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Before he was old enough to legally drink, there were "Best Of," rarities compilations, and .zip files floating through the ether.

Whenever industry prospectors earmarked him as the next big thing, he disappeared back underground, only to reemerge sharper, leaner, weirder.

Though only 26, the St. Louis- born rapper and producer has seen enough for several lifetimes--and raps as if he's tapped into many more. But after a few years of highs, lows, and traumatic odysseys, he was able to stare straight into the abyss and conquer it. This regained confidence is exhibited on fish don't climb trees, the largely self-produced new album that reaffirms him as one of rap's great auteurs.

While working on "fish", he vowed to be more true to the emotions and experiences he'd endured. Being true to those fractured, discordant feelings requires a prismatic approach. And so you get fish's exhilarating hairpin turns: from downtempo dub ("bora bora") to 808s rattling through a haunted house ("tourniquet"), beats that sound as if they're molting into new shapes in real time (the two- song suite of "daze" and "grey theory") to ones that that plunge to the
bottom of a pocket ("spirits").

The album's title comes from the maybe-apocryphal Einstein quote, about how a fish judged by its ability to climb trees will "spend its whole life believing it is stupid." For Watson, this meant embracing the cheery first half of the quote ("Everybody is a genius"), but also being cognizant of the dark undercurrents that flow just beneath seemingly innocent misjudgments and mis-categorizations.

A.R. Kive collates the three most astonishing works from that most miraculous of duos - A.R. Kane - comprising the ‘Up Home’ EP from 1988 that signified the band’s dawning realisation of their own powers and possibilities, their legendary debut LP ‘sixty nine’ (1988) and its kaleidoscopic, prophetic double-LP follow up ‘i’ (1989).

In founder-member Rudy Tambala’s new remastering, the music on these pivotal transmissions from the birth of dream pop, have been reinvigorated and re-infused with a new power, a new depth and intimacy, a new height and immensity. Vivid, timeless and yet always timely whenever they’re recalled, these records still force any listener to realise that despite the habits of retrospective myth-making and the
safe neutering effects of ‘genre’, thirty years have in no way dimmed how resistant and dissident to critical habits of categorisation A.R. Kane always were. Never quite ‘avant-pop’ or ‘shoegaze’ or ‘post-rock’ or any of those sobriquets designed to file and categorise, A.R. Kive is a reminder that those genres had to be coined, had to be invented precisely to contain the astonishing sound of A.R. Kane, because
previous formulations couldn’t come close to their sui generis sound and suggestiveness. This is music that pointed towards futures which a whole generation of artists and sonic explorers would map out. Now beautifully repackaged, remastered and fleshed out with extensive sleeve notes and accompanying materials, ‘A.R. Kive’ reveals that 35 years on it’s still a struggle to defuse the revolutionary and inspirational possibility of A.R. Kane’s music.

A.R. Kane were formed in 1986 by Rudy Tambala and Alex Ayuli, two second-generation immigrants who grew up together in Stratford, East London. From the off the pair were outsiders in the culturally mixed (cockney/Irish/West Indian/Asian) milieu of the East End, with Alex and Rudy’s folks first generation immigrants from Nigeria and Malawi, respectively. The two of them quickly developed and fostered an innate and near-telepathic mutual understanding forged in musical, literary and artistic exploration. Like a lot of second-generation immigrants, they were ferocious autodidacts in all kinds of areas, especially around music and literature. Diving deep into the music of afro-futurist luminaries such as Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Lee Perry and
Hendrix, as well as devouring the explorations of lysergic noise and feedback from contemporaries like Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers, they also thoroughly immersed themselves in the alternate literary realities of sci-fi and ancient history (the fascination with the arcane that gave the band their name), all to feed their voracious cultural thirsts and intellectual curiosity.

It was seeing the Cocteau Twins performing on Channel 4 show the Tube that spurred A.R. Kane into being - “They had no drummer. They used tapes and technology and Liz Fraser looked completely otherworldly with those big eyes. And the noise coming out of Robin’s guitar! That was the ‘Fuck! We could do that! We could express ourselves like that!’ moment”, recalls Tambala - and through a mix of
confidence, chutzpah, ad hoc almost-mythical live shows and sheer innocent will the duo debuted with the astonishing ‘When You’re Sad’ single for One Little Indian in 1986. Immediately dubbed a ‘black Jesus & Mary Chain’ by a press unsure of WHERE to put a black band clearly immersed in feedback and noise, what was immediately apparent for listeners was just how much more was going on here - a
tapping of dub’s stealth and guile, a resonant umbilicus back to fusion and jazz, the music less a conjuration of past highs than a re-summoning of lost spirits.
The run of singles and EPs that followed picked up increasingly rapt reviews in the press, but it was the ‘Up Home EP’ released in 1988 on their new home, Rough Trade that really suggested something immense was about to break. Simon Reynolds noted the EP was: Their most concentrated slab of iridescent awesomeness and a true pinnacle of an era that abounded with astounding landmarks of guitar-reinvention, A.R. Kane at their most elixir-like.

