A hastily convened supergroup who combine the power and fury of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill, Prophets of Rage failed, sadly, in their pre-election mission to prevent the end of America as we know it. Still, Chuck D and Tom Morello’s intrepid crew—who continue to pulverize audiences in Europe this summer before hitting Riot Fest in Chicago—have done something that many people may have thought impossible. They’ve made a very convincing argument in favor of the most vilified musical genre of the last 25 years: rap metal.Of course, the two preeminent styles favored by this nation’s youthful miscreants have had a complicated relationship ever since their earliest flirtations, like when Rick Rubin and The Bomb Squad deployed slashing guitar riffs and big John Bonham beats in an array of seminal hip-hop tracks. With the success of Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” in 1986, the door was kicked wide open, though it really was Anthrax and Public Enemy’s matchup on “Bring Tha Noize” that formed the blueprint five years later. Then Ice-T went to war with Warner over Body Count and things couldn’t get any more aggro if you tried.And try they did, on projects like the high-concept/higher-testosterone soundtrack for 1993’s Judgment Night, in which MCs faced off against a gallery of grunge and thrash acts like Slayer and Biohazard. The results inevitably were hit-and-miss, but Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin Park absorbed the lessons well. By the end of the decade, the cumulative effect on the new—or nu—rap metal hordes was akin to a back-alley bludgeoning.Inevitably, the formula got stale and the parties retreated to their respective corners in the wake of rap metal’s commercial zenith in 2004, JAY Z and Linkin Park’s fittingly titled Collision Course. Yet many of the style’s foremost progenitors remain in good health today. True, many have shifted tactics—you’ll hear more EDM in Linkin Park’s new album, One More Light—but the California chart-toppers were still asking Rakim to drop by the studio as recently as three years ago. In another sign of rap metal’s refusal to lay down and die, Cash Money Records signed Limp Bizkit, but alas, the band’s would-be comeback album is still in limbo four years after the release of “Ready To Go,” a shockingly OK team-up with Lil Wayne, a man who may be more metal than 18 Cannibal Corpses put together. Prophets of Rage are planning to release an album of new material in September.For some listeners, the music will remain dude-bro bombast at its most egregious. But at its best, there’s always been something compelling—even noble, in a quiet-emotional-moment-in-a-Michael-Bay-movie kind of way—about the alchemy that’s created when musicians from different paths join together in the common pursuit of getting as loud, hard, and gnarly as possible. Let the bludgeoning begin again.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.A revolution in music arrived in April of 1976. And like all good revolutions should, this one began with bongos. The extended percussion break was just one exciting element of the remix -- or “disco blending,” as the credits put it -- of Double Exposure’s “Ten Per Cent,” the handiwork of DJ Walter Gibbons and engineer Bob Blank and the first-ever commercially available 12-inch disco single. When the sales for this seven-minute masterpiece outstripped those of the regular 45 by two to one, the music business swiftly realized the new format’s potential.It’s no accident it was an independent record company, Salsoul, that first gave record buyers a chance to experience the musical mutations that DJs like Gibbons and Larry Levan were concocting in such clubs as the Paradise Garage and Le Jardin. Unencumbered by the girth of the major record companies, the indies had the agility and street-smarts to fully capitalize on the phenomenon, which began in the early ‘70s in Fire Island’s hotspots and David Mancuso’s Loft and pretty much swallowed America whole during Saturday Night Fever mania at the end of ‘77.By then, most majors had their own disco departments eagerly churning out 12-inches, sometimes by rock acts like the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and pretty much anyone else who wanted to get a song on the radio or in the clubs. But the big gears it took to move units for them meant that disco’s greatest innovations were by smaller operators. They didn’t mind the very limited lifespans for fleeting dancefloor faves and hastily assembled, studio-only acts, which didn’t suit majors more interested in the bigger profits that came with album sales and touring artists.This action was its most feverish in New York, disco’s birthplace and epicenter, where companies like Salsoul, Prelude and West End all fought hard for disco dominance. Labels based in other parts of the country -- like Casablanca in L.A. and TK in Florida – got their pieces of the action, too. By staying on top of the latest advances of DJs and the changing tastes of dancers, these labels were able to maintain a steady stream of 12-inch magnificence. And that lasted well after the majors abandoned the dance-music marketplace at the end of the decade, chased away by the disco backlash. There was also such a glut of product, many marvels only got a fraction of the exposure they deserved, which is why these tracks are so coveted by collectors and compilers today.The long-unheard mixes collected on For Discos Only: Indie Dance Music From Fantasy & Vanguard Records: 1976-1981 demonstrates how much incredible music was out there, and how little disco’s much-publicized death impaired the scenes in New York and the West Coast. The enterprising ways of many key indie labels had everything to do with that. Like Salsoul (which began by licensing a chunk of CBS’ Latin music catalog), Fantasy and Vanguard both started with very different kinds of music on their rosters than disco. Fantasy was founded in San Francisco in 1949 as a home for jazz great Dave Brubeck before hitting big with the Creedence Clearwater Revival. Founded in N.Y.C. the following year, Vanguard released many of the most iconic folk and blues recordings of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Listen closely and you can sometimes discern traces of those histories in the labels’ disco-era output, whether it’s in the irresistibly smooth jazz-funk the Blackbyrds cut for Fantasy or the impeccably performed tracks by the Players Association, which got its start when drummer/arranger Chris Hills and producer Danny Weiss began enlisting some of New York’s best session musicians to record covers of smashes like “Love Hangover” for Vanguard.But there are flashes of the future too, especially once Harvey Fuqua – a former Motown producer behind Fantasy/Honey, an Oakland-based disco imprint for the label – united his protégé Sylvester with young electronics whiz Patrick Cowley. With their synth-heavy, ultra-orgasmic sound, Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat)” spawned their own subgenre: Hi-NRG. Fantasy/Honey’s slate also included similarly exhilarating singles by Two Tons of Fun, two back-up singers for Sylvester – Izora Armstead and Martha Wash – who’d get a lot more famous when they changed their name to the Weather Girls.Meanwhile back in New York, Vanguard became a haven for some of the city’s most skilled disco purveyors. Rainbow Brown was the brainchild of Patrick Adams, a producer and arranger responsible for killer cuts for Salsoul and Prelude. A studio project modeled after Chic and Adams’ Musique by former Weather Report drummer Alphonse Mouzon, Poussez! was more sophisticated than its salacious-sounding name would suggest (but then it would have to be).It’s a testament to the era’s abundance of creativity that so much of this music has been little heard -- especially in their “disco-blended” incarnations -- since they first appeared. To mark the release of For Discos Only, here’s a playlist that relights the fuse for that original indie disco explosion.

Like so many great record companies, Greensleeves was a record shop before it was a label. Founded in the London neighborhood of Shepherd’s Bush by former accountant Chris Cracknell and a DJ from Norfolk named Chris Sedgwick, the shop spent two years building up a reputation as the place to find the tastiest island imports. Then in 1977, its owners made the shift to producing music in the UK themselves. The Greensleeves label made its debut with a 7-inch by Dr. Alimantado, a singer and toaster who was already finding favor with the city’s safety-pinned tastemakers thanks to DJ Don Letts and his punk-reggae parties at The Roxy. The arrival of Alimantado’s album The Best Dressed Chicken in Town—a high watermark for producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and for reggae in general—established Greensleeves as the real deal.Of the British labels that were instrumental in building a global audience for Jamaican music, Island and Trojan arguably retain greater name-brand cachet, partially because they arrived on the scene earlier than Cracknell and Sedgwick did. But Greensleeves may be the most influential due to the sheer gravity and diversity of its releases, as well as its ability to spread the hottest trends far and wide. Even before the label began, the store had a predilection for emergent sounds that had yet to enter the mainstream, its clientele largely turning up their noses at Bob Marley’s big sellers in favor of Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown. Greensleeves’ quest for freshness would reap the greatest dividends when Cracknell and Sedgwick made a fortuitous alliance with Henry “Junjo” Lawes, the producer and label owner who became the standard-bearer for dancehall in the 1980s. The ensuing cavalcade of new