New Music Friday: Stream new projects from bbymutha, Chanel Beads, Lord Spikeheart, and more

Brittnee Moore’s pen has only sharpened since she started releasing music as bbymutha a decade ago. Few rappers operate at her level of lyricism and style, balancing agile bars with a smooth southern flow and immaculate beat selection. Even fewer possess the rare mix of icy finesse, gut-punch humor, and genuine vulnerability that makes her music so consistently great. On sleep paralysis, she raps about her anxious attachment style and her sexual prowess with the same unimpeachable confidence, never missing a step. In standout singles “lines” and “go,” she projects the image of an unhinged, insatiable lover while sounding fully self-possessed, embracing the innate contradictions of the human condition; despite suffering abuse and struggling with serious mental health issues, Moore has built a successful rap career while independently raising four children. Most importantly, after almost quitting music entirely after her excellent 2020 debut LP Muthaland, she seems to be enjoying the process again — one simply can’t come up with a line as hard as “OK, you a dealer / What’s a dealer to a plug?” unless they’re thoroughly feeling themself. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Reading up on Chanel Beads you may see many off-putting phrases such as “Dimes Square” and “post-punk” but Your Day Will Come rewards listening with open ears. The band, led by Shane Lavers, makes an amalgam of pop hooks, lo-fi rap beats, experimental structures, and indie rock classicism that feels both reassuring and excitingly inventive. Underneath the genre-melding surface this is a tender album at heart. Lavers singing is complimented by his bandmate Maya Collette, their voices often seemingly melding into one alien register that floats through the dissonance of a song like “Idea June” to deliver lyrics (“I think I’m glued onto your back now”) that are both ungainly and yet offer romantic visions of commitment. When the album isn’t focused on love it turns its eye, instead, on the end of the world. “Urn” and “Police Scanner” are both dark tales of demise, one about death and the other about societal collapse. Your Day Will Come offers up a dreamlike soundtrack to the carnage of real life, finding specks of hope in every grain. — David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

The debut solo album from Martin Kanja, the Kenyan artist known as Lord Spikeheart, is an incandescent new frontier in extreme music. It’s an arena Kanja has fought in with gladiatorial fierceness as half of the now-disbanded Duma, but The Adept is bigger, glossier, and even more punishing. Kanja’s vocals pull from death metal tradition, his guttural growls and hellish snarls a portal for a maelstrom that knows no borders; its clouds gather mutated footwork drumlines that beat at the pulse of a recently severed vein, possessed electronic noise-rap, and nu-metal nods that never feel like throwbacks as much as trebuchet-strength tosses forward into the future. The list of collaborators is an inspired one — Safety Trance, Fatboi Sharif, Brodinski, and Backxwash are some of Kanja’s guests — but The Adept never feels like anything less than something only Lord Spikeheart could have made. It’s the sound of an atom of the soul being split, unleashing an eldritch new energy. — Jordan Darville

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

On A Chaos of Flowers, BIG|BRAVE somehow makes folk music so overwhelming and intimidating, it borders on physically oppressive. The music is a sludge of amplification, noisy fuzz, and warped moans; a collection of disquieting dirges with titles like “i felt a funeral” and “quotidian : solemnity” that move at a glacier’s pace. A Chaos of Flowers focuses on the Canadian trio’s dark “massive minimalist” sound, packed with slowly decaying synth lines and the distorted wails of a wobbly guitar, undulating between deep rumbles and noisy feedback that eventually taper off into the ether. Paired with the brooding beauty of Robin Wattie’s faraway voice and their haunting lyrics inspired by poems of isolation and despair, it’s a record that contains a level of disorientation that makes it difficult to figure out which way is up and down. — Sandra Song

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp