Month: July 2025

A DEAR IN HEADLIGHTS | 2025-07-20

It appears as though we’re in the midst of another summer of bars, ladies and gentlemen. With new full lengths from everyone from Rome Streetz, Wayne, Kevin Abstract, Boldy James, Clipse, Open Mike Eagle, Tyler the Creator, Freddie Gibbs & Al, Joey Bada$$, and JID all within the span of two months and change, there sure remains little room during the year of our Lord 2025 for any other outings to stick their head out. Unless they’re… head-lights. Very unassumingly, 32-year old American musician, producer, and singer-songwriter Alex G, a proud Philadelphia native, dared to swing his indie toy axe at the moon and challenge the aforementioned hip-hop avalanche by revealing his tenth studio LP Headlights right in the midst of that enemy crossfire. We’re pleased to report that both him and his music came out unscathed.

The project was released this past 18th July, couched right in-between the hallmark summer rap drops of Clipse and Tyler, the Creator, amongst others—not exactly two negligible acts at the turn of this decade. Believe it or not, Headlights is Mr Giannascoli’s major-label debut, marketed by Sony Music-owned RCA Records, and it follows the iconic and accomplished four-album deal run on British indie stalwart Domino Recording Company, between 2015 and 2022. That particular stint included perhaps his best overall, 2019’s House of Sugar, and culminated a few years ago in what at the time was his most well-rounded and wholesome effort with God Save the Animals. His latest offering is twelve tracks long, and clocks in at just about forty minutes of runtime: Alex G self-produced most of it himself, with additional help recruited in Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s bass guitarist Jacob Portrait (who had previously worked with Giannascoli on his aforementioned previous two studio albums). Less excitingly, before kicking off the Headlights cycle, the artist FKA (Sandy) Alex G also found time to score two official soundtrack albums for Jane Schoenbrun’s indie flicks We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024).

On this record, Alex G confirms he’s a naughty, albeit friendly, singer/songwriter. One that very deliberately exhumes public images of himself as if shunning away from the spotlight, and perhaps even suffering from it—all the while appearing more comfortable with this laidback set up than diving headfirst into the distribution and promo machinery that a major label would call for. Mind you, this is not inherently bad, and he is well within his rights to spin doctor such a framing onto his prime creative endeavor, particularly as it fits a narrative continuum started fifteen years ago. Hear us out on this though—as anticipatory singles for this project he plucks “Afterlife“, a pretty and catchy gem out in late May alongside the project announcement (featuring the drumming of none other than the E Street Band‘s Max Weinberg!), the kind “June Guitar” a month later, and finally the soft-spoken “Oranges” a day before street date. Are these three the best tracks on Headlights by quite a margin? Yes, probably.

Who does that, though? Who picks the cleanest, lushest, and glossiest numbers and de-contextualizes them from their housing record as teasers, if you’re Alex G? Everything from the gentle acoustic and electric guitar flourishes, the enveloping strings, and the timeless piano keys on these three cuts are something to behold. Were they a short single bundle issued by, like, James Taylor or Neil Young, people would scream for them to put out a whole album’s worth of this shit. Truly, all three are incredible exploits of pristine folk-pop, without Alex G’s trademark homespun low-fidelity enriching or spoiling them—depending on what side of the lore fence one stands on. Moreover, their lyrical ineffability transcends anything he has done before: “Love ain’t for the young anyhow / Something that you learn from fallin’ down“, “Let me write down / Every word / Once I was a mockingbird / Not an angel / But I’m your man“, and again “Wash in the river with the one I love / Every good thing with a little bad luck / You can cry baby, now, I ain’t bluffing / Wash in the river on bended knee“. I mean, come on?

One can tell Headlights is an Alex G record by the LP’s vicarious middle section, though. It’s the Pepsi test. Cuts like the loose and scattered “Spinning” sounds uncannily like a House of Sugar-adjacent cutting room floor extra, while the following “Louisiana” at number six on the tracklist harkens back to the legendary pre-Domino era of self-released hypnotic Bandcamp drops. It’s so direct and on the nose that one would think it’s bidding farewell to that DIY zeitgeist, for good. Perhaps it is. Regardless, it fits on the record, and it matters. Meanwhile, “Bounce Boy“, at number seven, comes close to us fantasizing how Alex G saw fit to dust off some of the guitar effects and pedal pre-sets he so unceremoniously championed on Frank Ocean‘s Blonde and Endless almost ten years ago. Yet he’s doing so in a self-referential and, yes let’s use that word, experimental way. Bottom line is, can anyone name us any major label artist who puts something like “Oranges” and this thing on the same marquee record? Well, in 2025 that might be less of a tall order, but still. You get the point.

