There was quite a stir on the internet when British singer Adele “debuted” her new beau Rich Paul after months of low-key “hanging out” (as he put it in an interview in The New Yorker in May), with fans flabbergasted (or outright confused, for the singer’s fans who don’t watch the sportsball) by the seemingly unlikely pairing. Paul, of course, is the agent of NBA superstar LeBron James, who it turns out isn’t above teasing his friend’s PDA with the “Easy On Me” singer, as he did on Twitter last night during the Thursday night football game between the Los Angeles Chargers (still feels weird to type) and the Kansas City Chiefs.
Adele, Paul, and LeBron’s other right-hand man Maverick Carter were all caught on the broadcast along with James’ mentor and favorite rapper Jay-Z, and he couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to troll his friends for being less famous than their companions. “Who the heck are Jay-Z and Adele’s +1s????” he tweeted, adding a monocle emoji for extra effect.
Of course, Mav and Rich are likely used to drawing just a little less attention after growing up with LeBron in Cleveland and helping to manage his career since he was drafted straight out of high school in 2003. Nearly 20 years later, it seems they’re as tight as ever — and enjoying the benefits of it, hanging out not just with LeBron, but with two of the biggest names in entertainment as well.
While a chunk of the Republican Party stays tethered to Donald Trump, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is standing firm against his GOP colleagues by touting the importance of the January 6 House select committee. During an interview on Thursday, McConnell condemned the assault on the U.S. Capitol building following Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally and praised the investigation into the MAGA coup, despite initially calling the committee “slanted and unbalanced.”
“It was a horrendous event and I think what they are seeking to find out is something the public needs to know,” McConnell told Spectrum News.
On J6 Committee: “It will be interesting to see what facts they find .. We’re all going to be watching it. It was a horrendous event .. I think that what they’re seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.” pic.twitter.com/X3a7Mj7xVe
McConnell’s stance puts him at odds with his counterpart in the House, Kevin McCarthy, who has shown intense loyalty to Trump and denounced the select committee investigation. However, McConnell’s position shouldn’t come as a total surprise. In October, it was revealed that McConnell and fellow Republican Senator Tom Cotton quietly worked behind the scenes to stop Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. While the two weren’t able to prevent the January 6 rally from turning to violence, they were instrumental in convincing fellow Republicans to pull back from derailing the certification process.
Also in the mix is a considerable amount of animosity between Trump and McConnell as the former president has routinely bashed the Senate Minority Leader for not being loyal enough. In a recent interview with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, Trump called McConnell an “old crow” and a “disaster” before blasting Mike Pence for certifying the election.
From the epic opening strains of “Introvert,” the introductory track on Little Simz’s sweeping, eclectic new album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, you know you’re in for something special. The album is equal parts fantasy storybook and intimate journal marked all the way through by the London native’s wit and vulnerability. It’s no wonder that it has been so highly regarded, perching neatly near the top of so many publications’ 2021 year-end lists. Her broad-ranging and nigh universal critical acclaim could be the first step toward her gaining and maintaining a toehold on the public’s attention stateside.
Such a feat would put her in rare company; while there have been several British rappers to develop cult followings in the US, few of them ever did so while maintaining such a stark, British outlook on the art form. Going back to the 1980s, rappers like Monie Love and Slick Rick switched up their accents to fit in — you’d hardly know they weren’t from New York’s concrete jungle hearing them rap alongside contemporaries like Queen Latifah and Doug E. Fresh. In the ’90s and 2000s, MF DOOM earned a stranglehold on the city’s underground scene, but again, there were many who were unaware of his origins until his visa issues in 2010.
Hell, even 21 Savage was unaware of his own British citizenship until recently, and his struggles to remain in the country in which he grew up have highlighted this nation’s archaic and byzantine approach to immigration policy. For all intents and purposes, he’s an Atlantan at heart and sounds like it. And while there was a minor grime explosion here in the US, it was largely spearheaded by another immigrant, Drake, who made a point of collaborating with artists like Skepta and Headie One. However, their popularity on their own feels limited to their joint works with artists who already hold a certain degree of social capital.
Simz is different. Her growing popularity on this side of the pond has come organically, without the help of flashy local features, which she has mostly eschewed since her signature 2017 project Stillness In Wonderland, on which the first inklings of her fantastical flourishes began to sprout. 2019’s Grey Area continued in much the same vein, showcasing the Brit’s verbal virtuosity and singular approach to left-of-center production. Unlike many of her countrymen, she seems distinctly disinterested in integrating popular local sounds — there’s no trap and nothing that could be counted as classic boom-bap either.
Nor does she employ the glitchy, sometimes off-putting digital sounds that have distinguished grime and drill, the two main British exports in rap-focused music, although she has dabbled in them from time to time. Instead, the production on SIMBI (it’s her name, see) is organic, pulsing with the living energy of the score from an epic, swords-and-sorcerers film series like Lord Of The Rings or Game Of Thrones. There is that regal-sounding intro, the Blaxploitation big band feel of the soul-baring “I Love You, I Hate You,” the militant funk of “Standing Ovation,” and the moody ballad, “How Did You Get Here.”
She also sticks close to her roots, incorporating West African rhythms into tracks like “Point And Kill” and “Fear No Man.” And despite the similarity of their titles, Simz’s approach to the praise of her gender on “Woman” is a far cry from Doja Cat’s, backed by a slinky beat and loungey instrumentation supported by Cleo Sol’s lilting chorus. Through it all, Simz’s poised flow anchors the wide-ranging production, drawing listeners in with its conspiratorial quiet. Though she rarely raises her voice, she still wields it like a dagger, whirling and flashing in dextrous patterns with the cool of concrete at twilight.
While hip-hop and rock-and-roll are cousins with unsurprisingly similar origins and parallel trajectories over the course of their respective eras of dominance in global pop culture, there’s one area in which they diverge. After rock swept the globe, the US was visited upon by the acts it had inspired, like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, who were met with an equally fervent enthusiasm to the one that brought these acts to our shores seeking their fortunes here. While rap has been met with just as much excitement around the world, that love has rarely been reciprocated by Americans who’ve kept international hip-hop acts at arm’s length.
Ironically, as I write this, the Disney+ streaming service hosts a documentary about The Beatles, their process, and their popularity called The Beatles: Get Back which stitches together close to eight hours of footage of the Liverpool band noodling around and creating some of their beloved works. It’s hard to say whether we’ll be watching a similar show about any British hip-hop acts in 50 years — after all, times, they have a-changed — but right now, Little Simz is at the cusp of starting her own British Invasion, one that could prove to be every bit as fascinating and influential as the original.
“People in this country that are Jewish no longer love Israel. I’ll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country,” Trump told Ravid. “I’ve said this for a long time, the Jewish people in the United States either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel.”
Those comments feed into antisemitic tropes that present Jewish-Americans as having some kind of “dual loyalty” to Israel, but Trump doubled down on those harmful stereotypes by subscribing to antisemitic conspiracy theories that allege Jews are in control of the government and media.
“It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress. And today I think it’s the exact opposite,” Trump continued. “The New York Times hates Israel, hates them. And they’re Jewish people that run the New York Times. I mean, the Sulzberger family.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has attacked Jewish-Americans — he’s called them “disloyal” and blamed them for his loss in the presidential election, seemingly upset that more Jews didn’t vote for him after he moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during his tenure. But this interview definitely sets a record for just how many antisemitic remarks a former president can make in one sitting.
Who says rappers aren’t role models? Megan Thee Stallion, who recently celebrated her graduation from Texas Southern University, has apparently inspired a wave of enrollments at her alma mater, according to TMZ and the school’s Health Administration program director Dr. Monica Rasmus. According to Dr. Rasmus, since 2020, an influx of onetime dropouts from the program has reached out to her about returning to school. While she says she hasn’t taken a headcount, there’s been a noticeable uptick in the number of former students — and even current ones — contacting her with inquiries about joining the program.
