Albums of the week: Ambiguous Desire, SUNN O))), Thundercat and more

Ambiguous Desire

Arlo Parks

(Transgressive)

Arlo Parks has discovered she loves to dance – and we are all the luckier for it. The 25-year-old star, who won the Mercury prize back in 2021 with her debut LP, Collapsed in Sunbeams, has returned with an album that manages to be both melancholic and groovy. Her new songs traipse through glittering synth and hedonistic club beats with her signature sadness.

Love is the problem and answer of Ambiguous Desire. On the slow, swaying beat of Senses, which features her friend and collaborator Sampha, she sings: “I can’t find no love for myself.” On Jetta, Parks rides in her car with a woman she is falling for: “It was kinda tender / It felt like surrender.” The lyricism is sappily beautiful, filled with “sun in your hair”, “moonlight” and “blossoming”.

Parks tells us that the joy of going out dancing is that you find a “glimpse of heaven” but you can’t take it with you. Still, she’s tried to bottle the magic – the feeling of “bodies in the summer breeze” and “friends spilling out onto the street”. The heartbreak that cuts through makes her songs feel all the more mesmerising and genuine. Lily Isaacs

SUNN O)))

SUNN O)))

(Sub Pop)

It seems appropriate that the sleeve artwork for Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s 10th album features two Rothko paintings. Just as the key to enjoying Rothko’s artwork is to lose oneself in the abstraction, so it is with drone-metal pioneers SUNN O)))’s monolithic sound structures. Immerse yourself in the slowly evolving washes of punishingly heavy guitar – always the same, always different – note how even the passing of time begins to feel distorted, and gradually their beauty will reveal itself.

Having worked with a variety of collaborators previously, their first album since 2019’s Pyroclasts finds them reduced to the core duo. That doesn’t presage any radical departure in style: the six lengthy pieces here still resemble sound installations rather than conventional songs. But recording for Sub Pop at Bear Creek Studio, surrounded by Washington state woodland, has left its mark, with field recordings occasionally audible beneath the almighty guitar noise. The closing track, Glory Black, even features a solemn piano interlude.

Turn off your mind, relax and revel in 80 minutes of neighbour-distressing catharsis. Phil Mongredien

POMPEII // UTILITY

Earl Sweatshirt, Mike and Surf Gang

(10k/Tan Cressida/Surf Gang)

Jay-Z recently suggested that, since hip-hop has already lost three of its four elements (graffiti, breakdancing, DJing), it may be time to abandon the fourth: rap. You wouldn’t use this disappointing double album to make your counter-argument. New York rapper Mike brings little of his onstage charisma to the booth. And although Earl Sweatshirt sounds slightly more engaged (“Mud on the casket / blood on the canvas” is a fine opening shot on this2shallpass) his natural wit is befogged by Surf Gang’s sluggish, repetitive production.

Perhaps their calculation is that, at length, this dose of attenuated, distorted beats under slurred raps becomes mildly addictive. It doesn’t. It’s not much of a collaboration either; each headliner has just one feature on the other’s work. Minty’s propulsive electro beat at least sounds finished, there’s smart use of the singer Anysia Kym on NOT 4TW and Back LA’s coda is reminiscent of Aphex Twin. Mostly, though, this is an aimless hour in the company of two rappers who could do better than prove Jay-Z right. Damien Morris

Distracted

Thundercat

(Brainfeeder)

In the six years since Thundercat’s last album, It Is What It Is, the west coast bassist and singer (real name Stephen Bruner) has exploded beyond the confines of the lively jazz fusion genre that made his name. After collaborating with the likes of A$AP Rocky and Gorillaz, and winning the 2020 Grammy for Best Progressive R&B record, Bruner’s frenetic, funk-laced improvisations have become instantly recognisable.

On his fifth album, Distracted, Bruner puts his well-honed craft to use across 15 ebullient tracks. Wonky synth solos and off-kilter grooves populate Candlelight and Great Americans, on which he showcases his skill for marshalling far-out improvisations. But it’s on the album’s features that his songwriting excels: the hooky Tame Impala collaboration No More Lies, and I Did This to Myself with Lil Yachty, are both certain to be dancefloor-fillers, while This Thing We Call Love’s soulful house is a perfect match for rapper Channel Tres’s languorous delivery.

Placing virtuosic bass solos aside, on Distracted Bruner proves he is an expert producer as much as a lauded instrumentalist. Ammar Kalia 

Black Hole, the penultimate track on Sean Solomon’s forthcoming debut The World Is Not Good Enough, has troubling origins. Born into a family with a history of bipolar, the LA-based musician and animator self-medicated with drugs and, he says, by the age of 15, “went to a psych ward”. The American underground singer Daniel Johnston “was an archetype for the sort of insanity I assumed I would face in my life – and the potential critical acclaim [I would get] for it,” he’s stated of the track. It is a knowing one-two of extreme vulnerability and wry humour that is a feature of Solomon’s work.

Johnston’s fragile artistry is a touchpoint, both musically and visually, in the wide-eyed cartoons Solomon creates. But his inspirations on this record span far and wide, reaching for the troubled euphoria of Car Seat Headrest and Neutral Milk Hotel on Postcard, or an early Arcade Fire-ish sense of epic yearning on Shooting Star. Wrapped around a series of bleak vignettes (a car crash; a flatlining career; the current state of America), Solomon’s music captures that meeting of misery and majesty that is a favourite of introverted indie kids across the land.

Having fronted the Sub Pop-signed rock trio Moaning, Solomon is now supporting Unknown Mortal Orchestra on their European tour. Lisa Wright

The World Is Not Good Enough is out on 17 April via Anti Records

Photographs by Ian Buosi/Charles Peterson/Joshua Gordon/Justin Boyd