Music for Giving a Crap About Other People
Deliriously strange club music, in-the-moment ambience, a knotted-up singer-songwriter, and more.
Welcome to the latest installment of Five Albums, the weekly feature for paid Hearing Things subscribers in which we discuss a handful of new records catching our attention. As music journalists, the question we get most often from friends is how to stay on top of what’s happening now. This is our attempt to provide a practical answer.
As we were compiling this, news broke that neo-soul great D'Angelo had died at the terribly young age of 51, from pancreatic cancer. We are gutted, and will have more on that in the coming days.
Our picks this week are musically disparate—a 2010s blog-hewned rap group making good on the promise of their origins, an ambient improviser inspired by Japanese environmental music, a quintet of punks throwing bows with sax solos, and more. But one trait they all share is that they care about the humans of the world and express that in ways that enrich our addled souls.
