WNXP Podcasts

Brooklyn-based trio Nation of Language has referred to their new full-length record as one for the emotional “wayfarer.” They elaborated on the theme that pervades their third LP Strange Disciple and connects its ten robust, synth-forward tunes.

Jalen Ngonda has described his music as modern soul and R&B, while trying to fit the Beach Boys and the Beatles somewhere in between. The DC-born, London-based singer-songwriter’s music could sound like a call back to the days of Motown and Stax Records and you can hear those elements on his debut album Come Around and Love Me. But it wasn’t digging through crates or going through his parents’ record collection that helped him discover the music that would later influence him.

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On “Over and Over,” the first single released from Becca Mancari’s Left Hand, they relive an important, early phase as a queer and gender expansive person: They call back to the youthful disregard and fleeting bravado felt after they escaped the rejection of the religious world in which they were raised, found a new home in chosen family and an uninhibited way of presenting themselves. With longtime collaborator Juan Solorzano, Mancari cast off restrictions and finally produced themselves on Left Hand, creating their most expansive work yet.

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Nashville band Snõõper’s debut LP is not a concept record preaching the gospel of exercise. But the group does punch above their weight.

Having formed just three years ago, the first songs and videos born out of COVID infections and forced off-work time for singer Blair Tramel and guitarist Connor Cummins, they’ve landed incredible opening slots and generated loads of hype for a new band, here and abroad. Their songs are so fast and compact, you might double-check your playback settings when streaming Super Snõõper, which is shorter than the average Nashville commute, 14 songs totaling just 23 minutes.

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Back in the mid-2000s, Be Your Own Pet frenetically tuneful punk sneered at the trappings of adulthood with snottily on-the-nose wit. After a 15-year hiatus, the second lineup reunited and recorded Mommy, a nervy new album, funkier, keener and muscular than any of BYOP’s previous work.

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After a collection of mixtapes starting in 2012 with The Mickstape, Mick Jenkins released his breakout project The Water[s], prequel to his third mixtape Trees & Truths. Despite releasing bodies of work dating back to those collections of mixtapes, EPs, and albums from The Healing Component and Pieces of a Man. It was after his third album Elephant in the Room where he knew something had to change. 

With this new level of freedom, Jenkins was able to create his latest project The Patience and album title appropriate for the patience he had to endure to get to this stage of his career.

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The Age of Pleasure is that “paradise found,” where she can, and does, love quite freely. “We’re in the Age of Pleasure baby, the Age of Pleasure,” Monáe reinstates to me over Zoom. On her last album, Dirty Computer, Monáe’s alter-ego Jane 57821 led a group of Black femme dissidents who broke free from The New Order, the totalitarian group of oppressors, and now they are living and loving in the Age of Pleasure.

The “paradise found” in The Age of Pleasure is an island of Black beauty, somewhere in the humid Caribbean, where it’s always golden hour, fresh fruit is being served in abundance to a beautiful group of people who do not make a distinction between friends and lovers.

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The bulk of Bully, the musicial monkier of Alicia Bognanno, fourth full-length LP Lucky For You serves as “one big love song to” 80-pound Shepherd-Husky mix named Mezzi. So when Mezzi passed away last year it upended Bognanno. It’s still a characteristically loud collection of tunes drenched in distorted guitars but it also captures the tenderness Bognanno felt and still feels now in Mezzi’s absence.

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Plenty of other artists have communicated significant matters through name changes this century. (Think: ANOHNI shedding Antony for a name that aligns with her identity as a trans woman; The Chicks distancing themselves from a regional term that romanticizes the old, segregated South; Yasiin Bey retiring the moniker Mos Def in favor of owning his personal evolution and conversion to Islam.)

Lo Naurel’s decision to no longer make music as Lauren McClinton falls squarely into that tradition of signifying artistic transformation.

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Bonny Doon’s new record Let There Be Music is our Record of the Week. It’s a sunshiny record, dare I say breezy with its “ohh sha laa laa”s and “nah nah nah nah”s. It’s a cold beer on a hot day kind of record. It’s as comforting as a worn-in porch chair. It an album that is decidedly happy and sounds like a group of friends who are relaxed and comfortable in their identity as a band.

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