A home filled with cracked porcelain, a creaky piano, a sinister voice growling, “What the *fuck* are you doing here?” Lucy Liyou has compared her new album to a “horror house,” and the avant-garde sound artist has clearly done her homework. Mr Cobra opens like a dark, cobwebbed staircase leading into a vast and foreboding space, all frantic flute and piano, creaks, and bone-chilling screeches (not to mention a slutty monologue seemingly communicated via Google Translate). Mr Cobra evades most classification from there, blending free jazz, musique concrète, ’00s pop, house, industrial techno, and air horns, interlaced with dialogue snipped from Korean folk operas and experimental films. The bespoke blend of influences lends to the record’s personal material: Liyou adapted Mr Cobra, she says, from a performance art piece she wrote about “a time back in high school when I fell in love with a predator.”
Yaya Bey: Fidelity [Drink Sum Wtr]
After Do It Afraid, an album that explored the Brooklyn-based singer’s grief following the death of her father, Yaya Bey wondered, “What part of that ache is specifically Black?” On Fidelity, she ponders the displacement of Black communities from her native New York, the complicated nature of relationships—familial, romantic, and platonic—and the deep joy we’re promised as we work through it all. Her resounding vocals melt over the crackly interiors of R&B, reggae, and Jersey club. As she sings on “Egyptian Musk,” you get the feeling that “The world is so cold, but baby it’s warm in here.”
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Kuru: Backstage Hologram [deadAir]