If anything, the remastered ‘Up Home’ that forms the first part of ‘A.R. Kive’ is even more dazzling, even more startling than it was when it first emerged, and listening now you again wonder not just about how many bands christened ‘shoegaze’ tried to emulate it, but how all of them fell so far short of its lambent, pellucid wonder. This remains intrinsically experimental music but with none of the frowning orthodoxy those words imply. A.R. Kane, thanks to that second generation auto-didacticism were always supremely aware about the interstices of music and magic, but at the same time gloriously free in the way they explored that connection within their own sound, fascinated always with the creation of ‘perfect mistakes’ and the possibilities inherent in informed play.

‘sixty nine’ the group’s debut LP that emerged in 1988 had
critics and listeners struggling to fit language around A.R. Kane’s sound. As a title it was telling - the year of ‘Bitches Brew’, the year of ‘In A Silent Way’, the erotic möbius between two lovers - and as originally coined by the band themselves, ‘dream pop’ (before it became a free-floating signifier of vague import) was entirely apposite for the music A.R. Kane were making. Crafted in a dark small basement studio in which Tambala recalls the duo had “complete freedom - We wanted to go as far out as we could, and in doing so we discovered the point where it stops being music”. There was an irresistibly dreamy, somnambulant, sensual and almost surreal flow to ‘sixty nine’s sound, but also real darkness/dankness, the ruptures of the primordial and the reverberations of the subconscious, within the grooves of remarkable songs like ‘Dizzy’ and ‘Crazy Blue’. Alex’s plangent vocals floated and surged amidst exquisite peals of refracted feedback but crucially there was BASS here, lugubrious and funky and full of dread, sonic pleasure and sonic disturbance crushed together to make music with a center so deep it felt subcutaneous, music constructed from both the accidental and the deliberate, generous enough to dance with both serendipity and chaos. ‘sixty nine’ remains - especially in this remastered iteration - ravishing, revolutionary.

The final part of this ‘A.R. Kive’ contains 1989’s astonishing double-LP ‘i’ which followed up on ‘sixty nine’s promise and saw the duo fully unleash their experimental pop sensibilities over 26 tracks, plunging the A.R. Kane sound into a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic vision of pop experiment and play. Suffused with new digital technologies and combining searingly sweet and danceable pop with perhaps the duo’s strangest and boundary-pushing compositions, the album did exactly what a great double-set should do - indulge the artists sprawling pursuit of their own imaginations but always with a concision and an ear for those moments where pop both transcends and toys with the listeners expectations. Jason Ankeny has noted that “In retrospect, ‘i’ now seems like a crystal ball prophesying virtually every major musical development of the 1990s; from the shimmering techno of ‘A Love from Outer Space’ to the liquid dub of ‘What’s All This Then?’, from the alien drone-pop of ‘Conundrum’ to the sinister shoegazer miasma of ‘Supervixens’ — it’s all here, an underground road map for countless bands to follow.” Perhaps the most overwhelmingly all-encompassing transmission from A.R. Kane, ‘i’ bookended a three year period in which the duo had made some of the most prophetic and revelatory music of the entire decade.

After ‘i’ the duo’s output became more sporadic with Tambala and Ayuli moving in different directions both geographically and musically, with only 1994’s ‘New Clear Child’ a crystalline re-fraction of future and past echoes of jazz, folk and soul, before the duo went their separate ways. Since then, A.R. Kane’s music has endured, not thanks to the usual sepia’d false memories that seem to maintain interest in so much of the musical past, but because those who hear A.R. Kane music and are changed irrevocably, have to share that universe which A.R. Kane opened up, with anyone else who will listen. Far more than other lauded documents of the late 80s it still sounds astonishingly fresh, astonishingly livid and vivid and necessary and NOW.