Megan hasn’t exactly been shy about letting fans know about her twin ambitions. In addition to pursuing rap stardom, she used the downtime afforded by the pandemic to finish up her studies at TSU, accumulating enough credits to complete her bachelor’s degree in health administration. While she wouldn’t be the first superstar to go back to school while juggling a flourishing career (rappers 03 Greedo and Quavo both earned their GEDs in recent years, and even Drake passed his high-school equivalence exam back in 2012), she’s certainly been the most visible about it, posting bootylicious grad pics and inviting fans to a party celebrating her achievement.
Ironically, her next moves seem to be a far cry from her degree; she recently signed a first-look production deal with Netflix which could see her adding television creator to her already impressive resume.
Much maligned Senator Ted Cruz (who is vaccinated and famously wore a Texas flag mask while flying to Cancun in the midst of a devastating ice storm) took a break from being upset over Big Bird‘s promotion of vaccines to rail against United Airlines. He’s very, very upset at CEO Scott Kirby, who defended the hard-line stance of the airline on mandating vaccination for staff. While speaking to the Senate Commerce hearing this week, Kirby stood firm after being dressed down by Ted. In response, Kirby insisted, “We did this for safety. We believe it saved lives.”
Ted, however, is outraged on behalf of those United pilots who are resisting vaccination, but (as usual) he’s being hyperbolic. Reuters is reporting that 200 United employees have been fired out of a total of 67,000. Further and as Kirby related, only 6 pilots were fired out of a total of 13,000. This is far too many for Ted Cruz to stomach, and during that same hearing, he fired off a rant which Lauren Boebert enthusiastically tweeted and endorsed while slamming “these terrible mandates.”
This was great to watch!@TedCruz has been one of the leading voices against these terrible mandates & we need to keep pushing back against this as a party!
I stand with the workers at United Airlines – no one should be forced to get vaccinated just to go to work. pic.twitter.com/GIGiXhvsyh
Ted also hopped into the Twitter game and blamed the grounding of United flights (which is an ongoing issue fueled by the pandemic as a whole, not necessarily because of the firings) on the “abusive vaccine mandate.”
This would be the same United that is right now FIRING pilots who refuse to comply with its abusive vaccine mandate. https://t.co/5x3MeU3Xgd
Naturally, people came for Ted with a volley of arguments. This includes pointing out that United Airlines is well within its rights to forbid pilots from drinking alcohol before flights for safety purposes, so vaccines should be the same drill. Further, restaurant workers must wash their hands, and so on. The consideration of safety for the public is part of working in a public-facing job, but Ted is all about the “freedom.”
Rafael, what vaccines were you required to have before attending Harvard?
Would you prefer their slogan be: Fly the COVID Skies? Fly the anti-science airline…we defy gravity and we don’t know how? Fly with us: We have a death wish and we are looking for the nearest terminal? You really don’t think these things through huh?
Airlines require pilots to not drink alcohol prior to flying. Would you fly with a drunken pilot? Airlines require pilots be vaccinated. Would you fly with a pilot that could infect everyone on the plane with virus? No one is fired. They just don’t qualify for employment.
Hey Senator you know what else caused a shortage of pilots. Covid itself. Kirby said he made the decision after hearing about the loss of a United pilot in July, after spending the worst of the pandemic writing letters to the family members of United employees lost to the virus.
Gee, Ted, do you plan to also stand up for restaurant workers who don’t want to wash their hands after they use the crapper? How dare an employer tell them what to do with their body!
Customers looking to cash in on the viral popularity of notorious rap troll Tekashi 69 via a recent NFT sale reportedly wound up disappointed, calling the whole thing “a huge scam” in a new feature published today on Rolling Stone. This past October, Tekashi apparently jumped on the NFT craze, with an account advertising a Trollz NFT based on his album art in what sounds like a combination of the NBA’s Top Shot project and social gaming brands like Club Penguin.
Apparently, users’ created avatars would be automatically minted as NFTs and could be used to interact with each other via a 2D boxing game with future non-fungible prizes for winners. The group behind the Trollz project made it clear that users would own their tokens, and that some of the proceeds would be donated to charity but didn’t say which ones. Selling the 9,669 tokens at around $400 a pop, the Trollz group stood to make around $4 million.
