Artists

Toronto trio Metz recently dropped their third slab of post-hardcore heaviness and garage-punk pummel, Strange Peace, on Sub Pop Records. For his Dowsers playlist, singer/guitarist Alex Edkins has crafted “a love letter to T.O. and The Hammer”—a.k.a. Toronto and the nearby city of Hamilton, both of which are located along the curved Southern Ontario shoreline known as The Golden Horseshoe. The playlist features “a smattering my hometown favs new and old.”

When Brooklyn-based label Mexican Summer launched a decade ago, it was a side-project. Founded by Keith Abrahamssom and parent label Kemado Records, Mexican Summer began as an outlet for limited-edition vinyl-only releases with unique physical packaging and design, but it quickly grew into something much bigger, spinning off to become its own label and expand beyond vinyl. Over 10 years, with releases from breakout artists such as Best Coast, Ariel Pink, and Real Estate, along with more cultish fan favorites like Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Black Moth Super Rainbow, Mexican Summer has established itself as an endlessly adventurous yet consistently quality label, and one that it doesnt feel boastful to call a genuine tastemaker.This playlist, curated by the label, scans the Mexican Summer catalogue for some of their all-time favorites, from Swedish prog-psych jammers Dungen (the labels first ever release) to experimental electronic maestro Oneohtrix Point Never (whose Daniel Lopatin also runs the Mexican Summer imprint Software Recording Co.) to more recent finds such as Allah-Las spin-off PAINT.Mexican Summer co-founder Abrahamssom says: "Mexican Summer: a decade deeper, play listing our way into your heart. This selection represents a brief sonic history of our adventures since founding the label in 2008. Not everything is here, but everything would be too much. Some choice selects."

Five years ago, Mike WiLL Made-It took over the airwaves, his murky, undulating trap beats powering Juicy J’s “Bandz A Make Her Dance,” Rihanna’s “Pour It Up,” Ace Hood’s “Bugatti,” Lil Wayne’s “Love Me,” and many more hits. Meanwhile, he orchestrated Miley Cyrus’ emergence as a Top 40 libertine, delighting poptimists and infuriating others in the process. His sound was difficult to escape.Today, while fellow Atlantan Metro Boomin has taken over as mainstream rap’s omnipresent producer, Mike WiLL Made-It has scaled back. He’s focused on his Ear Drummers’ camp, particularly Rae Sremmurd, the brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi who made surprisingly durable pop-raps like “No Flex Zone,” “No Type,” and last year’s Billboard chart-topper “Black Beatles.” When it seemed impossible to play a mainstream rap hit without hearing his Brandy-supplied audio signature, Mike WiLL Made-It’s beats swung like pendulums—sort of like a trap version of those damned drops that bedevil electronic dance music. Listen to “Bandz A Make Her Dance” and “Love Me” back-to-back for those similar percussive builds.Mike WiLL Made-It’s latest full-length production showcase, Ransom 2, reveals that his techniques have grown far more complex. For “Razzle Dazzle,” he arranges a frizzy feedback storm over a booming kick drum; on Rae Sremmurd MC Swae Lee’s “Bars Of Soap,” he pairs 808 drums with icy synths reminiscent of Giorgio Moroder aficionado Alchemist; another Ear Drummers protégé, Andrea gets “Burnin” with a flurry of menacing cowbell percussion and dancehall chants.With cameos by Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, and other boldfaced names, Ransom 2 proves that Mike still has plenty of juice. And while no one may have paid attention to his 2015 Miley disasterpiece, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, he can still orchestrate a beautiful pop catastrophe: On the one-off single “It Takes Two,” Carly Rae Jespen and Lil Yachty remake Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock’s funky hip-hop classic into a thinly veiled advertisement for Target. Hear the latest evolutions of Mike WiLL Made-Its sound on this playlist.Click here to add to Spotify playlist!

