Tranquilizer
Oneohtrix Point Never
(Warp)
Over the past 15 years, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin has become a successful soundtrack artist as well as an in-demand collaborator (the Weeknd is a major client). His standalone works are most often ambient abstracts, rippling with analogue textures and loosely worn themes: soundtrack-adjacent, even before Lopatin started working with the Safdie brothers. His score for their 2019 thriller, Uncut Gems, was not only a character in its own right, it deserved a best supporting actor Oscar.
Lopatin’s 11th album as Oneohtrix Point Never is made from unpromising raw materials: 90s and 00s sample packs compiled on to CDs, shared online by audio nerds, mysteriously taken down and just as inexplicably restored years later. Lopatin’s grief at their loss and pleasure at their restoration forms the basis of Tranquilizer, a lush, woozy record. Lopatin is inspired by the idea of digital impermanence and also the banal – even the ceiling art in dentist surgeries.
For such a process-oriented bricolage, Tranquilizer is anything but dry. Fear of Symmetry, based around a serene, looped piano figure, makes a feature of skips and glitches, while the wistful Lifeworld and DIS positively bustle, their prettiness undercut by instability. Like the album as a whole, their calm is deceptive and slyly undermined at every turn. Kitty Empire
Cabin in the Sky
De La Soul
(Mass Appeal)
Few golden age rap acts made a good album after the death of a key member. NWA gave up trying, while Beastie Boys and Run-DMC split immediately. You could make a case for Wu-Tang Clan after the passing of ODB, but only A Tribe Called Quest truly succeeded. De La, Tribe’s chums in the Native Tongues collective, lost David “Plug Two” Jolicoeur in 2023, and haven’t been heard since 2016’s Kickstarter-funded And the Anonymous Nobody. The surviving members have done him proud.
Nas’s Mass Appeal label funded Cabin in the Sky, one of seven projects from rap greats such Raekwon and Slick Rick. It begins with one of their best ever skits, starring an avuncular Giancarlo Esposito: witty with a predictable yet devastating payoff, it is overlong, like much of De La’s 21st-century output, but sets the tone beautifully. There is nothing as wondrous here as Feel Good Inc, their track with Gorillaz, or Say No Go, but YUHDONTSTOP and EN EFF remind you how confident, articulate and enjoyable the old trio were. Damien Morris
Everything, in Time
Ella Eyre
(Pias)
During lockdown, Ella Eyre underwent vocal cord surgery and had to learn how to sing again. She left her label, went independent and rebuilt her voice note by note. Everything, in Time is the sound of that return to form: the fizzy, soulful, self-possessed Eyre stepping back into music.
The album folds together pop, R&B and elements of soul, moving energetically through the frustrations of love, dating and the everyday drain of living on our phones. There’s a deeper, smokier grain to her voice now, a texture that grounds the sugar-rush tracks and gives even the glossiest choruses a bruised interest. Rapper Tiggs Da Author brings a late-night looseness, while Eyre’s anger crackles on Space and Loverman, two spiky highlights that recall the emotional anguish and magnetism of artists such as Raye.
Kintsugi, named after the Japanese art of mending shattered pottery with gold-dusted lacquer, is an inventive anthem about a flawed relationship and making “beauty from a beast”. Now in full control of her masters, Eyre has done just that: she sounds steadier, clearer, wholly her own. Lily Isaacs
Somni
Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest
(Groundup)
If you are going to put together a dozen-strong jazz and funk troupe with a 50-piece orchestra, as Snarky Puppy’s Michael League has decided to do, you are going to need some authoritarian percussion to keep so many musicians on the same page. This is the problem with Waves Upon Waves, the opening track of this second outing between the US group and the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest; symphonic grandeur is overshadowed by a walloping beat.
Happily, most cuts on League’s ambitious suite fare better. It’s a concept album about dreaming, named in Catalan (League lives in Barcelona) and skittering across the state of half-waking, recurring dreams and so forth, all of it in contrast to the first collaboration between League and the Orkest on 2015’s nature-oriented Sylva. The essential ingredient remains the orchestra’s towering blocks of strings, played loud but with the finesse you would expect from an institution in business since 1945, while various Puppies add shape-shifting character. Recurrent is jaunty and cinematic but with an itchy Latin rhythm. Drift is slow, with a prowling motif, while Chimera slips somewhat uncomfortably into a widdling guitar. A daring, high-wire act only League would attempt. Neil Spencer
One to watch: The Hellp
Los Angeles natives Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have long sat on the fringes of underground pop. Now, as the Hellp, the pair have taken a decisive step into the spotlight.
What began as a fashion-world friendship – Dillon is a photographer, Lucy was a model – has become a project defined by its refusal to sit still. The Hellp’s early EPs, released from 2021 onwards, jolt between indie, electronic and rock influences.
And while they might look like a New York band from the early 00s, their sophomore album, Riviera, feels like an embrace of modernity, free from pastiche, and a deliberate evolution to avoid creative stagnation.
Dillon’s visual sensibility is a key part of the Hellp’s expanding universe; he recently contributed the artwork and promotional images to Rosalía’s latest album and brings a clear aesthetic instinct to Riviera. Sleek four-on-the-floor basslines, shadow-soaked synths and a coolly disaffected mood colour the opening track, Revenge of the Mouse Diva.
Threads of disillusionment and isolation run through New Wave America and Country Road, before hitting the glow of Doppler, which offers a moment of euphoria, like resurfacing after losing your friends on an overcrowded dancefloor.
For all its surface polish of leather jackets and skinny-jeaned nonchalance, the Hellp’s latest move reveals them as a band with more on their minds than image. They’re leaning into the frantic energy that has fuelled their cultish following, without compromising on emotional astuteness. Georgia Evans
Photographs by Robert Adam Mayer/Aidan Zamiri/Kaj Jefferies/Jeanette Luft