Best New Albums

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  Death Grips

  Death Grips

  Government Plates

  By Ian Cohen; November 19, 2013

  8.4

  Death Grips' excellent fourth album Government Plates loudly reestablishes the band as a group freed by having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future. Government Plates isn’t defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort, Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that won’t stay still. Some parts of Government Plates are actually pretty and not in that perverse, S&M way, and it's also filled with hooks, if you remember that the word is a synonym for a boxer connected flush with your face. MC Ride is every bit as percussive as Zach Hill, and Zach Hill’s drums can prove to be a mouthpiece that’s more fluent and expressive than its human counterpart.

  • Death Grips: "Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)"
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  Blood Orange

  Blood Orange

  Cupid Deluxe

  By Ryan Dombal; November 13, 2013

  8.5

  On his second collection of melancholic 80s-inspired pop odes, the 27-year-old singer/songwriter/producer Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, channels vagabond emotions into something universal and inviting. His Cupid Deluxe is an album that tenderly details heartbreak through the language of longing. Across the album, Hynes sings, writes, produces, and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, and synths. But this is hardly a one-man show. In fact, one of its greatest strengths lies in its pitch-perfect deployment of guests like Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth, Chairlift's Caroline Polachek, producer Clams Casino, and Friends' frontwoman Samantha Urbani. Not only does each member of the Cupid Deluxe team seem to fully understand the overarching wistfulness of the whole, but many of them show off heretofore unseen facets of their talent. Especially Hynes, who has never sounded as in-control as he does here.

  • Blood Orange: "You're Not Good Enough" (via SoundCloud)
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  The Range

  The Range

  Nonfiction

  By Mike Powell; October 31, 2013

  8.2

  Nonfiction, the first full length from electronic producer James Hinton (aka the Range), is a meticulous record filled with pretty sounds: soft pianos, fake strings, bass that stretches like taffy, and synth blips that twinkle like itsy bitsy stars. It isn’t an album easily pegged to any scene or narrative currently circulating about electronic music. Its rhythms are rooted in hip-hop, drum & bass, and late-90s R&B, rendered on the small scale of someone making music more for home listening than club play. It's the kind of record that doesn’t surge like a fire but instead grows patiently, like a vine.

  • The Range: "Metal Swing" (via SoundCloud)
  • The Range: "Loftmane" (via SoundCloud)
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  Arcade Fire

  Arcade Fire

  Reflektor

  By Lindsay Zoladz; October 28, 2013

  9.2

  Arcade Fire's lush, imaginative 85-minute fourth album, produced in part by James Murphy and featuring guest vocals from David Bowie, is a triumph, but not a victory lap; the band never sounds content enough for that. Instead, it's an anxious, occasionally downright paranoid album that asks big, barbed questions aimed not just at the man who may or may not be upstairs, but the more terrestrial gods of rock history, too. Nearly a decade after Funeral, Butler still sings like everything is at stake. And while there's always been a physicality about the Arcade Fire's sound, the rhythm section has never popped on one of their albums the way it does here. It's limber and loose, as though the songs were performed live; the arrangements breathe, seethe, and sweat. Reflektor sounds as if the Arcade Fire have ingested a bunch of the great art-rock records you're "supposed" to learn to appreciate in your formative listening years, and thrown them into the fire in an attempt to make new shapes from the smoke.

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  Mutual Benefit

  Mutual Benefit

  Love's Crushing Diamond

  By Ian Cohen; October 25, 2013

  8.4

  Throughout the seven gorgeous, baroque-folk songs from Boston outfit Mutual Benefit’s proper debut LP Love’s Crushing Diamond, the music can be described as loving, patient, warmhearted, and unfailingly hopeful. The sound here is proudly analog, though not lo-fi, and the songs are thick, but not dense. Beginning with lightly enunciated vocals, soft strands are collected and continuously bundled throughout and nuzzled by reverb without being smothered by it, a ball of sonic yarn to fall into.

  • Mutual Benefit: "Advanced Falconry" (via SoundCloud)