When one presses play on a City Father track one can never know what kind of journey to expect. An initial flash of a dark London garage beat quickly gives way to synths that suggest a retro-futurist Detroit. Before you know it you’re at the feet of a sci-fi house diva in awe of some beautiful melody. A City Father track is always wonderfully unpredictable in a world that often focuses a little too much on the beauty of hypnotic minimalism. There’s something of a different escapist joy to that which one usually experiences in dance music here. It’s weirdly similar to the complicated song-suites of progressive rock where whole albums of ideas are fused into one elongated song. City Father, however, pulls this off without the faintest whiff of pretension and with an eye fixed hard on the dancefloor. City Father‘s bruising remix of Saro‘s single “Vapor” is a worthy addition to the underground electronic producer’s catalogue.

The original version of “Vapor” is featured on Saro‘s “Boy Afraid” EP.

Connect with City Father via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and keep things fresh with Saro over Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

City Father is an LA-based musician who you’d swear was from London. His music is rich in the ominous bass sounds and irregular rhythms of that city’s distinctive club scene. “Coquette”, though, is more than a dull copy of a generically post-dubstep sound. The press release describes this track as existing “in that elusive space between club music and home listening”, an apt description of a track that seems almost to function as a condensed version of an hour-long DJ mix. While dance music might be known for its tantric repetition, City Father‘s “Coquette” hardly repeats itself at all. This feels more like a through-composed instrumental electronic piece than the minimal drum tracks of most house and techno. Each element that does appear in the track could be happily extended for several minutes, but the choice not to do so makes the track utterly addictive. Hearing each of these sounds once just isn’t enough.

Forget seedy jazz, City Father‘s “Coquette” is the sound of today’s night-time noir Los Angeles.

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Connect with City Father via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and re-discover his flip of Saro‘s “Looking” below!

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“Joli Mai”, Dan Snaith’s latest album under his Daphni alias comes hot on the heels of his recent addition to the Fabriclive mix series. In fact, this album is essentially an unmixed abridgement of that mix album. The album is made up of two different kinds of tracks: the first rely on repeating drum (and sometimes bass) loops with occasional vocal hooks or synth breaks; the latter are less skeletal in their addition of richer harmony and fuller synthesisation. This structure is largely the same as “Jiaolong”, the first Daphni project.

Like that project, it is the more fully textured songs that are more effective. That album followed three excellent singles with six mediocre, and occasionally downright irritating, tracks of the former type. These experimental tracks are often neither interesting dance tracks nor interesting experiments. On “Joli Mai”, tracks like ‘Hey Drum’ and ‘Face To Face’ typify these percussion loop songs. ‘Hey Drum’, as the name suggests, allows a pedestrian drum loop to repeat until almost two minutes into the song when a euphoric chord stab sequence enters, perhaps telling us the song will now continue in this mode. Alas, the synths end and we return to this drum break for most of this track’s unnecessary seven-minute duration. ‘Face To Face’, meanwhile, features a meaningless drum and bass groove gives new meaning to the phrase ad nauseum; it lacks even a single euphoric moment to break up its monotony. These tracks seem almost like a caricature of dance music’s repetitive nature. It’s as if a snobby rock musician had attempted to prove they could make dance music and this was their semi-satirical finished product.

DAPHNI‘s new LP “Joli Mai” offers only a few danceable tracks and interesting experiments

Luckily the other type of tracks on this album are greatly more interesting. The finest is easily ‘Tin’, a gorgeous summery house banger that will likely remain in my ‘Summer’ playlists for years to come. It’s a track that just repeats one perfect fully-realised loop, harking back to equally great sunshine house tracks like Orbital’s “Halcyon On + On” or Daft Punk’s “Revolution 909”. The other tracks in this mould are less successful but remain passable to fairly good. The album starts off with “Poly”’, a gorgeously building synth loop that gradually goes in and out of tune. “The Truth” is the next best track as it uses a simple chord sequence as the launching point for its waxing and waning energy levels. I’m sure this track could be a hugely effective track in a DJ set, something I can hardly say about any of these tracks really. Other tracks on the album fall somewhere in between these two modes with varying degrees of effectiveness.

