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.

Few bands greeted the new millennium with as much pure pizzaz as The Go! Team did when they emerged out of Brighton in 2004. Fronted by mastermind Ian Parton and featuring a rotating cast of members (most notably Ninja, who delivers most of the group’s irresistibly upbeat raps), The Go! Team stood apart from many of their indie-rock peers with their eclectic, overflowing cauldron of influences and sounds, drawing on everything from English big beat to classic film scores to ‘90s college rock to left-field hip-hop. Approaching their craft with the diligence of crate-diggers, The Go! Team’s music channels all the relentless joy of an elementary-school playground, their sing-songy melodies and marching-band exuberance freely mashing together samples and styles until the resulting product feels as if it’s about to burst.Part of the magic of The Go! Team is how the band is able to stir all their scattered sources of inspiration together into something that feels effortlessly cohesive, their cheer-leading celebration rock sounding as though it were the kind of thing that just always existed in the sunny side of our imagination. But a peek into their influences unveils a wonderland of varying artists and styles, a plane where the Beastie Boys can shoot hoops with Ennio Morricone, and Deerhoof might get caught stealing Pokémon cards from The Prodigy. With their new album, Semicircle, arriving on January 19, we took the opportunity to assemble a roll call of The Go! Team’s many muses, charting the ways that the band has connected the dots between everyone from Happy Mondays to The 5th Dimension, and, in the process, forming a compendium of feel-good music for the ages. One, two, three, GO!!!!

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Shakespeare once famously declared that brevity is the soul of wit, but simplicity has been the last thing on Kendrick Lamar’s mind for the majority of his career. His two previous albums, 2012’s ghetto uprising saga good kid, M.A.A.D. city and 2015’s political prog-rap opus To Pimp a Butterfly were sprawling, intricately detailed patchworks, suffused with symbolism and strung together with the kind of recurring characters and monologuing one would expect from the Bard himself. But DAMN. is a different story. Having already claimed the throne as one of (if not the) most talented rappers in the history of the game, DAMN. is the sound of a young artist at the peak of his abilities delivering his music straight, no chaser. Not to say that DAMN. isn’t as multilayered and critical as anything else K.Dot’s put his name on, but now more than ever it feels like Lamar’s focus is entirely on the songs rather than the cohesive effect of the project. Each song on DAMN. feels as if it is coming from a different universe, be it the ‘90s slow ride of “HUMBLE.” or the futurist R&B of “LOVE.” or the absolutely bipolar “XXX.,” which travels between Metro Boomin minimalism, Public Enemy fury, and smooth boom-bap consciousness in the span of four minutes. Though Lamar’s influences are vast and easily traceable (the bassy Afrofuturism of Flying Lotus, the beat-poetry prophecies of the Last Poets, the self-aware party-rap of OutKast), on DAMN. he synthesizes them effortlessly, letting his own musical voice shine through more clearly than ever before.All of which makes DAMN. an incredibly fun, engaging listen, and adds another notch to Lamar’s already impressive catalog. With small-time songwriters emerging from the woodworks on major tracks (Zacari?) and mind-boggling appearances from big-name rock stars (U2!?), DAMN. is packed to capacity with ideas and influences and collaborators—so take a listen to this playlist and start unpacking the latest from one of our generation’s greatest.

At the turn of the millennium, it seemed unlikely that an aging record nerd hollering about his favorite bands could possibly become the vessel for an entire angst-ridden generation—but that was before we had Sound of Silver. When James Murphy released his second full-length as LCD Soundsystem 10 years ago, he revealed the deeply sentimental roots behind all the dance-punk chic, the hopelessly melancholic critic who, no matter how many albums he might amass in his enormous collection, still can’t escape the simple truths of getting older and saying goodbye to all your friends. Though their short-lived retirement is now over, with the arrival of their first new album in seven years, it wouldn’t be LCD Soundsystem without gazing longingly towards the past. So we’ve taken the occasion to unpack James Murphy’s shining moment, the weepy behemoth of a dance record that is Sound of Silver.Murphy’s influences are as vast as they are easily traceable (all one has to do is look up the lyrics to the climactic band-listing outburst of “Losing My Edge”), yet the real magic of the album is how confidently it inhabits its own skin, effortlessly mixing the mechanic rhythms of Kraftwerk, the starry-eyed synth-punk of New Order, and the reckless rock worship of Lou Reed into something as comfortable in the club as it is at home on a turntable. Its endlessly looping electronics nod to the simple majesty of Detroit techno as well as the prickly brain-funk of the Talking Heads, yet what’s fascinating about Murphy is the way that he turns his love of these disparate artists into his own defining quality. LCD Soundsystem is a band of fanboys and fangirls playing for devotees of their own, celebrating the act of loving music and creating something entirely theirs in the process. Sound of Silver was the moment where Murphy’s band ceased to be a loving tribute to the many shapes of punk and New Wave, and became a fully-armed dance unit for the 21st century. Without further ado, we present our mix of the many sounds the fuelled one of our era’s most distinguishing voices.