stars—Eek-A-Mouse, Barrington Levy, Yellowman, Beenie Man, Ninjaman—would all become part of the Greensleeves story.Whereas the rock audiences that Island cultivated with Marley were wary of Jamaica’s increasingly electronic sounds, Greensleeves devotees developed an insatiable appetite for the new riddims that arrived in the wake of landmark releases like Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng” in 1986, Shaggy’s “Oh Carolina” in 1993, and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go” in 2003. Another spin on producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden’s ubiquitous Diwali riddim—which yielded hits for Wonder, Elephant Man, and Bounty Killer too—Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” was another monster hit for the label.Acquired by New York’s VP Records in 2008 but still prominent and prolific, Greensleeves hits the big 40 this summer, celebrating with anniversary concerts in Paris, New York, and London. Given that their back catalog contains over 500 albums (with an impressively high ratio of winners), any salute to Greensleeves is bound to be a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of gesture. But surely a taste of riddim is better than no riddim at all.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Writing another memoir, hiring replacement Wilburys, or actually bothering to show up to collect a Nobel Prize—these are just a few of the ways Bob Dylan could spend his eighth decade on Earth. Instead, he’s undertaken a rather different endeavor, one that on the surface may be as peculiar as any of his most inscrutable artistic gestures in the last half-century or more. But to just about everyone’s surprise, Dylan’s quest to perform and record his own versions of dozens of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra and others has yielded some unexpectedly marvelous music thus far.This week sees the release of Triplicate, the unfeasibly large follow-up to 2015’s Shadows in the Night and 2016’s Fallen Angels. The new three-disc set adds 30 more songs to the Nobel Laureate’s newly expanded repertoire of classics. Though most of them were initially made famous by Ol’ Blue Eyes, all are part of a canon that has become loosely known as the Great American Songbook, and also includes the handiwork of songwriters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, and the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. These songs transcended their own era—one that roughly spans the glory days of Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s to the artistic peak of Broadway musicals in the 1950s—becoming pop and jazz standards for many generations up to and including this one.As tired as these tunes may seem in slavishly retrograde renditions—with Rod Stewart and Michael Bublé being regular offenders, though we must never forget Seth MacFarlane’s big band jazz album—their lyrical wit, melodic sophistication, and sheer malleability mean that they’re forever ripe for reinterpretation and hardy enough to withstand the occasional act of desecration. To mark the arrival of Dylan’s latest venture into the Great American Songbook, we provide a survey of renditions by other artists—Bryan Ferry, Joan Jett, The Roots, and The Bonzo Dog Band, just to name a few—who clearly love this canon, but whose own approaches avoid those easy conventions.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!We’re eight movies into our age’s preeminent action movie franchise and Vin Diesel has yet to use more than one facial expression. To be fair, it can’t be easy to maintain such a high standard of manly, steely intensity while glowering over your hand as it grips the top of a steering wheel and you put the pedal to the metal. Indeed, moviegoers would likely start throwing chairs if they didn’t see Diesel’s hard-driving hero Dom Toretto assume his signature stare in the next installment of the increasingly bombastic, ridiculous, and thrilling series of high-octane blockbusters spawned by the original The Fast and the Furious back in 2001.Actually, it can feel pretty good to assume the pose yourself. For one thing, it helps foster the adolescent fantasy that you’re burning up the highway in a souped-up Dodge Charger or a tricked-out Koenigsegg CCX-SR—while The Rock hangs out the passenger side window and fires a bazooka at the bad guys, of course—rather than barely hitting the speed limit in a shitbox Corolla or CR-V with two booster seats in back.So with The Fate of the Furious blazing into theaters soon, it’s high time for a soundtrack that’ll further stoke those foolhardy dreams of speed and supremacy. Featuring songs from the hip-hop heavy F&F soundtracks and other tunes built for the road, this playlist is for all the wannabe speed demons who’d be just like Dom if that kind of driving didn’t get people killed in real life. Sorry to be a bummer, but face it: You’re no stunt driver.

