File under: Unnerving, serrated-edged, spacious art-punks who love dissonance and contrast

For fans of: Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Sonic Youth, Arab Strap, Xiu Xiu, The Birthday Party

From: Omaha, Nebraska

Personae: Jack Begley (guitar, vocals), Noah Sterba (guitar, vocals), Jeff Sedrel (bass), Kevin Donahue (drums)

Yuppies took a very long time to make their first album — the band formed in 2007 and has released a handful of singles and a split EP over the past few years, but their self-titled, full-length debut has just appeared on Parquet Courts’ label Dull Tools. It’s a terrifically unsettling record, flowing from quiet, spacious passages (with main vocalist Jack Begley muttering or chanting lyrics that sound like every phrase is in a separate set of quotation marks) to out-of-control punk slaloms like “Hitchin a Ride,” which Noah Sterba screams so hard his voice cracks. And the band’s years of playing together are evident in the way they run every song into the next, without a pause.

There’s a lot of history audible on Yuppies — the atonal hammer-and-release textures and shambling rhythms of some of these songs echo the late ’70s no wave scene, and Begley and Sterba’s voices recall the Midwestern punk rock of the ’80s. But it’s also an assured, startling take on the psychogeography of the Dust Belt landscape that spawned the band. “All right, all right, we’re going for a ride, whether you like it or not,” Begley snaps at the beginning of “A Ride,” and that’s Yuppies’ attitude, right there.

eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked with Sterba as the band geared up for a month-long tour.

On the band’s origins in high school corridors:

Me, Kevin and Jack all grew up together. In high school, I was writing songs, and Jack was writing songs, and we knew Kevin played drums, so we started playing together. Our earliest stuff was very primitive and…”young.” We were learning to play our instruments as we were playing songs. As we’ve gone on, we’ve kind of gotten more competent. We graduated from high school in 2007, and then in probably 2010, Jeff joined — we’d just been guitars and drums, and we thought, “Oh man — we gotta have some low end!”

On geographical separation and making their first album after six years:

Jeff lives in Virginia now, and Jack lived in St. Louis for a year or two. We’ve only had two or three years of being in the same city as a band. But once we got Jeff, we couldn’t play with anyone else. Even if after this tour we can’t play for another year, we won’t stop being a band — we’ll just kind of try to work with what we have and where we are.

The album’s definitely been a long time coming. One or two of the songs on the album we’ve had for four or five years; there are a few that we’ve thrown out, then reclaimed and put on the record. Most of the songs flow together, but I’d almost say that’s not something we consciously did — we’ve had a lot of space between times when we could practice, so the songs form their relationship with each other. Which is pretty cool.

On their nonstop live sets and how that translated to the recording:

Our shows are high-energy and anxiety-ridden. There are a lot of moments of chaos. We don’t take any breaks between songs, although we’ve got a bunch of different sets. We don’t have very long attention spans; we try to push ourselves to do new things at every show. The first side of the album we did in one long take. We recorded it live except for the vocals, and we thought, “This could take all day if we keep fucking it up 15 minutes in,” but we got the whole thing in one take. The second side we did in two parts — the first few songs run together, and then the last two.

On “What’s That?”:

That was one of the coolest songs to be a part of. We never talked about the writing of that song, we just started playing, said, “That’s kinda cool!,” practiced it again and started playing it at shows. When it started out, it was so different from how it turned out on the record. We never once talked about the structure of the song until the day before we recorded it. It was a bizarre process to be part of, watching this thing form itself.

On what they do when they’re not being Yuppies:

Kevin and I play with Simon Joyner — I’ve been playing with him for three or four years, Kevin just joined the group this year. We just made a new record and it’s awesome — more of an experimental record than Simon’s ever done. Simon lent me a space with an 8-track, and I recorded a solo album where I play all the instruments — that was released on Unread Records. Jack had a solo tape close to a year ago. And Kevin and I work at a diner that our friend owns in Omaha. Jack also works in a restaurant, and Jeff works in a restaurant in Richmond.

On the band’s favorite reactions to their music:

I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after a show and say, “It was good, but it made me feel really weird.” To be able to conjure up an emotion in someone, just from the sounds we’re making — to be able to create a feeling and have them really feel it too — that’s so flattering to me.

eMusic’s Tobi Vail caught up with Maricich over the phone to discuss the New York City art mafia, hugging the audience and squeezing her heart into a meat grinder.

What has changed for The Blow since you put out Paper Television in 2006?

[In 2006] I lived in Portland and worked with Jona Bechtolt [of Yacht] and then I moved [to NYC] with Melissa Dyne. Working with Melissa is super different because we’re girlfriends — also because we’re girls, and girls communicate differently on creative projects. We talk about everything. My experience with boys is like, “I’m just gonna do it and it’ll be cool.” At least with us, we like exploring, philosophically and theoretically, all the options of how things could be —we’re as interested in the process as we are in the outcome. [Melissa] hasn’t done albums before. She’s a sound artist and works with physics and sound waves in her installation work, and she used to play cello. We treat it as a total experiment, and sometimes we make one version of a song and go, “Huh, what if we try it completely New Wave this time?” and redo it. So it’s a process of building models. Sometimes we build one model and then we look at it and say, “Let’s completely renovate it and try it in a different way,” as opposed to being like, “OK, we’re gonna make an album and we’re gonna go about it the most direct and businesslike manner.” Our endurance for working with the process and playing around with it is vast.

Can you talk about the technical process of arranging the songs electronically?

We didn’t feel committed to a particular identity as music makers. IYou’re starting with the void. We both really tripped out on that, the fact that you can put any sound from any source anywhere. We knew we didn’t want to take the sounds out of a computer program, so we sampled different live instruments and perfected the samples so they sounded really clean. We would use generic computer sounds to make a beat and then find sounds to replace so that it [sounded] three-dimensional and rich. We inherited a couple of really weird synthesizers and Melissa just played around with them and tried to find the weirdest things she could.

How has your approach to performance changed over the years?

Music audiences can be so unruly, like a mob. We are learning how to sculpt the mob — make connections and take [the audience] to interesting places. During the live show, [Melissa] performs on a riser that’s at the back of the room in front of the sound engineer and I perform on the main stage and we have the crowd in between us. On my stage, there’s generally nothing besides myself and maybe some lights. The live show is us just hugging the audience in between us. We use that as a platform to see what cool stuff we can make happen. Melissa has a really strong role, but doesn’t want to be the one everyone is looking at all the time. We’re both working the room. She is making the room super high-fidelity intimate; she sets it up so it sounds really good. Little modules of sound are penetrating as deep into people’s ears as they can and opening people up a lot — and then she’s playing the electronic instruments — like manipulating samples and fucking with delays.

How would you describe your music to your cool aunt?

I come from a history of being super influenced by Kimya Dawson, but over the years, and in the process of making this record, we’ve both leaned more toward the experimentation of the ’70s — Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Brian Eno are big influences on this album. Also Bjork — she kind of led the way for talking about emotions in abstract and really intimate ways in her lyrics, not even rhyming sometimes, just straight-up describing. But the impetus from where I started from was definitely Kimya Dawson — the idea that you just pick up your guitar and you don’t have any resources and you don’t need any because your emotional honesty is enough to form a bond with the listener. She’s a really awesome songwriter, she can play guitar and she’s really perceptive.

But the swashbuckling adventure story of what it was like for us to make this record is that we basically just decided to squeeze our hearts into a meat grinder and see what came out. It’s still hard for us to describe the music. We didn’t think of about a genre or a style until after we were done. We were [essentially] jumping out of a plane or, like, taking pictures of ourselves falling and then seeing what they looked like. Style-wise we have no idea what this is, but it is emotionally resonant and honest so we feel like we are on track.

Are you still involved in a DIY or any kind of community in New York?

Community is hard to come by in New York. Everybody doesn’t live in the same neighborhood, so you have to unite along events, and the events we found ourselves uniting around are mostly within the queer art scene — what I call the “lesbian mafia of New York,” or I guess the “lesbian-trans-queer art mafia.” They don’t call themselves that, but that’s how I’ve thought about them. It’s a scene where they were like, “We need to make space for ourselves,” and really went about doing it and were successful and smart. To me, that is DIY: They didn’t see themselves represented in the world they were a part of — the art world — and were like, “OK, we’re gonna make ourselves be the people you wanna know.” That is super inspiring.

So what’s next?

The process of how we’ve been able to make sounds has arched through the sky and we’re watching it morph and change and grow. It’s like we wanted to create a planet but then it took massive time and energy and force just to get the materials and raw elements. And then they develop to a certain point and then you stop it and box it up and send it out to people. But that planet is still developing and growing and new things are evolving, because as we play the samples, looping and combining them with sounds from other songs and putting them all together — it’s all still changing. It’s super fertile. After the album was done, we got way better at it. It’s a growing living thing, it’s not a product. Now that things are all greased up and moving, we’re just gonna keep recording and capture more of it.

Which is not to say they’ve forsaken their roots. They’ve still got punk attitude and country hearts, but the music on Blur the Line feels, on the whole, more thoughtful and controlled. The new confidence might explain why they’ve also decided to drop the shared “Darlin’” last name, embracing instead their real identities (Jessi Zazu, Nikki Kvarnes and Lynwood Regensburg) as opposed to the characters that had served as a sort of protection for so long.

While the Darlins were at a tour stop in Florida, eMusic’s Ashley Melzer spoke with founding guitarist Nikki Kvarnes about the Blur the Line and the band’s new attitude of self-acceptance.