In the 10 years since London’s enigmatic Burial released his boundary-breaking sophomore LP Untrue, the face of electronic music has changed dramatically. Not only have new arenas opened up for ambient-leaning producers to bring their experimental soundscapes into the spotlight, but the divisions between such typically at-home forms of listening and more club-oriented sounds have continued to blur. Though his releases seem to come less and less frequently, Burial’s thumbprint still courses through dance music today, whether in his haunting, intimate use of vocal samples, his brisk, tactile beats, or his free wandering into the kind of ethereal abstraction usually reserved for avant-garde composers.Part of what made Burial’s sound on Untrue so inspiring was his willingness to tackle original rhythms, without regard for what scenes he might be breaching. At turns reminiscent of house, garage, dubstep, and hardcore, Untrue is as bracingly pulsing as it is forlorn and relaxed, capturing the sounds of dance music at their most provocative, enveloping, romantic, and pain-ridden all at once. You can hear his influence in the dark nightclub ruminations of Dean Blunt, the grimy bass sculptures of Andy Stott, the ethereal beatmaking of Jamie xx, and even the minimal rhythms of latter-day Radiohead—all of whom have taken his blueprint for emotional, mysterious dance music and carried it valiantly forward into the future. Burial left an undeniable mark on music with Untrue, and with this playlist, we explore the many ways that his vision lives on today.

In the 10 years that have passed since Annie Clark first emerged from the Texas woodworks as St. Vincent, her very essence has seemed to undergo a radical transformation. Though such evolution is natural for any artist over the course of a lifetime, it feels especially befitting for a performer such as Clark, whose work has always tugged at the tensions between constructed, elegant beauty and the well of animalistic chaos simmering underneath. She’s gone from a charming, low-key indie starlet to a full-blown art-pop maven, and looking back upon her marvelous catalog now, we can start to see how the hints at what St. Vincent would become were secretly hidden in plain sight all along.From her very first album, Marry Me, Annie Clark seemed to decorate her songs with a Disney-like sense of fantasy and wonder, constructing the kind of delicate, baroque pop that seemed as if it could’ve come out of a doll house. But her guitar work suggested something more contorted, tearing forth from her songs like the chestburster from Alien, and making it clear that despite how fragile her musical creations seemed to be, Clark was concealing something that absolutely needed to be freed.As she continued to release albums like the gossamer Actor and the surreal Strange Mercy, her penchant for discordant riffs, extraterrestrial synth effects, and danceable grooves only grew stronger, but it was her meeting with David Byrne that truly signalled a major shift in her approach. After collaborating together on the funky, horn-laden Love This Giant album, Clark took a little piece of Byrne with her, and her follow-up self-titled release saw her constructing an entirely new persona whose artifice and coldness came with some of the most hard-hitting rhythms she had constructed yet. Having completed the journey from a twee curiosity into a living, Bowie-esque art-celebrity installation, her latest material sees her embracing pop music more than ever before, without losing her taste for folding the provocative into the seemingly innocent.It seems that as time has gone on, Clark has become more and more comfortable with the violent undertones that even her earliest work had motioned towards, urging movement and release over quiet appreciation. With her latest album, MASSEDUCTION, coming down the pipeline, we took the opportunity to take stock of how far Annie Clark has come, and to ready ourselves for whichever version of St. Vincent will emerge from the chrysalis next.

