There are a couple reasons that I can't believe that YoungBoy Never Broke Again (formerly NBA Youngboy) is 17. First, he burst onto the national scene last year with a near fully-formed sense of melody and songcraft, the vanguard of a Baton Rouge youth movement with seemingly limitless potential. The other is that his life has aged him far beyond his years.

If vaporwave had ever realized its destiny as a freshman-level college course, this would be an effective textbook. Not only does Nmesh lay down some 25 disjointed high-concept low-brow bangers, the thing's fleshed out with a further 15 remixes from the Orange Milk Records roster, as unpredictable a crew as exists in electronic music today (including a dude named foodman, whose Ez Minzoku is the only art since 2013 that I've truly felt pressure to appreciate without the vaguest notion of why). Like most albums that tack on a bunch of remixes, it feels scattered as hell; unlike most such albums, it's to great effect.

Randy Newman will always be the Toy Story guy to me. That's not a dig at all - in my mind, it's impossible to refer to Toy Story in anything but a superlative context. It's for exactly that reason that I almost turned back once looking at Dark Matter's tracklist; it's not a great time for music from old dudes in general, and especially not for old dudes writing songs titled Putin.

I can't decide if it's because I'm having trouble keeping up or because there is less than one interesting album coming out per week, but either way I'm gonna start being a little more flexible with the recency of the stuff I write about up here. For one thing, I average at least a couple months of intending to play a given Soundcloud mix before I actually sit down and get the 40 minute thing done. After that, though, it can easily become a fixture.

Listening to any one of these songs is sufficient to determine whether you'll enjoy the album, which doesn't necessarily mean that they all sound the same. Rather, Lana Del Rey is the holder of the music industry's most credible claim to a singular identity, a characteristic that has the win-win effect of repulsing dummies and raising her to veneration beyond comparison in the eyes of the faithful. The effect is similar to finding that entirely unknown artist who was somehow communicating your exact emotional state, but the artist happens to be internationally recognized and the you've now spent years in the headspace.

Lulu is back, baby! To be completely honest, I haven't listened to much of Vega's 21st century work, so it may in fact have been 2007's Station that was back when Lou Reed and Metallica blessed us with the decade's most maligned record. In any event, Alan Vega died last year, obligating at least one good faith listen to his first posthumous release.

My first draft of this was real angry, mostly because I wasn't sure how to write a shrug. Far be it from me to knock Jay-Z's cynicism; the guy's got an otherworldly ability to suss out what's commercially viable in rap at any given moment (when you refuse to release your music on streaming services other than your own free trial factory, you have to pander to the people that actually buy CDs). There's just no particularly compelling reason to listen to this.

Who was checking for this? We've all been to a Washed Out show at some point, in the front row tripping over ourselves to show that no, we were feeling it all around-est. However, I didn't expect the dude to age out of that with us - something about chillwave's unyielding summer iconography always made me think that the artists themselves were more in exile than on vacation. Sure, the timing of Mister Mellow's June release date and subsequent summer tour is far from coincidental, but the album finds Ernest Greene far from stagnant.