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2 days ago | 
pitchfork.com | Mano Sundaresan
You can draw a line from Pi’erre Bourne’s spacey, pixelated beats on Playboi Carti’s self-titled mixtape to countless production choices of the last half-decade. To name two: flansie and Skimayne’s synth storm on Yeat’s “Gët Busy” and OK’s bruising bassline on OsamaSon’s “Fool.” For a couple years in the late 2010s, Pi’erre was one of the most innovative producers in hip-hop, concocting pure ear candy by layering sugary electronic melodies and silly soundbites over locomotive 808s.
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3 weeks ago | 
pitchfork.com | Mano Sundaresan
Nearly two years ago, at a listening party for Offset’s solo album SET IT OFF, the rapper previewed a song with Playboi Carti christened by the fan community as “Rock Out.” It’s pretty great. Carti goes in over a bouncy, conservative-for-him beat full of the bluesy melodrama you’d typically hear on Rylo Rodriguez tapes, gleefully rapping “rock out rock out rock out rock out” as a gun-reloading sound is spammed.
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1 month ago | 
pitchfork.com | Mano Sundaresan
Last summer, I joined Pitchfork as its new editor from the world of 2020s independent music blogging. It is an unglamorous world, but one I’m deeply fond of, all janky websites and Substack newsletters. It is where a lot of terrible, unedited writing is happening, but also where some of the most vital and urgent writing is happening.
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1 month ago | 
yahoo.com | Mano Sundaresan
Last summer, I joined Pitchfork as its new editor from the world of 2020s independent music blogging. It is an unglamorous world, but one I’m deeply fond of, all janky websites and Substack newsletters. It is where a lot of terrible, unedited writing is happening, but also where some of the most vital and urgent writing is happening.
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1 month ago | 
nobells.blog | Mano Sundaresan
These days, I don’t like throwing parties. Maybe I’m just #27AndWashed, but I also think it has to do with the fact that they can be a lot of work, and you shouldn’t have to work hard to have fun! (All the hours that went into those Living Gallery events last year…don’t get me started.) These days, I’d rather just kick it at the crib, invite a few people over, maybe watch a movie (damn I’m definitely washed).
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2 months ago | 
pitchfork.com | Mano Sundaresan
Maybe like you, I heard $ome $exy $ongs 4 U on Valentine’s Day en route to a weekend trip with my girlfriend. An admittedly less-than-optimal setting; much of Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR’s new collab album traverses the lusty dejection, reversed samples, and bleeding pads of single-man R&B.
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2 months ago | 
pitchfork.com | Mano Sundaresan
Longtime readers know that Pitchfork has always been about following your favorite writers, hoping their byline will show up when the reviews section updates a few minutes after midnight. This is because music criticism is all about taste and POV, inherently personal, subjective things. With our new slate of columns, we’re empowering three of the most vital music critics of this era, giving them free rein to write about what interests them and expanding the breadth of what we cover.
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2 months ago | 
yahoo.com | Mano Sundaresan
Longtime readers know that Pitchfork has always been about following your favorite writers, hoping their byline will show up when the reviews section updates a few minutes after midnight. This is because music criticism is all about taste and POV, inherently personal, subjective things. With our new slate of columns, we’re empowering three of the most vital music critics of this era, giving them free rein to write about what interests them and expanding the breadth of what we cover.
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2 months ago | 
pitchfork.com | Mano Sundaresan
There’s reason to be skeptical of the calculated chaos that has critics fawning over skaiwater. Add a weeping sample here, throw in a burnt 808 pattern there, make a brash new rap sound palatable to poptimists… aren’t we a little tired of this after Travis Scott? But then I turn on a song quite literally called “pop” and it all melts away. Maybe because skaiwater’s frag-rap pyrotechnics are not so much the point as they are the scaffolding for what’s becoming a dagger of a pen.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
yahoo.com | Mano Sundaresan
In October, some weeks before I met MIKE for our conversation on the Lower East Side, the New York rapper and producer was holed up for 13 hours in an interrogation room in Japan. He’d just finished playing what he described as one of the greatest shows of his life at Tokyo’s Frame Gallery. Feeling good, he and his crew got into a G-Wagon and made their way to the afterparty. But as they walked to the spot from where they parked, they were stopped randomly by police.
