Genres

This is the 14th and final chapter of our Thrash 101 program. This feature was produced in partnership with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe.For much of the digital-music era, Metallica have been one of rock’s most high-profile holdouts. Even after their infamous 2000 lawsuit against Napster, the band waited until 2006 to make their music available on iTunes, and waited until late 2012 to get on board with Spotify. And there’s perhaps no greater sign that Metallica have not just surrendered to the changing times but are actually embracing them than the fact all four members of the band recently uploaded playlists to Metallica’s official Spotify page. The playlists, posted during a few days of downtime on the massive two-year tour in support of 2016’s Hardwired...To Self-Destruct, range from an hour to over 100 minutes, and shed some light on the listening habits of the biggest metal band in the world.JAMES HETFIELD’S PLAYLIST (FEATURED AT TOP)In the ‘80s, Metallica started to hint that their influences reached beyond metal, with The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited betraying their fondness for punk. But James Hetfield’s Spotify playlist goes deeper into mellower sounds that Metallica would never touch, from jazz guitarist Bill Frisell to Portland-via-Auckland indie-rock band Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Still, Hetfield’s playlist is heavier on metal than those of his bandmates, with representation from the veteran thrash bands that influenced early Metallica like Venom and Dark Angel, as well as contemporary doom metal bands Pallbearer and Ghost B.C. Some songs appear to have caught Hetfield’s ear through films, like “Who Can You Trust” (Ivy Levan’s Bond theme-like track that opened Melissa McCarthy’s action comedy Spy), and the Gary Jules rework of Tears For Fears’ “Mad World” that was made famous by Donnie Darko. And Men At Work frontman Colin Hay’s emotional 2011 track “Dear Father” may have struck a deeply personal chord with Hetfield, who had a complex relationship with his own late father.KIRK HAMMETT’S PLAYLIST

Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett has long been known as the most musically open-minded member of Metallica, the guy who actually knew the bands they were playing with at Lollapalooza in 1996, and who praised Radiohead’s Kid A while many hard rockers sneered at the album’s lack of guitars. And Hammett’s Spotify playlist casts a suitably wide net, including Captain Beefheart, The Isley Brothers, and, of course, “Everything In Its Right Place.” Hammett’s guitar-god influences are in full effect with Jimi Hendrix and Thin Lizzy deep cuts. But he still has, by far, the band’s most stylistically unpredictable playlist, including two different, back-to-back versions of Damian Marley’s “Welcome To Jamrock” (the original and a live version with Jack Johnson) and Carole King’s title song for the 1975 animated musical Really Rosie.LARS ULRICH’S PLAYLIST

Lars Ulrich’s playlist opens with a little music from one of his bandmates, Robert Trujillo, who played on the Suicidal Tendencies track “Tap Into The Power” during his six-year stint with the L.A. thrash-funk band. Outside of a couple of groovy tracks from Bob Marley and Stereo MC’s, Lars Ulrich’s playlist is loud and guitar-driven, ranging from proto-metal influences (Diamond Head and Deep Purple) to ‘90s alternative rock (Nirvana, Oasis, and Rage Against The Machine). Ulrich also singles out the title track from The Osmonds’ 1972 album Crazy Horses, lending some credence to rock critic Chuck Eddy’s decision to include it in his list of the 500 best heavy metal albums of all time.ROBERT TRUJILLO’S PLAYLIST

While the other members of the band have dedicated their lives to Metallica and little else for nearly their entire careers, Robert Trujillo had a varied résumé before joining the band in 2003, and his playlist features some of the people he’s played with over the years. Like Ulrich, Trujillo picked a track from his tenure with Suicidal Tendencies, although he chose a classic Alice In Chains song in lieu of his work on Jerry Cantrell’s solo albums. The most intriguing tip of the hat to a collaborator on Trujillo’s playlist is to Ozzy Osbourne. In 2002, Osbourne controversially reissued two of his classic ‘80s albums with the original rhythm section tracks re-recorded by members of his then-current backing band, which included Trujillo. In 2011, those albums were reissued again with the original instrumentation restored, and Trujillo opens his playlist with “S.A.T.O.” from Diary Of A Madman, in its classic form with Bob Daisley on bass.