However, according to buyers that spoke to Rolling Stone, there were no royalties, no game, and little contact from the organizers. In fact, just days after beginning the event, they stopped minting new NFTs, well short of the previously stated goal of 9,669 tokens, claiming that the launch had been hijacked by hackers. The organizers themselves stopped responding to contact from Rolling Stone and the rapper himself, perhaps in an effort to distance himself from the debacle — which it was never clear he was ever actually part of — changed his profile picture on Instagram from his usual cartoon avatar to a plain photo of himself.
“There were KGB-type things going on,” one of the jilted users told Rolling Stone. “We’re sitting there waiting for answers. You couldn’t even type specific words in this Discord channel, because a bot would moderate what you could say. You couldn’t type the words ‘floor price,’ you couldn’t type ‘ban’ or ‘scam.’ If you did, you’d get a message that rejects your message saying that word is not allowed there.”
Another summed up the problem, saying, “Scammers are making promises they’re not delivering on, and they’re doing it like clockwork. Every month, some celebrity cosigns something, and people are getting screwed — and there are no legal repercussions for any of this. That’s the bigger issue at play.”
Considering Tekashi basically went to prison for being a bit of a conman and how little regulation surrounds blockchain technology at this point, this feels like a bit of a “buyer beware” situation. The only truly surprising thing is that anyone is surprised at all.
An offhand suggestion from her boyfriend of two years coupled with her own lifelong love of comic strips like “Calvin and Hobbes” and “Get Fuzzy” gave 22-year-old Catana Chetwynd the push she needed to start drawing an illustrated series about long-term relationships.
Specifically, her own relationship.
The drawings are refreshingly touching, honest, and instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever had to learn to live with, for, and around a long-term partner.
Chetwynd says her goal is to explore the peculiar aspects of relationships at different stages, using her own as the master template.
The series combines humor and playful drawings with spot-on depictions of the intense familiarity that long-standing coupledom often brings.
The comics are almost too real — and really, really funny.
If the following comics capture your relationship to a T, you’re most definitely not alone.
(All images by Catana Chetwynd.)
“When I started doing the comic, we hadn’t lived together or anything yet, and now we’ve done the whole thing of moving in together and meeting the parents and everything,” Chetwynd says.
The evolution of their relationship provides the creative fuel for the comic strip. Thankfully, her boyfriend John Freed is fully on board with being depicted in (digital) ink — despite having to occasionally awkwardly explain things that appear in the strip to their family and friends.
The connection she has built with Freed, Chetwynd says she wouldn’t trade for anything — especially now that it inspires her art.
“The end goal for me was always to have somebody that I could be comfortable with in this way, and I think I got that.”
Emo was going to survive in 2021 — I just wasn’t exactly sure how.
There isn’t a single aspect of the music industry that didn’t face an existential crisis in the pandemic, and I mean a real existential crisis. As in, “how are we actually going to exist?” But we can at least agree that emo, at least the kind that’s adjacent to the indie rock industrial complex and excludes legacy acts like Jimmy Eat World or Dashboard Confessional, always operates from a precarious position. Let’s just start with the obvious: emo music is typically made by cramming three to five people in a studio, their time financed by proceeds they scrounged together from service jobs or teaching gigs or the like. Besides, if we can think back even to the most recent “good old days” (i.e., 2014), the most celebrated bands were playing to maybe a few hundred people on tours where they were lucky to break even. And it’s not like any of these guys can just write off an entire year knowing a couple of Goldenvoice festival fees will put them back in the black.
The old way of doing things wasn’t perfect, but it was at least a viable means for a band to sustain attention after they released new music. Even after the past decade, emo’s presence in the broader indie narrative feels subject to the whims of a few writers rather than ironclad institutional decree. As Stereogum’s Chris Deville put it, “Many of the key bands in emo’s so-called fourth wave were breaking up or disappearing into indefinite hiatuses. The critical zeitgeist moved on to new sensations.” Moreover, the rumors of impropriety — often justified — that seem to constantly orbit this realm make it nearly impossible to fully invest in any ascendant band.
