Ann-Derrick Gaillot

On her debut EP XOskeleton, Jasper Lotti creates a soundtrack for the anxieties of the digital age, threading lyrics about connection and disassociation through pop melodies and rhythms that are as captivating as they are nerve-wracking. It’s a sound that Lotti has dubbed dys-pop or “dystopian pop.” But while many works about dystopia focus on totalitarian powers and cities in ruin, on XOskeleton, Lotti considers a more personal, existential type of imprisonment.
“It’s not like we walk out an...

On her self-titled sophomore effort, Laetitia Tamko leaps with both feet into new sounds and new horizons.
In crafting her self-titled sophomore album, Laetitia Tamko (aka Vagabon) was hyper-cognizant of how the context around her had changed. The unexpected success of her 2017 debut Infinite Worlds meant more resources at her fingertips, but also heightened scrutiny from a public that so often defaults to consuming black women as prophets of oppression and pain. “I was growing really weary o...

The soul singer’s latest is a multi-perspective, multi-genre examination of addiction and family breakdown.
Raphael Saadiq’s solo career has been haunted by the ghosts of tormented men and women. One such figure hides beneath the catchy pop melody of “You’re the One That I Like,” a song from his 2002 debut Instant Vintage about losing a love interest to addiction. Another lurks in “Grown Folks,” a concerned-but-scolding soul track off his sophomore album Ray Ray, about parents who can’t seem ...

There are no illusions as to what YouTube users are looking for when they click on titles that hold the promise of catastrophe. It’s why a video called “Pencil Stuck in My Eye Prank” has nearly 13 million views, why some of the platform’s most popular vloggers have taken baths in liquids like hot sauce, and why a video of a woman stomping grapes and then falling and injuring herself was an early viral hit on the video-sharing platform.
In recent weeks, a legion of YouTubers big and small have...

On March 20, 1989, the Oprah Winfrey–produced miniseries The Women of Brewster Place gave American television its first black lesbian couple. Already introduced the night before to the stories of Mattie Michael (Winfrey), Etta Mae (Jackée Harry), Ciel (Lynn Whitfield), and Kiswana (Robin Givens) — four black women who end up at a tenement on dead-end Brewster Place as a last resort — about 49 million people tuned in to see the end of their saga. Moments into that two-hour episode, Mattie, Ett...

Close to midway through poet and singer-songwriter Jamila Woods’s new album, Legacy! Legacy!, comes a crunchy rock song named for a fellow Chicagoan of note, the blues legend Muddy Waters. On “Muddy,” over dragging, distorted electric-guitar riffs emulating the grittiness of Waters’s signature slide-guitar sound, Woods reminisces on his ability to cause a ruckus and spawn imitators. In that evocation, she offers an antidote to the threat of black alienation. “They say now / More than ever / I...

On Florist’s third studio album, the band’s creative force, Emily Sprague, begins with an exercise in self-soothing. “Emily, just know that you’re not as alone as you feel in the dark,” she sings, her voice echoing and fraying amid a guitar line that shifts from mournful to optimistic. It’s rare for musicians to address themselves by name in their songs, so the line is jolting in its directness. Though Sprague is alone, singing a song to herself, her highly personal message is rooted in an ea...

In December 2014, D’Angelo released his third studio album, Black Messiah. It was a timeless reflection on love and survival within the maelstrom of American racism that nevertheless inspired one mostly prosaic, and slightly demanding, question from critics and fans: What took him so long?
Journalist Tavis Smiley basically asked D’Angelo as much in a rare interview nine months later. “I’m always writing and learning. It’s about growth,” the reclusive legend said of what he did in the 14 years...

Recording a perfect cassette mixtape from the radio requires careful tuning, commercial dodging, and the technical dexterity of leaping to your radio’s speaker to catch a beloved song midair. The playback of this now dated practice can be disarming by today’s standards, each song carrying the specific atmosphere of the room it was recorded in, songs cut off or captured in media res, wrenched from their contexts, an incohesive whole. On his new Blood Orange release, Angel’s Pulse, British sing...

The New York City psych-rock quartet’s debut full-length beckons the listener with dreamy keyboards, twinkling guitar, and a recognizable buzz of stoic anxiety.
Obituaries and biographies often give the illusion that lives unfold along ever-advancing, if wandering, timelines. In fact, those forward trajectories are made up of millions of tiny spirals—routines followed, patterns performed, habits fallen into. Most days are slightly deviating copies of one another, with periodic breaths of nove...

When ambient singer and composer Ana Roxanne originally recorded and released the unusually named six-song collection ~~~ in 2015, she did it alone, without any formal announcement or fanfare, keeping the deeply personal work largely to herself for fear of the reaction. Soon after, she moved away from her hometown of Oakland to Los Angeles. A friend passed her album along to producer Matthewdavid, who was looking for artists to perform at a daytime ambient series in a park. He reached out and...

When chef Megon Dee-Cave moved to Portland, Oregon, with her family in 2016, she did it with the goal of learning more about cannabis. Five years earlier, when she owned her own bakery in Baltimore, customers began inquiring about edibles, which led her to experiment with combining cannabis and food for the first time. Once in Portland, she immersed herself in the recreational industry, only to find she was one of a small number of black people involved. “A lot of times I was the only fem...

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a folk classic that came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins.
A spotlight comes up on Tracy Chapman as she moves into the a capella song “Behind the Wall.” She sings from the point of view of a neighbor hearing a woman screaming in the apartment next door. Her trembling contralto soars and then, just as quickl...