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.

Young Thug says “Metro Boomin want some more,” Kodak Black says “Lil Metro on that beat,” and most famously, Future says, “If Young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gon’ shoot you.” Regardless of which rapper is identifying Leland “Metro Boomin” Wayne at the moment, odds are you’ve heard his name and his beats on the radio a lot in the last few years. The St. Louis native began driving to Atlanta to collaborate with musicians as a high school student. Since his flashy piano work on 2013’s “Karate Chop,” he’s been one of Future’s closest collaborators, and he’s slowly expanded his clientele across the music industry, from Kanye West to Nicki Minaj.Although Metro Boomin is a master of the heavy bass and busy hi-hat programming of Atlanta’s ubiquitous trap sound, his work isn’t as singular or distinctive as previous kings of the scene like Lex Luger and Mike WiLL Made-It. Instead, Metro has distinguished himself with the sheer variety of sounds that he’s integrated into the trap blueprint, from the haunting chords of “Bad and Boujee” by Migos to the ethereal flute sample of “Mask Off” by Future.Metro Boomin is also a big collaborator, crafting the woozy groove of ILoveMakonnen’s quirky hit “Tuesday” with Sonny Digital and working alongside three other producers on Big Sean’s “Bounce Back.” His ear for bringing together the contributions of others served him well as he executive produced Drake and Future’s hit collaborative album What A Time To Be Alive and 21 Savage’s breakthrough mixtape Savage Mode. Sample 2017’s hottest producer with this playlist of his greatest hits.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

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.”

Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser weren’t so obviously ahead of the curve when the duo’s debut album as MGMT arrived 11 years ago. Maybe that’s because their wild, baffling, possibly culturally insensitive hipster-shaman look on the cover of Oracular Spectacular seemed more suggestive of the “spectacle” component of their cryptic title rather than a reference to the Oracle of Delphi or any other seers of ancient times.Nevertheless, few could’ve known how prescient they turned out to be when it came to heralding the dippy, woozy aesthetic of so much music from this past decade. Likewise, recent singles like the mesmerizing, darkly witty “When You Die” (from their upcoming fourth album, Little Dark Age) arrive into a rather more crowded field of freaky, dreamy pop oddballs than either of them could’ve anticipated back when “Electric Feel” was everywhere in 2007. With equally ubiquitous early singles like “Time to Pretend,” the duo crafted a canny merger of elements that felt modern and retro at once. Along with fellow travelers like Ariel Pink, MGMT popularized a lo-fi take on psychedelia that soon begat terms like “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop.” Yet they were also remarkably astute about their music’s potential chart appeal——perhaps more so than they would’ve liked, seeing as VanWyngarden and Goldwasser would famously retreat from the spotlight and dive into more willfully obtuse sounds for 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s MGMT, the pair’s subsequent and far less commercially successful albums.As the original articles were content to return to the fringes, many more artists would come to frolic in the Day-Glo-colored playground they built with Oracular Spectacular. Some——like Foster the People, Passion Pit, and fun.——would have fewer reservations about using these previously subterranean strategies and textures to create ear candy with mass appeal. The likes of Portugal. The Man, Two Door Cinema Club, and Neon Indian felt just as free to get their respective electric feels on. Meanwhile, Tame Impala, Temples, and other retro-renegades would continue their own MGMT-like exercises in temporal displacement, jumbling together ‘60s, ‘80s, and ‘00s aesthetics to create psych-pop that belonged to no age in particular. And there’s been no lack of shimmering, sun-kissed pop slathered in vintage synths and analog effects thanks to Mac DeMarco, who collaborated with VanWyngarden on some thus-far unreleased recordings in 2016. Indeed, there may be a whole new generation of MGMT devotees judging by the off-kilter yet eminently catchy sounds favored by teenage sensations like Cuco, Superorganism, and Cosmo Pyke.So were those two luridly attired loons on the cover of Oracular Spectacular looking into the future all along? It’s impossible to say, but this playlist featuring the many inhabitants of MGMT’s musical universe might’ve made them the envy of Nostradamus.

