Albums of the week: Armand Hammer & The Alchemist, Whitney, The Belair Lip Bombs and Mavis Staples

Mercy

Armand Hammer & The Alchemist

(Backwoodz Studioz)

Over a decade, the prolific New York hip hop duo Armand Hammer have earned a reputation for dystopian, erudite lyricism. Over 25 years, the producer the Alchemist has racked up credits on umpteen projects; he is also Eminem’s tour DJ.

This is one of many recent and forthcoming Alchemist collaborations, which include an album with Erykah Badu. He first worked with Armand Hammer (rappers billy woods – who, like bell hooks, uses the lower-case styling – and Elucid) in 2021 on the critically acclaimed Haram. This reunion does not disappoint. Elucid and woods layer impressionistic verses full of cynicism and gallows humour over the Alchemist’s sample-heavy landscapes. The easiest way in is through Super Nintendo, a bloopy, nostalgic cut on which the rappers recall a simpler past, woods contrasting old times with an ageing parent’s decline.

On Scandinavia, the Alchemist’s elegant piano line is set against Armand Hammer’s rhymes as they quote Shakespeare and Chicago rapper Chief Keef. On Nil by Mouth, woods free-associates over a quasi-military rat-a-tat. “Goddamn Rhodesia, Arm & Hammer, acetone and ether, a fistful of dollars, Ebenezer squeez’em,” he snarls. A bleak, beautiful record. Kitty Empire

Small Talk

Whitney

(Whitney Inc)

Whitney’s 2016 debut LP Light Upon the Lake was a thing of rare beauty: a pairing of minimal ingredients with a maximalist approach to warm, heart-on-sleeve melody that set its creators, Chicago duo Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek, on a singular path. Ironically, with 2022’s third studio album Spark, it sounded as though Whitney had lost some of theirs: the wide-eyed romance of that first work replaced by something more determinedly polished, electronic and modern.

So Small Talk is a welcome return to form, from the charmingly rinky-dink piano on opening track Silent Exchange, with Ehrlich’s immediately recognisable, pure falsetto emerging like an old friend. On Evangeline, featuring California singer Madison Cunningham, the duo flesh out their sound with dramatic, orchestral flourishes, while on Islands (Really Something) they follow a more country-flecked, finger-picking path. But it is in the satisfying chord progressions of Won’t You Speak Your Mind and the cosiness of Dandelion where Whitney tap back into what makes them special. Lisa Wright

Again

The Belair Lip Bombs

(Third Man)

Melbourne four-piece the Belair Lip Bombs created such a stir with their 2023 debut Lush Life that Jack White’s Third Man label signed them the following year and reissued the record globally. Its follow-up repays that faith: the 10 songs on Again are a joy, the sort of breezily jangling indie that requires real dedication to make sound so effortless. Indeed, Another World and Hey You boast the same easy kinetic energy that made fellow Melburnians Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever so exceptional (it surely isn’t a coincidence that that band’s Joe White is co-producer here).

Their slower songs (If You’ve Got the Time, Cinema), meanwhile, are more in the classic rock vein, and just as potent. To top it all off, frontwoman Maisie Everett treads a fine line between observational lyrics (“You used to say my name / Now you say that I remind you of someone else”) and the occasional slapstick flourish (“I knew I was doomed when I saw you / And it hit me like a pie in the face”). A breath of fresh air. Phil Mongredien

Sad and Beautiful World

Mavis Staples

(Anti)

For the past two decades, Mavis Staples’s albums have taken a familiar shape. A grandee producer (Ry Cooder, for example) will look after the music, while the last surviving member of the Staples Singers delivers devastating covers drawn from the widest realms of Americana, with a core of spiritual and protest songs. This 14th solo record, produced by Brad Cook, follows the pattern, and is the 86-year-old Staples’s fiercest reckoning with her troubled homeland: things are much changed since her civil rights days alongside Martin Luther King, but she remains unbowed.

Aside from a rowdy moment with Tom Waits’s Chicago, the backings are restrained. Slinky neo soul frames Beautiful Strangers, Kevin Morby’s extraordinary song about mortality in wartime: “If I die too young / If the gunmen come / I’m full of love / So release me.” The title track, written by the late Mark Linkous, retains its fragile enchantment. Curtis Mayfield’s We Got To Have Peace has its 1971 funk banner raised high, while Gillian Welch’s Hard Times is transmuted from its famine era settings for city life. Exalted too, is Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, its stubborn optimism given the rhapsodic voice its author could never summon. Devout, defiant and flawless. Neil Spencer

One of the pleasantly surprising things about She’s In Parties is their name, borrowed from Bauhaus’s goth rock classic from 1983 – the sound of a coffin opening at a disco. Like Radiohead taking their name from a Talking Heads track, She’s In Parties is a misleading musical reference, given the Essex quartet’s bright, catchy take on various strains of alt-rock. Which makes it perfect – a warning not to expect the expected.

Although they don’t tread the same doomy vale as Bauhaus, the band’s songs are sharp reports from the midst of quarter-life crises, delivered with power and poise. Their new EP, Are You Dreaming?, is a wonder; five fantastically detailed, pop-shaped pocket symphonies.

The band formed in 2019 to play frontwoman Katie Dillon’s indie-ish songs with gussied-up elements of dream pop, 80s synth bops and indie jangle. End Scene, from 2023, was themed around her love for US teen movie The Breakfast Club, while last year’s Puppet Show looked outward to the world. Both had high points, especially Velveteen and Ballad of the Broken Nebula.

But they’ve kept growing to become a more interesting, unpredictable act. The song Are You Dreaming? poses the question: “What if a power ballad, but shoegaze?” Same Old Story is My Bloody Valentine by way of Paramore, while REM closes the EP with a sensational coda that turns a seemingly mundane song sublime. Damien Morris

Are You Dreaming? is out on Submarine Cat records

Photographs by Alexa Viscius/Elizabeth DeLa Piedra/Polocho/Bridie Fitzgerald