How long after Screws Get Loose did you start thinking about the next album?

Immediately, I guess. We’re kind of always working on stuff. We set up a chunk of time over the winter where we were just focusing on that and we weren’t touring. But yeah, that’s something we’re always kind of working on.

Did you go in with certain ideas?

It kind of all just fell into place with what was going on in our lives collectively, me and Jessi especially.

Like what?

Just time to reflect on the past couple of years. Like, actually spend some time with ourselves and dive deep into some stuff that’s really personal. This is the first time — well, not the first time, but it was a different kind of way of writing the album. Jessi would work on her songs and I would work on my songs, lyrically, and then we’d come together and go, “Well, what about changing this?” or, “What do you mean by this?” It was just a different approach than trying to write really personal songs with another songwriter.

There does seem to be a level of patience about this new record. Is this the first work you’ve done with Roger Moutenout?

He was suggested to us by our manager a while ago. We did a 7″ with him and we did a couple other recordings with him. He is just a joy to work with. He’s helped us grow a whole lot. We love the studio. We love working with him. So we were all about working on the album with him and trying something different, working with a different producer, ’cause we’re kind of a different band now too.

What has that transition been like?

It’s been really good. It’s been gradual. Adrian started playing with us right before we went into the studio for a couple months, just fleshing out the songs and trying to tighten things up, talk about all the parts that we’re doing. Also, this is a transition because [in the past] we’ve always switched instruments. It’s always kind of been up in the air who plays what role. This is the first record where Jessi and I are playing guitar, we sing our parts, Lynnwood plays drums and Adrian plays bass. It’s always been kind of a clusterfuck of “Well, what do you want to do?” and on the last album my arm was broken, so I wasn’t able to play on the album.

Is there a reason why you wanted to streamline that way?

Yeah, it’s made us a way more solid band. It’s more defined what everyone does. It gives time to focus on exactly what it is that you’re doing and giving yourself a specific sound.

In looking back at your press over the years, you’re constantly being pigeonholed as “wild women” or reckless. How do you feel about that?

I mean, I understand why, because when we first started out we were really wild and crazy. We were just so excited to be in a band, we were just going all the way, all the time. There was some focus on music, but I think the performance and engaging people was what we were concentrating on, whereas now it’s a little bit more introverted. We still really want to interact with audience members and we want it to be an experience. And, whatever, people can think whatever they want about us, but they’ll know in the future what this album is and what the band is, and that it’s not just, “Let’s get drunk and party. These are a bunch of fun, silly songs.” There’s some depth behind it and we’re exposing ourselves a little bit more instead of these characters we’ve built over the years.

Listening to the record, I almost felt a level of regret in regard to that. Do you think that’s a theme? Like the song “Optimist” seems to have that as a crux of it.

Jessi wrote that, but no, no, not regret. It’s less regret and maybe just more awareness of how people perceive you. It’s not a song about regret at all. It’s about being an optimist and you realize that maybe not everyone’s as optimistic about what you’re endeavors are or, I don’t know, getting a hard time because you’re doing what you want to be doing. This is really broad — I’m being vague about it because I don’t want to describe a song that she wrote, because I’m sure she has way more to say about it than I do.

Well, which of your songs on the album do you think captures that theme of identity most for you?

Each one of the songs are reflections of who we are and sides of ourselves. “In the Wilderness,” that’s this idea of people being wild, but it’s deeper than that. It’s more about struggling to want to be in a mysterious place, or the depths of your subconscious and how hard it is to grasp imagination for this generation. I want people to know there’s this other side of me that’s very in touch with, I don’t know, the animalistic nature of man and woman and the facades that everyone puts up. That’s kind of a representation of the album: the man and woman and the black and white and the opposites of everything, and creating a balance between the two.

Right, I think there’s a part of the album that’s a voice for the misfits, people on the fringe. Or maybe just people who are comfortable with sexuality and vulnerability.

Absolutely, because there has to be a balance. You can’t just be this overly confident person throwing all your ideas out there and being like, “This is the way things are.” You have to be humble and you have to be vulnerable in order to grow and to be optimistic and able to just expose yourself as a whole human being.

Were you worried about the way the cover of the album art would be received at all?

Oh, no. I mean, there’s a reason why we put it out there. We feel like that represents what this album is and who we are and to break down that whole like idea of people pigeonholing us, to just be like, “This is us. This is a part of us and this is us all together and this is what the band is now.”

What do you want a listener to take away, to hear in the difference from Screws Get Loose to Blur the Line?

Maybe just kind of identifying with themselves, being like, “Whoa, I feel that way about myself, and I didn’t even really know I felt that way about myself.” There’s a lot of self-realization in this album on both sides, me and Jessi. The songs we wrote are like, “This is OK. I’m going to show my beauty, all my ugliness and all my fears and all my strengths,” and maybe just for someone to realize that it’s okay to be fucked up, but also be really strong and intelligent, simultaneously. I guess, just self-acceptance.

File under: Dour but hooky jangle-pop with a decidedly Anglophilic edge

For fans of: The Smiths, The Housemartins, The Lucksmiths, The Go-Betweens

From: Brooklyn, by way of Florida, by way of Connecticut

Personae: Andrew Marr (vocals/guitar), Jared O'Connel (bass), John Barinaga (guitar), Jake Beal (drums)

Ski Lodge’s debut Big Heart opens with a jangle and a pout, a tumble of giddy guitars, a handclap drum track and frontman Andrew Marr sighing, “You don’t have to be like me/ You don’t have to make the same mistakes.” And while the go-to easy critical reference point for this Brooklyn band has been another band with a Marr in it, Big Heart is more than a mere Manchester mimeograph. Its songs sway and sashay, guitars wreathing the edges like fine lace on velvet shirt sleeves. But all that frilliness masks a bruised heart: Throughout Big Heart, Marr laments his inability to connect with lovers and friends and his frustrations with his own shortcomings.

eMusic’s editor-in-chief met up with Marr at a New York coffee shop to talk about Florida, emotional alienation and the perils of teenage drug culture.

On the early influence of the Grateful Dead:

I was in a jam band in high school. We did a lot of Grateful Dead and Phish songs. I started to sing a little bit for the first time in that band. I still respect the Grateful Dead. I was obsessed with them for a while, then I went through a phase where I started listening to more indie music and thought, “Well, I can’t really like the Grateful Dead and Phish if I’m liking this other music.” I’m kind of getting over that now, and realizing that they were great songwriters, and that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. I think a lot of the distaste for those bands has to do with the type of people who like that music and not the music itself. I mean, have you ever been to a Phish show? It’s such a ridiculous scene.

On the downside of growing up in a wealthy community:

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. It’s pretty suburban — it’s about 45 minutes from New York. It’s a pretty wealthy town — that’s usually why people have heard of it, though my family wasn’t super wealthy. It was a great place to grow up, but it’s kind of fucked up also. Kids there just have access to a lot of money. There are a lot of drugs, and that had a big impact on me. High school basically revolved around doing drugs and trying to do as little school work as possible. I was fully in it. I started by just experimenting [with drugs] with friends in middle school — a lot of my friends had older brothers, so it was just out of curiosity mainly. But then I just fell into that group of people, and that was just what we did. It got bad. I crashed a couple cars, so my parents kind of caught on after that. [Pause.] They were their cars.

On being exiled in Florida:

I went there for rehab — I think a lot of people end up there for the same reason — and then I just got stuck there. I started in Del Rey Beach and then moved a little north to the West Palm Beach area. I was there for four years. I didn’t really like anything about it, to be honest. I just kind of stuck around because I couldn’t really get my shit together. A year or two before I moved up here I finally got a band together and we played out a little bit down there. The scene there, there’s just not much going on. Touring bands don’t really visit there much. Miami has a pretty good venue, but it’s just way out of the way from where I was. I saw Radiohead while I was down there, but not really much else.

On his slow departure from the jam-band scene:

A friend of mine played [Death Cab for Cutie's] “I Will Follow You into the Dark” on guitar one time, and he was singing it, and I was like, “That’s an awesome song — who sings that?” And he told me. And I got really into Plans and Transatlanticism, and I listened to them a lot. That was the first band in that world. I got into the Shins right around that same time, too. So then when I was in Florida, I was writing a lot of Death Cab-inspired songs on the piano and just recording them into my laptop. At some point I was just like, “I want to start writing on the guitar — I’m kind of missing this whole other feel.” So I started messing around with it on my own and wrote songs based on my ability. As I’ve gotten better on the guitar, my songs have gotten a little more advanced than they were initially.

On songwriting as biography, and therapy:

None of the songs on Big Heart were narratives about other people. I’m more of a biographer. I get these little snippets of ideas and I try to piece them all together. “Anything to Hurt You” is just about being a bad influence on somebody else — looking at my mistakes, and saying to someone else that they don’t have to go through the same shit. And the title track is about a death, a figurative death. I’ve always had a hard time connecting with people — both knowing what other people are thinking and telling people what I’m thinking. Songwriting is a way for me to speculate on what relationships are really like, or what another person’s intentions were when I really have no idea. So the title track is a personal song about my inability to open up to people — in relationships, specifically. My girlfriend used to say I had no heart. And she was fucking around with me, but that’s what inspired me to think, “What does it feel like to not have a heart? And what does it feel like to open yourself up but then have your heart crushed?” That song for me is about the struggle between closing yourself off to everything versus opening yourself up and dealing with pain. I’ve gotten better — I’m going to therapy, and I’ve gotten better at telling people what’s going on in my life, but before that I was totally closed off. So I think songwriting is a useful tool for me. It’s part of my process.

