good), Roman Candle (great), and Either/Or (masterpiece). But Smith would return to stripped-down recordings all the way to the end, and one of his best is “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” from 2000’s Figure 8.About that voice: You’ll notice it sound heathery; it’s the soft side of the human voice. Listen to “Say Yes” and hear how his approach can sound vulnerable and sweet and then powerful with overdubbing—Smith was a master at tracking his own voice. On “Angeles,” hear how he uses a quiet tone but can also summon a battered toughness. Smith was also a great actor.About that guitar: He played rhythm well but was especially skilled at coming up with lead lines, figures he would repeat throughout a song. Notice how the intro on “No Name #1” foreshadows the verse in a folksy way. This is Smith, the guitarist, showing off his great songwriting skills. On “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” the opening figure is delicately bent, something to stare at. This is Smith, the guitarist, as an ornamental player, who is great at adding curlicues and embellishments.EXPLORING THE SPACE

Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify“Miss Misery” (on our first playlist) was nominated for an Oscar, which Smith lost to Celine Dion. Smith signed to a major label and his music opened up, incorporating many more instruments. He always played drums, bass, piano, and guitar—often, he was the only player on his albums—and the full range of his skills can be heard on 1998’s XO.“Baby Britain” recasted Smith as a solid piano man with a certain barroom jauntiness, while “Bled White” introduced a new, fuller sound, with multiple guitars and keyboards. He indulges in his George Martin and Brian Wilson fantasies with the wall of vocals in “I Didn’t Understand,” one of his prettiest recordings.STUDIO DECADENCE

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyBy 2000, Smith was living in L.A., doing drugs irresponsibly and eating ice cream for every meal. On Figure 8, the music is lovely and less heartbreaking than before, but the songs seem more like formal exercises with wild instrumentation and arrangements than statements from the gut. The harpsichord on “Junk Bond Trader” and the cinematic plod of “Happiness/The Gondola Man” suggest that Smith would make a great film scorer, as does “Everything Means Nothing To Me,” which thrillingly descends into a blown-out drum loop. Smith emulates Brian Wilson here, mental instability and all.POSTHUMOUS RELEASES

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyAfter he took his own life in 2003, we got the unfinished From a Basement on a Hill, which shows that the experimentation on Figure 8 was only the beginning. He was plotting his Pet Sounds, and it’s just as messy and smart as his finest work, but also kind of… not. We don’t need “Ostrich & Chirping,” but we do need “A Fond Farewell”—proof that Smith could still turn out an “Elliott Smith song” no matter what. We also got New Moon, a polar opposite kind of recording, lo-fi, humble, and intermittently excellent, particularly “Whatever (Folk Song In C).”After he died, we learned that Smith was prone to vacillating between these two modes: bare and lush. And we learned that his music went through a lot of iterations before he felt like he nailed it. In retrospect, he did.

Four Tet (nee Kieran Hebden) has said that he wants his music to tell the story of his life, and his tracks do occupy the same psychic space as a certain class of Instagram pictures: the sun-dappled portrait taken on a mountaintop, or the early morning shot of the steam rising off an alpine lake. These are the sort of moments that are too slippery to adequately capture in a caption, though, invariably, we try. A lot of musicians spend their career chasing a sound, and while Hebden does have a certain sonic palette -- one that is inordinately taken up by anything that chimes -- the listener gets the distinct impression that, more than anything, the British producer is in search of a feeling.This is true of the work he does on remixes. Hebden is not only one of the most prolific remixers of his generation, but also one of the most catholic. He’s remixed Riri as well as the Australian avante-electro-jazz quartet Tangents. And while his remixes generally correspond to the stylistic shifts and whims of his own work, there are times when they precede his own transformations, seemingly blurring the subject and object. In many ways, these remixes provide an alternative history of Hebden’s own music.One thing you’ll notice is that while Hebden’s sound is unmistakable, he rarely transforms the tracks he remixes, at least not entirely. There is an occasional bit of brinksmanship with the source material -- for Bonobo’s early track, Pick Up, Hebden takes the originals dusty breakbeats and adds a stuttering, polyrhythmic pounce; and the fact that he would remix half of Madlib’s Madviliany album feels somewhere between an homage and a dare -- but, for the most part, Hebden’s remixes are retellings of the original, albeit a bit refractured. Hebden latches onto a specific idea, melody, vocal line, or beat in the source material, and tweaks that according to his own muse. He’ll add a bit of electronic swirl to the spacial post-rock of The Drift, draw out the pinging keys of Matthew Dear’s “Deserter,” or tuck a thumping disco beat and skronky sax line beneath Nenah Cherry’s after hours swinger “Dream Baby Dream,” though, ultimately, the focus of that remix remains on Cherry’s smokey voice. Similarly, his remix of The XX’s 2002 “Angels” adopts the original’s chimy key drops and maintains the vibe of post-coliatal emotional surrender, but Hebden flips the melody and adds in airey textures that make the track more tender than sensual. It feels as if two artists are viewing the same scene -- lovers, naked, intertwined, near daybreak -- and coming to slightly different, though complimentary conclusions. Hebden is also very savvy when it comes to selecting the tracks he remixes. It’s easy to understand why Radiohead commissioned him to remix “Scatterbrain” from the band’s 2003 album, Hail to the Thief. With its spare, hypnotic guitar figure at its core, the original sounds like a daydream -- albeit a particularly dark one -- and in many ways it matches with the more pastoral, delicate electronic music that Four Tet was making at the time. But Hebden has mentioned that he very quickly came to resent the folktronica tag that critics and fans applied to his 2003 album Rounds, and he quickly pivoted to a new sound. This remix could be a early indication of that transformation His remix takes the track into an entirely different direction.Thom Yorke’s vocals are sliced and reprocessed, and paired with a jittery drum pattern and (towards the end) atonal, skronky sax outburst, which hints at the IDM-tinted free jazz experiments of Hebden’s middle period work.As Hebden’s own sound evolved, from the more acoustic/organic work of Rounds to the dancefloor-ready tracks of his later work, his remix work gained a fuller, more bass-heavy sound. A great example of this is his remix for Scandinavian nu-disco DJ/producer Todd Terje. The track starts out with a swell of chiming synths (of course), and the motif pops up repeatedly through the track, but the song soon settles into a four-on-the-floor dance groove, giving the track an immediacy that balances out Hebden’s more delicate tendencies. In some ways, Hebden’s work as a remix is just as satisfying as his own solo work. Yes, the latter feels more high-stakes and substantial, but his remixes are oftentimes more playful and experimental, as if Hebden is testing out ideas and aesthetic masks. Yes, to an extent, the payoff for these are his full length albums, but, as with many things in life, the journey is oftentimes more fascinating than the destination.