Genres

Thank you for checking out the 10th installment of our Thrash 101 program, produced in conjunction with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 radio station hosted by heavy-music experts and artists such as The Dillinger Escape Plans Ben Weinman and Death Angels Will Carroll. Listen now for free.What makes the history of thrash so legendary is not just the time and place from whence it sprung, but the fervor behind it all: the aggression, the solos, the speed, the sheer collision of wailing NWOBHM and hardcores piss and vitriol. Its fast, its dark, its got an attitude—and its also got a sense of humor. But no matter what, its always an invigorating listen. And in 2005, when it came back around, thrash proved its also completely timeless.Bands like Municipal Waste and Toxic Holocaust dug the torch out of some filthy dumpster (most likely in an abandoned skate park littered with cigarette butts and shitty graffiti), dusted it off, and fired up a whole new explosion. Notable young thrash bands popped up in a seemingly endless supply and broke through the zeitgeist, bringing with them a love for the sound and the opportunity to take a trip back in time. But it wasnt all about nostalgia. Thrash became a necessary mainstay in a landscape overtaken by metalcore and mainstream active rock disguised as metal. The Big Four were working through their third decade and some of them had veered off in directions far beyond their thrash foundation. To the new school, the excitement and vitality of what once was needed to rise again. And since the mid-2000s, it hasnt stopped. In 2017, we see crossover bands like Power Trip and Iron Reagan raising the flag, guitar shredders like Ramming Speed and Foreseen HKI carrying the tradition, and full-on crushers—like the all-female Nervosa—waging their own assault. Meet the New School of Thrash.

On August 20, 2002, NYC was a much different place than it was just a year previous. Post-9/11, the air hung heavier, thick with apprehension and paranoia—exactly the type of environment ripe for an album as stunningly devastating as Interpols debut. Looking back 15 years, Turn on the Bright Lights remains the chiming centerpiece of 21st-century post-punk because it so acutely reflects its time and place of origin, while capturing a deep-seated malaise that would extend well past that time and place.Some 20-plus years before that, post-punk rose and fell with a sound that was so sharp and brutally real, there was no chance it could survive long. like PiL would invent it; bands like Joy Division would fully embody it. Their songs—tightly wound and always teetering on the edge of catharsis without ever fully realizing it—articulate that maddening clench in the pit of the stomach that refuses to ever completely let go. Its a similar feeling that Interpol intricately conveys on tracks like "PDA" and perfect album opener "Untitled," with its thick bass and quivering guitar jangle streaked in wavering drones. It doesnt hurt that Paul Banks stoic baritone fluctuates at the same low, dolorous tremble as Ian Curtis did.But where those pioneers stripped punks fiery brutality down to its starkest essence, Interpol also paint it in varying tones of goth and grey, echoing gloomy sonic architects like The Cure, Bauhaus, and Echo & The Bunnymen, whose seductive atmospherics, pounding rhythms, and damaged guitar jangle haunt slow-burning ballads like "NYC" and "Hands Away.”While Interpol may have found influence from dreary 80s England, their debut is purely rooted in early 00s New York. But youll never have needed to experience either time or place to wholly absorb the myriad shades of discontent—the disillusionment, dread, isolation, and alienation—rendered so achingly intoxicating on any one of these songs.