A songwriting comeback that's simultaneously over and underdressed

“He’s so talented he can do anything!” That’s the gist of what’s typically said about Justin Timberlake, and for the most part it’s absolutely true. He’s an exceptionally nimble and unfettered singer/dancer, an extraordinary mimic with a drummer’s sense of timing. These gifts have helped him tremendously in comedy as well as drama, and despite the increasing maturity of his music and acting pursuits, he hasn’t let go of his ample boyish charm: This ex-Mouseketeer, ex-’N Sync-er still radiates mischievous yet all-American fun. And unlike so many stars who attain thoroughly mainstream saturation, he takes genuine risks that have actually increased his popularity: His last album, 2007′s FutureSex/LoveSounds, packs way more sonic, rhythmic and compositional quirks than most records that sell more than 10 million copies.

These are the stats that have empowered Timberlake to make a supremely — and, at times, foolishly — confident 20/20 Experience. The first of two full albums released six months apart is 70 minutes but only 10 songs long. Most are straightforward from a songwriting standpoint: “Tunnel Vision,” “That Girl” and several others see-saw back and forth between two chords for extended and sometimes relatively static periods with minimal contrasts between verses and choruses. But most are also complex in arrangement and texture, adding and subtracting rhythm and tempo as they smoothly groove along. Although some like “Don’t Hold the Wall” accelerate into dance tracks, the overriding vibe is more bedroom/strip club than dancefloor, as if Timberlake envisioned a Prince album almost entirely comprised of deep cut ballads. Aside from the singles “Suit & Tie” and “Mirrors,” which both draw from the opposing worlds of blatant chart pop and PBR&B, there’s little indication that anyone tried terribly hard to write hooks. Instead, this feels like a deservedly rich guy’s willfully anti-commercial fantasy of bohemian retro-futurist soul mother lode.

As such, Frank Ocean’s Channel ORANGE looms large over 20/20. But where Ocean employed complex chords and fearlessly soul-searched, this uncomplicatedly happy guy simply riffs on sex, status and his favorite records. He’s still in cahoots with Timbaland, the super-producer who practically invented these lurching, squelchy electro slow jams decades ago with Aaliyah and Ginuwine. Symphonic string swells and big band horn blasts may punctuate the otherwise slinky likes of “Pusher Love Girl,” but Timbaland doesn’t take Timberlake too far from Southern hip-hop: 20/20 is mixed to favor jeep-bumping bass that tends to blur the tony details that have been showcased far more successfully in the entertainer’s televised performances of this material. As such, it already feels more like a stepping-stone for multi-million-dollar tours, endorsement deals and general world domination than an entirely satisfying autonomous listening experience. Suit and tie aside, it’s simultaneously over and underdressed.

The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2 combines outtakes with newly-recorded material. That suggests that much of 2 of 2 is not a whole lot different from what came immediately before it, and in one way that’s true: Also created with Timbaland and his studio sidekick Jerome “J-Roc” Harmon, 2 of 2 is heavy on protracted, deluxe arrangements just like its predecessor. Featuring a slightly shorter average composition length, it is nevertheless still an album of jumbo cuts: 74-and-a-half minutes distributed among 12 tracks. Be sure to wait for “Pair of Wings,” the blissful acoustic ballad that’s hidden at the end of “Not a Bad Thing.”

But as its first single, the breezy, Off the Wall-flavored disco jam “Take Back the Night” suggests, 2 of 2 is faster and more dancefloor-friendly than much of the first 20/20, and therefore strikes with far greater instant impact: Opener “Gimme What I Don’t Know (I Want)” proves Timberlake remains the only superstar who can spit human beat-boxing ticks and tocks while keeping his tongue firmly in his cheek. He’s only a randy euphemism away from his SNL self-parodying self. A song about putting on a private show for one’s paramour, “Cabaret” boasts the naughtiest, most blasphemous line he’s ever dared sing: “I got you saying ‘Jesus’ so much it’s like we’re lying in a manger.”

The big difference is that these rigorous and rhythmic cuts are better suited the substantial song size: The longest one, “True Blood,” pumps from start to finish with a slew of breakdowns, buildups, contractions and expansions. Aside from the hard-rocking grinder “Only When I Walk Away,” there are few surprises. “Amnesia” has a sweet symphonic left-turn after the song’s main body fades — just like some of the first half of 20/20. Mostly, this is just Timberlake and Timbaland doing what they do best: Laying down the heavenly beats, ramping up the devilish charm and trouncing most mainstream contenders.

Faster and more dancefloor-friendly than much of its predecessor

When Justin Timberlake’s last album, The 20/20 Experience, arrived last March, it struck many as both over- and underwhelming. Lengthy, with few songs under six minutes, but shorter on hooks and forward propulsion than much of the singer’s catalog, this languid, elaborate album has, over the last few months, aged rather well. It’s a meticulous record, rich with atmosphere, one that reveals the subtleties of its sensuality with repeated plays.

Now comes The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2, a sequel that combines outtakes with newly-recorded material. That suggests that much of 2 of 2 is not a whole lot different from what came immediately before it, and in one way that’s true: Also created with Timbaland and his studio sidekick Jerome “J-Roc” Harmon, 2 of 2 is heavy on protracted, deluxe arrangements just like its predecessor. Featuring a slightly shorter average composition length, 2 of 2 is nevertheless still an album of jumbo cuts: The standard edition features 74-and-a-half minutes distributed among 12 tracks. Be sure to wait for “Pair of Wings,” the blissful acoustic ballad that’s hidden at the end of “Not a Bad Thing.”

But as its first single, the breezy, Off the Wall-flavored disco jam “Take Back the Night” suggests, 2 of 2 is faster and more dancefloor-friendly than much of the first 20/20, and therefore strikes with far greater instant impact: Opener “Gimme What I Don’t Know (I Want)” proves Timberlake remains the only superstar who can spit human beat-boxing ticks and tocks while keeping his tongue firmly in his cheek. He’s only a randy euphemism away from his SNL self-parodying self. A song about putting on a private show for one’s paramour, “Cabaret” boasts the naughtiest, most blasphemous line he’s ever dared sing: “I got you saying ‘Jesus’ so much it’s like we’re lying in a manger.”

The big difference is that these rigorous and rhythmic cuts are better suited the substantial song size: The longest one, “True Blood,” pumps from start to finish with a slew of breakdowns, buildups, contractions and expansions. Aside from the hard-rocking grinder “Only When I Walk Away,” there are few surprises. “Amnesia” has a sweet symphonic left-turn after the song’s main body fades — just like some of the original 20/20. Mostly, this is just Timberlake and Timbaland doing what they do best: Laying down the heavenly beats, ramping up the devilish charm, and trouncing most mainstream contenders.

Spilling over with crisp, witty rock songs, punctuated by bonus noise doodles

Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have now been recording as Quasi for 20 years and nine albums, outlasting nearly all of their contemporaries, which is astonishing for a band whose main lyrical themes are indignation and self-laceration. They’re still enormously creatively fertile as a duo (a format they’ve returned to after a few years with bassist Joanna Bolme) — Mole City is spilling over with crisp, witty rock songs, punctuated by bonus noise doodles. Weiss is a pile-driving drummer most of the time (she tones it down when the songs call for it, but it’s really fun when she cuts loose), and Coomes favors super-fuzzed-out instrumental sounds and massive riffs to set off his weedy smart-alec voice. And they’re as locked into each other’s sense of rhythm as any two musicians can be: Either “Blasted” deliberately includes an incredibly weird metrical shift or both of them impulsively threw in an extra half-beat at the same moment.

Quasi’s performance aesthetic is punk rock all the way, but one weird and wonderful thing about them is that their songwriting is totally grounded in the pre-punk era (the ending of “See You on Mars” is boater-and-cane music-hall, and the singalong tune of “Bedbug Town” could have appeared on an old Kinks record). Mole City reaches back to the early glam and metal era for some of its sounds — there’s a lot of T. Rex and Ziggy Stardust, and a little bit of Black Sabbath, in its grooves. As usual, though, Coomes and Weiss’s harshest critiques are reserved for their own impulses. One of the album’s centerpieces is an unhinged Big Star pastiche called “Nostalgia Kills,” and the climactic “New Western Way” skewers the culture of a generation raised on “Nestlé Quik mother’s milk/ Mickey Mouse plastic spoon.”

Creating another facet of their constantly evolving identity

If 2012′s Divine Providence was Deer Tick’s last-call bar-romp, Negativity is the Rhode Island quintet’s bleak morning-after. Much more introspective and subdued, Negativity largely ditches the group’s trademark drunken swagger for emotional and musical depth.

Singer John McCauley wrote Negativity in the course of a year in which he suffered a broken engagement and his father’s incarceration for tax fraud, all while alternating between smoking cocaine and trying to clean up. As such, the lyrical content of Negativity is appropriately abject: The quasi-ballad “Mr. Sticks” addresses McCauley’s dad and “The Wall,” “Just Friends” and single “The Dream’s in the Ditch” all depict various broken relationships.

The album is also the most musical in Deer Tick’s nine-year career, as the band employs keys and more melodic guitar lines for a fuller sound. Negativity is also punctuated by horns courtesy of Austin, Texass’ 11-piece Grupo Fantasmo on songs like “Trash” and “The Rock.” The emphasis on technicality and sobriety, unfortunately, take away some of what made Deer Tick special to begin with. They deserve credit for creating another facet of their constantly evolving identity; it’s just a bummer that negativity isn’t as much fun.