I’ll make the argument that when Home is Where’s Brandon MacDonald proclaimed “5th wave or die”, it made a bigger impact than any emo album released in 2021 — including their own. There had been plenty of exciting bands and micro-scenes bubbling up over the past few years and by organizing them into an easily understood (if highly contestable) taxonomy, MacDonald created a new narrative that drew attention the way no single band could; the same way that “emo revival” had done years earlier when few mainstream sources were paying attention to Algernon Cadwallader or Everyone Everywhere on their own. Detractors claimed this whole fifth wave thing was extremely silly and very online, which missed the entire point. Obviously, it was an online phenomenon. Where else were emo bands supposed to go in 2021?
As anticipated, the bottlenecks in vinyl production and live bookings means that things aren’t truly back to normal. They probably will never be. Perhaps the ceiling doesn’t feel quite as high for these bands as it used to be a few years back, but the distribution of attention feels far more egalitarian now — a band with less than 1000 monthly Spotify listeners is privy to the same amount of hype as one who is four albums into a celebrated career. It’s one of the reasons 2021 felt like the most exciting, truly new year for emo and its many offshoots in a long, long time.
As such, creating a top ten of 2021’s best emo albums required a significant narrowing of definitions. Does this include EPs? And if so, what’s an EP when Home is Where’s I Became Birds and For Your Health’s In Spite Of were explicitly deemed as albums despite running less than 18 minutes each. Were landmark releases from One Step Closer and Fiddlehead truly emo or hardcore-adjacent? Were Portrayal Of Guilt, Knocked Loose, and SeeYouSpaceCowboy screamo or metalcore? Were Parannoul and Dltzk shoegaze and digicore innovators or artists who reversed decades of assumed wisdom by pivoting to emo and creating their masterworks? Probably both. Do we focus solely on emo’s fifth wave or acknowledge how some of the previous wave’s biggest names emerged with music that was just as challenging and thrilling (and often divisive) as the new vanguard?
But regardless of how much I struggled with the criteria for defining the best emo albums of 2021, what I can say for certain is that everything here truly earned its spot.
10. I Feel Fine – The Cold In Every Shelter
If they hadn’t reached the point of total cliche by the end of 2019, gang vocals are at least acknowledged as a cheat code by now. Yeah, yeah — we’re all in this together, you can’t really stay in key during the chorus, but man… I’m still gonna point and shout. Even after two years of mandated social distancing and livestreamed concerts, hearing four guys crowd around a microphone at the same time failed to regain any sort of novelty until I Feel Fine’s debut LP asked a question so obvious that nobody seemed to take it seriously before — what if the gang vocals were all the vocals? Better yet, the Brighton band comes across like the blissed-out Crash Of Rhinos we never knew we needed, setting their massed yells against the sort of classic, revivalist twinkle that itself became a cheat code towards “pretty” and only seems to take on new forms outside of America. It’s still all rousing and moving and emotive like this music should be and one of the year’s most unexpected triumphs of transformative engineering — The Cold in Every Shelter somehow restarts two dying batteries with the same pair of jumper cables.
9. Johnny Football Hero – Complacency
Critics spend their waking hours trying to taxonomize taste and then a band like Johnny Football Hero comes along and once again makes it all look pointless. The Philadelphia trio claim Attack! Attack!, Dance Gavin Dance, and At The Drive-In as simply three formative bands that whip ass and who’s to argue when they submit Complacency as evidence? The Emo Diaries or MySpace? Chops or hooks? Mineral or MCR? At any given minute, Johnny Football Hero revive the same debates that have troubled emo fans for decades and shut them down by only answering yes and yes.