Recorded in 1995 and 1996, mostly in John Fahey"s room at a Salem, Oregon boardinghouse, the performances on Proofs and Refutations prefigure the ornery turn of the page that marked Fahey"s final years, drawing another enigmatic rabbit from his seemingly bottomless musical hat. Cloaked in the language of dogma - what is he proving? refuting? - this is Fahey dancing a jig in the Duchampian gap, jester cap bells a-jingling. True believers? He"s got something for you: an uncompromising vision that you can sneer at ("guy can"t play anymore and refuses to concede!") or embrace as evidence of his genius ("the reinventor does it again!"). Skeptics? He"s there with you, too: sending up the fallacy of certitudes altogether. Institutions, systems, accepted wisdoms. Heroes. Alternative facts, indeed. Right out of the gate, Fahey re-materializes before us, somewhere between Oracle of Delphi and Clown Prince at Olympus. Mounting a thundering dialectic from on high, "All the Rains" resembles nothing else in his extensive discography - betraying roots in everything from Dada to Episcopal liturgical chant - and contains nary a plucked guitar note. You can"t fool him! When the lap steel of yore appears on "F for Fake," it serves more as soundbed for an extended sequence of vocal improvisations, running the gamut from wordless Bashoian caterwauling to free-form (but decidedly fake) Tuvan, even revealing a burnished falsetto in the process. Fahey takes on a different kind of provocation in the two acoustic guitar-based tracks closing Side 1 - "Morning" parts 1 and 2 - the first of 4 recordings in this session that have him wrestling with the ghost of Skip James, perhaps Fahey"s effort to wrench the "bitter, hateful old creep" (his words) back into the grave. Anchoring Side 2 is the two-part "Evening, Not Night," the second half of his extended cathexis on James (and the latter"s avowed castration complex - another story for another day, perhaps). Bit of a chill in the air - where"s the impish Fahey from earlier? Unmistakably working through some psychic wounds here, we might think: the unheimlich rendered in glistening viscera. Or is he playing with our notions of authenticity, of his reputation as troubadour of raw emotional states, a pilgrim of the ominous, the simmering unconscious? These cards are kept decidedly close to the vest. The opening and closing pieces again feature Fahey"s guitar as drone soundbed - employing distortion, oscillation, and an altogether absurd quotient of reverb to create texture and harmonics that are - if we wanna go there - not dissimilar to the sustained tonic clusters of Tibetan singing bowls, the hurdy gurdy, Hindustani classical music, or La Monte freaking Young. Portions of this material appeared on obscure late "90s vinyl in the 7" or double-78 rpm format, but as a "session" it has lain dormant more than a quarter century now. Taken together, we can now see these tracks as secret blueprints to latter-day Fahey provocations, several years prior to records like 1997"s City of Refuge and Womblife.

RIYL: PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, Dead Can Dance, Black Sabbath, Depeche Mode. In Blood is the group’s 14th album and the follow-up to 2020’s critically acclaimed Dances/Curses (Album Of The Year – The Quietus, Top 10 International Albums – Irish Times). It was typical of a band so well-known for stellar live performances to release their most successful album at a time when they were unable to back it up on the road. As was the case for many, lockdown changed the band’s lives in unexpected ways. Some felt a form of cabin fever at not being able to continue to make music (diverting their energies elsewhere - founding Wrong Speed Records for starters) whereas others relished the peace and quiet, perhaps questioning whether they wanted to return to the life they had before. Gigs (so long the lifeblood of the band) were booked, postponed, and cancelled. Things began to unravel and perhaps for the first time since the band formed in 2003 it was hard to see how it could continue. A plan was hatched to attempt to re-energise and reassemble the band: they would begin work on a new album. They would approach this as though a Somerset version of The Desert Sessions – members old and new and guests would contribute as and when time and restrictions allowed. Lyrically, British folk and ghost mythology provided the starting position for the song themes ranging from mutated stories of grief and loss written in the 14th Century (Perle), spiritual reawakening by ancient apparitions (Avalon) to the growth of nature after devastation (Can’t Feel Around Us, Over Cedar Limb), a metaphor also for spirit and body renewal and rebirth after trauma. The results sound free of any genre shackles and it suits Hey Colossus. They have taken the expansive anything-goes approach that made Dances/Curses so successful and fine-tuned and shaped it into an 8-song single album that never treads water or fills time. The prominent vocals steer the listener through the music, defining it as opposed to punctuating it (or being buried by it). The album is a calling card for the band in their 20th anniversary year. As odd and challenging as long-term fans would expect or hope for, but somehow more accessible and to the point than ever before. It is the closest the group have ever come to a pop record, radiating positivity through the murk like a small ray of light in some very dark and very weird times. Music can never entirely negate these feelings but, like the natural world referenced in the lyrics and sleeve, it invisibly bonds people together, lifting us up if we choose to let it.