As LCD Soundsystem release their fourth studio album American Dream, fans owe more than a little gratitude to David Bowie. Indeed, James Murphy has been quick to give the late rock icon credit for encouraging him to reactivate the band six years after their 2010 Madison Square Garden swansong, an action-packed evening that was documented both in the Shut Up and Play the Hits documentary and the live album The Long Goodbye. Murphy had gotten close to Bowie during the singer’s last years and even collaborated with him musically, doing a sterling remix of “Love Is Lost” from The Next Day and performing percussion on two songs on Blackstar. Unsurprisingly, LCD Soundsystem’s performance of “Heroes”—one of Murphy’s favorite songs from long before he had his own coffee brand—was the most poignant moment at their Coachella reboot in 2016.That deep connection between sadly missed master and studious acolyte may explain why American Dream—an alternately moody, anthemic, inspirational, cranky, and expansive masterwork if there ever was one—sounds like it could’ve fit into Bowie’s own back catalog. If you’re looking for a precise location, it’d be between Low and Lodger, the point in Bowie’s Berlin tenure when he shifted from Krautrock- and Kraftwerk-influenced experimentalism into a harder rock and dance sensibility. Yet the most Bowie-esque element of the new album is its adventurous spirit, something that’s continually been part of the LCD Soundsystem aesthetic as Murphy refined and extended the hallmarks first heard in the dance-punk moment of early-‘00s New York.Of course, a whole lot has changed since then, and American Dream reflects the shifts that have gone on not just in Murphy’s life and career, but those of his bandmates, too. Many of the album’s most exciting moments point to the influence of the other musical activities of the LCD membership, whether it’s the brooding electro-pop of drummer Pat Mahoney’s band Museum of Love, the continuing dancefloor adventures of Nancy Whang and John MacLean in The Juan MacLean, the edgy post-DFA tech-funk of artists on Tyler Pope’s Interference Pattern label, or the sprightly synth-pop Al Doyle makes with Hot Chip. Likewise, there are traces of the music that fills Murphy’s DJ sets on his own or with Soulwax as Despacio (e.g., Telex, Suicide, The Cars) or his scores for the films of his pal Noah Baumbach, along with hints of his other recent musical obsessions like The Roches, the art-pop sister act revered for their intricate and intertwined vocal harmonies.So all of this belongs alongside Murphy’s cherished Bowie/Eno-isms in our exploded view of American Dream, a work whose creative vision and generosity are as wide as such a title demands.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Kristen Stewart owes a king-sized thank you to Olivier Assayas for aiding her startling transformation from Twilight moper to one of our age’s most reliably edgy and surprising screen actors. The French director first guided Stewart to greatness in his 2014 drama Clouds of Sils Maria and does it again in Personal Shopper, an eminently weird and stylish thriller that hit U.S. theaters on March 10, 2017. The high-profile collaboration has brought wide attention to the former film critic-turned-auteur who’s been a hero to cinephiles since establishing his voice in the 1990s with a string of extraordinary features.Assayas’ impeccable musical taste and ability to match sound and vision have been apparent ever since he combined the image of leading lady Maggie Cheung clad in black leather with the dissonant snarl of Sonic Youth’s “Tunic (Song For Karen)” in his 1996 breakout Irma Vep. He later collaborated with the band on the score for 2002’s Demonlover and featured Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore in his 2006 music doc Noise. Gordon also has a bit part opposite Asia Argento in his 2007 thriller Boarding Gate.Indeed, like Eurocinema peers Claire Denis (who’s enjoyed a long and fruitful alliance with Tindersticks) and Leos Carax (whose roster of musical collaborators ranges from Scott Walker to Kylie), Assayas has an approach to scores and soundtracks that’s far more adventurous and sophisticated than the predictable hit parades in most Hollywood fare and the played-out, random mixtape-sensibility of Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and their legions of wannabes.This survey of music from such Assayas essentials as Clean, a drama featuring an exhilarating performance by a then-breaking Metric, and Carlos, a mini-series about Carlos the Jackal scored by Wire—originally with songs by the Feelies until they objected to being used alongside images of terrorism—includes songs that he used for highly dramatic and memorable purposes.

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.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Sylvester James Jr, better known simply as Sylvester, was one of the boldest and most memorable figures to emerge out of the late ‘70s disco scene. His signature song, "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)," remains not just one of the most recognizable songs of the era but possibly the most exhilarating, too. Sylvester was more than just a hitmaker -- he was an icon for both the LGBTQ community and the San Francisco dance music scene. His life is the stuff of legend. During his far-too-few 41 years on the planet, the distinction between factual incidents, apocryphal stories, and fantabulous fabrications is often difficult to discern -- and where’s the fun in trying to do that, anyway?My favourite of these legends reflects the ongoing inability of the music industry of the ‘70s and ’80s to figure out what to do with a natural-born star with such a singular sensibility. Frustrated by one of these record companies’ efforts to tone him down and repackage him as a Teddy Pendergrass-type – whose husky voice Sylvester could actually emulate when not doing his trademark