8. Origami Angel – Gami Gang
Origami Angel Broke Minecraft probably wasn’t intended to be the most bittersweet document of what the pandemic took from the scene in 2020, but here we are. Though its madcap execution and instantaneous success confirmed Somewhere City’s status as an instant classic, Origami Angel was supposed to be spending the summer spreading the Gami Gang gospel to beanie’d and air-tapping kids in dank rooms across America, not playing DJ sets that crashed internet servers. They were basically finished with a new 20-song album that would take them to the next level, but instead, they reworked some of the titles and dropped a couple of remixes on vinyl just to keep themselves afloat. Clocking in at about 50 minutes, the version of Gami Gang that eventually dropped in April had the heft and duality of a double album, if not the length. It’s at once a refinement of Origami Angel’s acrobatic motivational anthems and an explosion of their boundaries, incorporating bossa nova, bedroom folk, nu-metal, and trap instrumentals. It’s an album of giddy fan service for a band that’s virtually inseparable from their fanbase, while finally allowing space for the darkness that was banished to the edge of Somewhere City. It’s an album that provided closure on a grim chapter of Origami Angel and a show of supreme confidence from a band that will never take their future for granted.
7. Really From – Really From
Saying “this album should’ve gotten more attention” felt more futile than usual this past year — aside from, say, Olivia Rodrigo or Adele or maybe 5-10 other Big Indie artists, who didn’t deserve some kind of signal boost in 2021? And yet, while Really From (fka People Like You) had been difficult to classify even before they underwent a sudden name change, their self-titled album seemed aligned with a number of broader cultural and sonic trends: a widespread reckoning with Asian identity in American culture, interrogations into family systems and upward mobility, an uptick of interest in both ambient and jazz. But if Really From still feels like it hasn’t gotten its proper due, that might have less to do with the fickle nature of the narrative than the Boston quartet’s unwillingness to let themselves be pinned down. Their instrumental passages aren’t jazz-tinged but actual jazz, the result of improvisational flair that only comes from hundreds and hundreds of practice hours. It’s often Michi Tassey’s elegant voice taking on the album’s most defiant and abrasive themes, whereas Chris Lee-Rodriguez’s divisive, classically emo yelp centers the most considerate and conflicted moments. It sounds like nothing besides other Really From albums and feels exactly like 2021.
6. Ogbert The Nerd – I Don’t Hate You
There’s the Emo Revival that you read about in respectable mainstream outlets, starting in about 2013: a wave of ambitious, considerate bands that set the genre on a course correction after a decade under the influence of MySpace, Fuse TV, and Hot Topic. And then there’s the actual Emo Revival that took place before all of that, a bunch of snarky, sloppy, and self-loathing bands that could still sound the greatest thing you’ve ever heard in your life in a beer-skunked basement. Their spirit lives on in Ogbert The Nerd, who released I Don’t Hate You deep in December, because that’s the least careerist move possible (they are also named Ogbert The Nerd). They identify as “New Jersey’s only emo band” despite being from the same city as Thursday. They shout “I RUIN FUCKING EVERYTHING!” within the first ten seconds and rarely does a minute go by without several more f-bombs. Madison James screams about kissing in parking lots and finding hidden copies of The Bell Jar like they’re a matter of life and death. The song that’s actually about a funeral ends with laughter. “Malkmus” sounds absolutely nothing like Pavement. “Matthew Renzo Vs. The Hoboken Parking Authority” has the lyrics from Cheers’ theme song on its Bandcamp link and it’s actually an instrumental. But no one who was truly on Ogbert’s wavelength could mistake their irreverence for indifference: name another album that inspired a full-length tribute by its first birthday.
5. hey, ily! – Internet Breath
“Being very online” is the unifying thread of fifth-wave emo and as the title of their dazzling EP indicates, hey, ily! might be the most online — an act whose music mimics the dazzling, dizzying, and disorienting experience of reading a friend post about their struggles with disordered eating, gender dysphoria, and depression on Twitter while a nightcore playlist plays on a hidden tab. The seemingly tossed-off tag on the riotous opener “Digital Lung.exe” becomes apt as hey, ily! dashes through its chiptune melodies, screamo interludes, and bit-crushed pop — Internet Breath indeed comes across as fifth-wave emo compressed into a compact, shareable file, to be blasted out from Billings, Montana to anyone who wants to hear the genre’s future.