As Miley Cyrus gears up to release her sixth studio album, Younger Now, she appears to have come full circle: from nepotistic wholesome country actress to culturally appropriating twerking pop star to experimental absurdist performer and back again. It seems like just yesterday Miley was apologizing for disappointing her fans because she took a bong rip of “salvia” on camera, the first in a string of rebellious acts that disintegrated Cyrus’s family-friendly image one TMZ headline at a time. Now Cyrus is engaged to her longtime on-and-off again celebrity partner Liam Hemsworth, and she’s infamously shed much of the “bad girl” image that defined her for the past several years.Miley’s look and sound have changed so much that it’s easy to forget her last album, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, was a strange collaboration with Wayne Coyne that featured Big Sean, Phantogram, and Ariel Pink. Miley released the album, which had no pop singles, online for free. The project represented the culmination of Miley’s personal and artistic experimentation, the depths of the “weird phase” from which she seems to have emerged unscathed.About a year before that album came out, Miley spoke to Rolling Stone about her relationship with The Flaming Lips. She claimed she had been listening to that band exclusively, as the two had been teaming up in the studio to record some Beatles covers. Miley’s work with Coyne and the rest of The Flaming Lips undoubtedly influenced her music and performance style during the buildup to Dead Petz, but it’s surprising to revisit just how strong her relationship with the band became.This playlist, which consists of the 10 songs Miley listed to Rolling Stone in that May 2014 feature, contains some unlikely choices. Miley doesn’t mention “Do You Realize?>” “She Don’t Use Jelly,” “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” or any of the Lips’ more widely recognizable songs. Miley lists “Try to Explain,” from 2013’s The Terror, as her No. 1 choice, an understandably contemporary pick for a young fan. Yet she also digs deeper, citing Zaireeka’s “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair” and Soft Bulletin cuts like “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” among her favorites. She also includes the rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Money” that The Flaming Lips did with Henry Rollins for their 2009 Dark Side of the Moon cover album.Miley displayed a thorough knowledge of The Flaming Lips’ discography in her Rolling Stone interview, and the songs she picked span various eras of the band’s work. The Flaming Lips have maintained an unusually lengthy musical career, due in large part to a constantly evolving sound and a consistently entertaining, always absurd onstage presence. Even if Miley’s sound shifts back from the strange turn it once took, the singer could learn a thing or two about longevity from her former collaborators. Either way, The Flaming Lips have obviously impacted Miley’s life in a significant manner, and all of us could benefit from having our pop stars be fans of one of the best experimental psychedelic bands of all time. And besides, listening to 10 good Flaming Lips songs has to be better than listening to Miley’s new album, right?

Montreal synth-soul duo Milk & Bone recently released their dreamy debut album, Deception Bay, on Bonsound Records. In advance of their upcoming North American tour, they’re letting us road-test their road mix. “When we’re out on tour, it gets difficult to find artists to listen to that we all love, but that we haven’t listened to the day before. There’s a lot of driving involved, and we need for the designated driver to stay focused and for the rest of the crew to be able to relax. Here’s a selection of music that keeps us both awake, but soothes us at the same time. Songs that’ll energize you and make you ready to get things going when you get to your destination.”—Milk and Bone

Miss Sharon Jones, who passed away from pancreatic cancer on November 18, 2016, may have not briefly conquered pop like the late Amy Winehouse, who famously used Jones’ band the Dap-Kings to make Back in Black. But unlike most of the unsung soul-blues world from which she emerged in 1996, when musician and producer Gabriel Roth plucked her out of a Lee Fields recording session, Jones eventually soared as an international headliner. Songs like “100 Days, 100 Nights” appeared on film and TV soundtracks and commercials. Her “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects” became a holiday perennial. She became the subject of an inspirational, award-winning documentary about her fight against cancer, Miss Sharon Jones! And she collaborated with Lou Reed, David Byrne, and many others. Jones served as an influential rejoinder to an increasingly formulaic and electronic pop and R&B environment, and led a small revolution subsequently called “retro soul.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Adele, Aloe Blacc, Joss Stone, Leon Bridges or any other revivalist flourishing without the woman whose first Desco 7-inch preceded Back in Black by a decade, mentored fellow soul shouter Charles Bradley, and is Daptone Records’ biggest star. Sharon Jones may have been taken from this world too soon. But she got her due.

