New York are masters of anhedonic pop. The drolly named duo—26-year-old Estonian performance artist Gretchen Lawrence and 24-year-old Senegalese-American visual artist and model Coumba Samba—ostensibly draw from club music and hip-hop, but you can’t imagine their second album, Rapstar*, giving anyone the energy to lift their feet from the ground. It’s remarkably dead-eyed music, characterized by Samba’s sardonic deadpan and chilly minimalist glitches that sound like the Sheffield experimental duo snd as covered by the girls from Gossip Girl. The most excitable that the two musicians sound on Rapstar*—which is not very excitable at all—is when they splice their voices together on the title track to deliver a terse, twisted assessment of modern life: “The government will fuck you/And claim you deserve it.”
Where so much prototypical “Gen Z music” uses maximalism to capture a sense of overwhelmed disaffectedness—think Babyxsosa beginning a song by yelling and ending it as if she’s been distracted by her phone—New York take a different tack. Rapstar* is both mundane and disorienting, down to its format: On Bandcamp and streaming services, it’s been inexplicably split into two volumes, subtitled Side A and Side B, meaning that you’ll have to make a playlist of all the tracks to listen in one go, or otherwise fiddle with Spotify halfway through, as if you’re flipping a record. On “bronx,” Samba repeats the phrase “In the Bronx I walk” until it takes on the character of Sisyphean struggle; on “no bra,” London-based performance artist No Bra mutters about “Making out with no dress” over a subliminal, mutant footwork beat and improvised piano, making for an unpleasant but resolute answer to the question, “What does a sex jam sound like for a generation that reportedly hates sex?” It is frequently irritating music, but if you’re someone who’s frequently irritated by the world around you—who, for example, wants to scream about the fact that there are two Blank Street Coffees within 100 feet of Tottenham Court Road station—it can feel kind of soothing, a representation of modernity that depicts life as neither distorted and maximalist nor gloomily dystopic, but somewhere in the middle.
New York’s debut, 2022’s darkly funny No Sleep Till N.Y., leaned enough into electroclash and ’00s signifiers—skinny jeans, the aforementioned Gossip Girl lilt of Samba’s voice—that it could broadly be tied into a broader reappraisal of “indie sleaze” and blog house, an idea furthered by last year’s “night n day,” on which they flipped the hook of Ladytron’s “Seventeen” into something even creepier and more depressing than the original. Rapstar* still kind of sounds like “Shoes,” particularly on “kicks,” on which Samba recites lyrics about shoe addiction over an IDM hum, but it also feels less indebted to the past than previous New York music.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