4. For Your Health – In Spite Of / In Spite Of II
In spite of what, exactly? You fucking name it — cops, exes, abusers, genre convention, and, again, cops, whether they’re acting in the interest of the carceral state or DIY clout chasing. On their bracing debut, For Your Health are not paralyzed by rage but propelled by it, 12 gleaming and jagged shards of serrated screamo, sasscore shoutalongs, and mall-punk melody bound by centrifugal force — and that’s not even getting into their notoriously entertaining Twitter feed, which might as well have an executive producer credit. If it often sounded like For Your Health crammed several albums’ worth of ideas into 17 minutes, the remix album In Spite Of II proved it — in allowing their songs to be transformed into folk, chiptune, and metalcore EDM by many of the acts that populate this list, For Your Health confirmed that anger is a gift and one worth sharing.
3. Foxing – Draw Down The Moon
The singles strongly suggested a bold intention to infiltrate the gilded halls where ad syncs, festival lineups, and Clear Channel playlists are dictated. The band themselves admitted that Draw Down The Moon was a record they could only make after accepting that their audience might not ever grow beyond the one they already have. This apparent contradiction was reconciled by the actual reception of Draw Down The Moon — within a month that saw Deafheaven, Lorde, Kanye West, and Drake erect new lightning rods, Foxing was somehow subject to the most contentious critical divide, a buildup of enthusiastic raves completely undermined by a single, spiteful punching down. If it wasn’t the response that Foxing deserved, it still seemed somewhat apt for a band too often defined by sublimating bad luck into powerful art. As well as Conor Murphy’s virtuosically cracked voice served Foxing’s past incarnations of progged-out emo, it’s even better suited for a record of pop songs pressurized by precarity: If “Go Down Together” ever does pump from a festival stage, it’s speaking to the person who is quietly freaking over how to tell their partner they withdrew their last $20 from the ATM. When Murphy spends the title track begging to show you he can keep it all together, it’s only because he’s desperate enough to make up for all the times that he couldn’t. On “Cold Blooded,” he howls at the moon trying to summon the pitiful and beautiful sadness that once came so easily. Whether trying to communicate with the dead or put their faith in love or art or themselves, Foxing are speaking to a higher power that only seems to answer back like a father who’s not mad, just disappointed. Foxing knew all along that they will never make music cool enough for the foregone conclusion of critical acclaim or complacent enough fade into background chatter at an Ace Hotel — Draw Down The Moon is the only “pivot to pop” album of 2021 that bore the excitement of real risk, a band familiar enough with defeat and disaster to propel themselves to the next level and not look down.
2. Home Is Where – I Became Birds
Brandon MacDonald sees transformation in everything around her — tadpoles, cops, bongs, and electric grids alike are in a constant state of flux, slowly gathering power or bursting into flames. These are the vivid images that populate Home Is Where’s indelible debut LP I Became Birds, where MacDonald’s own story of gender transition is told not literally, but very clearly. It’s in part because Home Is Where are a thoroughly modernist act utilizing the kind of instruments you’d find around a campfire — acoustic guitars, harmonicas, a reedy, piercing yell. And while their knockabout arrangements and surrealist poetry rightfully earned comparisons to Jeff Mangum and their patron saint Bob Dylan, what MacDonald shares with them more than anything is a truly charismatic presence that makes every word sound like a future prompt for academic analysis. At barely 18 minutes, I Became Birds leaves plenty to the imagination — there’s no telling where Home Is Where goes from here, only that MacDonald will boldly lead the way.
1. The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Illusory Walls
Not gonna lie, when I saw “We Never Broke Up And We Never Will” in the liner notes of Illusory Walls, my heart sank a little bit. The urgent maximalism that made The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die the most exciting indie rock band of the 2010s felt like the cause and effect of living on borrowed time. A band with that many members and that name — especially an emo band — was bound to magnificently implode at some point, so whether it was the charitable causes or the April Fool’s Merch, “Getting Sodas” or “Derrick Talks Shit About The Venue/20 Minutes Of Harsh Noise,” Harmlessness or Between Bodies, they never held anything back.