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This album seems mostly geared towards two different types of specialist listeners: gear fetishists and rhythm obsessives. I fit into neither of these two categories. Judging from interviews about the Daphni project, at least the first album, Dan Snaith was creating many of these tracks using a newly purchased modular synthesiser. The only people interested in the intricacies of these analogue synths are other obsessive synth fetishists like Snaith’s friends Floating Points and Four Tet. To anyone else these sounds could’ve been made on a program like Ableton with no major differences. These extreme areas of speciality and nerdery are fine if you are also able to create convincing and interesting tracks. But here, they barely function as anything listenable. It’s like writing a dense novel of obscure symbolism that doesn’t function as a readable narrative: only academics are going to care or profess to see anything of worth in it. It’s likely that this gear obsession is the way these hipster elite musicians reconcile their love of dance music as a reasonable obsession. By making synthesis this mathematically complex, they prove to themselves that house music is more than just hedonistic bangers (it’s no surprise that Snaith has a Ph.D in maths and Floating Points a Ph.D in neuroscience).

The other specialist group I see this appealing to is those who have an in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of things like polyrhythms and African drumming. In the seventies, these rhythm nerds likely owned twenty-piece drum kits and notated the rhythms of Rush and Led Zeppelin drum solos. I am far from one of these people. I have no opinions on who is and isn’t a good drummer. My issue with Ringo Starr is entirely based on his songwriting, not his timekeeping or anything technical. My own rhythm keeping skills have always been shoddy at best. Texture, melody, harmony, and aesthetics are far more my area. This is why for me, only half these tracks contain anything of slight value.

Many of Australia’s biggest bands seem tailor-made for this climate. Like the beer and barbeques, it’s music that’s often intended to accompany sunshine. Having grown up somewhere where barbeques are often rained off and much of the beer is not intended to be served ice cold, it’s certainly noticeable. This is my pet theory as to why groups like Tame Impala, Flume and Cut Copy thrive in Australia. Much of their music is dazed yet upbeat, full of major keys, and generally embodying the philosophy of ‘no worries’. It’s certainly a pleasant break from the unrelenting nihilism found in much of the best music from the UK, whether post-punk or grime. What I’m really saying is that Cut Copy’s music seems ‘Tied To The Weather’, as one of the tracks here so succinctly puts it. It’s certainly likely I’ve managed to cherry-pick a few examples that fit my hypothesis and ignored a bunch of data that doesn’t, but this is a subjective album review, not science. Interestingly, Melbourne has some of Australia’s most consistently inconsistent weather so Cut Copy’s sound should perhaps reflect a little more of the turbulence of their home. These weather contrasts at least explain how Nick Cave could’ve emerged from Melbourne, as well as suggest the cities preference for dingy techno over EDM (something that is reversed in the rest of the country). Anyway, I digress.

Despite a few memorable hooks, Cut Copy‘s fifth album “Haiku From Zero” often sounds too domesticated or uninspired.

While Cut Copy have been of crucial importance to Melbourne’s dance scene, much of their music sounds more like indie for a world where dance music and indie are two sides of the same musical coin. The idea that they were ever separate musical genres with different histories, audiences and traditions is now an alien concept. Most of their tracks are verse/chorus/verse songs that just happen to be underscored by a four-to-the-floor drumbeat and some synthesisers. The traditional hooks of the song are more important than dancefloor tropes like builds or drops.

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Cut Copy’s “Haiku From Zero” starts things off with ‘Standing In The Middle Of The Field’, one of the album’s more electronic tracks. The vibe is not unlike Animal Collective circa “Merriweather Post Pavilion” with its blend of African thumb piano and house beats. The joyous insanity of Animal Collective, though, has been removed as if that group had been domesticated, house-trained and bred in captivity. This is typical of the album. While there are a few memorable hooks, there’s little here that’s really exceptional. We get tracks like ‘Black Rainbows’ which plod along as if they are mediocre covers of someone else’s songs. In the chorus of that song, singer Dan Whitford lets loose the least committed “hey” I’ve ever heard in a song.

This essentially is my complaint about this album in miniature: I don’t believe the emotions the group are trying to convey to me. Cut Copy often sound as if they are uninspired by their own work. The vocals often seem to float lightly above the songs without becoming too involved with them. As if Whitford is detached from what he sings. He almost sings like a higher pitched crooner, with that bored Sinatra-esque cool. While this approach might have worked for the Rat Pack and their air of urban disinterest, it’s hardly an approach that works over house-inspired beats.

My favourite dance music is that which grabs you with the intensity of its emotions. As far as the seminal indie dance groups go, Cut Copy have often been the one I’ve most struggled to see the merits in. They have none of the jagged edges of The Rapture, none of James Murphy’s existential record clerk witticisms. It’s a little too polite. Much of it is mere mid-tempo lightweight indie with a disco kick and a synth or two. While I appreciate the sunny outlook of this music, it’s far from my own grey sky thinking. I’m sure I’ll hear one of these songs while drinking a beer in 30-degree heat and briefly feel that I totally misunderstood this album, but I can’t imagine it bothering me too long.

It’s an internet-bred subgenre where beautiful pieces of emotional house are released by artists with names like DJ Seinfeld and Ross From Friends. Impossibly, it seems to be both very ironic and very heartfelt. It sounds like a stripped-back version of deep house coated with the nostalgia-soaked retro-futurism of vaporwave. It almost seems like the first music that Skynet might make when it first attains consciousness and is failing to understand and replicate the internet’s various cultures.

Lo-fi house is hardly new, though. It is essentially a rebranding of the music that some were calling “outsider house” a few years ago. Musicians like Delroy Edwards, Huerco S. and Anthony Naples stripped back dance music to the gritty necessity of kick drum and moody futuristic atmosphere. Many of these musicians had backgrounds in scenes like noise, ambient or punk, bringing a focus on stripped-back rawness from those genres. Appropriately, their music was rough, distorted, experimental, and about as serious as noise and punk scenes tend to be.

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Vaporwave, by contrast, is known for trading in irony and postmodernism. Age-old feelings of disconnection, loneliness and existential nausea are appealed to in a semi-ironic manner. The music, meanwhile, features slowed down and cut up samples from kitschy 80’s pop or muzak. Unlike outsider house, vaporwave is a music that is dense with a symbolism as important as the music itself. The culture is essentially halfway between a music scene and an internet meme — reading the comments on vaporwave YouTube uploads can often be half the fun. Its visual aesthetic blends VHS visuals, advertising, early internet design, a fascination with Japan and sculptures of the classical world into its own distinct vision. This visual-heavily culture is essentially the dominant language of many of the more hipster parts of the internet.

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Combining these two cultures leaves lo-fi house resembling melancholic 90s deep house recorded to cassette and packaged with a veneer of internet-age irony. It’s sad, but knowingly so. Nostalgia and memory are linked to old technology, effortlessly connecting the degradation and warm distortion of analogue sounds with memory’s own rose-tinted failings. Vaporwave-ish touches include pitched-down, reverb-heavy sampling and cheesy sounds like the Yamaha DX-7 keyboard. The hazy, minor key ambience of the music soundtracks loneliness just as well as the collective euphoria of a dancefloor.

This is a scene that started in no one place at any one time but through the internet’s ‘global village’. Producers from Australia (Mall Grab), Spain (DJ Seinfeld), the UK (DJ Boring, Ross From Friends) simultaneously came up with similar ideas (and names). Each of the producers was responding to similar societal, technological and musical stimuli. It was curated by record collecting channels like hurfyd, Slav, and OOUKFunkyOO, and driven by the neural networking of YouTube’s recommended videos feature. These YouTube recommendations have been key. As Jeff Ihaza wrote in his article on the scene:

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YouTube’s recommendations are so smart — and account for subtleties in ways that other platforms still don’t — that it effectively became a radio station for underground labels to scoop up fans.

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YouTube has further importance here with many of these channels adding vaporwave-ish, dated video footage to the tracks as music videos. This provided the usually visual-averse underground dance scene with something a bit different, making the music just as likely to appeal to stoners as ravers.

Lo-fi house itself is fuelled by a backlash to the professionalism, popularity and polish of EDM. The back-to-basics approach of the genre is itself hardly musically innovative.

The possibility of this kind of simultaneous global scene didn’t start with the internet, though. Australian band The Saints independently arrived at a ‘punk’ sound in 1976, despite their geographic distance from London or New York, through their love of quintessential ‘proto-punk’ bands like The Stooges and The MC5. Musicians worldwide can similarly respond to a love of the same precursors and a hatred of the same popular artists. Music is almost Newtonian in this way: sounds and genres often have an equal and opposite reaction. Lo-fi house itself is fuelled by a backlash to the professionalism, popularity and polish of EDM. The back-to-basics approach of the genre is itself hardly musically innovative. It draws heavily on house and techno’s origins in Chicago and Detroit minimalism, music that was often fairly lo-fi and DIY in the first place. The instruments used are often analogue sounds (or reproductions) such as the semi-mythical Roland 808, 909 and 303 instruments. These sounds are considered to be more ‘authentic’ than the complex CPU-intensive sounds that can be made on modern production software (think of the sounds in your average Skrillex track). The added layer of postmodern irony appeals to the art-school weirdos whose use of words like ‘postmodern’ excludes them from the assembled beautiful people at the EDM festivals.