Once you get past all the decadent, gaudy squalor of Hollywood, perhaps the most defining characteristic of Los Angeles is the myriad of gentle, swaying palm trees lining the streets, standing tall and surreal against the smog-stricken sky. L.A. is an urban tropicalia muddied by human ambition and confusion, and this sensibility has seeped into some of the most prominent and experimental artists working in the city today. Whether it’s in the chime-ridden new age of Leaving Records, the sandy jam sessions of Not Not Fun, or any of the sundry attitudes that coalesce under the local community radio standard-bearer Dublab, you can hear the palm trees coming through in the forward-thinking sounds of the L.A. underground, becoming churned from an object of paradise into something caught between imagination and reality. This mix gathers some of the most exciting voices making music in Los Angeles today, and attempts to find some common ground in their scattered, psychedelic visions.

Although they’re often disregarded as a legitimate art form, video games have reached an astounding level of sophistication over the past few decades. We’ve come a long way since the days of simple arcade shooting simulators and digital table tennis. Video games have become one of the defining mediums of our time, offering deep interactive experiences and aesthetic invention not found in other formats.Music has always played a central role in video games, serving as both the sonic architecture upon which worlds are built and the emotional anchor players can connect to, as they explore new environments full of pixelated, inhuman shapes. Video game music is a unique art, beholden to the practical requirement of creating an endlessly looping soundtrack, while also tasked with building themes that slip into the mind subconsciously, returning and restating themselves with all the cohesiveness of a Sondheim musical. It’s background music created for a world completely unlike our own, and that’s why much of it sounds so out of place when heard outside of the game.Some truly remarkable music has emerged from the pantheon of video game producers, peculiar and moving pieces from the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, David Wise, Koji Kondo, Yasunori Mitsuda, Grant Kirkhope, Gustavo Santaolalla, and Disasterpeace to name but a few. This playlist highlights some of the finest moments in the genre, where the composer reaches past the lens of nostalgia and into territory that connects emotionally—even if you’ve never picked up a controller.

Straight from the decrepit basements of Memphis comes one of the most distinctive, experimental, and otherworldly communities in all of hip-hop, where hissy cassettes, mutilated R&B samples, punishing 808s, and MCs firing off at breakneck speeds are only the beginning. Obsessed with satanic possession, graphic depictions of murder, and turning rap music into a kind of sonic and atmospheric purging, the movement first gained prominence in the ‘90s with Three 6 Mafia, and grew to comprise a vast network of interconnected crews and producers. These beats may be dusty, but beyond their low fidelity lies a surprisingly prophetic vision of rap music to come: stuttering hi-hats, pounding bass, and rhythms that are so aggressive and upbeat that one can’t help but hear the delirious sounds of modern trap laced within the sludge. This is by no means a “Memphis Rap Greatest Hits” — the genre is endless, and many of its most crucial gems are buried within the hallowed corridors of YouTube. But if you’ve never known “horrorcore” to apply to anything outside of ICP, hit that play button and let Satan be your guide.

Josh Homme may very well be one of the last true rock stars to break through to the mainstream without ever really selling out. From his early, sun-baked days as a member of sludge-metal outfit Kyuss to his current status as a Billboard 200 shredder who gets called on to write licks for Lady Gaga, Homme has truly carved out his own special niche in the music world. And make no mistake; he is the god of that niche.It’s easy to understand why Homme has been able to climb such heights with his filthy-yet-welcoming approach to rock. Homme is like a fine-tuning pop songsmith who just happens to be that leering guy at the corner of the bar who wouldn’t think twice about decking you right in front of everybody. His riffs may be gnarly, but they’re wound tight as a spring, and as tough as he might sound in his music, he never crosses over into the kind of aggro-metal territory that usually scares outsiders away. Homme sits at a unique intersection in music: He’s a genuine guitar hero who doesn’t need to tread along the outer extremes of heaviness in order to get a festival crowd banging their heads in excitement, but he’s never had to dumb his music down, either.Between Queens of the Stone Age and his various other musical projects, Homme has made an undeniable mark on modern music as one of the few rockers still finding success doing it completely his own way. Though he may have cleaned his sound up since his formative time in Kyuss, it’s only been in service of making it thrash even harder, and opening up the beauty of brutality to listeners who might not normally dip into such heavy waters. As a toast to Homme’s surprising, rewarding career in rock, we’ve put together a collection that embodies his unique, enduring ethos.