Because he has nothing better to do with his time, each week, Micah Peters riffs on the most awe-inspiring, confounding, addictive, or otherwise hilarious moments from the week in music. This week:
Sad Future on FKA Twigs’ “holy terrain”
FKA Twigs is famous for crafting vulnerable, breathy, weirdo R&B; Future is famous for, among other things, crafting vulnerable, muddy, weirdo R&B. The two are natural compliments—one covers the withering highs, the other handles the devastating, gravelly lows. It makes sense that Future has the only feature on Twigs’ forthcoming album MAGDALENE, is what I’m saying, but in a recent i-D interview—her first in three years—Twigs gave a concrete reason for it, too: She just loves Sad Future. “I love when he gets emo, when he expresses himself,” she said.
I wouldn’t say Future’s verse on this track comes from the same dark, defeated, aggrieved place that “Damage” came from, but he sounds similarly desperate, and intoxicated:
Pray for my sins, make me stronger where I’m weak, yeah (Pray for)
We die, we die together, the prophecy complete, yeah (Prophecy)
We gettin’ high, we touch the sky until we deceased, yeah (Deceased)
And if you pray for me, I know you play for keeps, yeah (Play for keeps)
The fog is rolling in—Sad Boy Fall swiftly approaches.
Any 20 seconds of Charli XCX’s “February 2017”
“February 2017” at once carries three distinct styles: There are the sparkly synths that dotted Clairo’s recently released Immunity, the thumping, off-kilter bass that defined Yaeji’s mesmerizing EP2 in 2017, and finally a sugary pop explosion at the end, as Charli begs for forgiveness over what sounds like straight prog house production.
It burns bright and fast, wrapping up in just under two minutes—if you don’t count Yaeji’s soft, beautiful outro, which actually does sound like an entirely different song.
The scratchy, throaty part of Slowthai’s verse on “Psycho”
Slowthai has been performing his Denzel Curry collaboration at live shows for a few months now, but this week the actual, honest-to-goodness recorded version of “Psycho” saw the light of day. The song is hair-raising from the very beginning, jolting to life with screechy strings that aren’t too far off from the ones that score the iconic shower scene of the Hitchcock film. But then the bass hits, sounding preboosted and completely fried, and it provides a serviceable backdrop for Slowthai and Curry—both of whom I’d describe as “chaotic good”—to go as haywire as their hearts desire. The video, appropriately, dropped on Friday the 13th, and it’s nearly impossible to watch, what with all the strobe lights and spinning images:
The second half of Slowthai’s verse recalls the mosh pit that swirled around the floor of The Echo at his show in Los Angeles a few months ago. The bass deepens, and his voice gets raspier, more deranged: “SPLIFF IS EXHAUST/I’LL PUT YOUR FRIEND IN THE MORGUE.”
Jetsonmade’s blippy production on Jackboy’s “Lately”
South Carolina producer Jetsonmade is no longer an unknown quantity, thanks to his work on hits like DaBaby’s “Suge,” which has that incendiary seven-jab bass combo: dun-dun, dun-dun-DUN, DUN, dun. It almost doesn’t matter which other effects he slides over it; those drums hit every time. Jetson’s work is near synonymous with the Carolinas’ sound at the moment, and as of late, he’s been lacing the tracks of artists like PG RA and Florida rapper Jackboy, whom he considers “underdogs,” with pure heat.
“Lately,” from Jackboy’s Lost In My Head, out last week, is one such heat rock. Jackboy couches stouthearted streetisms in his minihooks, stuff that doesn’t really apply to your life, but feels fun to sing aloud, and seems primed for Instagram captions: “Lately I been testin’ all my dawgs just to see who flaw.”
This Don Toliver “Cardigan” snippet
A thing I forgot to mention when discussing Travis Scott’s Look Mom I Can Fly last week: Don Toliver’s yet-to-be-named debut album will probably be very good—if it’s fair to make assumptions based on a 16-second clip of fuzzy vocals and awkward dancing.
That bit, taken from one of Toliver’s studio sessions, was surprising and exciting enough that the internet bestowed upon it a name—“Cardigan”—cleaned up the audio, looped it, and elevated the snippet from low to medium quality. Ben McLemore has already used it in an offseason workout video, and with the way this song—which is nowhere near complete!—is being received, we’ll probably all be bored of it by the time we get the other 95 percent.
