Artists

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.

M83 is fixated on the sky, on big sound, on feeling alive. Their name is taken from Messier 83, a spiral galaxy; their music, however, comes from primary member Anthony Gonzalez’s long engagement with pop history. Some of his influences, such as the Cocteau Twins, Vangelis, and My Bloody Valentine, are apparent from listening to his music, and yet, his love of the weirder sides of Pink Floyd and The Beatles is equally important. His synthesizer tones are in touch with the ethereal sounds of Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream, while the pacing and drama of his more epic works unquestionably gesture toward Slowdive and Sigur Rós. M83 transforms the greatest qualities of these musicians into sonic collages that feel simultaneously familiar and fresh.

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.

Since 2010, Londons DJ Mais Um Gringo—thats Portuguese for "One More Gringo"—has channeled his passion for Brazilian music into Mais Um Discos, a label dedicated to contemporary Brazilian musicians who, in the labels words, "fuse styles, disregard genres, and irritate purists." Their catalog runs the gamut from Graveolas sprightly nova-tropicalia to the loping rhythms and rhymes of Espião and other artists featured on their compilation Daora: Underground Sounds of Urban Brasil. They pay special attention to the deep links between African and Brazilian musical traditions: Poet Arnado Antunes and guitarist Edgard Scandurra team up with the Malian kora legend Toumani Diabaté, while São Paulos Bixiga 70 pay tribute to the spirit of Afrobeat with a distinctly Brazilian twist. Venturing even further afield, Metá Metá project samba through a fuzzy, post-punk lens.

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.