Back in 1984, when he was the Aussie post-punk poster boy for heroin chic, no one would’ve expected Nick Cave to last another decade, let alone more than three. Nevertheless, Cave has not only survived but thrived, making remarkably productive use of his time both as frontman for The Bad Seeds and with his many other musical and literary endeavors. A new compilation has arrived, Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (1984-2014), ahead of his band’s North American tour later this month. It’s a valuable primer on the singer’s history with the quasi-supergroup he initially formed in London in 1983 with members of Einstürzende Neubauten, Magazine, Foetus, and Cave’s original cadre of degenerates, The Birthday Party.But even though the compilation is curated by Cave with help from his longtime foil Mick Harvey, it only tells one part of the saga. A fuller picture requires digging deeper into the music he made inside and around the edges of The Bad Seeds’ mighty oeuvre—this includes key Birthday Party tracks that anticipate his trajectory, as well as the many covers he’s recorded of such heroes as Lou Reed, Serge Gainsbourg, and Leonard Cohen, all of which bear Cave’s thumbprint just as dramatically as any of his originals do. He’s also been an eager collaborator and musical partner for a wide array of fellow mavericks, including the veteran UK cult group Current 93, Marianne Faithfull, and his ex-girlfriend Anita Lane, with whom he and a few of The Bad Seeds cut a majestic version of the Sister Sledge hit “Lost In Music.”Another early song recorded with Lane, Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld, “A Prison in the Desert” comes from the soundtrack of John Hillcoat’s 1988 drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead and anticipated Cave’s latter-day career as a prolific film composer with his trusty partner Warren Ellis. And of course, there’s Grinderman, the ferocious Bad Seeds side project that helped rejuvenate the mother ship with its rude demonstrations of middle-aged lust and the savage wit that’s as fundamental to Cave’s artistry as any of his melancholy qualities. Some similarly indispensable studio and live tracks from The Bad Seeds that are sorely missed on Lovely Creatures complete our alternate history of this surprisingly hardy alt-rock icon.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Released in conjunction with a trio of new digital singles—including “No Frauds,” her half-hearted response to Remy Ma’s ferocious “shETHER” diss—Nicki Minaj’s “Queens Got Da Crown” playlist is an admirable survey of her borough’s vaunted rap lineage. Nicki’s selections lean towards rap’s clubby mainstream, so instead of Nas’ “The World Is Yours,” we get “Hate Me Now.” Some historical figures like MC Shan aren’t included at all, but pioneering group Salt-N-Pepa gets three tracks. (Perhaps the least known artist here is Stack Bundles, who was murdered in 2007.) Overall, the playlist is inelegantly sequenced, with each artist’s picks bunched together. But give Nicki credit for revealing Queens’ deep hip-hop roots to her younger teen followers, especially the ones who may be more familiar with her “Super Bass” megahits instead of her “I Get Crazy” mixtape origins. The only act who doesn’t hail from Queens here is JAY Z; his “Can I Get A…” presumably merits inclusion because, uh, he owns TIDAL.(Note: Nicki’s playlist includes a remix of Mya and JAY Z’s “Best of Me” that’s featured on the Backstage soundtrack, which is a TIDAL exclusive. We substituted it with the original “Best of Me” from Mya’s 2000 album Fear of Flying.)

What’s This Playlist About: Post-everything It boy Nico Jaar releases a playlist of fluttering lo-fi, Indian-inflected jazz, sound collages and SFX recordings. Occasionally, a recognizable name will pop up——Leonard Cohen, Actress, Dirty Beaches——but most of this is exalted esoterica, perfect for a morning coffee with mysterious deities. It would also feel at home in the more psych-oriented valleys of Jaars own meandering DJ sets. Overall, the playlist answers the question: If music is background noise, why not make background noise music?Biggest Surprise: How Jaar weaves Eastern music into the mix. The rhythms have always been present in his own tracks, but the sounds here are foregrounded and unfiltered.Greatest Discovery: "Ein Wort" by 70s multimedia electronic collective Monton, who skirt the boundaries of Krautrock, dub, and ambient.Hmmm, I’m Not So Sure About: The numerous sound effect tracks that make up a majority of the playlists last portion.