Rock's instrumentation, chopped so finely it stutters like R&B

The Los Angeles sister band HAIM — their last name, one that rhymes with “time” — employ rock’s instrumentation, but chop it up so finely it stutters like R&B. They’re not the first to do this, of course, but HAIM’s blend, a mix of bright, brittle percussiveness and soft sisterly harmonies, feels unique, a sound that’s both nervous and resolute. It feels like youth, that knowledge that everything’s already been done before, but that you’ve nevertheless got to make your own mark. Providing most of the instrumentation as well as the singing, Este, Danielle and Alana Haim do exactly that.

There are other precedents to HAIM — Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac in the precision of the production and the assuredness of the hooks; the sunniness of the Mamas and the Papas or Wilson Phillips. But because the songwriting is as strong as the sisters’ delivery is nonchalant, there’s an immediate and assured identity here that’s striking, and it transcends its many influences.

Nearly every cut exudes the confidence of a single: There have already been four of them, and that doesn’t even count “If I Could Change Your Mind,” a soft-rock plea punctuated by handclaps and hi-hat from the disco gods. And yet there’s plenty of weirdness too: “My Song 5″ features not just Tom Waits-goes-dubstep moves and a righteous double-tracked fuzz bass solo, but also super-distorted virtual trombones that essentially fart along with the vocal. Wilson Philips never thought of that.

Moby first broke through in 1991 as a New York club DJ (he’d been a regular at the multi-level space Mars, in the Meatpacking District, where he’d play everything from hip-hop to dancehall reggae as well as house music and early techno) who’d scored a novelty hit: “Go,” which utilized Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme. Within two years of “Go” hitting the UK Top 10, the small, geeky multi-instrumentalist was signed to a major label (Elektra) and issuing critically-acclaimed titles (1993′s Move EP and 1995′s Everything Is Wrong) that bridged the rave underground and the pop mainstream. Dance purists blanched at first (and pop fans shrugged, at least in the States), but by 1999 — after a detour into loud rock with 1997′s divisive Animal Rights — Moby had perfected the amalgam with Play, a warm recasting of downtempo beats, sampled blues vocals, and inviting instrumentation that sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Since Play, Moby has settled into a comfortable niche as both a dance-music forefather (he frequently DJs at festivals around the world) and singer-songwriter whose songs are often sung by others. That’s particularly the case on the songful new Innocents, which pairs Moby not only with his first outside producer — Mark “Spike” Stent, who worked on Massive Attack’s early records as well as, in more recent years, Lady Gaga, Usher and No Doubt — but a half-dozen vocal guests of note: Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, Mark Lanegan, Damien Jurado, Cold Specks, Skylar Grey and Imyang Bassey, Moby’s longtime touring vocalist. eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos spoke with Moby about the new album, the shrinking of New York studio space, and L.A.’s confusing topography.

Innocents is the first album you’ve made with an outside producer. Did that change how you wrote?

I’ve been working on music the same way for the past 30 years. I go into my studio and I play guitar or play keyboards or play around with different equipment and I just keep writing until I end up with something that I like. Sometimes I’ll read interviews with musicians who will talk about an erratically different way in which they approach making one record different from the next. I wish I had those interesting stories, because it’s really just me alone in my studio with a bunch of weird equipment, and it has been for quite a long time.

Because you were recording with someone else, did you treat your initial recordings as demos?

Yeah. I would go into my studio and spend about six months coming up with a bunch of ideas. When I first started meeting with Spike I had around 200 ideas, but clearly they weren’t 200 good ideas. We focused on probably 30-40 of those ideas and then we started reaching out to people who we thought might be interesting to have on the record. I got really lucky, because only a couple of people didn’t get back to us.

When did you begin to meet with Mark “Spike” Stent?

I think a year ago. To be honest with you, my grasp of time is kind of not that great. Like, the other day I was signing something and I had to put the date in there and I felt like the Absent-Minded Professor because I couldn’t remember what year it was.

[Stent] afforded me a degree of objectivity and perspective that I normally don’t have. Your perspective on what you’ve written really changes qualitatively the moment you share it with someone else. That for me was the main benefit of working with the producer is having this regained objectivity.

What led you to work together? Did you meet socially before this?

I’ve been signed to Mute Records for a while. Daniel Miller [the owner of] Mute Records, kept working with Spike and Alan Moulder, who did a lot of records. I really liked the records that Spike had worked on, some of the early stuff like the KLF and Massive Attack and Björk, which is ironic because a lot of people who want to work with him are interested in more of his pop productions [including Beyoncé and Madonna]. In turn, I think the reason he wanted to work with me is because I wasn’t interested in making a big pop record. I wanted to make something more lo-fi and weird.

You take a couple of guys in their 40s who spent most of their lives in studios, and the first thing they start talking about is their favorite weird old equipment. I have a slightly compulsive collection of tape delays — about eight of them. None of them work particularly well. You end up almost having an orchestra of tape delays. At one point the record was sounding very, very clean. So we ended up spending a couple of days putting the record through some sort of processing that would make these clean recordings sound more grimy and characterly.

The odd thing about…I would almost call it the new way of making records, because in the old days things were more compartmentalized. There was a writing period, followed by a recording period, followed by a tracking period: You’d have the drummer come in and spend a week doing drums, and then the bass, and then the vocals. Now you keep writing and recording and adding things to songs and playing around with stuff until things are done. The mixing process, rather than being a separate, added process, is almost a continuation of the creative process.

What changed the most from your initial idea of what the album might be and what it became?

When I first started thinking about this album I wanted it to be an underground, lo-fi dance record. Spike got me to change the focus to a more lo-fi melodic album. He said that when he listens to my records, what resonates with him is the more melodic music. He is the one who pushed it to become more like a singer-songwriter album. “Don’t Love Me” and “A Long Time” originally were very grimy, minimal dance tracks. He pushed me to give them more an emotional quality and more interesting chord structures. Those are the two holdovers from what the album was originally meant to be.

What lo-fi dance records inspired that initial idea?

Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English; a lot of early electronic music like Silver Apples and Suicide; Manu DiBango; a lot of Jamaican dance music and African dance music; and especially things that Wally Badarou played on. He’s one of my favorite musicians of all time. He’s the unsung hero of so many dance records. And a lot of New York records made in the early ’80s: Liquid Liquid, ESG, the Bush Tetras, Medium Medium, Konk. Just the records I grew up on. I’ve rediscovered them.

It’s funny — one of the people who helped me rediscover them was my old assistant Alex [Frankel]. He’s now in the band the Holy Ghost!, on DFA. When he was working with me, I would hang out with him and his friends, and they were all in their early 20s, and their favorite records were my favorite records when I was in my teens in the early ’80s. They kind of reintroduced me to the kind of music I loved. He was my assistant at the time [of 2008's Last Night]. I was playing the tracks I was working on to him. Every now and then he would get excited about something, and that was when I knew it was probably worth pursuing.

You moved to L.A. three years ago. Do you approach music differently there than you did in New York?

I think so. I have a sort of poetic-philosophical understanding of how living in L.A. has affected how I make music, and also a very practical, direct way. The direct way is college radio. Living in New York, I mainly listened to music that I owned. New York has good college radio, but terrible broadcast signal strength. Whereas in L.A., there’s KCRW and KXLU — really great college radio — and I think that’s affected how this album sounds.

On a more poetic level, L.A. is so vast, so byzantine, so weird and so un-cohesive, so in a way, when you move you have to make this huge effort to try and understand Los Angeles and make sense of it. Most cities are very cohesive: New York, Paris, Frankfurt, San Francisco, D.C., amazing, wonderful cities that are quite small and quite cohesive. Then you come to L.A. and it’s just [got] absolutely no cohesion. It almost makes people who live here search out a degree of smallness and comfort, because the city is so huge and confusing. I feel like this album has a smallness and comfort to it that might, oddly enough, [come from] living in L.A.

I thought I’d live in New York forever. Then I stopped drinking five years ago, and when I got sober I suddenly realized that New York is the single best place to be a drunk and unfortunately not the best place to be sober. The culture in New York revolves around going out and drinking and doing drugs and being degenerate, which is amazing when you can do that, but then you get sober and you feel kind of left out. Everyone in New York is out having the best time of their lives, and I’m at home watching 30 Rock DVDs. Also, I realized I wanted to be warm in the winter, and I wanted to be around nature.

New York, because it’s so affluent, most of the writers and musicians have been pushed out, so I wanted to live in a place that’s got more creative community. At some point I guess four or five years ago I realized that I actually had more friends [in L.A.] than I did in New York, especially when it comes to music. The real estate in New York is too expensive for anyone to have studios anymore. A couple of years ago, some friends of mine in L.A. were looking to record an orchestra in New York. There wasn’t a single recording studio in New York where they could record an orchestra. They ended up having to rent an empty space in a theater — and while they were recording, there was a huge Korean birthday party happening next door. They actually had to cancel [the session], because the Korean dance party music kept coming through the walls. Now, I actually don’t know too many professional musicians who don’t live in L.A.

You’ve been putting out records frequently these past few years. What kind of clock do you work on? Do you write music every day you can?

I don’t know how to do anything else, and it’s what I love to do. When I was 13 or 14, I spent a lot of time reading books, and some of my heroes from back then were Flannery O’Connor and Woody Allen and Picasso. I was always impressed by their work ethic, that idea of: When you’re inspired, go into the studio and work. When you’re not inspired, go into the studio and work. If you have success that means you should work more. If you have failure that means you should work more. No matter what’s going on an artist or writer or musician’s life, the only appropriate response is to keep working.