What hasn’t changed throughout Headlights is Mr Giannascoli’s childlike naïveté, the earnest innocence at the core of these sound recordings. And yes, his extremely pleasant to the ear melodic layering is still in these tunes, too. Such pureness continues to belie distinct creative choices, though. For instance, he chiefly misses the mark on the record’s third act. But that’s ok. For we’re not going as far as declaring the tangible drop in quality from track number nine onwards as intentional, because that’s precisely Alex G’s inscrutably mystical quality. He comes across as knowing better than committing to tape the nasal and contrived vocal delivery on “Far and Wide“, yet does he really? Absent the self-indulgent and rowdy live take of album outro “Logan Hotel“—he isn’t new to bookending a project with a live version, see House of Sugar—and conceding that the title track is a bit of a grower with inherent replay value, “Far and Wide” and penultimate cut “Is It Still You in There?” are simply too lukewarm for his standards. Let us not forget, this is his tenth studio album after all.

Yet, part of it is what makes him so endearing and gentle to the outer world. Deep down we (wanna) know he does have the full album of pristine folk-pop in his bag, but either willingly or unwillingly, he opts for linear evolution over abrupt revolution. However, does he realize he’s playing in the major label leagues now? Most likely. On the dire and forlorn front-end standout “Beam Me Up“, he nods both that degree of revelatory self-awareness (“Some things I do for love / Some things I do for money / It ain’t like I don’t want it / It ain’t like I’m above it“), and sketches a long-shot metaphor borrowing from American football, not a foreign signifier to him: “Coach, I’m on the rocks / Coach, I’m threading needles / I leave it on the field“. We like to think that the titular headlights he finds himself surrounded by are the ultralight beams of the mainstream music circuit—while for someone like him it would be tempting to withdraw and burrow even more deeply, he instead chose to fight back with love and kindness. This album is proof.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

CLIPSE’S LET GOD SORT EM OUT IS SYNTHESIS PERFECTION | 2025-07-13

Veteran hip-hop fraternity duo Clipse (Malice and Pusha T) put out their fourth studio full length, Let God Sort Em Out, just a few days ago, and a sudden underground thrust imploring us to chuck down a few words about it immediately took over. We were all powerless to deny it. The LP marks the rapper pair’s first project as Clipse since 2009’s Til the Casket Drops, which preceded the tectonic industry splashes of Lord Willin’ (2002) and Hell Hath No Fury (2006). In the sixteen years since their last full length, everything but the kitchen sink has happened. Senior bother Malice quit the group in 2010, briefly changed his stage name to No Malice by virtue of his conversion to Christianity, only to reappropriate his original moniker a few years ago. King Push, on the other hand, went on to successfully pursue a consummate solo career that involved the release of four records as well as a couple high-profile rap feuds. The storied Virginia outfit then saw fit to reunite in 2019 for a guest version on none other than Kanye West‘s Jesus Is King—which kinda leads us to this thing coming out earlier this month to great anticipation and acclaim, after about two years of gestation.

Longtime collaborator and early DMV scout Pharrell Williams—who lent his production duties on each of the previous three Clipse albums—returns for Let God Sort Em Out, having overseen each of the thirteen cuts back-to-back, for a total runtime of just over forty minutes. The former Neptunes and NERD record producer extraordinaire also doubles as a featured guest on wax, together with a slew of marquee collaborators including John Legend, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, Stove God Cooks, The-Dream, and Tyler, the Creator. Lead standalone single, the ominous and engrossing “Ace Trumpets“, first arrived in late May, alongside with the project announcement, while non-streaming promo-only single “So Be It” was initially released as a music video halfway through June. A day before the album dropped, Malice and Pusha windowed two more cuts from the big joint exclusively to Apple Music: the highly-anticipated K Dot-featuring “Chains & Whips” (also sporting some gnarly guitar work by Lenny Kravitz), and “So Far Ahead“. Oh yeah, and the album was low-key subsidized by leading French international fashion house Louis Vuitton (it was recorded at their Parisian headquarters). If you still hadn’t guessed it, this thing is a big deal in hip-hop.

The high anticipation for the drop was in no small part due to the fact that Let God Sort Em Out was allegedly initially slated for a 2024 release. Yet, in a turn of events that has had the music industry up in arms since the nuclear Drake–Kendrick Lamar rap battle last year, the album was stalled for a long time as Clipse’s then-imprint Def Jam Recordings—owned by major label Universal Music Group, this will become important in a minute—reportedly requested Kendrick Lamar’s guest bars on “Chains & Whips” be either censored or else they wouldn’t drop the record. Although the official explanation for the failed truce remains unclear, Pusha T publicly claimed in multiple interviews that UMG’s boycott stemmed from his and Kendrick’s ugly brawls with Canadian megastar rapper Drake—most notably via Pusha T’s 2018 diss track “The Story of Adidon” and the aforementioned generation-defining beef from last year. Crucially, a few months ago Drake filed a self-referential defamation lawsuit against UMG for its promotion of K Dot’s beef coup de grâce “Not Like Us“. Refusing to acquiesce, Clipse agreed to pay a seven-figure sum to stunningly buy themselves out of the Def Jam album deal, instead self-releasing Let God Sort Em Out via a distribution agreement with Roc Nation. Wow.

