Very rarely do young bands become as universally revered as Big Thief has in the past couple years, so it’s understandable to be wary of their sudden rise. But, for whatever my opinion is worth, I think the hype has been largely deserved. Two Hands is the band’s fourth album in three years (not counting the solo projects its members have also released in that time), and they show no sign of slowing down anytime soon. This isn’t a case of quantity over quality, either. All four albums stand distinct, each bringing a new element into the mix, and it’s pretty remarkable for a band to undergo such a rapid evolution while also remaining true to its core musical values. In Big Thief’s case, the heart of their music lies in Adrienne Lenker, whose wily vocals and cathartic lyrics cut to the bone.

There’s a lot of debate raging online over which album released this year, U.F.O.F. or Two Hands, is better. For me, Two Hands uncontestedly hits harder and more consistently. While U.F.O.F. takes more risks, resulting in several excellent songs (the title track, for example, is still one of the most magical things I’ve heard all year), it’s a bit too meandering to hold my attention as a whole. Two Hands, meanwhile, is visceral and raw. Perhaps it’s sloppier, but there’s a gripping immediacy in its willful imperfection. The six-minute centerpiece “Not” is a blistering litany of flashing images (“your spine tattoo,” “your shimmering eye,” “the starkness of slate,” “the nameless grave”), like the relentlessly brutal older sister of Capacity’s tender “Mary.” Elsewhere, Lenker’s delivery alternates between throat-tearing desperation (“Shoulders”) and hushed reverence (“Replaced”). She even pulls off a wordless, wounded wolf howl. Each of these choices feels as spontaneous and uninhibited as the music that surrounds her.



It’s hard to believe that Pang is Caroline Polachek’s first proper outing as a solo artist, considering just how long she’s been making music. She started out in the electronic indie pop band Chairlift, where she released three albums and co-penned “No Angel,” one of the best tracks on Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled album. From there, she shifted into more experimental ventures, releasing music under pseudonyms like Ramona Lisa and CEP and falling in with the PC Music crowd, contributing her otherworldly vocal presence to tracks like Danny L Harle’s “Ashes of Love,” Charli XCX’s “Tears,” and felicita’s “marzipan.” All that is to say, it should come as no surprise that her debut album under her own name is as accomplished and refined as it is, but the immediacy with which its songs seemed to spring fully-formed into the world over the second half of 2019 still caught me off-guard.

Of course, Pang has very much been a meticulous and long-gestating labor of love; this becomes clear in interviews where Polachek and co-executive producer Harle extensively detail the writing and recording process. But the making of the album was kept so largely under wraps that it seems possible songs like “Door” and “Ocean of Tears” and “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” all of them intricately produced and immaculately performed, magically birthed themselves. It’s a fitting way to think of the album, in line with its ornate baroque stylings and the mystical world-building contained in its images and videos. Everything about it comes together into a fantasy novel-esque whole, each song/chapter changing color like a mood ring as they document an emotional journey from doubt to acceptance. The playfully cyclical “New Normal” sits alongside the fairytale-esque whimsy of “Hey Big Eyes” and the near-operatic despair of “Insomnia,” not a single one of them seeming out of place. Despite Polachek’s status as a veteran musician, Pang feels like it’s just the beginning for her, which is unspeakably exciting.



On LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods calls upon twelve of her personal heroes, largely black icons of culture and art, to create a patchwork of perspectives that captures the frustration and hostility she herself has experienced as an African-American woman. Sometimes she borrows their words, sometimes she places herself inside their heads, and sometimes she makes up new words that echo their values. Either way, each song is as much a snapshot of their cultural footprint as it is a resurrection of their ideas to help Woods navigate her day-to-day existence. As she sings on opener “BETTY,” “Great greats come down/They whisper to me quiet/’I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.’”

What emerges from this polyphony of voices is a portrait of Woods herself, a woman who would for once like to live without being belittled, doubted, or attacked. “I may be small/I may speak soft/But you can see the change in the water,” she sings on “ZORA,” but her inward-facing intensity only enrages those desperate to get a rise out of her, as she describes on “BASQUIAT:” “They want to see me angry/They want to see me bear my teeth.” But she refuses to be baited that easily. In “GIOVANNI,” she spits passionately, “A hundred motherfuckers can’t tell me how I’m supposed to look when I’m angry/How I’m supposed to shrink when you’re around me.” In other words, the only person with the authority to tell her when to be loud or quiet is herself, and she no longer has time for the microaggressions of others. By the end of “ZORA,” she decides, “I’m all out of fucks to give/Fear ain’t no way to live.” It’s difficult to distinguish when she is speaking as herself and when she is speaking as one of her songs’ namesakes, but it doesn’t much matter: they are her, and she is them. LEGACY! LEGACY! celebrates this lineal thread and the power it gives her to survive: “Tell it like I see it/Speak it so I be it/My ancestors watch me.”