You’ve worked with vocalist Inyang Basey for a while now. How did you meet her?

When I was going on tour with the album Wait For Me I had a singer I was working with in the UK who couldn’t get a work visa to tour in the States, so at the last minute I had to hire a new singer. The very last person I auditioned was Inyang. The moment she started singing I knew she was the one. It turns out she’d never really sung professionally; her day job at the time was working at Carnegie Hall in their 20th Century classical music division. Her background when she was growing up was listening to the Dead Kennedys and the Sex Pistols. It’s funny that this skinny white kid was introducing her to older gospel and soul music.

Did Spike suggest any singers for the album?

Yeah. I basically started asking friends of mine whom they would recommend. My criteria were quite specific: I was looking for people who had really interesting emotional voices but who could also write really interesting lyrics. Spike’s one recommendation was Skylar Grey. She’s known more for being a pop person, but her background is more singer-songwriter based and a little more experimental. I asked Daniel Miller, and his one recommendation was Cold Specks. The way it works with all the collaborators is, I sent them about five instrumentals to see if anything resonated with them. Each of them picked one or two that they liked. Once the vocals have been recorded and sent to me I then rewrote the song around the vocals.

Did you resend a track to multiple vocalists before you got a yes?

Oh yeah. I had 10 instrumentals I really loved and really wanted vocals on. I’m kind of mercenary when it comes to trying to get the right vocals on the right track. It’s almost like a weird form of musical promiscuity, where I would sometimes send the same instrumental to three different people to try to see if it resonates with anyone.

Where was the third time the charm?

The song that Mark Lanegan co-wrote, ["The Lonely Night"] — that had been instrumental for a few years. I had never quite felt comfortable with what people had sent back. Then I gave it to him, and all of a sudden it felt like the vocals and the music made sense together. I made the final mix around his vocals. The music is mixed very quietly; the whole intention was to draw attention to his vocals.

Do you end up editing lyrics a lot?

Sometimes. The only person [I did that with] on this record was Skylar Grey. She’d written a line in the song: “Shades of grey.” This was right at the height of the Fifty Shades of Grey popularity. Skylar, because she lives up in the mountains, hadn’t heard about the book. I had to get her to make some suggestions for things that didn’t sound like they were referencing Fifty Shades of Grey. She thought it was funny.

I want to ask you about “Saints”: It’s obviously your instrumental style, but it seems looser and grander than usual — a big sweep with a lot of moving parts. Did it take a long time to put together?

It was supposed to be an instrumental that someone was going to write lyrics to, and I couldn’t find the right person. At some point Spike and I realized it was pretty good as an instrumental, so the focus was to try and finish it. I hired an arranger at the very end — I’d written orchestral parts, and I wanted to know what it would be like if someone came in and wrote orchestral parts. There’s a lot of big, bombastic brass parts. I think there are 300 different string players on it. It’s mixed in a way that the orchestral stuff doesn’t overwhelm the track. It almost makes me want to do a weird orchestral mix of it that strips out the drums.

Were you thinking of how some of these songs might be interpreted live?

No [laughs]. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to go on tour with this record. I’ve had that frustration in the past of recording music, putting it on a record, and then realizing that it’s impossible to play it live in any interesting way.

What led to the decision not to tour?

A lot of it involves aging. As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to realize that life is short, and as much as I like standing on stage and playing music, I love being at home working on music. Of course, it drives my manager crazy, because in 2013 very few people buy records and the only way musicians make money is by touring. Basically, I’m focusing on the one aspect of the music business that’s not at all lucrative, while turning my back on the only lucrative side of the music business.

Well, you’ve always had a contrary streak.

Yeah, I guess so. I appreciate that we all need to eat and need to pay the rent. But if you have a finite amount of time, shouldn’t it be spent on things that you really love and find important? Even if that means making less money and making my business manager and manager very unhappy, I’d still rather be in my studio working on music.

When Moby requested we interview Cold Specks as part of his takeover of eMusic, we were all too happy to oblige. The debut from pseudonymous songwriter Al Spx topped our list of eMusic’s Best Albums of 2012, and her live show had grown more riveting and more assured each time we saw her. Her performance on Moby’s record Innocents contains all of the things that made her first album so stunning — enigmatic lyrics, deeply-felt vocals and a free-floating but undeniable sense of spirituality. eMusic’s editor-in-chief J. Edward Keyes caught up with Spx by phone to discuss her new record, her collaboration with Moby and her paralyzing perfectionism.

I’m interviewing you at Moby’s request, because he’s taking over our site for a week, but it’s kind of convenient — your album was our No. 1 record of last year.

I heard about that!

So I thought this would be a good time to see what you’ve been up to since then. Where are you right now?

I’m in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I’m in a studio recording some songs for the next record.

How long have you been working on that?

Well. I don’t know. It’s kind of — [pauses]. Some of the songs have existed for a while, some are brand new. We didn’t start tracking until maybe a month ago.

So there were still some songs from your original batch that didn’t make it on to I Predict a Graceful Expulsion?

There’s just one. It’s existed in many forms, and I finally forced the son of a bitch to give in recently. I won’t tell you which one. It’ll ruin the surprise.

I was going to ask if it was the one you were playing on tour.

Well, actually, OK — I got that wrong. There’s two that have existed in a few different forms. The one that you’re speaking of — where did you see me play?

I saw you at Glasslands, then at Mercury Lounge, then at Piano’s.

OK. So you probably heard a bunch of the new ones. There’s a song… [stops suddenly] I don’t want to say!

You don’t have to!

Oh, I’ll just say it, whatever. There’s a song called “All Flesh is Grass” and a song called “Let Loose the Dogs.” “All Flesh is Grass” is probably written around the same time as “Blank Maps,” but it didn’t make the first record because I hadn’t figured out the arrangement for it, and it’s taken a couple of years to get right. The other one was written when I first started touring.

You talk about these songs existing in a few different forms — how do you know when to say “stop”?

I know it’s done because when I listen to it, I become filled with delight and satisfaction, and I know that I can’t make it any better. My producer, Jim, and the assistant here are probably realizing that I’m incredibly anal when it comes to the studio, but these songs exist forever, so I just want to get them right. I’m kind of a perfectionist. I want and I need for everything to be absolutely as perfect as I can make it.

What was the moment you started becoming aware that the first record was really resonating with people?

I guess when I started to tour the record, I would notice the crowds start to get bigger. We’d be playing tiny shows in small towns in the middle of nowhere — like, say, Denton, Texas — and there would be loads of people who knew and loved the songs. I guess that’s when I started to realize that I was doing something right.

One of the things that really struck me about the record was the way you took Bible verses and either recontextualize them or manipulate them in certain ways. How conscious a choice was that?

Not very conscious. The record is a representation of loss in many forms — mostly just loss of several relationships. I studied English and noticed Bible verses are common in literature. It’s the best piece of fiction in the world as far as I’m concerned. There are some really beautiful lines in it, and some lines really just stuck out to me. I don’t really like to go into detail about what the songs are about. I’m a very private person and my songs are very vague and I really do love it when people interpret it and take it in different ways. I think it’s incredibly fascinating.

A lot of the story around the early record was about the falling out between you and your parents. From what I’ve read, it sounds like things are better now?

It’s all good in the hood. It was kind of blown out of proportion in the early days. It was mostly just growing pains, really. My parents wanted the best for me and they didn’t necessarily believe that music was the best for me at first, but they’ve come around. It’s all love.

Does that mean you’ll start using your real name?

[Laughs.] No, I’m a very private person. I write music and I enjoy doing it, but because I do it, I think it’s completely unnatural to perform day in and day out and give yourself to people — a collection of strangers — every night. I’d much rather have a stage name and remove myself from it all.

So you take on this persona of Al Spx to maintain a sense of self.

That’s exactly what it is. Al Spx is a character, and she exists because I created a project called Cold Specks, and people kept asking me who Cold Specks was. And I thought I’d given enough at first, but evidently I hadn’t [laughs]. So I came up with a stage name, and that’s all I’m willing to give. I just got so uncomfortable attaching my real name and myself to songs that are incredibly personal and have the tendency to be morbid. It’s not a reflection of me, and I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the songs completely defining me as a human being, because it’s just one side of me. So I have a stage name.

I’d imagine it also allows you a degree of sanity because you can step out of that character when you’re not performing.

Exactly. When I’m not touring, I go back to the girl I am and remember who I am as a human being. It can be incredibly grueling at times. Al Spx is a tough bitch and she can deal with that, but when I’m at home, I want to just be me.

One of my favorite lines is on “Blank Maps,” where you sing “I am a goddamn believer.” What are some things you believe in?

I’m not sure. I’m still figuring it out. That particular song is — [pauses]. That particular song is about a boy, and I think I was just trying to let him know some things.

Have any of the people these songs are about heard them?

Probably. [Laughs] I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’d rather not say.

Let’s talk about the new record. Thematically, how do the songs relate to the songs on the first record?

It’s different. They’re louder. There aren’t any acoustic guitars — I’ve been joking that I’ve gone all “Judas” on this record [laughs].

Is this for real, or are you doing that thing you like to do to interviewers where you pull my leg and then I report it?

[Laughs.] I’m not! I’m not. I’ve stopped doing that. It’s more playful this record. The first record was a delicate record, and it was a moment in time and a reflection of a fragile girl. For this record, I’ve grown a lot as a human being. The songs on the first record were written when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, and I’ve grown a lot since then. I think I also got a little tired of being depicted as an “emotional songwriter.” That sort of seeped into my songwriting. So this one’s just playful.