And so the cloud of indifference that hung over 2017’s Always Foreign felt more like a matter of context rather than content — they moved to Philadelphia and wrote songs that were interpreted through the lens of Donald Trump’s rise to power. There were things that people had come to expect from TWIABP and Always Foreign mostly did them. More than that, their claims of solidarity were tainted by the ugly departure of several key band members. The crowds were noticeably smaller at their shows. In 2019, they wrangled a bunch of previously available singles and EPs and called it Assorted Works, the kind of move that typically stinks of contract obligation. They basically did nothing else for three years. They were an indie rock band now and didn’t seem to be enjoying it one bit.
TWIABP were not broken up, just broken down to the point where they couldn’t just run it back and Do TWIABP Things. At least not without making you wish they’d just broken up instead. But rather than trying to recapture their past glory or trying to replenish the substantial songwriting talent they’d lost, Illusory Walls bet on a remaining brain trust whose skill now appears to be have been underestimated or underused on their prior masterpieces — resulting in yet another transcendent album in a catalog full of them that still manages to be shocking. If Whatever, If Ever and Harmlessness were culmination events for emo as a whole, Illusory Walls is a monument to TWIABP itself, an imposing monolith towering over everything else.
Freed from any lingering, false hopes of indie crossover and embracing his new role as producer and musical director, Chris Teti fostered a prog-metal technicality that sets Illusory Walls from anything going in emo or indie rock as a whole. Yet he rarely gets enough credit for how judiciously this element gets employed: the tapping runs, detuned churn, and spasmodic time changes are only utilized to replicate the full-body panic of reliving religious trauma, stress eating in a cubicle, dying of a heart attack on a treadmill, or comparing the dimensions of your apartment to a coffin. When Illusory Walls shifts to the perspective of West Virginia’s downtrodden workers or David Bello’s grandfather, TWIABP create their most warm and intimate arrangements to date, where even a 15-minute meditation on dementia is more welcoming than intimidating. No longer aiming at specific bad actors, Bello and Katie Dvorak see a bigger, impossible corrupted picture where a poisoned Ohio River, the Sago Mine Explosion, Sackler Pharmaceuticals, WVU frat parties, and Philadelphia’s skyrocketing stratification all work in concert. Illusory Walls clocks in at 71 minutes, nearly half of which is contained in its final two songs, and feels like a band just getting started again.
In hindsight, “We Never Broke Up And Never Will” is redundant in light of the 20-minute closer “Fewer Afraid.” The former tells, the latter shows by reprising “Getting Sodas” — there isn’t the same desperation in this rendition that might inspire an audience of Fest attendees to crowd surf on stage. Instead, they regally ease into a chorus of their most quoted lyric, a band fully coming to terms with their legacy and in complete control of their future. TWIABP might actually break up one day. Illusory Walls will endure.
The Carter family has been causing quite the kerfuffle on social media of late, owing in large part to their usual reluctance to log on unless they have new projects to promote. Earlier this year, Jay-Z revived his long-dormant Instagram account, only to delete it again after it had served its apparent purpose: drawing attention to the Netflix Western he’d produced, The Harder They Fall. Now, it’s Beyonce’s turn. Tapping into the growing popularity of TikTok, Beyonce started an account, accumulating thousands of followers within an hour of the Tidal Twitter account’s announcement.
As of press time, Beyonce’s verified account has over 191,000 followers despite having no videos, no bio, and no profile picture. Such is the power of the Beyhive, who remain dedicated to following all of the singer’s moves, no matter how cryptic, perhaps in the hopes of being among the first to catch wind of another surprise album drop, a la 2014’s Beyonce.
Funnily enough, this isn’t the first time the Carter clan brought waves of new users to a simmering social platform. In 2020, Beyonce’s mention of OnlyFans on Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” remix (apparently penned by Jay) caused a massive jump in the site’s visibility and subscribership despite its reputation for being a bastion of spicy content. Beyonce’s latest move will likely have a similar enervating effect on TikTok’s mainstream appeal, which means that those funky dances are probably here to stay.
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https://t.co/36XFD9Xajv
On J6 Committee: “It will be interesting to see what facts they find .. We’re all going to be watching it. It was a horrendous event .. I think that what they’re seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.” 
(@Amy_Siskind) 