Nicolas Jaar has commitment issues. His music slithers between psych-speckled post-rock, world-building ambient, minimalist techno, hip-hop-inflected house, and reconstituted pop. Sometimes it’s slinky and sexy, other times it maps out a cavernous space that is icy and foreboding. As an artist, Jaar can be thought of as an arch conceptualist or a sharp-eyed technician, a festival-headlining electronic music god or a museum-dwelling avant garde knob twiddler.He’s all these things, of course. Regardless of the medium, the most interesting artists are the ones who spend their careers negotiating contradictions. Jaar is no different. He’s the NYC club kid, the omnivorous intellectual, and a product of South America’s political unrest. His tireless pursuit of Born in 1990, Jarr came up in the late-’00s NYC house scene, playing Brooklyn’s Marcy hotel parties. Gadi Mizrahi, who hosted the parties as one half of the legendary NYC house duo Wolf & Lamb, heard Jaar’s early compositions — which veered toward experimental atmospherics — and suggested that he add a 4/4 house beat beneath them. Within two years, Jaar had become one of the hottest DJs in NYC’s house scene, releasing his first EP (The Student) and starting his record label (Other People). At the end of this hot streak, he turned 20.Making a playlist of Jaar’s best music is difficult, to say the least. Figuring out how to sequence the euphoric house of his A.A.L. project with the austere techno of his Nymph EPs is a fool’s errand, while blending the Southwestern inflected psych twang of Darkside’s “Golden Arrow” with the sorrowful piano tones of his 2013 Leonard Cohen cover, “Avalanche,” is near-fucking-impossible.And what does one do with Pomegranates? The 2015 release was intended as a soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 Soviet-times movie The Color of Pomegranates, and combines scraps of electronic debris to approximate noisy ambient music. The music at the beginning of the collection is largely abstract sound design — the whizzing harmonics of opener “Garden of Eden” gives way to the clattering, gear-crunching ambience of “Construction” — but this leads to some of Jaar’s most beautiful music: the twinkling, near-East melodies of “Tourists,” the pastoral sheen of “Shame,” and the haunting piano ballad “Muse.”It all makes a little more sense if you’ve seen the movie. Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates is considered one of that era’s definitive underground films. In it, as well as its predecessor, 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Parajanov bucked the state-sanctioned aesthetic of social realism — a stylistically rigid movement that celebrated the nobility of the proletariat — for an hallucinatory style that veered between esoteric, Freudian examinations of a vast innerspace and oblique, symbolist critiques of Soviet politics and society. Upon release, Parajanov’s films were generally panned by native critics and banned by the censors, and Parajanov himself was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Siberia (ostensibly for his homosexuality).In many ways, Parajanov’s sideways agitprop is a fitting corollary to Jaar’s own work, but Jaar has definitely had an easier go of it. By the time Pomegranates was released in 2015, Jaar was one of the most celebrated producers and DJs in the world. He had a teaching gig at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His collaborative side-project Darkside had released their critically acclaimed debut, 2013’s Psychic, and became a touring powerhouse, treating audiences worldwide to their loose, spaghetti techno. And Jaar formed an interdisciplinary arts collective called Clown & Sunset Aesthetics that performed inside a geodesic dome at MOMA’s PS1 contemporary art museum. His 2012 BBC Essential Mix was named Radio 1’s Essential Mix Of The Year, while his 2011 debut, Space is Only Noise, was named album of the year by Resident Advisor, Mixmag, and Crack Mag.But Jaar’s breakout composition was 2010’s “Mi Mujer,” which remains his most streamed track on Spotify. It was a song that was never intended to come out — Jaar had laid down the Spanish language vocals of his mother, somewhere between a tribute and a joke — but Jaar released it after bemoaning the appropriation of Latin music samples in electronic music.This is not the only time that Jaar’s family showed up in his work, nor the only time that he has engaged with the issues surrounding the Latin American diaspora. Jaar is from New York, but his family is Chilean. His father, the celebrated multimedia artist Alfredo Jaar, was born in the Chilean capitol of Santiago in 1956. Alfrado’s family soon moved to Mozambique, but they were devoutly liberal, and when the socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected in 1972, the family returned to Santiago. Unfortunately, Allende’s reign was short lived, and the following year, when Alfredo was 17, Allende was assassinated as Augusto Pinochet rose to power in a bloody coup.Much has been written about Pinochet and Allende, particularly of the CIA’s involvement, but the net of it was that 3,000 were killed and many more “disappeared,” tortured, or imprisoned by the Pinochet-backed Chilean death squad the Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte). Jaar’s family stuck it out in Chile for nearly a decade after Pinochet took power before moving to New York in 1982. Pinochet himself held onto power until March 11th, 1990, when he was disposed following a country-wide referendum. At this time, Nicolas Jaar was 3 months old.Nicolas Jaar has never been an explicitly political artist, but this particularly gruesome chapter of history shows up in his work, particularly on Sirens, from 2016. That album is both his most personal and political work to date. If Pomegranates and the Nymph EPs found him exploring particular strains of his music — musique concrète and fractured techno, respectively — then Sirens is a synthesis, blending the warbling post-rock wanderings of his Darkside project with the textural elements of Pomegranates and the conceptual, cinematic framework of Space, while adding a veneer of pop to give the songs more structure. The collection also, perhaps tellingly, abandoned sampling, and was solely constructed with live instrumentation and Jaar’s voice. “The Governor” and “Three Sides of Nazareth” have a presence that’s lacking in his other work — in particular, the cowpoke vocals and driving baseline of “Governor,” which are juxtaposed with the swirling, subterranean sound effects.The spectre of violence and political unrest hangs over all of Sirens, but the most pointedly political track is “No.” It contains one of the albums few samples — a clip of Andes folk music — and its title references the 1988 referendum that would eventually bring down Pinochet (the choice was, effectively, “yes, he stays” or “no, he leaves”). Speaking to Pitchfork, Jaar noted, “What interested me a lot was that, in 1988, there was a referendum that asked the Chilean people: ‘Do you want Pinochet to stay for eight more years?’ That simple, yes or no. So the resistance—which was artists, leftists, activists—created a campaign for the ‘no.’ They effectively turned a negative message into a positive message, which seems like the most elemental change that you can do.”The track ends with a snippet of sampled dialogue between Nicolas and Alfredo Jaar taken from when the former was a child. It can be translated as such:“Alfredo: Stay against the wall. Put yourself against the wall. Go there and tell others. The one you like, tell a nice story.Nico: Once upon a time there was a little bird that was flying. And there, there was a man with a very big gun and did like this (gunshot).”It’s tempting to view Sirens as a culmination (or synthesis) of Jaar’s approach — the marriage of the personal and political; narratives built from scraps of memories and noise — but 2012 – 2017, his 2018 release under the moniker A.A.L. (Against All Logic), displays yet another side of Jaar. The tracks are hedonistic, transcendent, and eerily (for Jaar) coherent. “Rave On U” builds off clomping high-hats and smeared synth textures for a banger, while “Cityfade” comes outfitted with gospel handclaps, a streaking piano line, and a submerged children’s choir, and is his most accessible work to date. “I Never Dream,” meanwhile, is pure dancefloor euphoria, building off shuffling rhythms and lightly processed female soul vocal for a finish that’s as pretty and blissful as anything Jaar or any of his contemporaries have ever made.When building a playlist, the curator always tries to find the center of an artist or a genre. With Jaar, that’s nearly impossible; his work is endlessly digressive and varied. There are strains of ideas and sounds that appear and reappear, but putting a finger on one feels impossibly reductive. The journey may be bumpy, but it also includes some of the most important and idiosyncratic music created this decade.