So more major-key songs?

I actually can’t answer that for you, but only because I don’t know anything about music. I play in two tunings, and they’re both, I guess, minor tunings — it’s always gonna be minor with Cold Specks — but I don’t actually know anything about music. I play guitar and write all the songs and I sit down with the boys and tell them what I want. Like I said, I’m incredibly anal in the studio.

I’m curious as to how you think other members of your band would describe working with you.

Chris Cundy, the woodwind player, has a phrase — he says I’m “predictably unpredictable.” And that’s accurate. I’m the most disgustingly indecisive person. I think I know what I want, but I really don’t.

Let’s talk a little bit about the collaboration with Moby — how did that come about?

We’re on the same label, Mute, and I think he was looking for singers and Daniel Miller from Mute mentioned me, so he looked up all my stuff and really liked it, and we just started working together.

Was the song already finished by the time it got to you?

“A Case for Shame,” he sent an instrumental. There’s a studio in London that I work in occasionally and I recorded some vocals and sent them back to him. It was a very creative and collaborative setup. The other song we actually recorded in his home studio. I had a day off on my last North American tour, so we stopped in L.A. and I went over to his house and recorded the second song. Very quickly, actually. He already had the instrumental and I had it for weeks but couldn’t come up with anything. The night before [we were recording] I scribbled some notes on my hotel notepad and went in and we did it in about an hour.

How is his process different from yours?

He’s not an anal piece of shit like I am.

That seems like you’re being pretty hard on yourself!

I like to think I’m funny with my harshness! [Laughs.] He goes with the flow, Moby. He doesn’t overanalyze. It’s something I learned from working with him. I can spend a lot of time just picking at things and just doesn’t do that. He’s a very free and open and creative man and he’s not at all disgustingly over analytical. It’s a really refreshing thing.

I’m sure some of that comes with experience, though.

Yeah, I’m only making my second record now. He’s had a lot of time to grow as an artist, so he knows what he wants and he gets there quickly.

I know you have a lot of influences outside of music. I was curious to know what you’re reading now.

There’s a book by Milan Kundera called Immortality that I just picked up the other day.

What kinds of books do you tend to be attracted to?

I like really descriptive stuff, and I like really short and sweet stuff as well. I like ‘em all.

Are you living in Canada when you’re not on the road?

I don’t live anywhere. I just finished touring. I’ll probably be moving back to London soon. I like it because it’s a very big city — I think it’s the best city in the world. It’s huge — there are cities within the city. So many people, so many things to do. It’s just a wonderful city.

Since Moby asked us to interview you as one of his favorite artists, I was wondering who you’ve been listening to lately and who you admire.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Scott Walker. Michael Gira from Swans. There’s this band from the UK called Savages that I really like.

I could almost hear a collaboration between you and Scott Walker.

Oh God, I would love that. The guy who did our latest music video did the video for that song “Epizootics!” from the last Scott Walker record. That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to Scott Walker.

The Flaming Lips have never shied away from life’s unavoidable existential dramas — Death, Love, Depression, The Afterlife (or lack thereof). But The Lips have never made “depressing” music: Steven Drozd, the band’s multi-instrumentalist and chief sonic architect, has a flair for melodic, rainbow-hued arrangements, and Wayne Coyne, their outsized frontman, plays the role of psychedelic jester, particularly on stage, where he crowd-surfs on inflatable bubbles, pours fake blood on his face, and preaches his deep ruminations to a cult-like fan-base in his cracked warble.

The Terror, the band’s 13th studio album, is a bleak — often morbid — change of pace, filled with repetitive synthesizer textures, ghostly choral voices, and dark lyrical mantras. Inspired by a dread of mortality and deep personal turmoil (Coyne’s recent divorce, Drozd’s brief heroin relapse), the duo recorded the album mostly alone, working quickly and spontaneously instead of layering the songs with overdubs. eMusic’s Ryan Reed spoke with Wayne Coyne about the album’s intimate recording process and complicated themes.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Steven Drozd said: “The Terror is this internal feeling you get that you and everyone you love is going to die. Everything in your life might be good, but there’s still this notion…that there’s more pain and suffering to come down the road.” It’s interesting to compare that quote to “Do You Realize,” which basically says the same thing but puts it in a beautiful, uplifting sense.

I think that’s what optimism is, in the end. You go, “We can’t bear this,” or you go, “We’ll find a way.” Sometimes music tells us so much about how we feel, and I think that’s why we like music so much — because it fills in. We utterly know what it means while it’s playing, but the minute it stops, it’s like, “I don’t know anymore.” I don’t think one way of thinking has to negate another way of thinking. I’m certainly not “Do You Realize.”

It’s a dramatic song, and I think it’s most powerful when it’s used at these dramatic moments. Most people I’ve talked to that have used it have done so at weddings and funerals, even the birth of their children. They see it as the sound of this big moment, where this other sound — this sound that we’re doing on The Terror — it’s this moment that’s with you all the time. It feels depressing and triumphant at the same time. A triumph isn’t “Hey, this is the greatest thing! We’re gonna live!” A triumph is saying, “We’ll just get through this.” We don’t have to make it any more sparkly than that.

When I read about the album’s dark themes, I expected the music to be depressing. And it is in a way, but there’s also a comfort in the sadness. There’s a bleakness to it, but it’s also really beautiful at the same time.

When we were making it, a lot of it reminded us of church music. We don’t go to church now, but when you were young, you’d sit there and try your best, not knowing what the fucking words were, to sing along with these simple mantras that people would sing in church. And it wouldn’t be about a singular singer. I think that’s what a lot of this music feels like as well. It’s not coming from a point of “I’m the singer.” I call it “the voices from beyond.” There are only a couple of songs in which you can hear me trying to sound like to sound like me. It’s just melody and words that are in the cloud of the sound of the song anyway. For me, it’s not meant to be this big statement by this big character.

So from what I’ve read in other interviews, Steven’s dark period was what really set the tone for the album. But I also know you were going through some heavy shit during that time. What was it for you that sparked this mood and the idea of The Terror?

We’ve always hinted at this type of music. But the main difference is: Even five or six years ago, if we were having a semi-big production going on, like some of these songs are, with drums and overdubs and a lot of voices being recorded — in the early stages of a lot of our records, we start early on with really primitive demos. But now we don’t do that anymore. A lot of times we’re just recording, and we’re not really doing a demo of a song. We’re just creating it right there. There isn’t gonna be a second version or a third version — it just is what we create.

And now we can do that without anybody being there. So you really are, in a sense, kind of a painter in a dark corner, painting whatever you want and not always thinking anybody has to see it. It used to be, no matter what we would do, we were surrounded by people who were helping us record — engineers, technicians and producers, and everybody is in there listening to everything you do, and sometimes openly judging us, sometimes not. But you’re not doing it in isolation of your own creation, and I think that’s the main difference.

I think we’ve always been able to do expressionistic, internal music, but it’s very hard to do that sometimes. In the past, we’ve never been alone making it. When you get musicians together, they want to do music. They want to say, “You play that, and I’ll play this.” This wasn’t music like that. It’s simple, repetitive…a lot of it’s even out of tune and out of rhythm with itself — it just happens to be something we liked. If Steven liked it, and I liked it, that’s all that mattered. We don’t care if it’s good or bad. If we’re happy with it, let’s go. So I think that’s really powerful and great luck — this kind of music that we’re drawn to is this cold, distant, unsettled thing.

I’m really curious how you guys were able to sustain this mood throughout the album. Is it a situation where you guys started to capture this mood so you noticed that pattern and said, “Let’s shape the record in this way”? Or did a lot of it just happen subconsciously?

That’s a narrow path to walk. Part of it is you want to stay in this color palette. Not to simplify it, but you have Picasso’s Blue Period, or whatever, they’re all reaching for the same thing. But that can also be limiting because you can start cutting off possibilities, and we don’t like to do that either because sometimes you think, “Oh, it couldn’t possibly be this,” but then you hear it and you say, “Well, it’s absolutely that.”

We really struggled with the song, “Butterfly…How Long it Takes to Die.” We struggled with that one in the beginning, because it felt too snappy. It’s well played, but I think it’s the only song on the record that has this little moment of funk in it. With Embryonic, we were doing that all over the place — being very clumsy and funky and primitive. And this wasn’t doing that. For whatever reason, we were on another trip. And when we were confronted with that song, we thought, “What do we do?” And we just rejected it for the longest time. And I didn’t think about [the lyrics] very much, I just said cosmic shit that you think of with the music. Then we re-looked at it, and we thought, “Why don’t we make it more like what the lyrics are talking about and see if we can make another version of this bleak, un-chromatic landscape.” I think it works — over the last three or four songs, you really feel like you’re no longer looking for the answer. To me, it sort of feels like you’ve found the answer. And sometimes with really distinct rhythms, that’s kind of what it’s saying. You know which path you’re on. Earlier in the record, we begin with a rhythm that isn’t very solid, but kind of dissolves into almost-rhythmless rhythms. They’re rhythms, but they don’t really push forward with a lot of confidence, and none of it rushes ahead. And by the end of the album, we kind of get something back. We know something different. That’s how it feels to me — I don’t know if it really is true, but that’s how it feels to me as a piece of music.

“Try to Explain” is absolutely beautiful, and it epitomizes everything I love about the album. That could be one of my favorite Lips melodies.