Missy is easily one of hip-hop’s most innovative talents. Her and Timbaland’s production effectively globalized the genre, and she’s always been underrated as a rapper -- she mined the space between singer and rapper a good decade before Drake got there. Some albums are better than others, but she never fell off, and it’s a travesty that she hasn’t released one in over a decade. Although her singles are epochal, she’s much more than a singles artist, and she’s the latest in Al Shipley’s amazing “deep cuts” series.

Electronic-pop polymath Moby returns with his 15th album, Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt on March 2 (via Mute Records). He recently teased the record with the nocturnal soul groover "Like a Motherless Child," but he provides a more panoramic view of what to expect through his playlist of the albums key influences. Judging from the tracklist, brace yourself for a record that slides along the continuum spanning African proto-disco (Manu Dibangos "Soul Makossa"), cinematic 70s funk (Gil Scott-Heron, Baby Huey), rhythmic post-punk (ESG, Liquid Liquid, Talking Heads), brooding New Wave (Simple Minds), and Ethio-jazz (Mulatu Astatke), with the ghost of the Thin White Duke wafting through the proceedings. But independent of its source album, the playlist also doubles as Mobys fantasy setlist had he been old enough to DJ at Danceteria circa 1981.

Moses Sumney is the kind of artist who delights in confounding categories. As the California-bred, Asheville, NC-based singer/songwriter recently told Rolling Stone, “When I was conceptualizing as a teenager what kind of artist I wanted to be, I knew I wanted to be soul and folk. Of course, then I grew up, and I was like, ‘Ooh, now I want to do some rock, and indie, and experimental, and jazz, and blah, blah, blah.’ And then I was like, ‘Wait, why do we have labels? Whatever!’”

Whereas his 2017 debut, Aromanticism, inspired many critics to put him at the forefront of a wave of artists redefining R&B, his wildly ambitious follow-up puts him deeper into his own personal gray area—or, to use the new album’s appropriately amorphous title, his area of græ.

The 20-track magnum opus finds him exploring a vast array of musical modes and lyrical themes with uncommon deftness, sensitivity, and imagination. A powerful and beguiling statement of purpose, græ simultaneously confirms Sumney’s uniqueness as an artist and contains pathways to the vast wealth of music that helped form that sensibility. Traces of early heroes like Stevie Wonder, Arthur Russell, and Sufjan Stevens are just as discernible in his sumptuous and spacious songs as the close study he paid to early-’00s masterstrokes by Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. What’s more, his savvy choices of collaborators on græ—James Blake, Thundercat, Mac DeMarco, and Daniel Lopatin just for starters—are highly suggestive of the kinship he feels with many other contemporary acts operating across the span of electronic music, jazz, indie pop, and oh so much more. Recent collaborations and other points of connection that fill out this playlist makes Sumney’s intentions seem nowhere near as hazy as his music may be.

Photo by Alexander Black

The music of Mouse on Mars feels both pastoral and otherworldly. Their odd ambient textures are interspersed with sonic trapdoors -- a jittery rhythm here, a squirming bleep there. It’s meditative music in the best possible way. We’re honored that these electronic music tricksters/pioneers recently created a playlist for us. Check out their description of the playlist below and be sure to check out their album Dimensional People.

In the past couple of months, we experimented with spatial mixing in various forms. Our involvement in multiperspectivity and spatial diffusion made us compile a playlist of pieces which could possibly be played back as simultaneous multi tracks in an imaginative space to overlap, coincide, oppose or complete each other. There is also an intentional slowed down time scale to this playlist which opposes the hasty listening habits of online music consumption.