Whats This Playlist All About?: The psych-pop duo gives us no context beyond the title, so we can only presume this mix of old, obscure tracks is somehow linked to their recent single "When You Die," a barbed and bitter psychedelic journey into permanent darkness.What You Get: An organ- and synth-infused distillation of MGMTs own dark, sardonic fascination with death. Youll float through ancient worlds with buzzing, blipping sounds from minimalist mastermind Terry Riley, Arabic pop star Ahmed Fakroun, and Nigerian electric-organ virtuoso Mamman Sani, then make pit stops through retro-futuristic realms dominated by doomy 80s synth bands.Greatest Discovery: This playlist is full of fascinating finds, but lets go with XEX, an 80s band from New Jersey doing icy, androgynous synth-pop long before the likes of Ladytron could even hold a synth. According to their Bandcamp page, the group could not afford to release their 1981 album xex:change, and thus it sat in obscurity for over three decades.Is This an Appropriate Soundtrack for Your Funeral? Absolutely. Its dark, sometimes nightmarish, and may have your more metaphysically minded loved ones feel like theyre escaping their bodies right alongside you.

September 2017 will see the release of Michael McDonald’s Wide Open, his first solo album of original material since 2000’s Blue Obsession. Following that record, McDonald reoriented his solo career around a series of albums in which he recorded tasteful tributes to Motown Records, cementing his position as one of the most respected “blue-eyed soul” singers of all time. But that career path, however lucrative it may have been, only served to make a fairly uncool pop star of the ’70s and ‘80s seem even less cool.McDonald’s status as a pop-culture punchline is perhaps best epitomized by the 2005 comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin, wherein an electronics-store employee played by Paul Rudd squirms with annoyance as a Michael McDonald live DVD plays on a loop at work. In 2007, I saw McDonald in concert and filed a review for my local paper, and the next day my editor sidled up to me with a smirk and said, “So...Michael McDonald, huh?”But in 2017, Michael McDonald is about as cool as he’s ever been. The “yacht rock” sound with which he’s associated (thanks to his work with the Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, and Christopher Cross) has become a renewable source of inspiration for dance and hip-hop producers. And over the past decade, McDonald has collaborated with a number of hip younger artists that appreciate the distinctively smoky grain of his voice, including Brooklyn indie bands Holy Ghost! and Grizzly Bear. L.A. future-funk bassist Thundercat even reunited McDonald with longtime collaborator Kenny Loggins on his acclaimed 2017 single “Show You The Way.”This newfound appreciation of McDonald didn’t happen overnight, and in fact there’s no one particular tipping point that turned him from camp to cool in the way that The Sopranos helped rehabilitate Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” But the seeds were laid by hip-hop, particularly when McDonald’s 1982 solo hit “I Keep Forgettin’” became the bedrock of Warren G. and Nate Dogg’s G-funk smash “Regulate.” De La Soul sampled Steely Dan’s “Peg” and Meek Mill sampled the Doobies’ “Minute By Minute” on hit singles, and dance producers like Grant Nelson have remixed tracks like “Yah Mo B There,” McDonald’s 1983 duet with James Ingram. But McDonald himself has also demonstrated himself capable of surprising displays of good taste, like his killer cover of Neil Young’s “Down By The River.” And the sheer range of artists he collaborated with in his heyday, from Van Halen to Patti LaBelle, has placed him at the intersection of rock and soul, and continues to inspire a wide swathe of music both popular and underground.

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