A certain kind of person seeks this musical authenticity in the ‘purer’ music of the past. The ideas that drive this movement originated in the Romantic obsession with the ‘folk arts’, and folk music particularly. This belief system involves the cherishing of an old way of life, focusing on community and ‘authenticity’. It often involves middle-class, left-leaning, college-educated types (hipsters basically) romanticising music that belongs to an ‘outsider’ community (black, poor, gay, etc.). They believe these cultures are pure and untainted, standing outside the ‘sickness’ of mainstream society. This type of thinking tends to attract those of us that didn’t really feel they fit into mainstream society anyway. Often the roots of a currently popular music are sought out and declared to be the ‘authentic’ source of the current ‘bastardised’ trend. The Delta blues revival, for example, valued the lo-fi analogue hiss in records by acoustic blues singers like Robert Johnson (who was never popular in his own time) to the cleaner, and then popular, sounds of electric blues and rock ‘n’ roll. This romantic idea has driven many backlash/revival movements from punk to trad jazz, throwback 90’s rap to northern soul. Of course, each movement is different but certain similarities appear in the use of old technology, the stressing of ‘otherness’ and a firm belief in new music as being too ‘commercial’ or made by sell-outs.

By using lo-fi production and old analogue synthesisers, producers symbolically attempt to detach themselves from modern technology and ‘commercialism’.

Lo-fi house, then, claims the authenticity of old Roland synthesisers, it also leans heavily on the ‘blackness’ of early Chicago house, which often used lush chords like minor 7ths to link itself to jazz. By using lo-fi production and old analogue synthesisers, producers symbolically attempt to detach themselves from modern technology and ‘commercialism’. All of this can be summed up by a belief in these sounds having more ‘soul’ or ‘humanity’ than those found in EDM. If science fiction has taught us anything, though, it is that the difference between human and machine, real and artificial is almost arbitrary. A complex enough computer can imitate any signifier of ‘soul’ you throw at it. That doesn’t mean that these musicians aren’t sincere about believing they hear ‘soul’ in old house music, just that logically this is pseudo-mystical nonsense. Seeing as we’re all at least a little bit infected with romanticism, though, emotion will often win over logic. Maybe when it’s this much fun we should sometimes let it.

Now, on to the tracks themselves:

First off, the essential tracks from this genre/sound are ‘Talk To Me You’ll Understand’ by Ross From Friends, DJ Seinfeld’s ‘U’, DJ Boring’s ‘Winona’ and Baltra’s ‘Fade Away (Vocal)’.

‘Talk To Me You’ll Understand’ is the archetypal track of this scene, it is possibly also the best. It is a track that has distorted muted beats under a gently repeating series of minor 7th chords. On top of this it has the best hook in the whole genre with the sung vocal of the song’s title. At one point the track breaks down for a guitar solo that could come straight from the 80s.

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‘U’ is also a surprisingly beautiful piece of music from an artist with such a dumb name. The song itself lacks a trace of irony in its moving piano house ode to a dead relationship.

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‘Winona’ is an impressionistic track that features a repeated sample of Winona Ryder talking over distorted drums and dreamy chords. The bass sounds like your phone vibrating on a table. Probably the least interesting of the genre’s ‘big tracks’.

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‘Fade Away (Vocal)’ is a mournful track propelled by crisp analogue drums contrasted with slow Blade Runner-ish synth pads.

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Other bangers include:

Mall Grab ‘Can’t (Get U Outta My Mind)’ – Turns a sample of Alicia Keys’ ‘Feelin U, Feelin Me’ into vaporhouse heaven.

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Raär ‘Sometimes I Hear Sirens’ – Astral travel by way of acid techno.

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DJ Boring ‘Sunday Avenue’ – The beauty of distortion meets the beauty of melancholy.

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Ross From Friends ‘Gettin’ It Done’ – House so deep it sounds submerged.

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Demuja ‘I Want You’ – Smothers a 90’s house sample in filters and reverb.

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DJ Seinfeld ‘Time Spent Away From U’ – So distorted and vague it almost coins housegaze as a genre.