Sweet Apple is the power-pop supergroup featuring vocalist John Petkovic and guitarist Tim Parnin of Cobra Verde, and bassist Dave Sweetapple and drummer J. Mascis of Witch. (You may also know the latter from another band.) To mark the release of their second album, Sing the Night in Sorrow, Petkovic created this special Dowsers playlist featuring songs from the record, and the classic tracks that directly inspired them. Here, he breaks down the albums key influences on a song-by-song basis.SONG: "(My Head is Stuck in the) Traffic"INSPIRATION: “Girl U Want” by Devo“(My Head is Stuck in the) Traffic”—the opening track on our album, Sing the Night in Sorrow—features this driving, jagged riff on the verse. The obvious thing would have been to pair it with straight-ahead drums, but it wouldn’t have provided the kind of tension we were shooting for. Devo are one of the pioneers of the “herky-jerky” rhythm with songs like “Girl U Want,” “Mongoloid” or even “Whip It.” Devo popped into my head right away because they embraced the tension between guitar and drums. As a whole, none of those Devo songs sound all that much “Traffic,” but if you listen to the hi-hat and where it fits, and the loopiness of the rhythm, they owe a debt to Devo.SONG: “World I’m Gonna Leave You”INSPIRATION: The theme song from Get SmartI was flipping through the TV late at night and was stopped by the theme song to the 1960s secret-agent spoof Get Smart. The riff just sounded so bad-ass—these boisterous horns blaring out this punchy melody with this incessant rhythm underneath it. Right away, I hit pause and picked up a guitar and started playing along until that riff turned into something very different—which became the basis for “World I’m Gonna Leave You.”SONG: “You Dont Belong to Me”INSPIRATION: “Tubular Bells - Pt. 1” by Mike OldfieldOn the surface or in any other way, “Tubular Bells” sounds nothing like the Sweet Apple song. But the opening to Oldfield’s song, made popular by The Exorcist, always resonated with me because it features a circular note pattern played with layers of instruments. The strategy matched what we were trying to do with a note pattern played by Tim on acoustic and electric guitars on the intro and outro of what is otherwise a power-pop song.SONG: “A Girl and a Gun”INSPIRATIONS: The soundtrack to Duck You Sucker, and “Man With Harmonica” from the soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in the WestBoth of these Ennio Morricone soundtracks roll out sprawling themes. They also boast so many stellar details: A plucked banjo that acts more as an uneasy marker of time than an instrument; a detuned note played in unison with another to create a warbled melody; an incidental sound; those warped harmonicas; those haunting, weird vocals. “A Girl and a Gun” features all sorts of sounds that might not specifically sound like Morricone’s soundtracks, but there’s a similar strategy at work with the strummed autoharp, the layered vocals, the out-of-tune synth lead, and the warped toy piano. Meanwhile, the plucked banjo is straight out of these soundtracks.SONG: “She Wants to Run”INSPIRATION: The soundtrack to The Royal TenenbaumsI like some Wes Anderson films, but the sheer amount of whimsy in the scores borders on empty signifiers. I wanted to capture that kind of whimsy in the acoustic opening to “She Wants to Run," only to follow it by having a rock n roll band bust down the door and smash their acoustics and turn up the amps. So we recorded the sound of a cord being plugged into an electric guitar jack and then having a loud rock band blowing the acoustic troupe away.SONG: “Candles in the Sun”INSPIRATIONS: "Cocaine and Camcorders," by UNKLE and South from the Sexy Beast soundtrack + "Hey Bulldog" by The BeatlesThe UNKLE contributions to the Sexy Beast soundtrack boast these pulsating drones that make the songs mesmerizing, because they keep throbbing along even as other parts come in and out and change. The notes and instruments are different, but the guitar riff provides a similar function, pushing along even as chords modulate. As for the guitar tone, check out George Harrison on later-period Beatles songs, like “Hey Bulldog” or “I Want You (Shes So Heavy).”SONG: “Summers Gone”INSPIRATION: “The Great Dominions” by The Teardrop ExplodesThe idea of doing some sunny ode to the end of summer in a place where the sun doesn’t shine often was the basis for the song. It features sunny back-up vocals, but there is also a drone throughout the song. A song that incorporated the drone to moody effect so well is “The Great Dominions,” by Julian Cope’s early band The Teardrop Explodes. The drones continue throughout and in many ways glue the song together with this deep, hypnotic underpinning that gives it a sense of foreboding menace.SONG: “Thank You”INSPIRATION: "Saturday Night Special" by Lynyrd SkynyrdThe perception of Lynyrd Skynyd as some "southern-rock" band overshadows just how great and timeless the production is on the band’s records—from the guitar and bass sounds to the deep snap of the snare. When we went into this one, I was imagining that snare run recorded really hot—ditto for the guitars.SONG: “Crying in the Clouds”INSPIRATION: “Morning Sun Rays,” by Popol VuhThe German group created a number of stellar soundtracks for Werner Herzog and so few groups managed to make the acoustic guitar so evocative and otherworldly—especially when combined with other string and wind instruments. The Sweet Apple song features six- and 12-string acoustics paired with a droning harmonica and a toy accordion, as well as a collage of various instruments in the middle part. While it doesn’t sound like anything Popol Vuh, it embraced the group’s expansive view of acoustic music.SONG: “Everybodys Leaving”INSPIRATION: “By the TIme I Get to Phoenix,” Glen CampbellSongs about leaving are bound to be moody and full of longing and loss, but how do you convey that without being melodramatic? Glen Campbell hit it with the string arrangements on the Jimmy Webb-penned classic “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” It’s accentuated with the breezy pacing of his vocals and the space to breathe in the music—which makes it all the more evocative. “Everybody’s Leaving” might be a very different-sounding song, but there was a general strategy at work—and we hoped these little layers, like the echo-y electric piano on the bridge, accentuated a similar atmosphere.

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.

They said it would never last—back in the early ’80s, when synth-pop came in vogue, short-sighted detractors deemed it a fad and predicted it would have a short shelf life. Nearly four decades later, history has told a very different story: Not only were the original wave of synth-poppers succeeded by new generations of electronic artists, there are still plenty of old-schoolers still hanging on and plugging in, proving that you’re never too old for synth-pop.Gary Numan was one of the first performers to bring synths to the fore in the post-punk era, and even as he edges toward sexagenarian status, he hasn’t compromised his musical vision one iota. When Depeche Mode started turning heads, they were callow youths with some upstart ideas. But as the elder statesmen of electronic pop today, they’ve become one of the most influential bands of their generation.As the ‘80s marched on, the likes of Erasure (including former Depeche Mode man Vince Clarke) and Pet Shop Boys popped up, adding a more danceable feel to the synth-pop canon. Back then, nobody guessed that these groups would take their sound into the 2010s, but here we are.However, you don’t have to be a superstar to stick around in the synth-pop realm. British duo Blancmange never really made it past cult-hero status back in the day, but that didn’t stop them from releasing a string of new albums starting in 2011. After he split from Ultravox at the end of the ‘70s, John Foxx took an innovative, and ultimately underground, path into electronic sounds, but his absence from the spotlight hasn’t hurt his artistic longevity one bit.These are the synth-pop survivors—the artists who firmly planted their feet into new musical ground long ago and never let their electronic dreams die out.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.