With “Close As You Get”, originally released in 2007, Gary Moore continues the musical journey he started with his highly successful album “Old New Ballads Blues” by mixing reinterpretations of Blues classics such as ‘Have You Heard?’ by John Mayall or ‘Thirty Days’ by Chuck Berry with own compositions.

Being out of print on vinyl for a while, “Close As You Get” is now available again: as a heavyweight double vinyl edition.

For over two decades Jonathan Katsav has used his Crave project to fray rap at its fringes, using Memphis and Houston's low-and-slow legacy to inform sounds that have as much in common with Merzbow as they do Tommy Wright III. Working under a variety of different monikers such as Lieu Noir, Sniper Bait and Soul Collector, the French producer is most prolific as Crave, and "Inner War Delirium" is a substantial and broadly cinematic addition to his canon. Katsav approaches each track as if it's a scene from a movie, using real life experiences to explore separate characters and contrasting emotions. Using different narrators and disparate vocal styles, he navigates grim, blown-out landscapes, driving neon drenched trap synths and horror choirs against overdriven kicks and waterlogged industrial atmospheres. Mangled field recordings, squealing static and gurgling synthesized bass opens 'PHYLLIS', goading the cautious with serrated, carnival synths and cacophonous vocals that sway lugubriously between rap and grindcore. The relationship between dark and light, death and rebirth, is at the heart of "Inner War Delirium", rippling through every track's oozing amalgamation of inebriated hip-hop and buzzsaw noise. Katsav's sounds are an attempt to subject us to the physicality of his own life's puzzle, and he cuts them into vignettes like a director. On the album's final track, listeners are swiped from in front of the speakers and bundled into the trunk of a car, rain rattling on the metal and the album playing on in the distance. It's a way for the producer to turn the camera back on the audience and ask them to consider their own complicated reality - it's Crave's story, but everyone's a part of it.

Building off of the themes of identity, storytelling and experimentation on her critically acclaimed debut album, Khonnar (2018), Deena Abdelwahed’s upcoming album Jbal Rrsas is the next chapter of a reimagining of what club music could be. The album spans seven tracks of bass, techno, and experimental music, with Abdelwahed consulting with masterminds like Tunisian composer and multi-instrumentalist Khalil Hentati, aka Khalil Epi, and Iraqi-British multi-instrumentalist, composer, and researcher Khyam Allami, as well as Egyptian mastering engineer Heba Kadry, to help realise her vision.

Jbal Rrsas starts with the seductively apocalyptic opener, The Key to the Exit, a deconstructed sha’bi production. With tracks like Six as Oil and the delightfully intense Violence for Free, Abdelwahed leads users to a desert rave, where industrial rhythms are left unbridled. Abdelwahed’s vocals on Complain and Pre-Island are powerful and exposed, confidently placed on dizzying avant-garde productions. The Wire previously said “Khonnar is an assured debut that sits on the edge of a whole swathe of possibilities, not only sonic but also geographical, social and political.” With Jbal Rrsas finds Abdelwahed deftly navigating through those possibilities, frequently pushing against genres, labels, and social identifiers, while elevating club music to otherworldly heights.

Home to legends, not just in Jazz but music itself, Ronnie Scott's in Soho London has been the home to innumerable world class performances but none more so than Peter Green.

A backdrop normally shared for jazz artists was transformed into the raucous good time for Blues fans from all over to witness Peter Green two years into his comeback.

This recording features tracks that range from Fleetwood Mac classics & Blues originals all with Peter Green's inimitable flair. Tracks such as 'Albatross', 'Black Magic Woman', Rattlesnake Shake', 'The Green Manalishi' & 'The Supernatural' as well as versions of Travelling Riverside Blues' & 'Steady Rollin' Man'.

This edition, originally released on 2CD & now available on vinyl, comes as a welcome return for many fans that might have missed out on the first edition of its release. A highly limited 20,000 numbered copies of the 'Soho Sessions' package, which sold out immediate on its release.

Now this new edition on black double LP allows for you to experience the wondrous energy from that night time & time again.

