It’s a sunny day in Miami at the 2017 Ultra Music Festival, and a sweaty mass of neon-bearing concertgoers waits at the influential EDM event’s main stage. Hailing from China, Kromi was a long way from home. Nonetheless, the former pop singer-songwriter stood among the herd, itching to see the legendary DJ Tiësto perform. 

During that epic set, her long-awaited excitement turned into desire. Kromi tells SPIN that she leaned over to the friend she was with and decidedly informed: “I want to do this. I want to make this music. I want that guy [Tiësto] to know me.”

Just a year later, that fantasy manifested itself on the Las Vegas strip. Kromi regularly performed at Sin City’s most popular clubs and opened for electronic music heavyweights among the likes of Zedd and the Chainsmokers. 

In 2019, just two years after looking up at Tiësto, Kromi became the first Asian female DJ to have her own Vegas residency at the XS nightclub. She used her experience as a pop singer-songwriter in China to hone her live performance and to create a strong connection with audiences.

When she wasn’t hitting late-night crowds with her blistering basslines and club-shaking drops, Kromi was in the studio crafting singles and releasing them on streaming services. Some of her early tracks, like “Daddy’s Girl” and “Golden Girl,” showcased versatility in her emerging style and the forward-sounding nature of her songs.

In 2020, two years deep in the club circuit, Kromi began garnering worldwide recognition. Alongside headlining an extensive tour of China, she was deemed the country’s No. 1 DJane by DJaneTop, a female DJ news website. Additionally, she placed No. 4 in Asia and was ranked No. 45 overall.

As Kromi established herself as a club fixture in the U.S. and China, her singles caught on with the public. In particular, “F Boy” went viral on TikTok, and was played in over 8 million videos. Her latest singles, the pulsating “We Getting Low, released in October, and January’s “Baby We Go Fast” are already among her most-streamed tracks. Clocking in at 150 bpm, “Let’s Go Fast” is an undeniable dance floor anthem. The track brings the full impact of Big Room, with soaring vocals, epic leads and machine gun risers.

Fueled by the confidence and happiness that first drew her to dance music at that Tiësto gig, Kromi continues to experiment and grow artistically. As her music continues to catch on, Kromi continues to resonate within the always-evolving DJ landscape.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

On his 1976 solo album, future Nick at Nite star Donny “Ralph Malph” Most warbled the following Nostradamus-like assessment: “Rock and roll is dead / But it won’t lie down.” Spooky, isn’t it, how Most, no rock genius he, so knowingly anticipated the “Rock is Dead” doomsdaying in vogue some 20 years later among record-biz and music-critic types.

More from Spin:

• He Said, She Said: An Interview With John Lennon
• Frankie Cosmos Is Ready to Be Herself
• Transgender and Black, Searching for an Audience

So it’s with all due respect to Ralph Malph, et al., that we present this ranked assessment of the 40 Most Vital Artists in Music Today. What our highly subjective list reveals is hardly an artform eyeballing extinction; instead, odd ducks like Beck, the Wu-Tang Clan, Ani DiFrano, and DJ Shadow have helped expand not just rock’s parameters but its center, and bedrocks such as the Smashing Pumpkins, U2, and R.E.M. have taken notice. Vitality isn’t just about invention — rock’n’roll is a tradition, too, as is selling lots of records. But all the artists herein share at least one thing in common: the convention that rock has yet to exhaust its possibilities, or its pleasures.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Editor’s note: This exclusive, in-depth interview, conducted in 1975, first appeared in our October 1988 issue. We’ve re-posted it to celebrate what would’ve been John Lennon’s 79th birthday. Read through and experience Lennon talking about his marriage, his finances, the Beatles’ legacy, meeting Elvis, and much, much more.

More from Spin:

• Beatles Biopics Cast Wives, Ariana Joins ‘Horror Story’
• 5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: Milo Aukerman of the Descendents
• Paul McCartney Sets Santa Barbara Tour Warmup

Lately everyone has had something to say about John Lennon. But he always said it best himself. In this exclusive unpublished interview, the last word, appropriately, is Lennon’s.

In the early spring of 1975, when this interview was conducted, John Lennon had moved back to the apartment he shared with Yoko after an 18-month binge of drinking and carousing with friends in Los Angeles. He was embroiled in deportation proceedings with the U.S. government, and in financial proceedings with his former manager Allen Klein. He had just had a No.1 hit “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” with Elton John, but his own career had reached a plateau, and he looked forward to a period of introspection.

Having put the drinking behind him, he was about to begin a five-year period of withdrawal from the public eye.

Why do you think the immigration people are making it so difficult for you to stay here?

I am trying to think of his name, so I can give him credit for his quotes … He put it this way: “It keeps all the conservatives happy that they are doing something about me and what I represent. And it keeps the liberals happy that I am not thrown out.” So, everybody is happy but me. I am still being harassed. Liberals don’t feel too bad because I am still here.

It seems to me that they really use you?

Yeah. It keeps all the other pop stars in line. In case they get any ideas about reality. Keep them in their place. They also hassle Paul, George, Mick Jagger … obviously Keith Richard.

What does Elton John do — he is here most of the time? David Bowie?

Elton John has a clean image. David’s image … they probably haven’t realized what it is yet; it takes them a bit of time. Bowie, they probably just think he’s something from the circus. He’s never been busted and he didn’t get mashed up with lunatics like Jerry Rubin. And Abby my boy Hoffman.

Are you still friends with them?

I never see them. They vanished in the woodwork … Jerry has been nothing but trouble and a pain in the neck since I met him. I decided, as he didn’t lead the revolution, I decided to quit answering the phone.

Why do you want to live in New York now? Why in the U.S.?

Because it’s more fun here. Some of the nasties think I’m here for tax reasons. But it’s hardly worth explaining to people. I only decided to live here after I’d moved here. I didn’t leave England with the intention … I left everything in England. I didn’t even bring any clothes. I just came for a visit and stayed. If I had wanted to do it for tax I should have informed the British Government; I would have gotten an amazing tax-refund for one year. But I forgot to — so I just ended up paying taxes anyway, here and there. If I’d only thought of it, I would have made a million pounds or something. In America, they should stop saying I do it for the tax. I like it here! Is anywhere better?

Do the English get upset when you say that?

The English tend to get a little “…you’ve left us!” They never say it, but you can tell it by the way they write about you. But, it’s too bad. The Liverpool people were the same when I left Liverpool. Or when the Beatles left Liverpool. It was all, “You’ve let us down!” You know, “You should stay here forever and rot … ” I’m not really interested. I like people to like me. But I am not going to ruin my life to please anybody.

What kind of life do you live in New York? It doesn’t seem like the kind you’d expect a star to live.

Pretty normal. I don’t know what a star lives like.

Some live it up. It seems you don’t.

I don’t live it down. I’ve lived it down, played it both ways. Especially when you first get money — you live it up. I had all the biggest cars in the world … and I don’t even like cars. I bought everything that I could buy. The only thing that I never got into is yachts. So, I went through that period. There is nothing else to do once you do it. I just live however makes me most comfortable.

What makes you most comfortable right now?

Peace and quiet, and a piano. It’s all basically that. And occasionally spurting out to some event. Just to prove I’m still alive.

You said once on radio that your separation from Yoko was just a failure. What did you mean?

Well, it’s a joke. They always say, “Their marriage was a failure,” at every divorce. Ours was the other way around; our separation was a failure. We knew we would get together one day, but it could have been 10 years. Like Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner — we could have gone that long. It was fate, or our decision, or whatever. I don’t know how it worked. We knew we’d get back together one way or another, but had no idea when. We probably would never bother getting a divorce. I mean, if you’re living apart you are as divorced as can be.

What if you wanted to marry again?

I don’t think I’d ever bother. If this one didn’t work out, then it ain’t worth bothering about.

How is your relationship with May Pang now? I’m surprised she is still working for you.

I just didn’t wanna “OK — quit!”

How does she handle it now?

She’s handling it alright. It’s hard to know, because I’m hardly spending any time with her. Any time at all, actually. I don’t know … But what can I do about it? She knew what the scene was from the start. There was no question … neither Yoko nor I left each other for another person. We just sort of blew up. Blew apart. And then sort of filled in … so as not to be alone at night. I don’t wanna put May down. She is a nice girl. But she knew what the scene was. I was always talking to Yoko on the phone. I never went anywhere without telling her. “I’m going to L.A.” And she said, “Good luck to you.”

So, we were still good friends. We just blew apart. We didn’t even plan to get back together. I was just going to visit her. And I visited her many times before. And I just walked in and thought, “I live here; this is my home. Here is Yoko, and here is me …” The other time I visited we’ve been a little … we’ve spent hours together, but I haven’t been relaxed. The last time I went I just never left. It was the same … I physically left Yoko in the apartment, but I didn’t leave her. And she didn’t leave me.

Would you mind telling me how you live? How big … ?

It is a big apartment, and it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have grounds … you know, it’s secure. And people can’t get in and say, “I’m Jesus from Toronto,” and all that. That still happens. Which was happening in the other apartment. You just couldn’t go out the front door, because there would be something weird at the door.

Why did you live in L.A. for a little while?

The separation was physical as well as mental. Our only communication was really on the phone. I just went there to get out of New York for a bit. Trying to do something down there. But I spent most of the time drunk on the floor … with Harry Nilsson and Ringo and people like that. And ending up in the papers … that went on for about nine months. It was just one big hangover. It was hell. But that’s why I was there.

Rolling Stone mentioned John Lennon “playing second fiddle …”

That’s garbage. What second fiddle? I’m not playing second fiddle to Ringo when I play rhythm guitar. It’s all right for me to play rhythm guitar in back of Ringo’s record, but if I play rhythm guitar in back of Elton’s record, or in back of David Bowie’s somehow I’m lowering myself … I think they are good artists. And they are friends of mine, and they asked me to go and play. It’s like in the old days. Like Brian Jones is on a track of the Beatles years ago. And he played saxophone. In those days you weren’t allowed to say, the record companies wouldn’t allow it. So it was never mentioned. Everybody used to play on each other’s sessions, but nobody ever said anything.

Nowadays it’s always said. And Elton asked me to play on “Lucy.” He said, “I’m gonna do this song. I’d love it if you came and played.” He was too shy to ask me. He got a friend that we both have to ask me … And I said, “Sure I’ll come.” So I went to play and sang chorus or some garbage. Why is it not belittling for Mick Jagger to sing in back of Carly Simon? Why am I some kind of God that isn’t allowed to do anything?? It’s bullshit.

How do you feel about people doing covers of all those old Beatle songs?

I love it. I was thrilled he [Elton] was doing it. People are afraid of Beatle music. They are still afraid of my songs. Because they got that big image thing: You can’t do a Beatle number … You can’t touch a Lennon song; only Lennon can do it… It’s garbage!Anybody can do anything. A few people in the past have done Beatle songs. But in general they feel you can’t touch them. And there are so many good singles that the Beatles wrote that were never released. Why don’t people do them? It’s good for me; it’s good for Paul. It’s good for all of us. And Elton would have had a No. 1 record without me; he didn’t need me. And anyway, I was only Dr. Winston O. Boogie on it … ’cause they weren’t sure; and we didn’t have time to get real permission …

What about going on tour?