Now, with a few paragraphs of introduction out of the way, let us cut to the chase: this record is a near perfect hip-hop coalescence. More than any this decade, hell arguably since Kanye West’s Yeezus, this collection of tracks is a true blue masterclass display of sonic synthesis, sound curation, and creative extraction—at least on the mainstream front. We don’t jive with numerical scores over here, but this album is wall-to-wall rap enchantment, and would see it fly damn real close to the 10 sun. Malice and Pusha T’s bars are so carefully selected and lyrically impactful that virtually not a single word or ad lib is wasted on the album. Both of their enunciated, matter-of-fact flows coast in and out of pockets making each stanza sound like the most important thing you’ll need to hear this year. Pharell’s backtrack beats are so linear, synthetic, and one-dimensional that silence and space become fruitful allies in this no-waste mixing approach. That’s how even the slightest beat switch, such as on “P.O.V.”, feels like entering into a whole new dimension of sound. This is outta sight.

Nearly each single one of the thirteen numbers features a lone driving beat motif that gels its track from front to back. Whether that’s bass, piano, horns, strings, or percussions; everything sounds so necessary. And sanitized. The refrains are so few and far in between that not only do they feel like they could get modularly stitched to any of the songs on the tracklist, but they become so memory-engrained and sticky it’s ironic for an hip-hop outfit known for its hardcore rapping, anti-earworm chorus stance. Clipse have always heavily relied on their grooves, beats, and production, but this exploit feels like they have finally perfected their acclaimed trademark songcraft. The music on Let God Sort Em Out is all-enveloping, hypnotizing, ethereal, and just so damn thick. There’s a gelid, cold industrial tapestry that bookends the forty minutes of material. And precisely because one is to assume there are so few individual tracks in each of the record’s partial stems, this kind of overture allows for each sonic pillar to crank up to eleven, and go assemble a muscular gesamtkunstwerk that lines up thirteen architectural marvels on the tracklist.

As most people undertaking creative endeavors know, reducing and essentializing a work of art is so much harder than adding bells and whistles to it. As celebrated American writer, humorist, and essayist Mark Twain famously said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Less than an artistic compromise, knowing how to cut what fat and which darlings to kill oughta be seen as a purifying act of love toward the art being made. In the Apple Music interview hyperlinked above, the Virginia Beach duo revealed how nothing was left on the studio’s cutting room floor—the thirteen records that made Let God Sort Em Out were all they wrote. A rarity in today’s bonus tracks/B-sides/deluxe version streaming obsessed climate. This is a pursuit of clarity and distillation. We can’t think of a rap outing that hasn’t done that better than this album in a long, long time. Naturally, by virtue of spacing out the recordings so much and weaving constituent room for certain segments to breathe, the Thorton bros rhymes stand out like crown jewels. On this album, the vocals are so front and center it’s not even funny.

When Malice dedicates all his bars to this old man on the parental tribute opener “The Birds Don’t Sing”, he achieves spiritual heights on passages like “I can hear your voice now, I can feel your presence / Askin’ “Should I rap again?”, you gave me your blessing / The way you spelled it out, there’s an L in every lesson / ‘Boy, you owe it to the world, let your mess become your message’“. Conversely, King Push’s articulation on track number seven “M.T.B.T.T.F.“; “My presence, your plеasure / Peasants, he’s prеssure / I been knee deep, ki deep / We at ZZ’s, me and Lee Lee / Get you fronted for the summer so easy” is so cold-blooded and sinister that quite literally no one else could deliver it the same way. What’s even more remarkable is that unlike the reputation that precedes them, Clipse manage to pull such a compound stunt off while keeping cocaine bars to a bare minimum—instead opting for obscure financial report jargon on the unforgiving “E.B.I.T.D.A.” (acronym for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization).

The latter is arguably one of the fastest beats Pusha T ever laid vocals on. And yet, in spite of—or precisely because of—the heightened BPMs, the 48-year old former GOOD Music label president manages to invokes the central mantra that underpins this album: “I need more space to make pace“. Every his wish is Pharrell’s command. With a producer-rappers chemistry completely off the charts, for God’s sake, these gentleman are literally related and from the same childhood neighborhood, it’s no wonder each piece of music on here sounds indispensable. This is an outstanding project in the mainstream hip-hop space precisely because it stands out from the pack so much. Alas, the intention with which each single sonic nook and cranny is perfected feels like a lost practice, a manufacturing no longer worth engaging with. Well here we are stating the opposite: this shit still matters. Mostly because it sounds so freaking good. Mark our words—not Pitchfork‘s—this record will land in the upper single digit rankings for most of the Albums of the Year lists you’ll be checking out this November. Let God sort those out.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV