THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020 5
OPPOSITE: COURTESY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART / THE JEFFERSON R. BURDICK COLLECTION / GIFT OF JEFFERSON R. BURDICK; RIGHT: ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD A. CHANCE
The days of dance-pop divas being dismissed as commercial products
are largely gone, but on Dua Lipa’s new album, “Future Nostalgia,” the
London-born songbird is gunning for more than grudging acceptance.
Indeed, when she won Best New Artist at the Grammys, last year, she
used her speech to savage the Recording Academy’s outgoing president,
who had remarked that female artists needed to “step up” their efforts in
order to earn recognition. Lipa continues to body-slam the chauvinists
on “Future Nostalgia,” with taut disco and funk-lite tracks that use
rubbery bass lines to reinforce her dusky alto and cheeky lyrics. Like
a torch singer on the offensive, she brings the fight to former lovers,
industry executives, and even outmoded ideas about sexual assault.
Lipa, who poses in the driver’s seat on the album’s cover, doesn’t take
her foot off the gas—or cede control—for thirty-seven minutes of
high-powered synth pop.—Oussama Zahr
ELECTRO-POP
1
MUSIC
Flat Worms: “Antarctica”
PUNK A basic tenet of high-octane rock music
is to make as disobedient a racket as possi-
ble, preferably in the least amount of time.
Certain arty corners of punk rock add an
ambitious proviso: create this din while ap-
pearing well read. Los Angeles’s Flat Worms
have spent the four years since their 2016
début attempting this balancing act; on their
latest LP, “Antarctica,” the musicians simul-
taneously evoke madmen barrelling down a
hill and intellectuals enduring the spiritual
assaults of grotesque capitalism. The trio
have long been championed by Ty Segall, the
garage-rock aesthete whose GOD? Records
imprint is releasing “Antarctica,” and here
they gain another prominent indie co-con-
spirator—the recording engineer Steve Al-
bini, who robs the musicians of their fuzz to
underline a brittle instrumental sizzle. The
streamlined sound trains ears to Will Ivy’s
vaguely dystopian lyrics, involving scorched
empires and flamboyant loneliness. (“This
is a town where no one else lives—it’s Ant-
arctica.”) Though recorded last year, Ivy’s
words resonate in the current one. After all,
to a punk, the world is forever on the brink
of ruin.—Jay Ruttenberg
Irreversible Entanglements:
“Who Sent You?”
JAZZ Like much else in jazz, righteous anger
expressed in poetry has its traditions. Moor
Mother, the spoken-word artist who electri-
fies Irreversible Entanglements’s new album,
“Who Sent You?,” might find antecedents in
Amiri Baraka’s incendiary “Black Dada Nihil-
ismus,” which appeared on the free-jazz attack
that was the New York Art Quartet’s self-titled
début album, from 1964. But America, no
matter the era, never suffers any shortage of
societal outrage to inspire poets, and Moor
Mother has plenty to say. She dominates the
album with her observations on racial iniq-
uity, weaving her words among the goading
rhythms laid down by the bassist Luke Stewart
and the drummer Tcheser Holmes and the
sparse yet pointed melodic lines of the sax-
ophonist Keir Neuringer and the trumpeter
Aquiles Navarro. Yet her strength lies in her
restraint; she largely lets her knifelike verses,
rather than any extreme vocal force, do the
slashing.—Steve Futterman
Jennifer Koh: “Alone Together”
CHAMBER MUSIC The violinist Jennifer Koh has
earned a sterling reputation for her com-
manding technique, but the ingenuity of her
programming and commissioning initiatives
also merits attention. Her live-stream series,
“Alone Together,” reflects conditions born of
the COVID-19 pandemic—specifically, forced
isolation and economic hardship. Koh asked
twenty-one prominent composers whose ties
to universities or other institutions provide
them with financial stability to donate a new
thirty-second piece for solo violin. Each then
named a freelance composer to receive a paid
commission from Koh’s nonprofit, ARCO
Collaborative. Koh presents the succinct
works on her Instagram and Facebook pages
on Saturday nights, and then archives the
performances on her YouTube channel. The
next program offers world premières by two
highly visible creators, Jen Shyu and Nina C.
Young, and by the colleagues they selected,
inti figgis-vizueta and Adeliia Faizullina, re-
spectively.—Steve Smith (April 18 at 7.)
Ambar Lucid: “Garden of Lucid”
INDIE POP Ambar Lucid was eighteen when
she began releasing earnest, inward-looking
dream pop, full of precocious observations
about her relationships and her childhood.
Her song “A letter to my younger self,” from
2018, reads like a handwritten page torn from
a journal: Lucid sings about a wrenching pe-
riod of loneliness after her father was de-
ported from the United States. Although her
reflections were perceptive, her delivery was
slightly wide-eyed. That’s changed with her
début album, “Garden of Lucid.” From the
first track, an atmospheric ballad called “Gar-
den,” her voice is deeper, more resonant, more
commanding. She uses this newfound vocal
strength to play with different sounds, trying
her hand at soaring, upbeat pop on “Story to
Tell,” a song on which she cheerfully declares,
“The sky’s no longer gray.”—Julyssa Lopez
Minor Science:
“Second Language”
I.D.M. Techno music is escapist by nature—it’s
dance-floor-ready science fiction that often
focusses on celestial synthesizers—but it can
also give off a strong sense of interiority. The
London electronic-dance producer Angus Fin-
layson’s music, released under the moniker
Minor Science, is a good example. He crafts
tracks that have a surround-sound spatiality,
but his début album, “Second Language,” works
in approachable miniature, coming in at a trim
thirty-seven minutes. Spanning several sub-
genres—electro, footwork, drum and bass, and
armchair I.D.M.—the tracks’ rhythms amble as
much as they trot. His compositions frequently
zag when you expect them to zig, delaying their
climactic moments—an enticing approach that
delivers on the tease.—Michaelangelo Matos
“Nightly Met Opera Streams”
OPERA After the Met was forced to cancel the
balance of its season as a result of the COVID-
19 pandemic, the company turned to its overfull
vault of live movie-theatre transmissions and
launched a series of nightly screenings on its
Web site. The next seven days’ offerings may