Jacques Greene ‘Fall (Baltra Remix)’ – The soundtrack to 21st-century urban melancholy.

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‘LMK’ is the musical equivalent of a booty call — it offers a brief flash of intimacy while avoiding leaving a deep emotional cavern in your life. Kelela’s songs have always had a certain minimalism to them, mostly taking the form of vocals atop what are essentially hip-hop beats. Her voice isn’t interacting with complex jazz-indebted chord sequences but mechanic percussion and heavy bass. You focus on surface level beauty, the thrill of her syrupy voice interacting with those inhuman machines. It’s the beauty of sex that promises nothing else; physicality detached from meaning.

Kelela‘s ‘LMK’ is like the beauty of sex that promises nothing else; physicality detached from meaning.

As far as Kelela tracks go, this is one of the most physically impressive. It does what each of her songs do by presenting little more than atmosphere, bass and drums but each of those elements is sharpened and focused. It establishes a dense air of intrigue enough to reel in even those most puritanically opposed to R&B’s sultry siren-calls. This might be a hook-up but it’s one you’ll be thinking about for a long time.

After being picked as a backup dancer for Kanye West’s ‘Yeezus tour’, Kacy Hill managed to get her music into the hands of one of West’s colleagues and then West himself. The rest is not quite history. Hill’s artist narrative is yet to escape this ‘discovered by Kanye’ tag. The pleasing part of this, though, is that Kacy Hill’s music sounds nothing like Kanye’s. Unlike Travi$ Scott, Chance The Rapper or Future, her music is not tethered to a sound that Ye created. Perhaps this is due to advice she received from West himself. Hill said that part of West’s mentoring of her involved a typical West-ian talk of being true to oneself, and amusingly “a long tangent about how Rihanna and Drake sell more than he does”. Kanye is a strong believer in the individual, in discovering one’s own path. This doesn’t mean, however, that Hill’s music is totally original. In one interview, she states two artists she’d like to work with as James Blake and Florence + The Machine. From what you can hear on ‘Like A Woman’, she already could be. Much of her music sounds like Florence Welch’s swooping melodies atop James Blake’s piano-bass production. Hill channels these two artists into a sort of sex-positive R&B that is certainly not lacking in charm.

With ‘Like A Woman’, Kacy Hill channels James Blake and Florence Welch into a sort of sex-positive R&B that is certainly not lacking in charm

The album is described by Hill as one that tries to confront the contradictions of the way we deal with the nexus of femininity and sexuality in our culture. Hill describes her message as one of embracing herself as “a sexual being and also someone who demands respect”. She seeks to separate female sexuality from shame. It’s a space full of contradictions and grey areas, empowerment and exploitation. The issue with the expression of female sexuality is often contextual, for whose sake is sexuality being expressed for? After all, one person’s masturbatory fantasy is another’s call to arms. Of course, the main issue is that things are seldom solely empowering or degrading but sitting somewhere on a spectrum of the two. In a past life, Kacy Hill was a model for American Apparel, known for their firm belief in the religion of ‘sex sells’. Her unconventional look and sexuality is still on show here but with a larger degree of her own agency.

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The album starts with ‘Like A Woman’, one of its finest songs. Its mixture of bass, piano and soaring vocals is characteristic of the album as a whole. It’s a song that feels almost weightless. Percussion is reduced to nothing more than finger-snaps and a kick drum while Hill’s voice and piano cover most of the audible sonic horizon. Minimalism like this is wisely used throughout this album. Many of the songs sound like Feist re-covering James Blake’s version of ‘Limit To Your Love’. They are built on foundations of little more than sub-bass and light percussion. ‘Cruel’, particularly, is notable here as it starts off as a spectral rhythm & bass track. It then commits an abrupt about-face halfway through as it switches from clipped instrumentation into the open space of a heavily reverberant and delay-ridden guitar. It is like driving out of a long, dark tunnel onto a high mountain road. ‘Hard To Love’ breaks the pattern established by these piano ‘n’ bass songs. It’s a change of gear into the kind of driving synth pop that populated Sky Ferreira’s ‘Night Time, My Time’. It’s the sort of ‘pop’ track that, like Ferreira herself, seems unlikely to ever grace the higher echelons of the Billboard Hot 100. While the first half of the album shines in this way, its formulas start to seem strained by the second half of the album, ‘Arm’s Length’ particularly, is too close to an average Florence knockoff for my liking.