The first vinyl release from American artist Sydney Spann, Sending Up A Spiral Of well encapsulates Spann’s body of work thus far. On their music, which reacts to themes of family systems and care work, Sydney writes, “people who have done care work —nannies, sex workers, therapists, nurses— may possess their own musical knowledge, developed over time through particular modes of voicing practiced to achieve a desired outcome in their labor. Attending intimately to these ways of voicing and listening and bringing them into a sound practice could be a way to legitimize a less recognized kind of musical knowledge.”

Sending Up A Spiral Of explores this unarticulated expression through sound and song. The titular piece traces Spann within some quixotic woodland, as if beginning inside of some urban fairy-story. Self-soothing singing quivers under dragging branches, peeling cement and other tactile grit. The work drops into a new proximity half-way through as electronic contours overtake the environment. Sine-tones smolder in a pulsating choreography, perhaps reminiscent of Richard Maxfield’s “Night Music” played at half-speed.

The second section of the record depicts a series of five smaller portraits, expressed (or disguised) as lullabies. An oceanic humming permeates them. “Possession” and “Purposeful Evening” are the most song-like lullabies, with their verse-chorus repetition and melodic simplicity. Innocuous words “baby” and “honey” are encoded with deeper, often painful connotations. Sydney’s voice and vision for this album is ambitious, cloaked in the strains and contradictions of what love means in the nuclear family.

A 16-page artist pamphlet of rubbings, photographs and sheet music accompanies the LP, along with a digital PDF of Spann’s thesis “Sending Up A Spiral Of: A Musical Epistemology Made Through Care Work.”

This is extremely special. Expansion have taken a 80s soul classic and released it for the first time as a single together with a brand new version. Its part of an exciting series of 10 singles combining two versions of an established soul and jazz tune.
The Tom Browne version was recorded in 1983, produced by Dave Grusin & Larry Rosen for GRP/Arista Records and features a sensational vocal by Carol Woods.
The never before issued brand new version by Diplomats Of Soul takes the song back to how it may have sounded if first recorded in the 70s with live bass and full rhythm section with horns. Incognito feature as musicians with a special guest vocal performance by the brilliant Imaani

Clear Vinyl

Repressed! Get On Down proudly present Mecca And The Soul Brother, the critically acclaimed 1992 full-length debut from Pete Rock & CL Smooth. The album is considered as one of the greatest Hip Hop albums of all time. Boasting tracks such as the first single, “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)”, a dedication to their deceased friend; “Trouble T-Roy”, which went on to become not only their signature hit, but also one of Hip Hop’s all-time great songs. The album is propelled forward by Rock’s quick, soulful interludes; usually bits of old R&B tunes layered with his signature trumpet and sax loops. Smooth’s liquid freestyle delivery pieces together the perfect vocal match that, together, creates a sprawling, nearly 80-minute-long album on which not a single song or interlude is a throwaway or a superfluous piece.
Mecca And The Soul Brother has stood the test of time. The release has been named one of the essential recordings of the 90s by Rolling Stone, appears on Ego Trips listing of the Top 25 Hip Hop albums released from 1980-1998, and appeared on The Source’s 100 Greatest Rap Albums of all time.

The Shaman is back with 2 EP... Maybe it could have been a Double Pack :)

But is good have the choice of making it happen as so on your side, rather than beeing forced ? Even if it's a total hasard in a way...
This Ep is a weird melange of emotion and Banging dancefloor...

Enjoy and LISTEN

The Chemical Brothers - one of the most acclaimed and innovative electronic duo in the world - have announced details of their tenth studio album For That Beautiful Feeling.

Recorded in the band’s own studio just near the south coast, this is a record that hunts for and captures that that wild moment when sound overwhelms you and almost pulls you under yet ultimately lets you ride its wave, to destinations unknown. It’s a record that pinpoints the exact moment you lose all control, where you surrender and let the music move you as if pulled by an invisible thread.

Die australischen WOODS OF DESOLATION haben sich in aller Stille zu einem der weltweit herausragenden Vertreter des atmosphärischen Black Metal entwickelt. Was 2005 als Soloprojekt von Multi-Instrumentalist D. begann, hat sich über fast zwei Jahrzehnte und Dutzende von Aufnahmen zu einem Werk von erhabener Schönheit und Traurigkeit entwickelt.
Im Rahmen einer neuen weltweiten Zusammenarbeit mit Season of Mist sind die bahnbrechenden WOODS OF DESOLATION-Alben nun wieder in allen Formaten erhältlich.