In July 2017, New Jersey native Nicole Atkins released Goodnight Rhonda Lee, her fourth serving of lush orchestro-soul and regal R&B. But on her best-of-2017 list, she indulges her love of dark, heavy rock and oddball art-pop:1. St. Vincent, MasseductionI’ve always loved Annie’s lyrics. Romantic and smart. Here, she is at the height of her powers, like a female Prince. So glad she exists, because the world needs rock-star superheroes right now.2. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Murder of the UniverseI listened to this album so much this year I thought I was going insane. Kind of King Crimson in a space action movie, complete with a narrator to lead you through this journey.3. The Black Angels, Death SongI saw them perform this record live a few times this year and was blown away, as I usually am by The Black Angels. “Half Believin” breaks my heart.4. The Lemon Twigs, Brothers of DestructionThere are so many exciting and fun musical moments on this EP. Reminds me of the Kinks at times. These brothers are so young and have such a deep, musical understanding of history. I think they’re the most important band I’ve heard in a long time.5. JD McPherson, UNDIVIDED HEART & SOULJD McPherson has one of my favorite voices ever and, on this record, he takes pockets of songs to really unexpected places, turning older sounds into future sounds. Very original, while keeping you warm and fuzzy.6. Queen of the Stone Age, VillainsI put this on when I need to fuck the day.7. Mark Lanegan, GargoyleThis man could sing anything and I’d love it. Fortunately, his poetry is just haunting as his voice, and every record he releases reveals a deeper and more beautiful layer.8. Dion, Kickin’ Child: The Lost Album ’65There are so many melodies on the top of this record that put me in another world. It inspires me greatly.

9. King Krule, The Ooz

I’ve shazamed a lot of songs on this album this year, like, “Whoa, what is this?!” Completely original. It melds so many different types of music, but doesn’t sound gimmicky. He gives me the same feeling I had when I was young and Trent Reznor (who he sounds nothing like) came out—like, this person is gonna start an entire new sound that a lot of people are gonna follow.

10. Mavis Staples, If All I Was Was Black

It’s powerful and raw and amazing and timely. I’m just getting acquainted with it, because it just came out and it’s on repeat.

Trent Reznor has been soundtracking the end of the world for decades now, and somehow—no matter what is dominating the news cycle—it always feels appropriate. Coming out of the bowels of Cleveland, Ohio, as a fan of Skinny Puppy, Gary Numan, and Nitzer Ebb, Reznor brought his blackened synth-pop to the masses with 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine. On that album, between the seething industrial dance anthems “Head Like a Hole” and “Sin,” he bared his soul for “Something I Can Never Have,” a minimal piano elegy that dares to dangle its feet over a great black hole of hopelessness. Each succeeding NIN album would include at least one such devastating dirge: The Downward Spiral’s “Hurt,” The Fragile’s “The Great Below,” With Teeth’s “Right Where It Belongs.” Even the highly underrated Still, a 2002 set of instrumentals and stripped-down songs, was completely dedicated to the concept.

Now a prestigious Oscar-winning composer, Reznor has long mastered the art of eliciting emotion from the subtlest of sounds and drawing out our deepest-seated anxieties from the space between those sounds. Just see his haunting scores for films like The Social Network and Gone Girl with Atticus Ross, the darkly ambient Ghosts series, and more recent doom-stricken dirges like Add Violence’s “This Isn’t the Place.” As any NIN fan understands, there’s something sinisterly seductive about allowing yourself to slip into your own shadow, to slide further down the spiral, to soak in the dreariest of drones. But what’s kept the band evolving—and what makes you keep listening—is the profound realization that darkness can’t exist without light. To that, Reznor’s most powerful compositions manage to radiate and resonate with the slightest sense of solace (see: “Leaving Hope”).

As music scholar Tim Lawrence brilliantly makes the case in his recent book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983, disco couldn’t die no matter how hard the haters tried. Instead, as the new decade began, disco mutated into a variety of exciting and scintillating new strains. Though Lawrence’s book is primarily concerned with the influence of hip-hop and post-punk experimentalism on what dance music was becoming—as well as the wizardry of DJs like Larry Levan and the socioeconomic conditions in New York itself—there were also developments of a more technological nature.It’s easy to hear how the plush strings of Philly soul were giving way to layers of synthesizers and sequencers: This was funk and R&B for a new space age, the latest sonic innovations creating a dramatic spike in the bounce-per-ounce ratio. Sadly, Roger Troutman never provided a firm indication of the winning ratio, not even on the opening track of Zapp’s epochal 1980 debut album, but he did help provide a synth-funk blueprint that continues to yield some of the plushest and most pleasurable music known.Nite Jewel—the Los Angeles singer and musician otherwise known as Ramona Gonzalez—has been one of synth-funk’s foremost purveyors in contemporary times, since her music began showing up on MySpace in 2008. With such fellow Angelenos as her husband and producer Cole M.G.N. and the ever-industrious Dâm-Funk, she’s fostered a sparking new golden age for synth-funk fantasias like the kind that used to flow freely from the likes of Zapp, Mandré, and the SOLAR Records stable. As Nite Jewel drops her fourth album, Real High, it’s high time to head deep into the neon-lit nights this music evokes.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Some bands are predominantly studio entities who take their music on the road out of promotional obligation; I’ve always felt that Mogwai is a live band who happens to make albums. And despite having never seen them live (they ended up canceling the Chicago show I had tickets for a few years ago), I’ve found their generous offerings of live tracks over the years to be a fine substitute. These selections really glorify Mogwai’s post-rock essence, allowing the band to be heard in their element as a cohesive, refined unit that flows, climaxes, and recedes together. These tracks showcase the band’s uncanny ability to instantly switch from glacial drones to gnarled, meteoric guitar lines that tower above the mix. Their agility is amazing to me, as is their ability to collectively commit to a dynamic or timbre within a split second. As a member of a noise-rock band myself, these are things I aspire to do with my own group, and Mogwai is one of the ensembles I always turn to for sonic advice.Their earlier, more guitar-centric music is clearly on display here, with excellent and moving performances of “Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home” and “Cody.” Unfortunately, their unbelievable live LP, Special Moves, which has great performances of later tracks “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead” and “I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School,” isn’t available in its entirety on Spotify, but I highly recommend seeking it out elsewhere. Government Commissions (BBC Sessions 1996-2003), however, is well-represented in this playlist, and it contains some breathtaking moments, from the reverb washes of “Superheroes of BMX” to the slow-burn intensity of “Hunted By a Freak.” Many of the other tracks here are from EPs and reissues. Mogwai has really done their fans a service by releasing so much live material over the years; to submit yourself to it is to experience the true nature of their music.