It does that thing we talked about, almost being a “voice from beyond.” It never seemed as though it was a singular person singing it. Even though I’m singing it, it’s almost like music that’s always existed, and someone sang it somewhere in time. And I think when we do music like that, where there is no character involved, it allows you to be vulnerable and say things that you probably wouldn’t say if you were being you. You wouldn’t say something so crushing. When that big crescendo of all those harmony voices break into that line, “Try to explain why you’ve changed,” it’s unbearable. It’s as though nature has been split open or something — that’s why I sang that line. It just sounded like that to me. That crescendo really was an accident; we stumbled upon these harmonies just willy-nilly. Steven did one or two, and I did a third one or something, and it really became emotional. We added the lyrics — the music always carried the message, but we just added the lyrics like, “Of course, this is what the music was saying.”

The song is just enough sad, and it’s just enough powerful, but it doesn’t last very long. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do in music because you want to do it again and again and make it bigger — but if you leave just below the hottest temperature, it’s almost like you can have it forever, because you can handle it. The temptation with dumb artists and musicians like us is that you want to go all the way. If it’s big, make it bigger; if it’s loud, make it louder. But if you’re lucky, you don’t do that. When that happens, it can be pretty powerful.

I think the biggest anguish and pain people have is when they can’t find the answer. Your mind can’t stop searching, and it keeps you looking and keeps you wondering. And that’s really where your psychic pain is: Knowing the answer may be painful, but I think your imagination is something your worst enemy. Your mind sometimes goes to the worst possible place, and before you know it, you’re living in some unlivable hell. Most people I’ve talked to, without knowing it, have all pointed to that song and said, “I know what you’re talking about there. I can relate to that. There’s something about that piercing thing.” It’ s not demanding an answer — it’s longing for one. It’s crying out for something, saying, “I just wanna know!” It’s powerful, but I don’t know if I have any answers. Sometimes I know I’m singing something that’s trying to channel your subconscious. That’s a hokey thing to say, but for me, it’s not always, “There’s this thing happening in your life, so you sing about it.” Sometimes it’s just there.

Simple, assured and funny songs smarter than most 17-year-olds

The New Zealand teenager Ella Yelich-O’Connor has had quite a year. She wrote an uncontrollable phenomenon of a song called “Royals” that bum-rushed her home country’s charts before wandering off in search of new waters — currently, the song is brushing up against monoliths like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Robin Thicke on American charts. She reportedly wrote the lyrics to the song in half an hour and now, to place something solid at the center of her whipping storm of hype, she’s produced a 10-song album.

Despite all this noise, Pure Heroine feels unhurried, just like that breakout hit. The vibe is simple, assured, minimalist. Her voice is an instantly striking and likable instrument, ear-catching and conversational but odd, like someone assuming a difficult-to-place accent. It’s throaty and purring in places but mostly just undemonstrative, fitted sleekly to the demands of her songs. Her delivery is declarative and rhythmic, and her melodies offer a stripped-down version of the cellular hook-writing technique that, over the last half-dozen years, has rewritten pop music’s genetic code.

The songs themselves are funny and legible and shrewd, sketching out a sharp framework and shading it in expertly. If she weren’t a solo performer, she’d make a successful behind-the-scenes hit writer. “Royals” starts out with the economical couplet “I cut my teeth on wedding rings in the movies/ And I’m not proud of my address” and relaxes into a chorus that is both a mockery of catchy singsong choruses dripping with name brands and an expertly deployed version of same. On “Ribs,” she streaks the song with details so specific that they take two or three listens to absorb: “The drink is spilled all over me/ ‘Lover’s Spit’ left on repeat.” Wait — “Lover’s Spit,” the late-album track on Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People?

One of the repeated lines of that song is one that should be funny coming from a 17-year-old: “It drives you crazy getting old.” But a great pop songwriter, like Ray Davies or Carol King or Taylor Swift, can dial in on pretty much any emotion, even one they only have a kind of dress-rehearsal acquaintance with in their own life, within the clean confines of pop song. O’Connor’s songwriting is more subdued and low-key than the radio chart pop of the moment — “Royals” is mostly a fingersnap of percussion, and “Ribs” is a rainy-windshield blur of synth pads and muted drums — but it’s blessed with this same supernatural acuity. These songs are smarter than any 17-year-old I’ve ever known, and smarter than a lot of 40-year-olds I know now.

Here, Bratton walks us through some of his favorite Cascine releases.

A singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist bursting with creativity and expressiveness

Three albums into a career that was initially boosted by her ties to fellow Canadian act Arcade Fire (members of the Grammy-winning band have produced or co-produced each of her records), Basia Bulat has rocketed past any need for such big-name associations. Tall Tall Shadow reveals a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist bursting with creativity and expressiveness, one who belongs in a league with recent rising talents such as Sharon Van Etten as well as longer-term indie mainstays such as Neko Case.

Bulat’s versatility with guitar, piano, autoharp and charango (a lute-like Andean instrument) allows her to compose on a broad canvas, allowing the tone of her material to range from haunting balladry reminiscent of classic English folk (“Five, Four,” “Paris or Amsterdam”) to moody explorations (“The City With No Rivers”) to the instantly engaging urgency of “It Can’t Be You” and the title track. Binding it all together is Bulat’s spectacular and singular voice: She draws you in as if you’re privy to an intimate conversation, then suddenly soars high with sweetness and grace, seeking a revelation somewhere in the astral plane. She’s a brave singer, not one to hide her voice in a glaze of sound; the words stand out and cut deep. “Burn it till you’re set on fire/ Tell me when you cut the wires/ Talk me out of this time/ Open this heart of mine,” she implores on “Wires.” That deed is done: On Tall Tall Shadow, Bulat’s heart is wide open.

Nailing the zeitgeist with enduring, hook-focused songcraft

Chvrches singer Lauren Mayberry and synthesizer/production team Iain Cook and Martin Doherty knocked around the Glasgow indie scene for years in bands like Twilight Sad, Aereogramme and Boyfriend/Girlfriend — respectable and oft-underrated outfits that often hewed close to the Scottish stereotype of cathartic mope-rock. Having finally scored a hit that makes people sing along happily (“The Mother We Share”), they’ve decided they’re not going to blow it. Their debut, The Bones of What You Believe, is subtly ambitious in the same way their arena-aspiring heroes (Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears) were: Mayberry’s laser-guided melodies cut through glass, the synthesizers are rendered with pristine neon clarity rather than the imploded fog that marks the “synth-pop” of today.

The trio also shows their old-school roots by making Bones a true album experience. Sure, the hit singles (“The Mother We Share,” “Gun” and “Recover”) are included, but they’re sequenced perfectly throughout so that new favorites can emerge, whether it’s the jet-propelled “Night Sky,” “Tether”‘s moody balladry or even the two Doherty-fronted songs, which show that Chvrches aren’t just “Lauren Mayberry and the two dudes in hats.” The result nails the zeitgeist on pretty much all fronts — the stylization of the band name, the anonymity blog hype to quasi-major-label-signing to presence in what will surely be a ton of ads for high-end consumer products. With all that said, it’s almost certainly going to sound as good in 20 years as it does now because Chvrches’ attention to enduring, hook-focused songcraft ensures it would’ve sounded great in 2003 or 1993 or 1983.

Vulnerable, life-affirming and acutely self-aware

Ha Ha Tonka’s music has always been richly steeped in Americana, folk and bluegrass. But on Lessons, the Southern Missouri quartet’s fourth and most diverse full-length, these genres are starting points. The familiar stylistic signifiers — four-part harmonies, prickly mandolin, stomping acoustic guitar — merely add texture to songs that, at various points, conjure Shearwater’s strummy introspection (“Staring At The End Of Our Lives”), Spoon’s compact pop (the bass-heavy, wrinkled title track) and Wilco’s rugged alt-country (“Pied Pipers”). Whimsical piano, plush organ and jagged electric guitar contribute additional color.

Alongside this sonic progression, Ha Ha Tonka continue to broaden their songwriting voice. Lessons is a vulnerable, life-affirming, acutely self-aware record that addresses both personal foibles and strengths. (The band members come by this wisdom — and the album title — honestly: Frontman Brian Roberts says the record was jumpstarted by an inspiring 2011 NPR interview with the late author Maurice Sendak.) “I can’t keep learning the same lessons over again,” Roberts pleads wearily on the title track, before contradicting himself in the very next line: “I keep learning the same lessons over again.” Yet despite this frustration spiral, he’s committed to self-improvement and figuring out his lot in life, as well as staying positive. “No, I don’t want to be dead to the world around me,” the frontman cries over and over again on “Dead to the World,” as majestic strings pirouette around his words, buoying his pained optimism.

A set polished as brightly as their breakout hit

When Swedish singers Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo, aka Icona Pop, performed at Seattle’s Showbox during the beginning of an electronic-pop showcase — part of the city’s annual Decibel Festival — in September 2012, they played to fewer than 100 people. But those people were into it, bunched at the lip of the stage and chanting hard with every word. There was something appealingly scrappy and ready for anything Hjelt and Jawo exuded, even as the music itself prides itself on sheen. More than just an electro-pop group, they came across as electro-pop purists, the way a garage-rock band might be a different kind of purist.

Few songs have gotten to prove their own inexhaustibility in an extended space the way “I Love It” has — a hit that keeps bubbling up in the charts, not to mention in DJ sets via an endless array of remixes. It kicks THIS IS… ICONA POP off just right — a thrill ride you’d have to be Scrooge to resist. The rest is polished just as brightly, albeit to greater degrees of resistibility. The faster stuff — shock — is better overall; the Vegas-jaunt-ready “On a Roll” and the fizzy-lifting new wave synth hook of “Then We Kiss” are particularly spirited. Thirty-three minutes is plenty; they make Red Bull cans small for a reason, too.