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As you’d expect from an album Kanye was near, the production throughout is fantastic. Kanye himself ‘executive produced’ the album, which could mean anything really. Four of the tracks are produced by DJDS (fka DJ Dodger Stadium). These two LA-based producers recently had a fair amount of input on ‘The Life Of Pablo’ as well as being great house producers in their own right. Their production memorably graces ‘Keep Me Sane’ and ‘Static’. The heavy kick drums that punctuate Hill’s voice in ‘Keep Me Sane’ are particularly interesting. One of the most unique features of the album is its lack of features. These subtle meditations on femininity and love could’ve easily been completely ruined by Future rapping about pussy or Percocet. This gives it an edge over every album that Future (or whoever) will do this over in 2017. This is the sort of insight and originality that gives ‘Like A Woman’ enough of its own identity to be a worthwhile alt-R&B album.

SZA (real name Solána Imani Rowe) deals with the way one’s own anxieties can affect a relationship and how not accepting one’s own flaws can lead to a refusal to believe that another person could ever accept those flaws. It’s a reminder that relationships can exacerbate your anxieties if you merely expect someone else to fix all of your problems without working on them on your own. ‘Supermodel’ opens the album with admissions so vulnerable they feel like therapy set to music. In the song, SZA writes a letter to an ex, telling him she slept with his friend and singing, ‘Why can’t I stay alone just by myself/ Wish I was comfortable just by myself/ But I need you’. With this, Rowe seems to acknowledge the complexities of a relationship in a way that is often missed; she acknowledges her own error while still managing to criticise her partner.

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At various points, SZA worries about how her clinginess and her body might lead to her partner seeking others. She sings, ‘I’m sorry I’m not more attractive/ I’m sorry I’m not more ladylike’. It’s a reminder that relationships often involve us trying to live up to society’s problematic version of how we should look or act. Struggles to attain your gender’s stereotype are magnified by relationships where we typically idealise a gender stereotype. Rowe sings of looking to be what her other wants: ‘I wish I was a normal girl/ how do I be your baby’. These are the sort of issues we can understand intellectually as problematic but still yearn to fit in. At least when you’re single you can face less responsibility for your inevitably problematic behaviour. It’s less likely to directly hurt anyone or to hang over you. Each member of a couple’s insecurities can rub up against the others in a relationship causing even greater friction.

Thematic analysis aside, SZA’s music has matured and come closer to rivalling the high bar set by her TDE labelmates (Kendrick, Schoolboy Q, etc.). Her vocal delivery throughout the album is brilliantly idiosyncratic. Her voice jumps to unusual intervals while she incorporates rap-like flows into her animated singing voice. She has progressed hugely since her mixtape ‘Z’, where she struggled to have a distinct identity. ‘Childs Play’, from that album, saw her outshined on her own track by Chance The Rapper (who, to be fair, is very hard to share a track with). She mostly struggled to break away from the anonymity of the world of the R&B hook singer. Since then, SZA has found a way to make herself stand out in an R&B world that has rarely been so full of unique talents. The beats are an enjoyable take on alt-R&Bs blend of up-to-date electronic and hip-hop textures with just a touch of older jazz or soul sounds. Muted late-night textures are generally left in favour of bright pop tones and major keys. A particular standout beat-wise in ‘Doves In The Wind’ with its 90s-ish breakbeat adorned by an off-kilter synth and a well-used sample from Redman’s ‘Let’s Get Dirty’.

While I do enjoy ‘CTRL’, I’d say much of it is merely strong. The pop direction of single ‘Drew Barrymore’ appeals less to me than the dreaminess of ‘Prom’ or the gospel-ish harmonies of ‘Weekend’. Surprisingly, the most successful of the guest rappers is not TDE labelmates Kendrick or Isaiah Rashad but Travi$ Scott, whose autotuned croon fits snugly into ‘Love Galore’.

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By an odd coincidence this piece has been written as my own anxieties have been flaring up. In the depressed states that often follow this lack of confidence, writing can seem like a pretty pointless process. The song that has hit closest to home for me has been ‘20 Something’, a song about the difficulties of figuring out your own life. It’s likely that after ‘Z’, SZA herself did a lot of soul-searching before reaching the point of greater maturity that this work represents. While your 20s are often romanticised by older people, they’re also incredibly difficult as your freedom becomes daunting rather than exciting and you yearn for a sense of stability. ‘Ctrl’ manages to be a remarkably vulnerable album in a genre that specialises in that openness.