Die australischen WOODS OF DESOLATION haben sich in aller Stille zu einem der weltweit herausragenden Vertreter des atmosphärischen Black Metal entwickelt. Was 2005 als Soloprojekt von Multi-Instrumentalist D. begann, hat sich über fast zwei Jahrzehnte und Dutzende von Aufnahmen zu einem Werk von erhabener Schönheit und Traurigkeit entwickelt.
Im Rahmen einer neuen weltweiten Zusammenarbeit mit Season of Mist sind die bahnbrechenden WOODS OF DESOLATION-Alben nun wieder in allen Formaten erhältlich.

Today, Anjimile Chithambo, better known as Anjimile, announces his new album, The King, out September 8th, his first full-length since 2020’s breakthrough Giver Taker. To herald the announcement, he shares lead single, ‘The King’, accompanied by a visualiser by Daniela Yohannes, whose striking painting takes centre stage on the album cover.

Highlighting the artistic shift from Giver Taker to now, ‘The King’ opens with a lofty, melodic choir, an intro that belies the song’s motives. Suddenly, sinister arpeggios interrupt the reverie, and the voices grow darkly serious. Deeply steeped in the confusion, grief, and rage of being Black in America, ‘The King’ pushes back against the tired adage, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” hissing, “What don ’t kill you almost killed you// What don’t fill you//pains you// drains you.”

“If Giver Taker was an album of prayers, The King is an album of curses.” In his second album, Anjimile continues exploring what it means to be a Black trans person in America. The brutally honest reflection of 2020’s deadly summer is less reminiscent of the pink cloud of early sobriety and more rooted in the reality of seeing brutality with clear eyes. Drawing from influences ranging from religion, Phillip Glass, and lived experiences, the album is a grand step forward for Anjimile. Nearly every sound you hear on The King comes from two instruments: an acoustic guitar and Anjimile’s own voice. Other than a few beautiful contributions from Justine
Bowe, Brad Allen Williams, Sam Gendel, and James Krivchenia (Big Thief), the album is the result of a year in LA working intimately with Grammy and Juno winner Shawn Everett.

Let the synths take you away if everything gets too much.

We’re going on a little journey to a remote island surrounded by colorful §ourishing coral reefs. Before you get there you’ll just have to dive deep into the wavy dark ocean before you reach the coastline. At first this might seem dangerous but the beams of light get more and more visible as you finally dive up. You feel the warmth of the water and you start hearing waves rolling along the coastline. Finally, you reach the warm beaches of an island where everything is that you need.
The rich and healthy vegetation and rare species are welcoming you like you lived there your whole life. And after taking your time you feel the strength in yourself rising again, being able to move forward with hope, love and compassion

The most famous songs of one of the greatest names in the history of Musical in Broadway and who has his star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. Including "Cheek To Cheek", "Steppin" out with My Baby"...

Today, Anjimile Chithambo, better known as Anjimile, announces his new album, The King, out September 8th, his first full-length since 2020’s breakthrough Giver Taker. To herald the announcement, he shares lead single, ‘The King’, accompanied by a visualiser by Daniela Yohannes, whose striking painting takes centre stage on the album cover.

Highlighting the artistic shift from Giver Taker to now, ‘The King’ opens with a lofty, melodic choir, an intro that belies the song’s motives. Suddenly, sinister arpeggios interrupt the reverie, and the voices grow darkly serious. Deeply steeped in the confusion, grief, and rage of being Black in America, ‘The King’ pushes back against the tired adage, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” hissing, “What don ’t kill you almost killed you// What don’t fill you//pains you// drains you.”

“If Giver Taker was an album of prayers, The King is an album of curses.” In his second album, Anjimile continues exploring what it means to be a Black trans person in America. The brutally honest reflection of 2020’s deadly summer is less reminiscent of the pink cloud of early sobriety and more rooted in the reality of seeing brutality with clear eyes. Drawing from influences ranging from religion, Phillip Glass, and lived experiences, the album is a grand step forward for Anjimile. Nearly every sound you hear on The King comes from two instruments: an acoustic guitar and Anjimile’s own voice. Other than a few beautiful contributions from Justine
Bowe, Brad Allen Williams, Sam Gendel, and James Krivchenia (Big Thief), the album is the result of a year in LA working intimately with Grammy and Juno winner Shawn Everett.