File under: No-wave hardcore; harmony meets disharmony in an unpadded cell; the sound a Kathy Acker novel would make if it was a band instead of a book

For fans of: Free Kitten, Arab On Radar, Destroy All Monsters, Scissor Girls, Magik Markers

From: Oakland, California

Personae: Marissa Magic (guitar, vocals), Jaime Clark (drums), Vanessa Harris (guitar, vocals)

Oakland’s Stillsuit mix experimental noise rock with punk politics, creating a feminist soundtrack to the confusion of sex and violence in a gendered world. Loud treble guitars in weird tunings duel while drums pound away in another time signature. Their live show lays waste to squares who cover their ears, clear the room and even pull the plug.

Stillsuit is the best band in America, and their legitimacy is not predicated on outside approval. Like all great underground groups, they make up their own rules. Listen and learn.

On noise vs. punk:

Marissa Magic: Sometimes I describe us as noise-rock, but I also kind of hate that [term].

Vanessa Harris: [Noise] is where a lot of my personal history lies, but it can be limiting. My conception of a punk band means that you care about things. I want to be explicitly feminist and care about the ways in which we do things. We are a punk band in that sense, but maybe we don’t totally sound like one.

On moving beyond the “man/woman” show and intersectional feminism in 2013:

Jaime Clark: The feminist scene in the Bay Area isn’t just about women or cisgendered women, it’s about gender-non-conforming people and people of color. It also considers class dynamics and so many aspects of people’s backgrounds that are not necessarily directly related to gender.

Harris: There’s also a lot of non-feminist punk stuff that’s going on too and that can be a bummer — some of those “man/woman” shows that happen —

Clark: — as in, “men” and “women” are at the show, and that’s it —

Harris: And they are very much acting out roles that are traditional. Being in consideration of all those things is what good feminism is. What inspires me about feminism is that it can encompass anything. It should be asking questions about race, class, gender, queer — I don’t know, everything.

Magic: Sometimes we get asked to play bigger noise shows and we are the only women on the bill — or it will be, like, very man/woman situations — I think it’s important to play those shows but it can be challenging.

On what they dislike most in popular music:

Magic: I don’t like music that sounds like it’s made by hippies on cocaine. Like ELO, Steely Dan — I just hate groovy-talented-guys doing groovy-talented-things in really expensive studios and everything sounds slick. Also a thing that bums me out is that a lot of the music I really like sonically is either lyrically or aesthetically really fucked up.

Clark: Generally I dislike Bruce Springsteen and I dislike “Don’t Stop Believing” — things that are sort of like “songs for every guy out there.” Also, drums or percussion really make or break a band for me. I don’t like music where it feels like whatever percussion has no life. I like a lot of music that has drum machines or pre-recorded beats, as long as it seems like life got put into creating it.

Harris: I hate ’80s synths. I hate the new ’80s noise dudes doing ’80s synth-music thing. It’s so unappealing to me. I love Steely Dan. I don’t like Journey, but I like Boston. But I would pay money if I never had to hear that song “You Spin Me Right Round” again.

Magic: The other day she said “I would pay $5 to never hear that song again.”

Harris: Yeah, I don’t care that much. But I could do without it.

An impeccable encapsulation of their strengths

The songwriting gifts of twangy Canadian rockers the Sadies are often overshadowed by their musical collaborators — a list that includes Neil Young, the Band’s Garth Hudson, Neko Case and Jon Langford, to name a few. But Internal Sounds, the quartet’s 16th studio album, is an impeccable encapsulation of their strengths. Produced by vocalist/guitarist Dallas Good, the full-length touches on familiar sounds: barnstorming garage jangle (“The First 5 Minutes”), elegiac folk (the mandolin-aided “So Much Blood”), cowpunk (“Another Tomorrow Again”) and the kind of nostalgic alt-country that flourishes in the U.S. Midwest (the fiddle-augmented, Bottle Rockets-like “Another Yesterday Again”; the Uncle Tupelo-esque harmonies and ragged heart of “The Very Beginning”).

Still, Internal Sounds isn’t afraid to take chances: The 90-second “The Very Ending” is an ever-so-brief foray into prog rock, while the album-closing “We Are Circling” is a heavy psych drone that boasts mesmerizing interlocking vocals from Buffy Sainte-Marie, who unearthed lyrics she wrote in 1971 for the occasion. Lyrically, the Sadies are just as brave; songs touch on past indiscretions and heartaches, but feature protagonists who are self-aware enough to overcome these struggles and push past regret (“I can’t change what’s done is done/ I won’t fight for anyone but me”). This indefatigable mindset gives Internal Sounds an optimistic edge that’s inspiring and age-defying.

Their most clear-headed and well-rounded album to date

The make-or-break moment on Kings of Leon’s sixth LP is “Comeback Story,” a grandiose, slow-burning arena-rock anthem built on lonely guitar twang, a ghostly choir, and (what?) pizzicato strings. Depending on what kind of fan you are, it’s either the band’s syrupy tipping point — or their maximalist masterpiece.

Really, it’s both. The Followill boys aren’t the same scrappy backwoods teens who once earned the title “Southern Strokes,” haphazardly garnishing their power chords with hormonal rebellion. Their evolution has been subtle, but substantive: They’ve embellished their sound with bits of fractured art-rock (2007′s Because of the Times), glossy pop-rock (2008′s Only By the Night), and honest-to-gosh country (the mellower bits of 2010′s Come Around Sundown). But with Mechanical Bull, they’ve managed to synthesize all these elements (and some unexpected new flourishes) in ways that feel fresh and vibrant.

The main catalyst is a practical one: Bull arrives after a three-year interim, their longest to date. Following his now-infamous drunken stage tantrum in 2011, frontman Caleb sobered up and started a family. It can’t be a simple coincidence — Mechanical Bull is their most clear-headed and well-rounded album to date. First off, it’s richer sonically. Where Come Around Sundown sounded stifled and squashed, Bull is a full-blooded beast. There’s added muscle to Jared’s bass and brother Nathan’s reliably dextrous drums; Matthew’s psychedelic guitar spasms now reach an Edge-like grandeur only hinted at previously.

More impressive is the album’s sprawling breadth. For the first time in years, they sound liberated from the expectations of what a “Kings of Leon album” should sound like. Instead, they seem to simply be enjoying the process of crafting their songs: From the blistering power-punk riffs on “Don’t Matter” to the atmospheric power-ballad “Beautiful War” to the funky, swampy blues strut of “Family Tree,” they’ve hit a bull’s-eye on every target.

Shouting her newfound confidence from the rooftops

Since striking out on her own in 2009, former Vivian Girls/Crystal Stilts drummer Frankie Rose has sounded more self-assured and willing to take risks with each album. Herein Wild, which follows last year’s excellent Interstellar LP, is no exception. The album features more polished production, emphasizing the emergence of ornate instrumental details like cinematic orchestra shivers (“Cliffs As High”) and muted trumpets and strings (on the otherwise acoustic “Requiem”). As a singer, Rose is more confident in her ability to express varying depths of emotion; in particular, her slightly mysterious vocal delivery turns an electropop remake of the Damned’s “Street of Dreams” into something closer to a spy movie theme.

Despite these additions, Herein Wild feels like a logical progression from Rose’s past work. Like Interstellar, the record contains plenty of lush, keyboard-gilded indie-pop — highlighted by the lilting Sarah Records homages “Sorrow” and “Into Blue” and the burbling, Stereolab-like “Question Reason” — and textures influenced by the Cure’s bleakest early days (the frantic drums and deep-cutting bass line of “The Depths,” cyclone-like synth spirals on “Minor Times”). The difference is that Herein Wild‘s more deliberate approach adds gravitas to Rose’s longing and melancholy, and lightness to her more optimistic moments. Both ends of the spectrum are evident on the fuzzy opening salvo “You for Me.” The song alternates between quiet verses and stomping choruses, creating intensity that mirrors the self-awakening described in the lyrics. By the end of the song, Rose sounds positively giddy as she repeats the phrase “Can you see?” as if she can’t wait to shout her newfound confidence from the rooftops.

On top of all that, throughout most of the ’70s he was ridiculously prolific, and although his pace has since slowed, Elton has maintained much of his monumental popularity for five decades. Although his increasingly traditional output suggests that, like most veteran rockers, he can’t be bothered with trends, Elton remains the superstar of his generation most keenly attuned to new artists and movements. After all these years in the spotlight, he remains more eager to spout off on the latest buzz acts than he is to talk about himself. He’s the only major pop composer besides Bacharach to let other lyricists — usually Bernie Taupin — speak through him.

And though he may be self-effacing, Elton is a gay ambassador to the straight world: He’s the homo in every homophobe’s record collection, the outsider who managed to get really, really inside. But, as with many mega-successful celebrities, he’s dealt with depression and addiction in a way that’s tangible in his work: Those two factors together have accounted for some spotty to downright terrible records. Not even Paul McCartney at his most pot-addled and domesticated has sunk as low as Victim of Love or Leather Jackets.

We prefer to judge him by his early-to-mid-’70s hot streak and by his 21st-century albums that quite consciously recall the timeless triumphs of that earlier era, but we’ve evaluated each of his 31 studio albums here, making note of buried treasure on otherwise shipwrecked records, and we wish you happy digging through a golden pop songbook that’s substantial in every sense of the word.