falsetto – our hero had no recourse but to burst into the president’s office while wearing a blond wig and negligee and exclaim, “This is my image and I’m not changing it!” Gestures of defiance don’t come much fiercer than that.Regardless of whether it actually went down like that, the story is in keeping with the unapologetically lusty bravado that Sylvester brought to many classics of disco’s golden age. The recent arrival of For Discos Only: Indie Dance Music From Fantasy & Vanguard Records -- a compilation featuring rare versions of many of these tracks, including “Dance (Disco Heat)” and “Over and Over” -- is one of many recent signs that Sylvester continues to loom large. Another is the near-weekly namechecking he receives on RuPaul’s Drag Race, whose host was inspired by the bravery and brazenness Sylvester displayed in an era that was far more closeted than its hedonistic reputation may suggest. Though producer Jacques Morali populated the Village People with symbolic representations of members of New York’s gay subculture and initially marketed the group to LGBTQ audiences, the record company and performers (all but two of whom were straight) still played coy with mainstream listeners about the true inspiration of songs like “Y.M.C.A.” Openly gay performers – like Tony Washington of the Motown act Dynamic Superiors or the utterly singular Klaus Nomi – remained surprisingly rare.Of course, things were different in San Francisco, disco’s West Coast epicenter. Later memorialized by writers like Armistead Maupin, the city’s clubland was a far wilder and bolder place than even New York’s. The scene’s music makers had no choice but to keep pace. A former songwriter and producer at Motown, Harvey Fuqua showed a keener understanding of Sylvester’s potential than most of his music-biz peers would when he signed the singer -- who’d been a member of the gender-bending avant-garde theatre troupe The Cockettes – to his imprint on Fantasy. He also made a deal with Sylvester’s backup singers, a duo named Two Tons Of Fun who’d have their greatest success as the Weather Girls with “It’s Raining Men”.But Fuqua’s smartest move was teaming Sylvester with Patrick Cowley, a San Francisco synthesizer boffin with a knack for increasing the intensity of the kind of sultry, machine-made grooves that Giorgio Moroder had first fashioned for Donna Summer. When Sylvester’s gospel-influenced yet unabashedly carnal vocals topped Cowley’s sleek synthesizer throb on hits like “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, the results were so extraordinary, they birthed their own subgenre: hi-NRG.At the height of his success at the end of the ‘70s, Sylvester was a sensation among gay and mainstream audiences alike. But like many artists of the era, he struggled to find a new direction when the disco backlash caused record companies to be more skittish about the kind of flamboyance that had been de rigueur just a few years before. More gospel and soul influences came to the fore on Sylvester’s final albums for Fantasy and subsequent recordings. He also showed off other aspects of his voice, his natural baritone having been long obscured by his show-stopping falsetto.By then, the gay community that had made him a star had begun to suffer the ravages of the AIDS plague. After one final triumph with the singer on 1982’s exhilarating “Do You Wanna Funk,” Cowley became an early casualty. AIDS would also claim Sylvester in 1988, though he defied another taboo by going public about his condition in an interview published before his death in the Los Angeles Times. “It bothers me that AIDS is still thought of as a gay, white male disease,” said the singer. “The black community is at the bottom of the line when it comes to getting information, even when weve been so hard hit by this disease. I’d like to think that by going public myself with this, I can give other people courage to face it.”The songs Sylvester was working on at the time of his death were posthumously released on an album named Immortal. Given the long shadow that his music and style cast on the present, the title seems like more than the usual hyperbole, and the cover photo of him in flaming orange hair and a pair of black heels captures his timeless spirit. Here’s a playlist of Sylvester at his finest.

Even though five years separated Tame Impala’s surprise commercial juggernaut Currents and the arrival of the belated follow-up The Slow Rush, it can feel as if Kevin Parker’s gauzy, blissed-out brand of pop-psych-funk never really went away.

One reason is the staying power of Currents marvels like “Let It Happen,” “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” and many others that never left the go-to playlists in nearly every trendy place of business you happened to enter at any time of day or night. Then there was Parker’s stream of beguiling collaborations with pop, hip-hop, and R&B superstars—Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, and Kanye West among them—and Perth pals like Pond, the psych outfit that includes many past and current members of Tame Impala’s live incarnation.

Industrious even when forced to escape from a fire in Malibu while at work on The Slow Rush in late 2018, Parker primed the pump with a series of advance singles, starting with “Patience.” Like the rest of the music that eventually followed, the preview tracks demonstrated Parker’s eagerness to double down on the influences that permeated Currents—especially the keys-forward splendor of ’70s prog-pop inspirations like Supertramp, Wings, and 10cc—while expanding his palette of rhythmic predilections into house, techno, and French Touch. The Hendrixian flair of Tame Impala’s earlier albums is present and accounted for, too.

So here’s a selection that charts the road Parker traveled to The Slow Rush, an album that feels just as likely to become part of the moment (and part of the ether) as its predecessor did.

Photo Credit: Matt Sav