On their rambunctious debut, Guppy, Charly Bliss were a young band finding their footing. Mainly, they were having fun, making songs in the spirit of grunge rock but with clear pop sensibilities. Eva Hendricks’ voice was the lynchpin, a bratty nasal whine, equal parts sugar and venom, that easily sold otherwise nonsensical lyrics. Its follow-up, Young Enough, finds the band growing up a little. The pop hooks are more explosive, the production is glossier, the lyrics are more direct, and Hendricks occasionally possesses the slightly wearied tone of a young woman who’s seen and experienced some real shit. Although “Chatroom” is the album’s brightest, catchiest number, its lyrics, written as a direct response to an experience of sexual assault, describe a man who presents a squeaky-clean image that everyone buys into, even as his private actions contradict it. “I was fazed in the spotlight, his word against mine/Everybody knows you’re the second coming,” Hendricks sings, touching directly on the all too common tendency for women to be doubted. Meanwhile, “Hurt Me” is a brutal account of a toxic relationship that culminates in Hendricks hurling words like daggers at her lover: “Eyes like a funeral/Mouth like a bruise/Veins like a hallway/Voice like a wound.” These are powerful themes, and Charly Bliss has evolved enough as a band to deliver them with conviction.



On Better Oblivion Community Center, Conor Oberst, now a veteran of the folk-rock scene, teams up with one of its most promising newcomers, Phoebe Bridgers, to create a modest but memorable ten-song collection. If you’re familiar with either artist, there’s nothing here that’s particularly surprising. Even one-offs within the context of the album, like the electronic-tinged “Exception to the Rule” and the wily rocker “Big Black Heart,” can be traced to sounds that Oberst especially has experimented with in his past bands, Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos. What their collaboration does prove, however, is that they both have the right to call themselves powerhouses within their chosen musical realm. The earnestness of Bridgers’ voice is an effective foil to Oberst’s tired rasp, and their lyrical talent is sharpened by one another’s presence. Opener “Didn’t Know What I Was In For” establishes their skill for balancing specificity and universality in its closing verse: “To fall asleep, I need white noise to distract me/Otherwise, I have to listen to me think/Otherwise, I pace around, hold my breath, let it out/Sit on the couch and think about/How living’s just a promise that I made.” This anxiety about simply existing is a recurring theme, also carried over in “My City,” where Oberst and Bridgers wail in unison, “All this freedom just freaks me out.” Me too, guys, me too.



One of my first obsessions of 2019 was Nilüfer Yanya’s “Heavyweight Champion of the Year.” There’s something incredibly naked and vulnerable about the way Yanya, backed by a solitary electric guitar, seems to tug at her own vocal cords like marionette strings, producing animalistic squeaks and yelps as she repeatedly berates herself, “You’re a liar, a liar, girl/You know your limit . . . No, he can’t commit.” It’s the closing track on her debut album, Miss Universe, for a reason: because it reaches nearly impossible emotional heights. However, it being released as a single beforehand somewhat dampens the effect of the other very good songs on this album. It’s not that they’re worse; they’re just different, either wearing their chaotic emotions fully on their sleeve (rocker “In Your Head”) or maintaining a cool and detached demeanor (jazzy midtempo “Melt”). But flashes of Yanya’s white-hot feelings occasionally float to the surface, as in “Melt” when she deadpans the cruel couplet, “I bet your brain cells won’t last/I bet they cling to the trash/I hope they melt on the way back to your place.” Overall, Miss Universe isn’t the album I expected, but it’s a strong showcase of Nilüfer Yanya’s potential as an indie mainstay.



You never know quite what you’re going to get with Holly Herndon, which is exciting and frustrating at the same time. On one hand, she can turn out absolutely staggering masterpieces that stay a hundred steps ahead of a genre that cycles quickly through one trend after another. On the other hand, she sometimes gets lost inside her ambition, producing tracks that are sound experiments rather than listenable songs. Of course, Herndon is an experimental electronic composer with a PhD in computer research and an interest in AI, so it’s to be expected that she would want to stretch the limits of what can be defined as music. On PROTO, though, these more difficult moments lack the substance to feel like essential pieces in the album’s bigger picture. Luckily, there are enough of those aforementioned masterpieces to almost entirely make up for it. “Eternal” and “Frontier” are built on layers and layers of voices, Herndon’s own among them, that have been fed into and spit back out by her AI “baby,” Spawn, in forms that are more machine than human but unsettlingly retain their human-like shapes. In “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt,” these layers are stripped away, leaving Herndon’s voice alone to glide between the listener’s ears in shimmering waves, inventing a spontaneous and strangely beautiful digital dance.