I think it would be a drag. I am sure I enjoyed parts of it, but not much of it. My decision was already made on touring, long time ago. I always changed my mind about things; and then everybody got angry, and said, “… but he said …” I don’t know if I’ll ever tour again; I can’t say. But just the idea of it … it’s just … you gotta pull a group together, invent a group. And then you gotta whip them into life, make them a real group, and not a bunch of guys. Then you gotta go around all those snotty little dressing rooms — and all you get is money. That’s all you get from a tour: cash.

How about money?

I am doing alright. I am rich in England, and medium well-off in America. ‘Cause a lot of money is stuck in England.

And you can’t get it over?

‘Til 1977. And then the pound might be worth 2 pfennigs by then. So, we’ll see what happens. You might suddenly see me touring in 1977 … very enthusiastically …

Why can’t you get it in before 1977?

Because there is some mad law. The English don’t allow any money out of the country if they can help it. And they always tell me to invest in this and that.

Do you?

No.

So where do you keep the money you have?

It’s just in a bank. I never invested anything.

You can see the amount?

I never look at it. It never changes. They give you an interest now and then. The only things you can invest in are like big fascist things. Like South African gold mines. All those things that don’t … I couldn’t bother with having shares and all that. It’s quite enough to get a chance without watching the shares on Wall Street or in England. I said: Give me a list of things I can invest in that don’t involve exploiting people. And they couldn’t come up with anything. And I am not that fanatical like Joan Baez or not brave enough to pay taxes. I just pay them and I know they buy bonds with them. I just can’t deal with it. Especially in England I can’t deal with it. So, I just leave it in the bank. And it either goes up with the market or goes down with the market. And that’s it.

How about the oldies album? Why did you do all the oldies?

I started out doing these in ’73 with Phil Spector. I just came off Mind Games, which to me was like an interim record between being a manic political lunatic to back to being a musician again. And Mind Games is like the cross between them. I was really playing mind games, mind games is what it was. I had enough of this trying to be deep and think … “Why can’t I have some fun??” And my idea of fun with music was to sing. Sing anything. And whenever I sang in a studio, when I wasn’t singing my own deep and personal songs — it was singing rock’n’roll, which I started out to do.

So I thought: I know what to do. I’ll make a rock’n’roll album of all the songs I’m always singing in the studio between takes. And I don’t even wanna be the producer. I’ll do it with Phil Spector. ‘Cause I’ve worked with him before. It took me three weeks to talk him into the fact that he could produce it … and it wasn’t gonna be co-production like “Imagine” and other things, where I never let go of the control. I just said, “You’re gonna do it. I just wanna be Ronnie Spector, or the Chiffons, or whoever it is. And I’ll just sit there and sing. I’m not even gonna come in until you got it on the tape. I’m not gonna check anything — the bass drum, or the drums like I want it … It’s gonna be like you want it. And I’ll just do singing.” And it was great at first that there he was, being the Phil Spector that I never allowed him to be. In complete control of 28 guys playing live. And to me it was … for a lot of us who hadn’t been there originally it was like seeing the Spector sessions of the early ’60s, which none of us saw. And he was fantastic.

But it got madder and madder, and it ended up breaking down, just falling apart … everybody was drunk, except for about two people, actually. It was just a drunken madhouse. And he ended up with the tapes. And I couldn’t get hold of them. He had them locked in his house. And I found out he’d secretly paid for the sessions, through Warner Brothers or something. I didn’t know anything about it, because all my sessions are just paid for by EMI or Capitol, and I never even think about it. And now not only the session’s collapsed, but I haven’t gotten any tapes … The having fun fell into having no fun. Then I was hanging around L.A. for months and months, waiting for him to come out of his hole. All these stories came out: He’s had an accident, he’s dying … You never know what to believe, ’cause he lives an incredibly surreal life, in his own head. You call him … or he won’t turn up for a session. And instead of saying he doesn’t feel like going he’d say something like, “The studio’s being burned down.” First I’d be accepting all this, then I started checking up … and there was nothing wrong with the studio …

Anyway, it was really bummy. So I ended up hanging around L.A., waiting for him to come out. Sometimes I got annoyed. Then I said, “I can’t be annoyed. I’m crazy, he’s crazy. He’s crazier than me, that’s all. Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to” — any rationalization. Then I got fed up. And I got fed up being drunk, and I got depressed. I never leave tapes in the studio. There is no unreleased work. It was driving me crazy. Then I decided — I was getting drunk with Harry Nilsson a lot — and one drunken morning I said, “Why don’t we do some work instead? Instead of just getting into trouble?? My name gets in the paper, you never get mentioned … and I get all the problems. I am the one with the immigration problems. So let’s do something constructive.” “Constructive” turned out to, “OK, let’s make an album of Harry. And that was fine by me. I didn’t want to make an album by me, I wasn’t in the mood. So, we ended up doing it. Halfway through I sobered up. Cause I had this idea — if we all lived together: Ringo, Harry Nilsson, Klaus Voorman — somehow Keith Moon got in on it. This is my brilliant idea, to have us all live together and work together. And we’d all be in tune. But it was a madhouse.

And halfway through I realized that we were committed, and this wasn’t my album, and somebody was paying RCA, and we’d better get on with it. And Harry, after the first session, comes to me, and he’s got no throat, no voice, whatsoever. I say, “What’s going on?” And he’s got no voice. I don’t know if it was psychological or what. It was a bit of that. There I’ve got this great singer with no voice, and a house full of drunken lunatics. So, I suddenly got sober in the middle of it. I’m responsible, I’m the producer, man! I’d better straighten out. So I straightened out. And I got to be the one that was straight, and they were all looking at me like that … I soon got to be the odd man out. I ended up locking myself in the bedroom, trying to keep away. So we finished that one, and then I went back and started Walls and Bridges. I was straight as a die by then. Just seeing other people drunk is enough to straighten out.

The day before we started Walls and Bridges some deal was made, and Phil sent me the tapes back, of the rock’n’roll stuff. We’d cut about eight tracks. In eight months!! I couldn’t deal with him then; I finished Walls and Bridges. And then I started playing the eight tracks — I didn’t even wanna hear them. Only about four of them were savable, the rest of them were … miles out of tune … just mad. You couldn’t use them, 28 guys playing out of tune!! I just salvaged what there was of them. And I was getting depressed. What can I do? Make an EP? They don’t have EPs in America. Put them out one by one? I wasn’t sure enough of their quality that they were gonna be singles. Some of them were alright, but I didn’t feel confident about them.

So I recorded 10 more in five days and stuck it all together — and that is it. It started out to be fun and ended up … it ended up to be fun. The 5-day sessions were great fun. We just did two or three a night and we didn’t get all into it. We all just rocked, relaxed. It started out fun, became hell, and ended up fun. There was so much buildup. Waiting for this great record. Of Lennon and Spector. And I nearly for the first time didn’t put it out. But then I let people hear it; people who had not been involved. And the record company who hadn’t been involved, they never heard of it. And they said, “It’s alright. We like it.” And friends liked it. They said it’s alright; it ain’t bad. Actually they liked some of it. And that’s the story, folks …

And right now, about your plans? ’75?

Stay alive in ’75. That’s my motto. I don’t know. I just feel pretty alright. ’74 was just hell. Just a drag. ’74 lasted about three years … A little bit of it tailed into ’75. But I just feel good now, I’m writing well. So I’m happy.

How do you do it? Do you write when you are in the mood? Is your mind always thinking about writing?

I’m always at it. The best stuff usually comes out on impulse. Or inspiration. And I hardly have to think about it. But I am always writing. In the back of my head, or if somebody says something, I’m storing it away — a line, or an idea. There is never a moment when I’m not writing, almost. Although I don’t think I’m writing. There’s a specific time when I just sit down and write.

Do you have a lot of songs stored away, or ready?

I never have a lot left over. I have some left over that I occasionally forget, and then remember them, and just use bits of them.

How do you write the lyrics?

I just scribble on a bit of paper, you know. And then leave it in a sort of pile. And when it begins to be more interesting, I venture on to the typewriter and type it out. And the typewriter adds things, too. I change it as I type it. It’s usually the third draft when I get to the typewriter. Depending on how easy it came. If it just all came it’s just like “write it and type it.” But if it’s a general song, I’ll type it a few more times. But the final version is never until we’ve recorded it. I always change a word or two, at the last minute.

You have the lyrics first, and then the music?

Usually. It’s better. I like that. The music is sort of easy. I sometimes envy Elton John. Bernie Taupin sends him a big stack of words, and he writes all the songs in five days. I could do that. But I am too egocentric to use other people’s words. That’s the problem. So it’s my own fault. I still like black music, disco music … “Shame, Shame, Shame” or “Rock Your Baby,” I’d give my eyetooth to have written that. But I never could. I am too literal to write “Rock Your Baby.” I wish I could. I’m too intellectual, even though I’m not really an intellectual. I feel as though I am a writer, really. And the music is easy. The music is just all over the place.

How about you as a father? How old is your son [Julian] now?

He is 11 now.

All I know is that you took him to Disneyworld … right?

Yeah, that was hell. Disneyland was better, the first time, in L.A., I took him there. Because I went with a gang, and there were a few of us who were flying a little. But Disneyworld — I was there on the most crowded day of the year, around Christmas or something. Seeing him is good. What we do is irrelevant. I went through a period of, “What are we gonna do?” and all that crap. It doesn’t really matter. As long as he’s around. Cause I don’t see him that often.

How is it for an 11-year-old boy to have John Lennon as a father?

It must be hell.

Does he talk about that to you?

No, because he is a Beatle fan. I mean, what do you expect?? I think he likes Paul better than me … I have the funny feeling he wishes Paul was his dad. But unfortunately he got me … It must be hard to be son of anybody. He is a bright kid and he’s into music. I didn’t encourage him, but he’s already got a band in school. But they sing rock’n’roll songs, ’cause their teacher is my age. So he teaches them “Long Tall Sally” and a couple of Beatles numbers. He likes Barry White and he likes Gilbert O’ Sullivan. He likes Queen, though I haven’t heard them yet. He turns me on to music.

I call him and he says, “Have you heard Queen?” and I say “No, what is it?” I’ve heard of them. I’ve seen the guy … the one who looks like Hitler playing a piano … Sparks? I’ve seen Sparks on American TV. So I call him and say, “Have you seen Sparks? Hitler on the piano?” and he says, “No. They are alright. But have you seen Queen?” and I say “What’s Queen?” and then he tells me. His age group is hipper to music … at 11 I was aware of music, but not too much.

How is it when you walk around in New York? I guess, you are not walking around with a bodyguard like a lot of other people?

Are you kidding? It’s not 1965, it’s ’75. People just see me. And occasionally just bother me a bit. But the most they ask for is an autograph. I don’t care, I sign an autograph. Sometimes the taxi drivers, if they are young, get a little bit … And I say, “Yes, it is me. Keep your eye on the road.” But apart from that it’s no hassle. In general I just walk around. I love it. People just say, “Oh, it’s him,” or, “It isn’t him,” but they don’t jump on me. Because I’m not in the prime of my career, or whatever they call it. I am not Elton. He can get around, but it’s pretty hard.

What about simpler days, like in Hamburg?

You know what I have written — carved — on a church in Hamburg? “John loves Cyn.” That was my first going out with her at that time. A church that overlooks … just outside the Reeperbahn. But out right in town, and it’s got a big green tower, that you can walk up in. And we all carved our names on there. You can have a look. There will be John + Cyn, Stu [Stuart Sutcliffe] + Astrid, Paul + … what the hell was the girl at that time?

Were they all English girls?

Except for Astrid with Stu. I think Stu and Astrid is up there … but I know John + Cyn is. We stuck our names up there with whoever we were hanging on then. I didn’t go out with a German girl. I ended up with an American, I never saw her again.

Did you ever meet Elvis?

Once, yeah. It’s an interesting story. We were terrified. He is our idol. We went to meet him, all the gang this day. We went in and he was sitting in front of a TV. We were in the middle of a tour, ’65 or something. He had this TV, I remember; he had an amplifier and a bass plugged into it. And watching with no sound on the TV. And playing bass and singing, and we were sort of singing along. But we were really just watching him. I always thought of it from our point of view; I never thought of it from his. And years later I heard from a friend, who is friendly with his ex-wife, that he was terrified too: a)’cause we were the new thing and b) what was gonna happen. And that he had been prancing around for hours in preparation, thinking of what to say. And we worshipped him.

It’s a strange story … I just remember sitting there and him playing the bass. And me thinking, “It’s Elvis! It’s Elvis!!” It’s actually Elvis. He looked great then, no weight on him. He looked good. And he was shy a bit. I’d like to see him in Vegas ’cause that’s where he’s supposed to be at home. But I’d be embarrassed if they said, “And there in the audience is John Lennon.” I’d hate it. I’m dying to see him.

Tell me about your therapy with Chanuk?

Part of it was not to self-control yourself, in any way. That included anything so I would just eat and eat and eat. And it was all very well for the mind, but for the body it was terrible. But the idea was, “Well, I am an artist, not a model, so fuck it. I wonder who I try to please … ? It was me I was trying to please, I found out; too late, after I’d got about 5 million pounds. And I wore the same clothes for two years. I had two things: a jumpsuit — not a fashionable one; one you get to do the plumbing in. I had two of them. And that’s all I wore for almost two years. In the middle of the Chanuk thing I got fat as hell. I was living on chocolate and Dr. Pepper … I mean, Chanuk was an idiot, but he was not bad. His therapy was good. It was just he was a pain in the neck. So I got big, and I wore the same clothes … I got used to it. I didn’t feel terrible about it, but I didn’t enjoy it. I was a slob.

Your sex life? Did it change while you were at it? Did you get conscious of being ugly?

No, because I was in the therapy with Yoko, and we both were as fat as hell. And in the dark it feels great. We both would roll around … It’s when you wanna go somewhere else, or when someone else sees you that you are conscious of it. Sometimes I don’t like dressing up. And I don’t dress up for months, or almost a year. Just wear a T-shirt and jeans. And someday I just get an urge to get dressed. And then you can’t wear anything — nothing looks good, nothing … you always look like an asshole.

Did you go shopping?

I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t buy anything. ‘Til the weight was gone. George is a lucky one. He eats like a pig — and nothing happens. Makes me mad. Ringo gets fat as a pig. I wasn’t a fat kid. I just got fat through greed. Ringo was a fat kid, so he always had problems. I got fat when we got rich and famous. And he didn’t, he watched it.

How did you keep your sanity when you got rich and famous?

I didn’t. I was born crazy, so it wasn’t that unreal. It was just like a dream. Like being Alice in Wonderland.

Is it the same thing when you look back now?

Yeah. This is a dream, right now. I am sort of aware, but it’s sort of unreal, being here.

For me, being with you, suddenly it’s not “John Lennon,” but a person, a man …

I am a guy, yeah. That is true. But how do you know unless you see somebody? I am just some guy who did … whatever. Always see me as me. I was always me, all the way through it … I love motels ’cause there is no reception area. I like hotels too. But I like motels as well. Just invisible places where you check in with a credit card, in the middle of the night, anywhere. Some guys in taxis now, old guys, they recognize the voice is English, but they don’t recognize me. They don’t know who the hell I am. They say, “Oh, you’re English! I was over there in the war…” And they go on and on … and tell me amazing life stories … They ask, “what do you do” and I say, “I’m a musician,” and they say, “Are you doing alright?” “Yeah I am … “

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

We live in a time where artists are expected to do less, and are celebrated for it: fewer interviews, fewer magazine covers, fewer award shows. Manufacturing an air of mystery around a new singer or rapper is by now an industry standard marketing strategy. Meanwhile, the bigger artists get, the more they seem willing to forego the grand charade of promotion—which is to say, interaction with the world at-large—barring whatever a brand has paid them millions of dollars to do.

Beyoncé is in no ways immune to this. Recently she has only been interviewed by the daughter of a billionaire friend to promote her fashion label, and in many ways she may have popularized it: She agreed in 2014 to pose for T, the New York Times‘ fashion magazine, without sitting for questions, and then did the same for Vogue’s vaunted September issue a year later. Instead, she releases music that interacts with the gossip that exists to fill in the blanks. She tours, but otherwise communicates with her fans through a meticulously curated Instagram account and documentaries that have the patina of confession but don’t say much of anything at all. Any unflattering photos are legislated away.

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Yet if there is an artist who more than makes up for this new paradigm—who harnesses the power of doing less instead of just enjoying its luxury—it is, of course, Beyoncé. In that regard, her performance at Coachella on Friday may go down as her crowning achievement. It was a show with a hell of an elevator pitch: Beyoncé doing an entire show backed by a full, HBCU-inspired marching band, with a surprise Destiny’s Child reunion to boot. But, as one imagines great elevator pitches must be (mine are all bad), that does not even begin to encapsulate the resulting spectacle.

What she delivered instead was… just completely ridiculous. The show was entertainment on a pure base level but also contained depths of subtext, plumbing cultural and familial history in what now feels like a joint project with her sister Solange. (That Beyoncé was the first black woman to headline Coachella only added weight to this endeavor.) It was anthemic and triumphant but also goofy and hilarious. It presented her work in what feels like the best possible light, breathing new life into songs that weren’t necessarily great in the first place—like “Party,” performed as a dance break with a revelatory new percussive arrangement—or parts of her catalog that can’t help but feel a bit stale (like “Me, Myself & I,” rendered with a tangible richness). It was a concert in name only, as highly stylized and choreographed as a Broadway production, with skits written in to cover for costume changes. The stream featured enough camera cues to suggest that the at-home viewer was as prioritized as the audience member. If any backlash comes its way, ignore it: this was the rare performance worthy of the awestruck praise it generated from the second it began.

That Beyoncé did all of this at Coachella—at at a time when festivals are weighing down the music industry instead of enlivening them, and a year after frequent collaborator Frank Ocean had months of trouble trying to roll out his own idiosyncratic festival set—felt almost like a joke. Watching the performance live early Sunday morning, I was left cackling like a small child who doesn’t yet know how to use his words. But, if anything, Beyoncé has a history of showing up to places she doesn’t need to be and putting on performances that are outsized compared to everything else that appears around them, like skyscrapers in the slums. In both 2014 and 2016 (the latter especially), she performed extended, intricate medleys at the VMAs, an award show that has been on life support for years. In 2011, she used that venue to reveal her first pregnancy. Coachella at least paid her a small fortune.

There is a certain generosity in all of this, and the world is not lacking for characterizations of Beyoncé as a benevolent ruler who descends from a summit to please her subjects when she so chooses. But, unless she is an incredible actor (history offers mixed results), the show also felt personally therapeutic. “This is a very important performance for me tonight,” she said at one point, and though she ended up being in right in the sense of how it will be remembered historically, she was, of course, just talking about herself. In the era of less, cultural moments like this—when art for mass consumption actually exceeds our expectations—feel like getting to sip from a desert oasis; we’re lucky, I guess, that Beyoncé has the thirst, too.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

Just three years ago, when Fleetwood Mac was awash in good vibes after the return of Christine McVie, MOJO Magazine asked Mick Fleetwood if it was the classic lineup or nothing. The drummer, who has anchored the British band with bassist John McVie since 1967, responded: “This is it, to me. Emotionally, if you think of the enormity of what has happened, the surprise of what has happened, the doors that have opened to be walked through…if you were writing a book, you’d go, ‘Isn’t it a shame I can’t end it like this?’ We’ve had the chance to end it like that and I wouldn’t dream of it any other way.”

Dreams never last. It was only a matter of time before Fleetwood’s rosy summary of the future of rock’s most mercurial band shattered, and April 9, 2018 brought the news. Lindsey Buckingham–the guitarist/singer/producer/songwriter who sat at the foundation of Fleetwood Mac since 1975–would not joining the band on its farewell tour later this year. Shortly after the story broke in Variety, it was reported by Rolling Stone that Buckingham was fired over disagreements concerning this tour.

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Details remain sketchy but as its surprise reveal fades, Buckingham’s departure seems like the inevitable end to his time in Fleetwood Mac. After all, the group had eight guitarists before he joined and, with this year’s addition of Crowded House’s Neil Finn and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, there have been six other members that have played with the group once Lindsey left them high and dry. Buckingham may have played a pivotal part of Fleetwood Mac’s story but it was only a part–one that was fraught with so much creative tension, it’s a wonder either of his tenures lasted as long as they did. Here we’ve created a brief history of Buckingham’s time with the band.

***

1973: As Fleetwood Mac release Mystery To Me, their fifth album to feature Christine McVie and guitarist Bob Welch, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks debut with Buckingham Nicks, a sweet, hazy collection of folky Southern Californian soft-rock produced by Ken Olsen. Buckingham Nicks sinks without a trace, leaving the duo nearly destitute and looking for a break.

1974: Fleetwood Mac begins the year battling a former manager who launched a competing band with by the same name, alongside members of a group called Legs, and ends it with Bob Welch quitting the band on the eve of recording an album. Desperate to replace his guitarist, Mick Fleetwood remembers Ken Olsen playing him “Frozen Love,” a song from Buckingham Nicks, earlier that year, so he offers Buckingham the gig without an audition. Lindsey insists that his partner Stevie join as well–a magnanimous gesture, to be sure, but also the first sign he’ll put his own creative interests first.

1975: Despite the reservations of John McVie–“we’re a blues band, this is really far away from the blues,” Olsen recounted–Fleetwood Mac decided to follow the direction of Buckingham and Nicks and refashion themselves on their eponymous 1975 album.

1976: As Fleetwood Mac climbs the charts in the early months of 1976, Rolling Stone reveals in an April 22, 1976 news item that Buckingham and Nicks are the second couple in Fleetwood Mac to be hitting “choppy waters.” This marks the first airing of the interpersonal strife within the band and it’s a double reveal, divulging the divorce of the McVies as well. With all their dirty laundry going public, the group embarks on the stress-filled recording of a new album, which they would call Rumours after all the gossip in the press.

1977: Released in February, Rumours elevates the band to superstardom. The album stays at the top of the Billboard charts for 33 weeks, generating the Top 10 hits “Go Your Own Way,” “Dreams,” “Don’t Stop,” and “You Make Loving Fun.”

1978: Riding high on Rumours, Buckingham and Nicks experience a detente in their personal relationship as they co-produce Walter Egan’s Fundamental Roll, which features the yacht rock standard “Magnet and Steel.” (Nicks would also sing harmonies on “Gold,” a hit Buckingham produced for John Stewart in 1979).

1979: Heading into the studio to record the sequel to Rumours, Lindsey Buckingham was insisting that the Mac make an album that turned their 1977 blockbuster on its head. Christine McVie would tell Creem, “I think if we hadn’t done that album, then Lindsey might’ve left,” but that doesn’t mean the sessions were easy. Nicks recounted in the liner notes to the 2015 reissue of Tusk–the resulting double-LP released at the end of 1979–that Buckingham was so adamant to do something the opposite of previous record “that I think he scared us.”

1980: Despite two Top 10 hits in “Tusk” and “Sara,” Tusk didn’t replicate the success of Rumours, and tensions began to bubble over onto the stage. During the final gig for the supporting tour for Tusk, Buckingham announced “This is our last concert….for a long time,” sparking chatter that the band was about to split.

1981: Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood all release solo albums, with Lindsey’s restless Law And Order and its accompanying Top 10 hit “Trouble” overshadowed by Stevie’s Bella Donna, which produced three hits in “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Leather and Lace” and “Edge of Seventeen.”

1982: Fleetwood Mac decides to reunite for a new album but, according to Buckingham, they tell the guitarist “we’re not going do that process anymore”–so he swallows his pride and the group makes the cozy, lovely Mirage.

1983: While Mirage floats down the charts, Lindsey Buckingham contributes the nervy “I Want You Back” to I’m Not Me, an album by Mick Fleetwood’s Zoo. (A move that suggests everything is operating smoothly behind the scenes.) Meanwhile, Nicks’s solo career flourishes with The Wild Heart and its hit “Stand Back”.

1984-1986: Upon the 1984 release of his solo set Go Insane, Lindsey Buckingham told Rolling Stone  “I’m trying to break down preconceptions of what pop music is” and, like most pioneers, he didn’t see much commercial success for his endeavors. This was the beginning of a rough patch for the Fleetwood Mac universe. Ten years on from their pop reinvention, the group were scattered and working on solo projects. Buckingham in particular was dedicated to his studio work, but he slowly came back aboard. After aborted sessions with Nile Rogers, Buckingham and his co-producer Richard Dashut agreed to helm the new record, which was largely made while Nicks was on a solo tour.

Whether the Finn and Campbell-infused edition of Fleetwood Mac flourishes or fails, one thing can be certain: it’s almost truer to the band for them to open up a messy new chapter. A tidy ending isn’t one suited for a story as operatic as Fleetwood Mac.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

On Sunday, the legendary Chicago label Drag City released the large majority of its catalog on Spotify and Tidal for the first time, ending its run as one of the last great holdouts of the streaming era. (Apple Music users have been enjoying early access since August.) The label launched in 1990, giving home to artists who operate at the freaky fringes of indie music: darkly comic singer-songwriters, psych-folk solo guitarists, blistering noise-punk bands, atmospheric synth explorers. It’s a vast and daunting catalog. Below, the Spin staff has compiled a list of a few great Drag City releases to help newcomers navigate it. In honor of the label’s freewheeling spirit, we’ve given space to both its best known artists and some offbeat personal favorites, including a few of the one-off experiments and unlikely collaborations that make Drag City so consistently engaging.

At the bottom of the list, you’ll find two extra releases by Will Oldham and Jim O’Rourke, two key artists who opted out of the streaming deal. We’ve included them because no Drag City list would be complete without them, and as a reminder that it’s still possible to go to a record store and buy this stuff, which is probably what the label would prefer anyway. All the true cheapskates out there can also find them in their entirety on YouTube.

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Smog, Knock Knock

One of the greatest gifts Drag City has given its fans by offering their catalog on streaming services is 25 years worth of Bill Callahan albums. You could reasonably recommend many (most, even) of Callahan’s releases as Smog and under his own name as his most perfect or evocative. Knock Knock, from 1999, is a good reminder of the more mischievous, musically experimental quality of his work as Smog, while still boasting plenty of his signature cascading fingerpicking and pithily devastating lyrics. There’s an immediacy to Knock Knock’s choruses and stylistic pivots, and his nods to classical minimalism, trip-hop, and grunge will likely to surprise listeners only familiar with Callahan’s later work. As with the best of his music, so much of the pathos and humor in the songs on Knock Knock surges up in the long spaces between the words. Whether you’re thinking fondly about moving to the country, thinking about leaving it, or pondering memories that “turn your bones to glass,” there’s a song for you here. —WINSTON COOK-WILSON

Royal Trux, Accelerator

By the time Royal Trux released their 1997 album Sweet Sixteen, complete with a cover photo of a toilet flooded with puke and shit, the brass at Virgin Records knew they weren’t going to recoup the duffle bags full of money they invested in Neil Michael Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema in one of the most outlandish major label signings of the great post-Nirvana alt-rock boom. Virgin’s loss was Drag City’s gain as the scuzzy duo swaggered back to their former indie home with Accelerator, a brilliant record that brashly deconstructed the tropes of ‘80s rock. We’re approaching Accelerator‘s 20th anniversary, and it has aged remarkably well for an album whose closing track paid tribute to action star and future Vladimir Putin admirer Steven Seagal. —MAGGIE SEROTA

Bitchin’ Bajas, Bajas Fresh

Recently, the members of Bitchin’ Bajas have occasionally functioned like a house band for Drag City artists looking for a little extra cosmic drone, showing up on records by Circuit Des Yeux and in collaboration with Will Oldham. Their own albums place percolating synths and instrumental loops at the center of the action, creating open vistas that recall the electronic music of minimalist pioneer Terry Riley as well as the kind of records you might find advertised as meditation aids in a natural healing store. Bajas Fresh, their most recent album, is also their most ambitious, with one track that stretches to 23 minutes and three seconds (called 2303, naturally) and another that refashions a ‘60s Sun Ra Arkestra composition as ambient music. “Jammu” patiently layers tones for nine minutes before closing with a thrilling rush of snare drum, a reminder that this sort of music needn’t always be about stasis—there’s plenty of room for ecstatic motion as well. —ANDY CUSH

The Fucking Am, Gold

Bay Area instrumental metal heroes The Fucking Champs require an almost archaeological examination of their jagged, sedimentary discography. The riffs go deep—so deep—that you gotta wheel in the backhoe to do the heavy lifting. A lot of their best work landed on Drag City, including the Champs’ collaborations with post-rock titans Trans Am. It was Gold, a Drag City LP from 2004, that realized the full power of these two powerhouse trios together as one behemoth, known forever onward as The Fucking Am. Whether on the Thin Lizzy-indebted “Taking Liberties” or the pummeling “Powerpoint,” the spirit of this record was so legendary and pure that an entire generation of math-core revivalists could never match it, despite all best intentions—the kind of rock ’n’ roll ether that suburban heshers daydream about huffing. With the LP long out of stock, and CD players all but nonexistent, this record streaming is a godsend from Valhalla. —DALE EISINGER 

Cate Le Bon, Crab Day

Every sound on Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon’s finest album is hair-thin. The music is so brittle that it’s disorienting, like it’s been sped up or you’ve just inhaled some helium. Somehow, the effect that is hypnotic—even relaxing—instead of caustic. Assuaging any potential anxiety, Le Bon croons and murmurs soothingly, just under pitch, like a non-Teutonic Nico. Her songs are invested with word-scramble humor out of the Gertrude Stein playbook and her own curious punchlines. Often, they are grounded by Le Bon’s cryptic metaphors for herself, as seen in relationship to some shadowy partner: “I’m a dirty attic,” “I was a humid satellite,” “I’m a blind in your window,” and so on. “What’s Not Mine,” a bewildered meditation on identity with a destructive jam of a coda, is possibly her greatest song. —W.C.W.

Rangda, False Flag

Rangda is the rare supergroup that offers everything, all at once, ceaselessly, with the fortitude of each member. A true power trio in an unorthodox sense, the band consists of guitarists Ben Chasny (whose solo project Six Organs of Admittance is one of Drag City’s tentpoles) and Sir Richard Bishop (of Sun City Girls) along with legendary drummer Chris Corsano (who played drums on Bjork’s Volta, among many other experimental-leaning albums). They drain every ounce of blood from their pure-noise freakouts, spaghetti western dioramas, and punishing psych-rock powerviolence. False Flag marks their first recorded statement, a Drag City classic in the tradition of, “why the hell not?” There’s a sense of partnership felt in these tracks, as each member gets a stab at wrestling some catharsis from their instruments, laying demons to rest at the feet of the listener as some kind of weird proof that they’re able to do so. —D.E.

Silver Jews, American Water

Sure, David Berman is a brilliant poet and musician, but he’s also one funny motherfucker. The acerbic Silver Jews leader has one-liners for days, which he shows off on “People,” one of several collaborations with his old friend Stephen Malkmus on Berman’s third album American Water. There’s something in the sleepy timbre of Malkmus’s vocals that really sells lyrical gems like “the drums march along at the clip of an I.V. drip, like sparks from a muffler dragged down the strip.” Berman’s ability to weave this sort of wry humor throughout the lyrics is perhaps his most endearing aspect, and it’s what made American Water an instant classic upon its 1998 release. –M.S.

Dope Body, Natural History

Dope Body were products of Baltimore’s fertile scene for noise rock and arty punk from around the turn of the most recent decade, thrashing for eight years before breaking up in 2016. Unlike Double Dagger, the righteously angry local post-hardcore heroes with whom they frequently shared the stage, Dope Body never seemed like they had an urgent message to deliver. They were more interested in having fun, delivering grungy half-time grooves that frequently verged on rap metal, with the goofy swagger of shirtless kids smoking weed in the corner of your local skatepark. Like the rest of their discography, their second album Natural History imagines an alternate history in which bands like Shellac and Fugazi were shamelessly radio-friendly party rockers instead of ascetics. “I’m just talkin’ shit!” frontman Andrew Laumann howls at one point during the riffy highlight “Road Dog.” That sounds about right. —A.C. 

Joanna Newsom, Ys

The eccentric, incorporeal pop songs on Joanna Newsom’s stunning 2005 debut The Milk-Eyed Mender prepared no one for the sprawling, programmatic epics that made up Ys, which surfaced just a year later. The singer-songwriter’s sophomore effort polarized fans, perplexing those looking for ululatory hooks along the lines of “Peach, Plum, Pear” and “The Book of Right-On.” But it made it clear that Newsom was a serious and unprecedented talent, more than a “freak folk” anomaly destined to be remembered most fondly decades on by former Arthur subscribers. Ys came across like one stream of speech-like melody, organized around the emotional peaks and valleys in Newsom’s libretto instead of musical reiterations. The swooping orchestral gestures came courtesy of Van Dyke Parks, another iconoclast who released a similarly ambitious and uncharacterizable avant-pop classic almost 40 years prior. Ys was lucky enough to come out during a time when the indie music blog set was actively championing unwieldy, baroque songwriting. Today, it towers above the rest of the strangest indie pop of that period (sorry, Blueberry Boat), and should rank among the greatest singer-songwriter albums of this century so far. —W.C.W.

Om, God is Good

The spiritual focus of Om, the offshoot stoner-drone-doom project that formed out of the even more renowned stoner-drone-doom project Sleep, was no secret from the beginning. Just look at the name! Their rhythms are mandalas, tracing a serenity prayer through heavy metal minimalism. Vocals come down like busted spiritual directives, the sound of the seraphim on skid row. God is Good, their first release for Drag City, saw Om swapping original drummer Chris Hakiu for Emil Amos of psych-rock goliaths Grails, and adding the endlessly skilled experimentalist Robert A. Lowe to their ranks. The album opens with one the longest Om tracks to date, the 19-minute “Thebes,” which seems to expand at the same rate as the universe itself. —D.E.

Palace Music, Viva Last Blues

The shapeshifting singer-songwriter Will Oldham is among Drag City’s most important artists, and Viva Last Blues is among his greatest albums. Released in 1995, before Oldham settled on Bonnie “Prince” Billy as his long-term stage name, it featured the appealingly ambiguous moniker Palace Music on the sleeve. The music inside is equally beguiling, proceeding with an elegance that almost seems accidental. Oldham delivers epiphanies as if they were offhanded jokes, and vice versa, accompanied on his rambles by a shaggy ensemble of acoustic instruments. There’s tremendous range despite the relatively limited palette: enough for one of the most painfully bittersweet love songs ever written, and another one about fucking a mountain. —A.C.

Jim O’Rourke, Eureka

Jim O’Rourke first made his name in the ’90s as an adventurous and frequently collaborative fixture of Chicago’s experimental improv scene, but when he signed to the city’s flagship indie label, it was to pursue an entirely different project. Eureka is his second and perhaps finest Drag City release, in a series of albums that focused on immaculate chamber pop instead of squalling noise. It includes an exuberantly reworked version of the Burt Bacharach composition “Something Big,” which should give you a pretty clear of the territory O’Rourke was working at the time. (He would later record an entire tribute album to the great pop songwriter.) O’Rourke’s reedy voice can’t match those of Bacharach collaborators like Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield, but that’s OK, because the album’s real magic is in its endlessly dynamic arrangements. The instrumental “Through the Night Softly” is a Side One closer for the ages, with twin climaxes that arrive via an unexpectedly delightful procession of steel drums, pizzicato strings, and triumphant rock’n’roll tenor sax. —A.C.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

During her four-minute music video for “Figures,” Jessie Reyez smashes her guitar to the ground with full force before looking into the camera with an intensity that implies she can see into the darkest corners of your soul. For the 26-year-old singer from Toronto, emotional honesty is admirable if not easy–she’ll wreck shit and then delve into tear-jerking vulnerability, revealing different sides and complexities in emotion. “The song was still so real to me that I couldn’t quite hold it together,” she tells me when we meet a few days after her performance at a New York festival.  “It ended up being a blessing.”

As a live performer, she is even more striking and exudes an unbridled energy that’s buoyantly captivating. When she sings, she belts from the bottom of her stomach to the top of her throat, as if her voice could rip through her frame with its integrity and candor. But that spontaneous burst of energy remains mostly in service for her performances and recording–when we speak one on one, she’s focused and thoughtful about talking about her music. “No one can interrupt your song,” she says about this dynamic. “I mean, they can pause the song, but you know what I mean.” 

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Perhaps these qualities have something to do with her background. Jessie Reyez was born and raised in Toronto, the daughter of Colombian immigrants, and has been around music her entire life. Her father plays guitar, and she felt a deep connection with reggae, which she was introduced to as a child. She refers to her own blend of genres as “Quentin Tarantino.” Songs vary from dark hip hop/R&B arrangements to mellow electric guitar hooks, but what shines through is the rawness and purity of her voice and the brutal honesty in her lyrics.

Since the release of her excellent debut LP Kiddo two months ago, Reyez has been focused on bringing her music and message to life. Last month she released Gatekeeper, a gut-wrenching short film about music industry sexism which resulted in a lot of buzz online, and when we meet, she’s just played Governor’s Ball, her first New York festival. Just last night, she stunned us with a breathtaking performance of “Figures” at the BET Awards. Now, Reyez is headed out on tour with a handful of sold out dates in the US and Europe, and she’s featured on Calvin Harris’ new album, out June 30th.

I really loved your EP, Kiddo, and the song that really strikes me is “Figures.” Obviously it’s deeply personal for you, but it’s also personal for the listener. What was it like to film?

Crazy. Honestly, we filmed more material. I think that was the first or second take of the day, and I was in the middle of my darkness, you know? We didn’t even know we were just gonna do it in one take. That wasn’t the plan. And then after we saw everything, the guys were like, “Jess, I think this is the shot,” and I was like “Fuck! Me breaking down, sick!” And that ended up being it. We shot a bunch of shit, and it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Watching that video and  “Shutter Island,” “Gatekeeper,” I noticed that bluntness and honesty are the running themes in your music. Why is that important to you?

Music’s always been in my home. My dad plays guitar, and I grew up listening to cumbia and salsa and boleros. And then I got introduced to reggae at like or six or seven and I was like, that was just everything. Writing, I actually started with poetry, when I was younger. My grade 7 teacher happened to see one of the notebooks that I filled up with letters, and she said “this is dope,” and went as far as to tell my parents, “I don’t know if you know, but your daughter is lit with the pen!” and I was like, “thank you!” And she was one of the first people in the schooling system that ever took the time to be like, “Maybe you should polish this. You got a little bit of a blade there! Could be a harpoon if you give it some time.” You know?  …But I was awful.

I was an awful singer when I was younger. And my writing, I don’t think it got any substance until I went through my first real heartbreak, you know? After puberty. When you feel like an adult, and you meet someone, and you two become one, and you think that’s it. Getting out of that was my first blow, and that first blow, I needed to get that pain out. And I couldn’t really go to class ‘cause I’d cry, I couldn’t go to lunch, ‘cause I’d cry; I was depressed. And so, my music teacher would let me crash in the music room cause I couldn’t bear to be around people. And the music room had this little corner room with a piano, and he would let me in there, and I would just go there and cry, and play. Cry and write and play.

Your twitter bio says, “I like to sing about shit I don’t like to talk about …” What is it about music that makes it that safe place?

Freedom. I feel like, even conversations. I’m a fan of writing, and writing letters, because I hate when I’m trying to get a thought out and I can’t. Sometimes, in a conversation with someone else.. You know, two people are trying to communicate, so you have this dance that you kind of have to abide by, too, pauses and stops and you lose your train of thought. But in that (writing), it’s like your breath, and you can’t say anything until I’m done. Writing a letter, no one can interrupt your letter. And you put [the song] out, it’s the ability to communicate without having any filter and stuff. And I really appreciate that outlet. It’s poetry or music. There’s other things that people fall to, vices, and I’m thankful to have that.

Speaking of putting things out there on the page, the video for “Gatekeeper” is kinda like that, and it hit me, and probably a lot of other women in music, pretty hard.

Thank you! I’m happy it resonated with you! Thank you for supporting it. I mean, I’m not happy you empathized with it..fuck that!

Seeing it as a film made it so much more real. What made you decide that you wanted to do an eleven minute movie instead of something else?

I didn’t want the story diluted. And of kind of that thing, like communication. I wanted to get everything out. I didn’t want anyone to get a misconception of what happened, I wanted to go through it. I also didn’t want it to come off as this high and mighty, pious kind of thing, just because I happened to decide that I didn’t want to do it. Cause I feel like, we’re all human, and it just so happened that I said no. There’s a point specifically in that video where I talk about how, when I got home, the reason everything was messed up was because I thought about it. I thought, “Well fuck this, you might have to do this. How much do you really want what you’re chasing? If this is the only obstacle, are you willing to break? Are you willing to give it? The fact that you have to question your morality and question your own boundaries, shakes. I feel like it would shake anyone. I mean, that shit shook me, it shook me to pieces. I was crying, I was a wreck when I got in the car, and when I got home. That’s why.  And the director’s amazing. Peter Horn was amazing. He really helped me articulate the story and go through it. But the car, everything that we said, all that shit is verbatim. It was just an experience.

So now you’re actually with a major label- what did that feel like, in contrast to what you went through?

It’s crazy. It was interesting. Cause we had the project done before we started taking meetings with anyone. The project’s been done for a year. Kiddo, the first song was actually made two years ago. And we had “Gatekeeper,” along with the catalog of songs that we were done with obviously. And we would sit down with people and it was interesting to gauge people’s reactions. Cause at times we would play it, and there would be someone sitting across the table that would be visibly affected, or someone would start crying, or someone would leave the room, you know, which was crazy. But then there were, like, cause the other side of the coin, where, someone would get visibly uncomfortable, like, you know I’m talking about you, you know? And it’s interesting when you can read things like that. You don’t wanna partner with an asshole. You don’t wanna partner with a piece of shit. You don’t wanna partner with the enemy that you’re talking about. So it was great  to be able to play that, and almost like that be a testing ground in the way that people reacted to it and be able to read what kind of human they are, you know? It was interesting. I’m happy with our decision though. Everyone’s been nothing but great and respectful, you know?

Do you think that, talking about those kinds of experiences, now that you’ve done it once, that you have to continue or want to continue, being that voice for women in the industry?

I feel like I’ve always just wanted to talk about my experiences, but I never wanted to be this like [sings melody like an entrance for royalty], you know what I’m saying? I think that takes away from the element of empathy and why people connected with so much, so all I wanna do is continue talking about the shit that’s happened to me, like my realness. I don’t expect to go through that again. I won’t let it happen again. The difference, now to then, is a couple years, and thicker skin, and gaining wisdom, and knowing how to move, particularly as a woman in this industry where you have to teach people how to treat people, you know? Then, I was quiet, I don’t know. This is different. If it happens, then I’ll talk about it, but I’m not gonna force anything. I feel like when you try something synthetic, then you’ve already failed.

Are there any other things that you wanna talk about in your music that you feel like you haven’t talked about yet?

Umm, it’s kind of like asking, do you know what kind of days God’s gonna give you tomorrow? I don’t know, I might be dead tomorrow, I might live ’til I’m 60 and climb fuckin’ Mount Everest. It just kinda depends on what tomorrow has in store for me, being a reflection of the experiences that God’s gonna put me through.

Are there any other people who you would love to work with?

Yes! Frank Ocean. I have so much respect for him. It’d be incredible. I hope I can produce, I hope I can deliver, I hope I can come to the table, because I feel like I’d be in awe for a minute. But like, Channel Orange was incredible, to me, and “Pink Matter” is one of my favorite songs of all time.  And if we’re talking living or dead, then Bob Marley, Amy Winehouse, that’d be beautiful. Me, Bob, Amy and Frank in a room? That’d be nice.

How did you initially develop your style? Who were your early inspirations?

I listened to a lot of Bob and Amy, growing up. Otis Redding, Beyonce, Carlos Vives, and then the Colombian stuff, Celia Cruz, so I feel like all of that contributed. I was an awful singer when I was younger, but I practiced. I’ve known what I wanted since I was a kid, so just ‘cause I wasn’t good wasn’t gonna deter me. But it really me, to meet people along the way who bothered to see that little bit of potential. Tyse Saffuri, from Toronto- I auditioned for this girl group when I was like 17, and I went in there with my guitar and my shitty-fuckin’-voice and shitty runs, and did it.

Obviously, I didn’t make it, but I was leaving, all fuckin’ sad and defeated, and I’m walking upstairs, and he comes running up and he’s like “Hey!” and my dad’s there, and my mom’s there too, and he’s like “You know, I don’t know if you’d be the right fit for this, but I see something” like, this is almost a decade ago, he’s like “I see something, you’d be great” and we worked and then he came to the house two or three times, and two or three times he shared with me knowledge that impacted me so much.

He said, “Study the greats, follow the runs, your ear will get used to it, the movement will get used to it, you just need to follow the greats,” you know?  From that day on, that’s what I’ve been doing. Learning that, and gravitating more towards theory, so I know exactly where I’m going, as opposed to just going by heart. Both which are dope, but I’m grateful to him also. And my dad and my mom. Not everyone’s blessed with family that support them, regardless, but they were always down. They’ve always been waving the flag.

Having parents that support you, I think sometimes one underestimates how important that is.

So important, so crucial. I mean, for me, it’s incredible that people do it without that. That’s admirable, that’s crazy. For me, I feel like I had an ally, having those day one’s be like, “okay, that’s what you wanna do, okay.” My mom was even the kind to like, I didn’t want to go to school for it. I just didn’t think that going to school for music was going to affect me. I always that it’s who you know and all that shit, so I was like, “No, I just gotta keep hustling.” But my mom was like, “Go to school for music!” And I was like, “Nah, I gotta go for Kinesiology, or English, or something tangible.” Cause that’s what you’re given since you’re a child, that idea that you need to have something, sturdy, you need to have this, you need to have that. But I had my mom in my ear, telling me, if you wanna go, go headfirst. Blessings.

You’re going on tour in Europe, and I saw that you’ve played in London before. Are there any new cities or anything particular you’re really excited for?

Europe! I mean I’ve only really been to London and France for a day and Germany, which was beautiful, and I went to Berlin. But, every time I cross that ocean, I feel like it’s a lie. Every time I cross that ocean, I mean I’ve only really crossed it twice. Three times? The fact that I’ve done that is insane. I’m stoked. I’m stoked to go live another day and see more land, see more green, more people, more cultures. Connect with more people. The fact that someone across the world knows some words that I put down on a paper because I was feeling like shit, and they liked it, is beyond. That, to me, is magic. I’m stoked. I’m excited. London was actually the first place that I cried on stage cause people were singing “Shutter Island,” fucking full- like, in Spanish there’s a saying that when someone really fuckin’ sings something, they’re singing it with all lung. Pure lung. All out.  And my mom and dad were there, cause they’d never been to Europe, and I brought them out, and I lost it. And just started crying on stage, saying “Thank you!” Everyone sang. I’m amped. I’m just amped for it in general.

Is there any new music we can expect from you in the coming months?

Hell yeah! Yes. I’ve been working. Yes. The answer is yes. The Calvin Harris song is coming out June 30th! It’s on Calvin’s album. And Migos, and Lil Yachty, and Kehlani, and me. Ariana Grande. (laughs). Doesn’t that sound like bullshit? Doesn’t that sound like a lie? Bitch, what? Like, you’re lying. It sounds like a lie.

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If a recent night in Brooklyn is any indication, the first thing you see at a Ho99o9 concert is their fans running for safety. As doomsday drones mark the New Jersey punk duo’s arrival, a wide space almost instantly forms in the middle of the audience. Nobody throws their elbows or tosses their bodies into the gap immediately, but the area elicits the same kind of urgency as an expanding sinkhole—leave now or get bodied. The panic happens before Ho99o9—pronounced “horror”are even fully visible on stage at the Williamsburg venue House of Vans.

Ho99o9’s well known love for chaos requires this kind of preemptive scampering. The band—comprised of members and co-rappers Eaddy and theOGM—became a news item at SXSW in March after a venue ended their set after two songs because the thrashing had become too intense. Years ago, Eaddy performed a show in Newark, NJ with his penis out. A couple of minutes before their House of Vans set, Eaddy teases to me that his partner theOGM regularly vomits as part of a pre-show ritual.

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But the band’s performance on this cool April night ends up being comparatively tame. Eaddy, in his wrinkled schoolboy outfit (and fresh Vans), waves his mic stand around like a phallus, but his navy pants remain buckled. The shrimp tempura theOGM had eaten a few hours earlier stays in his stomach, though he does take the stage in a stained, lace wedding dress. TheOGM didn’t attempt Eaddy’s acrobatic leaps, but his howls echo as he flexes and poses with the same fictitious gravitas as a Dark Horse comic.

Their crudeness doesn’t exist only to shock, though—even the wedding dress has some metaphoric value. “It comes from the movie Kill Bill,” theOGM explains. “The Bride got killed and she woke up and came back and just struck vengeance on all her oppressors that fucked her over. It’s kinda like a rebirth. That shit inspires me.”

Punk—or punk-inspired—music has always relied on some oppressor to rally against, whether it be societal malaise or myopic venue management. Ho99o9 appear to have found their own antagonist after three years of one-off singles, EPs, and mixtapes of industrial dirges and sternum-breaking roars: the anti-black state. Their debut album United States of Horror is no less abrasive than the duo’s earlier material, but it’s a leaner collection that draws its focus from wringing righteousness out of Ho99o9’s instinctual aggression. “Street Power,” the concert’s opener, is a power-chord throttling proletariat wet dream (“Kill the rich / Cities burning up in flames”).

While Ho99o9’s distorted noise is protest in the way that black art within a disenfranchising society inherently is, theOGM and Eaddy spent the weeks leading up to U.S.H.’s May release making their politics explicit. They released videos for the title track, as well as “City Rejects,” and “War Is Hell,” which together form a trilogy that examines the effect commercialism has on blackness—how it trivializes human experience for money. Police officers kill black men in a pixelated video game, and later theOGM is seen chained and whipped—all to the delight of viewers who are shown watching behind the comfort of screens, their eyes replaced by $2 bills. TheOGM explains the latter is a direct reference to pageview culture. “The dude that’s on the two-dollar bill [Thomas Jefferson], he was a slave owner,” he says. “That’s all people see is dollar signs: ‘How can we make money off of this?’ or ‘How can we exploit this even more?’”

As multifarious as black art is, it co-exists within a construct that commodifies its creators, regardless of whether it expresses actual pain or if it’s branded as doing so. Ho99o9 isn’t free from this entanglement either. On the night I see them, Ho99o9’s raucousness takes place inside the walls of a venue created by a shoe corporation. Yet, theOGM and Eaddy are attempting to make a convincing case for being subversive artists. How does one separate radicalism from a simulacrum of it?

***

Ho99o9 inversely reflect on their stage personas in conversation. Offstage, Eaddy reins in his lewd kineticism, shrewdly gliding in his all-black attire through the orange glow of Blue Ribbon Sushi, a restaurant tucked in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, toward our table to converse in low-volume spurts. TheOGM’s dreads—an ominous, angular sight silhouetted against the House of Vans’ blue lights—are bundled into a large cap as he plops toward us a few minutes later, slightly more engaged and chattier.

They’re purposefully obtuse in the way you’d expect artists who swing wildly between impulses and conscious subversion would be. Neither reveal their full name or ages; when asked, only theOGM responded, stating via a publicist’s email: “My real name is, Blue James the 3rd, I’m 199 yrs old.” (Both are likely deep into their 20s, as they graduated high school in the late aughts). During our dinner time interview, I ask them, “Would you guys describe your aesthetic as punk?’”—echoing the descriptors that’s been attached to them. But the duo bristle. Eaddy mutters that they “don’t wanna put a label on it” before abbreviating his thought by sipping on his glass of water, silently motioning for theOGM to take this question.

“We don’t want nobody to be like, ‘Oh, well they make rap so why are they singing?’ or ‘Oh, they’re singing on this, so why are they now rapping?’” theOGM excitably responds. “No, I do whatever I wanna do, when I wanna do it. So there’s no genre values for us, you know? If I wanna make country music tomorrow, nigga, I’m doing it.”

Ho99o9’s cacophony is in line with other noted musicians whose transgressions fall outside the mainstream’s idea of black narratives, which is part of the reason why they’re often tagged with perfunctory comparisons. Legendary punk outfit Bad Brains are a common touchstone. Although theOGM’s howls sometime faintly recall H.R.’s wild oscillations, Ho99o9’s synthetic compositions are different, to say nothing of their politics. For one, they don’t quite share in their forefathers’ rastafarianism—in an interlude on United States of Horror, which takes place in a vehicle, the OGM says, “He could let this wheel go right now. God ain’t going to fucking grab the wheel and take us back home. Nigga, we gon’ crash.” They’ve been also compared to contemporary avant-garde enthusiasts Death Grips, and though Ho99o9 are stated fans of that band, their phrasing is far more legible than MC Ride’s cryptic lyricism. And if you let Ho99o9 tell it, they have no recent influences. Maybe Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN., but only in how theOGM says it “inspired me just to be better as a human.”

Rather, the molding of Ho99o9 can be traced back to Eaddy’s hometown of Newark, as well as theOGM’s time growing up in Elizabeth and Linden—both cities consistently rank among New Jersey’s most dangerous. Eaddy, who used to focus his energies on becoming an NBA player, repeats over dinner the fatalistic belief that he didn’t think he was going to make it out of Jersey.

“It’s the same shit for any young black person,” MoRuf, a friend and fellow rapper from New Jersey, says over the phone. “You either ball, your parents win the lotto, or some shit like that. Or you’re a rapper. I think the art is something that give us hope of getting out of here even to this day. Being an artist and a college graduate myself, it’s like, ‘Yo, we gotta get the fuck up out of here.’”

And so Ho99o9 invented their own escape—by the late aughts, MoRuf, Eaddy, and theOGM formed the NJstreetKLAN collective (more colloquially called JerseyKLAN) along with a crew of other artists. The clique sought to make a new space in north Jersey that combined punk and hip-hop culture in a town apathetic toward the former, even though the two genres have often rubbed up against each other. JerseyKLAN, in MoRuf’s words, represented the diversity of the culture geeks like “students of [Kanye West], the niggas who liked Little Dragon, niggas who were in Newark and liked skinny jeans.”

The crew would travel to the more fashion-forward New York City to buy fitted clothes, returning to the Garden State and its 3XL white tees. Because they weren’t being booked in their hometown, JerseyKLAN would also pool their own money to throw shows at hole-in-the-wall venues—Eaddy from his jobs at Urban Outfitters and as an YMCA pool cleaner, and theOGM from his stints a hospital security guard, a mall employee, and a host of other gigs. But by their account, the sacrifices weren’t for nothing—the other skinny jean wearers of New Jersey found out they weren’t outcasts, and in front of those audiences, Eaddy and theOGM honed their craft. Their first performance together in late 2012 at New Jersey’s since-shuttered venue the Metropolitan had the seeds of the raucousness they’d soon become known for.

“This dude was flying off of shit,” theOGM recalls of Eaddy. “Not even caring about what he was saying or if the vocals sounded good at that time. We didn’t even care. Even right now, I don’t have that much in my refrigerator,” he continues, just before his shrimp tempura arrives. “I’m still struggling. Everything comes from struggle, or frustration from not being heard. I mean, we’ve been making music for a while now and we’re just now getting a certain platform. Like, I can’t like scream in a dude’s face. But on stage, I can express that. It’s cathartic.”

***

In summer 2014, JerseyKLAN rapper J.Philippe was down in Atlanta figuring out what was next for herself. The collective had dissolved as its members grew up and went after their own separate interests, but she was still in contact with her neighborhood friend theOGM, who told her he was working on a new project, telling her, “I’m in a band, but the music, it’s different.” Ho99o9 was coming, and theOGM was going through a shift

“Not only did his sound change—everything about him changed,” Philippe recalls. “His style, the way he was dressing, the way he did his hair. He was definitely growing into his own person.”

A majority of theOGM’s pre-Ho99o9 material positions him as an acolyte of the Soulquarians. He can be heard rapping over Erykah Badu and Andre 3000 beats and other bohemian productions. The songs are pleasant, but his lady-wooing persona lacked definition. Ho99o9’s first single “Bone Collector”—which dropped a year after theOGM’s last Bandcamp project, 2013’s SummerChristmas—was a dramatic shift. After JerseyKLAN’s dissolution, theOGM’s soulfulness had corroded into something brutal: Rawkus Records-friendly instrumentals were replaced by metallic death stomps, and theOGM openly referenced the Death Grips (“Had The Money Store with a death grip”). Eaddy played the horrorcore anchor. “Bone Collector” has since amassed over 75,000 streams on SoundCloud, exponentially higher than their solo SoundCloud material, proving that this radical shift resonated.

Ho99o9 permanently moved to Los Angeles in 2014 and sparked the interest of TV on the Radio’s David Sitek, who heard of the duo through a friend. Sitek found a creative match in the Jersey punks and got to collaborating immediately. “I think that in a world that’s so calculated and based on the artifice, it’s really refreshing to see people reacting to the immediate and the now,” he says. “I’ve watched them summon the energy from nowhere. We’d be hanging by my house, which is near the trees, and then we’ll just make this gigantic apocalyptic [track].”

Sitek holds four production credits on U.S.H.: The anarchic rallying cry “City Rejects,” the scuzzy “War Is Hell,” the title track, and the castigating two-minute blitz “Face Tatt.” The former three establish the pillars of Ho99o9’s angst amidst a project that is admittedly not quite fully realized. The riffs are often too repetitive and lack a certain tension needed to make some of the band’s guttural noises feel earned. But there are key moments were the exasperation is palpable, like on the title track’s bridge, where theOGM fumes against police brutality, racism, and “motherfuckers abusin’ they power.”

It’s those bits of relatable rage that give Ho99o9 their vitality. “Fuck the police” could easily be a rote phrase at the hands of a lesser artist, but the anguish of consistently being an other is felt. Despite spending years working with mainstream averse art, it’s a trick Sitek can’t all the way express.

“I think to do something that’s raw and undefined and honest is an act of defiance these days because of how artificial everything is,” Sitek says. “If you’re thinking about yourself and what your place is, you’re not really being creative.”

There was no such double-thinking at the House of Vans. TheOGM, Eaddy, and their backing drummer Brandon Pertzborn are all shirtless as they head into the set’s final leg. At the night’s climax, the music quiets and Eaddy ventures out into the crowd toward the center of the ongoing moshpit and sits down on the floor, demanding onlookers to do the same. After a brief countdown, he shoots up and screams “get outta my way!” in a performative rage, darting back towards the stage and leaving the wild-eyed punks to have at each other.

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When they perform live, Forest Swords reveal themselves for what they really are, which is the world’s proggiest dub reggae ensemble. On a recent evening in New York City, Matthew Barnes, who composes and produces Forest Swords’ albums as a solo artist, wore a camouflage shirt and watch cap, flailing behind his laptop and sampler pads like a man possessed. James Freeman, touring bassist, bopped calmly in a black crew neck that matched his guitar and Ampeg stack.

Both are slight, ruddy-cheeked guys with close-cropped red hair and beards. They look like they could be brothers. They look like they could be the same guy. Their instrumental songs were long and discursive, and they drew from a melange of genres. But so many of their dark and steely favored sounds–moaning disembodied voices, pulsating distorted low end, thumping giant footstep percussion, creeping static noise–arrived according to rhythms and patterns set out by the likes of King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry in Kingston 40 years ago.

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Barnes began work on Engravings, Forest Swords’ acclaimed debut full-length from 2013, shortly after discovering dub via a CD box set compilation of classic tracks released on the Trojan label. He was an out-of-work graphic designer who’d released the first Forest Swords EP in 2011 as something of a lark, teaching himself to make beats and use digital audio software in his spare time after being laid off from his job at a magazine in the UK. “I was just amazed at how dub sounded,” he said, sitting on a Union Square park bench on the day after the NYC show. “What they did with studio techniques, using the studio as an instrument, using sound as a tool, using space as a tool, and using bass as a tool. And I thought it could be quite interesting to put that kind of spacious bass sound into what I’m doing.”

Barnes designs all of Forest Swords’ album artwork himself, a remnant of his previous professional life. (“My dad always makes a joke that all my fans are designers,” he says with a laugh. “If I can give back to the graphic design community, I’m more than happy.”) The Engravings cover looks like it belongs to an experimental metal band, and many of the songs within are shot through with a dissonance Barnes gleaned from childhood favorites like Deftones and Aphex Twin. There are no reggae upstrokes or toasting MCs, but tracks like “Irby Tremor” proudly identify Barnes as a disciple of Tubby, setting skewed orchestral samples and spaghetti-western guitar against slow and steady basslines that are unmistakably Jamaican.

On Compassion, Forest Swords’ newly released second album, the influence is a little harder to spot. The songs are longer, more circuitous, with an emphasis on drama and narrative that was mostly missing from the A-B structures of Barnes’ earlier material. After Engravings became a critical hit, he took a brief break from making albums, working instead on commissions to score multimedia works: a contemporary dance piece, a sci-fi film shot entirely on drones, and the video game Assassin’s Creed Rogue. Compassion reflects this newly expanded approach, built on a mix of sounds Barnes created electronically on his laptop and arrangements of live instruments. “Panic,” an early highlight, opens like a contemporary update on an Ennio Morricone score, rendering a tense martial atmosphere from rolling drums and processed singing. Soon, the sampled voice of soul singer Lou Johnson breaks through the mix with violent urgency: “I feel something’s wrong / The panic is on.” Barnes’s arrangement, together with a striking video featuring dancers whose faces are always obscured, suggests something more is at stake than the precarious romance of Johnson’s original.

“I never wanted to jump into the studio as soon as I got the opportunity, and be like ‘I want strings, and I want brass, and I want a fucking choir!’” Barnes said. “Some of the strings on Compassion are real, and some of them are fake. Some of the brass is real, and some of it’s fake. I like the idea that plugins now are so sophisticated that you can get anything to sound like anything, and it’s very convincing. But occasionally, when you listen to it closely, or when you tweak it slightly, it can be really off, or a bit wonky. And it’s really fun to butt those two things together.”

Compassion is difficult to categorize. In addition to its filmic qualities, there are shades of ‘90s artists like DJ Shadow, Portishead, and Massive Attack, who used the sonics of hip-hop toward nocturnal music that was mostly divorced from the act of rapping. (The unabashedly epic scope of DJ Shadow’s Entroducing… cut “Stem/Long Stem” feels especially prescient.) It’s produced mostly on a laptop, and it feels like electronic music, but it has no aspirations toward the dance floor. Though he’s mostly mashing buttons onstage, Barnes has the coiled energy of a rock musician; when he occasionally picks up his guitar, he practically drapes himself over the instrument, glaring toward Freeman with a punkish mix of menace and affection.

The reluctance to follow the strictures of genre means Forest Swords sometimes has difficulty fitting comfortably into concert lineups. In New York, Barnes and Freeman were sandwiched between a set of trippy techno tunes by the Bronx DJ Umfang and the dance music deconstructionist Actress, who headlined. Just as Umfang was beginning to whip the reluctant audience into rave mode, Forest Swords solemnly took the stage, backed by a projected black and white photo of shirtless horseback riders on a beach. With its bare-chested men by the water and chiaroscuro lighting, the image reminded me of the cover to Slint’s Spiderland–an uncompromisingly tense and ambitious album that provides an imperfect but surprisingly appropriate point of comparison for Compassion.

Music history is littered with disastrous attempts by white and non-Jamaican people to make reggae their own, but they seem to be making a better go of it in Barnes’s native UK than we do in the States. Jamaica was a British colony until 1962, and if imperialism can be said to have a silver lining, one upside is the rich ongoing communion between British pop sounds and traditions from the island, from the Clash and 2 Tone ska in the ‘70s to jungle in the ‘90s and grime today. For Barnes, the delicate dance between appreciation and appropriation involves immersing himself in dub’s techniques rather than its outward style. “It’s like looking at a painter and thinking, ‘I really like his brushwork,’” he said. “I’m a middle-class white person. Dub isn’t my music.”

Still, it’s good to acknowledge your roots every once in awhile. At the end of their set in New York, Forest Swords played a Compassion track with a medieval orchestral arrangement and clubby syncopated snares. Suddenly, the sound became bright and spacious. The rhythms settled into easy half-time. A keyboard riff appeared to mark every off beat, soaked in echo effects. The bass throbbed on as it had been doing all night. After an hour of dense dub in translation, Forest Swords pulled out something like the unadulterated article. It sounded like a Black Ark or Studio One production. A few measures later, Barnes looked up at Freeman and smiled, then steered the music back toward the wilderness.

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If you wanted to pick a single moment of music to explain the phenomenon of Massachusetts post-hardcore quartet Pile–the rave reviews from fellow bands; the reasonable music writers driven into paroxysms attempting to explain their appeal; the crazed fans compiling detailed gear lists for members, getting lip tattoos, and wearing homemade t-shirts that call out not just specific Pile songs, but specific parts of specific Pile songs–you’d have plenty to choose from on the band’s sprawling sixth album A Hairshirt of Purpose.

I’m tempted to choose the riff that arrives at the climax of the final track, “Fingers,” which barrels forward and is filled with jarring stitches between sections, like a drunk and angry exquisite corpse. The riff arrives with a force that Pile has spent the previous 12 tracks gathering and only occasionally teasing out. On a record distinguished from the group’s previous albums by its restraint and the sophistication of its arrangements, the “Fingers” riff is a reminder of the band’s strength as a blunt weapon. But Pile’s reputation isn’t only built on thudding catharsis. Even on earlier albums like Dripping and Magic Isn’t Real, the band drew listeners in with glowing details, a nimble sense of timing more often associated with jazz or classical musicians, and a compositional ambition exceeding that of nearly all of their peers, playing to crowds of beery punks in basements across America.

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I find my favorite moment on A Hairshirt of Purpose while watching Pile play a set that contained almost the entire album, in front of a sold-out crowd in Brooklyn a few days after its release. (Six albums in, Pile aren’t playing many basements anymore.) It comes during “Leaning on a Wheel,” a twangy and melismatic ballad about the inertia of old relationships. Rick Maguire, Pile’s frontman-composer and one of its two guitarists, spends most of the song singing like a 1940s country-western yodeler as the band quietly spins out melodies behind him. Finally, near the end, Pile starts doing a muted version of the thing Pile does so well. The guitars lock into metronomic unison, drummer Kris Kuss urges them along with a steadily thickening rain of tom and snare hits, and Maguire’s voice rises into the sandpapery region at the back of his throat. The song achieves liftoff midway through a weirdly affecting refrain: “We’re all giving ourselves head, each in our own way.”

At the peak of this ascent, the guitarist in any other punk band in the world would either play a soaring lead or coast on power chords; instead, Maguire retreats into a fingerpicked triplet figure that takes you back to the twisted country of the song’s introduction without losing any of its newfound momentum. Even though I’d already listened to Hairshirt about 20 times before the Brooklyn show, I didn’t notice and appreciate this delicate little guitar part until then. This happens with Pile: because of their rhythmic and structural complexity, the songs often take their time settling into your brain. Something that seems like an odd musical choice the first time you hear it might have you playing air guitar alone in your apartment on the fourth or fifth listen.

After their set and a few beers with fans at the merch table, Maguire and the rest of the band retire to the apartment of a friend of a friend, where they sleep on the floor. “We’re getting older, and so are the friends we make through touring, and they’re getting nicer places, so that kind of helps” he tells me the following afternoon, standing in the drizzle outside a kitschy punk dive bar. Pile would play another packed Brooklyn show that night, then set out for five more weeks of floors and crowds and loud music.

I ask him about the fingerpicking in “Leaning on a Wheel” and the attention to detail in Pile’s songs, and he responds with the kind of gracious self-effacement he’ll be frequently asked to exude in front of fans on the coming tour: “I try to avoid doing the repetitive thing in the songs, when it’s lazy. Sometimes I do it anyways.”

Either with Pile or as a solo artist, Maguire has been on the road for a good chunk of his adult life, and he’s encountered far gnarlier challenges than overeager fans and journalists. In 2015, just as Pile’s fifth album You’re Better Than This was beginning to find a wider audience than their longtime supporters, he quit his day job at a Boston Trader Joe’s to focus on music full-time. Pile left for a nine-week tour to support the album, and when they got back, Maguire had no job and no place to live. For a summer, he slept in Pile’s practice space. To make ends meet, he began saying yes to every solo show he was offered, in addition to Pile’s already packed tour schedule.

Then, after a one-off Pile show in upstate New York, he and his bandmates went camping. They were having soup for dinner, and they warmed the cans over the fire without opening them first, thinking they’d heat up faster. Kuss opened his can first. Voila: hot soup. Maguire went next. As soon as he lifted the pull tab, the can exploded, emptying its contents onto Maguire and leaving him with burns all over his face. In Brooklyn, he laughs and swipes through his phone to view a series of photos from the soup explosion’s aftermath. In the first image, taken a day or two after the trip, he’s browned and his eyes are wrinkly and swollen. He looks two decades older than his boyish 31 years–“like Mickey Rourke,” he says. In later photos, his face is fully two-toned, like he’s suffering from vitiligo.  

“And Kris, the drummer, was like ‘You can’t stay in the practice space with a face like that.’ Because I was fucked up,” he continues. “Luckily it healed really fast, but man. I was living in the practice space. Had that shit happen. What the fuck am I doing? And then when I went South,” he says, retreating to to his parents’ house in Nashville and another home the family owns in Georgia, where he began workshopping the material that would become Hairshirt. “That was when I could finally be alone and lick my wounds.”

Pile got its start as a musical project about ten years ago, when Maguire began to tire of the breakneck punk his previous band Hel Toro was playing. He started writing more tuneful songs on acoustic guitar and piano, tossing them into a metaphorical “pile” for some yet-to-be-determined future use. The first two Pile albums, 2007’s Demonstration and 2009’s Jerk Routine, feature Maguire playing and singing mostly alone, explicitly channeling the influences of country music, the blues, and the primal folk songs of what rock critic Greil Marcus dubbed “the old, weird America.” He arrived at this sound, he tells me, in part because he hated the thought of becoming a “solo emo” act like Dashboard Confessional, which felt like the most obvious signpost for a punk singer going acoustic. And though no one would describe Pile as a “blues rock” or “Americana” band, the sound of traditional guitar fingerpicking and a feeling of bruised yearning imported from country music can be heard on all of their releases, including A Hairshirt of Purpose.

Pile got its start as a band a few years later, when Maguire started itching to play loud again.  He recruited Kuss on drums, Matt Connery on bass, and Matt Becker on second guitar. They played Maguire’s solo repertoire, and also drew from the exploratory indie rock of the late ‘80s and ‘90s–bands like Slint, Shellac, early Modest Mouse–not out of nostalgia, but the sense that there was still compositional terrain left uncharted when everyone sold their guitars and bought turntables. Maguire still wrote all the songs, but the band approached them with a new widescreen focus and communal energy. If the lovable existential dirtbags that populate The Lonesome Crowded West got together in a garage, listened to John Fahey and Mississippi John Hurt, and composed a symphony to the dust and clutter around them, the result might sound something Pile’s full-band lineup.

Pile got its start as a phenomenon sometime around the release of Magic Isn’t Real in 2010 and Dripping in 2012. Around this time, the band helped electrify the music scene in Allston, a dingy Boston neighborhood that is a haven for students, playing endless shows in the same sweaty punk-house basements where contemporaries like Speedy Ortiz, Krill, and Fat History Month cut their teeth. The chaotic energy of these early full-band Pile performances became the stuff of local legend, and as the success of Speedy Ortiz briefly directed the spotlight of the national music press toward Boston’s house shows, Pile’s peers began championing their music at seemingly every opportunity. Exploding in Sound, the buzzy record label that has spent the last several years releasing records by an increasingly recognizable roster of scuzzy basement rockers, launched partly because its founder loved Pile and wanted to give Dripping a proper release. Before Krill’s breakup in 2015, they released an EP called Steve Hears Pile in Malden and Bursts Into Tears. In the title track, the narrator laments that he’s never written anything as good as a Pile song (“Did you hear the latest Pile album? Not a stinker on it”), then emails Rick and asks to play a show together.

The reputation Pile has earned as “your favorite band’s favorite band,” and the minor hubbubs that have attended the releases of A Hairshirt of Purpose and their 2015 album You’re Better Than This, follow from a simpler truth about the band. For several years before the music press deigned to acknowledge them, they were on the road and in the studio, building their chops and a community around their songs. In a time of flickering buzz for Soundcloud upstarts and endless dire prognostications about the future and meaning of indie rock, Pile has something valuable and surprisingly rare: an actual fanbase, one that will stick around if the media attention they’re receiving eventually dries up.

“It’s ideal,” Maguire says the day after their Brooklyn show, the drizzle clearing. “I’m happy it worked out this way, because I would have been freaked out if it had all happened at the same time. It would feel so fragile. If it’s just that the press loves it, and then there are fans all of a sudden–if the press turns on you, then you’re fucked. It’s nice to just put stuff out, and there are people out there who are into it based on nothing more than what you’re doing.”

It wasn’t always like this. Pile hired a professional publicist around the release of You’re Better Than This, but before that, Maguire and the band’s label head were acting as de facto press agents. “It was just, like, crickets,” he recalls. He’s intensely curious about the machinations of the indie rock industry that happen outside the confines of the practice space and the tour van, and we spend a good chunk of our interview discussing the particulars of my job. We get to talking about artists for whom it happens the other way around: buzz first, then fans. “Like Vampire Weekend,” he says. “Dude’s dad was an A&R rep? I don’t know how true all that stuff is. But I think that band’s music is garbage. Maybe I don’t know all of it, or whatever. But it’s like ‘How did that happen?’ But I do know how it happened. If you pimp anything the right way…”

(I’d never heard this rumor about Vampire Weekend before, and it appears to be untrue. Ezra Koenig’s dad is a set dresser for film and TV, Rostam Batmanglij’s dad works in book publishing, and according to Wikipedia, Chris Tomson’s dad is an engineer. I can’t find anything about Chris Baio’s dad, but I know that his cousin is Scott Baio.)

By Maguire’s estimation, Hairshirt has gotten “far and away” the most press attention of all of Pile’s releases, much of it centered on the period he spent writing in Nashville and Georgia. “I think the press has really run with that, because it’s an easy thing to romanticize,” he says. “I was there for like a month, and I got mono there. So I wasn’t like, Oh, really expressing myself, you know what I mean? I was just kind of sleeping and watching TV and eating ice cream. But whatever. If people want to say I was doing some Justin Vernon shit in the woods, that’s fine.”

The record that Maguire wrote during his stint in the woods is easily recognizable as Pile, but with stronger singing, slightly less distortion, and occasional strings and piano that augment the songs without weighing them down. Maguire says it maybe feels “a little bit more mature” than its predecessors.

You can hear the changes on a song like “No Bone,” which features only voice and twinkling guitar arpeggios on a chorus that would have previously been assisted by thundering drums. Or the gorgeous “Making Eyes,” which, if you listen to it in a certain headspace, almost sounds like Grizzly Bear. At times, the band seems to delight in building toward violent catharsis and pulling the rug out from under you at the last possible moment. At the show in Brooklyn, a particularly raucous fan in a Yankee cap seemed to suffer coitus interruptus during “Dogs,” which contains multiple huge crescendos that lead not toward chugging rhythmic chaos, but drumless clean guitar and whispery falsetto. Fortunately for the Yankee fan, they also played Hairshirt’s serrated lead single “Texas,” which ranks among the heaviest songs in Pile’s repertoire.

Since the recording of Hairshirt, Maguire has taken another sabbatical down south, where he wrote material that could take the band in one of two starkly different directions on their next record. “I was thinking of having a bigger band–two drums, maybe some keys or synths,” he says. “But I’ve also thought about doing the exact opposite of that, which would be just piano, strings, and acoustic guitar. Super mellow, and it doesn’t get to that intense aggressive stuff that we do. It would be nice to make a record that you can put on and chill out and make dinner.”

Pile has put out a record every two years since Demonstration in 2007, with long tours in between each of the later albums. Maguire expects to maintain something like this schedule “until I physically cannot do it anymore,” he says, and then waits a beat. “Which could be, like, five years from now.”

Because Pile got the chance to write their own narrative before blogs started writing it for them, coverage of their records tends to fall into one of two categories. There are the mildly puzzled writeups, concerned as much with Pile the phenomenon as they are with Pile the band. Pitchfork’s review of Hairshirt, for instance, opens with “It’s impossible to talk about Pile without talking about their fans.” Their You’re Better Than This review refers to Pile as the band “your cousin at MassArt’s been raving about.” Then there are the gushing dispatches from writers who are clearly members of the band’s cult, attempting to convince you that their favorite band is in fact the greatest group of rock musicians playing in America today. “I am nervous because I have 35 questions in my iPhone for Rick, and some of the questions are so obsessively specific that I wonder if I am crazy,” reads a particularly rhapsodic 2015 article from Consequence of Sound.

If I haven’t made it obvious by now, the piece you’ve just finished reading lands closer to the second category.

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