New York are masters of hedonistic pop. The doll duo—26-year-old Estonian performance artist Gretchen Lawrence and 24-year-old Senegalese-American visual artist and model Coumba Samba—obviously draw on club music and hip-hop, but you can't imagine their sophomore album , Rapstar*, giving anyone the energy to lift their feet off the ground. It's stunning dead-eyed music, characterized by the sardonic deadpan of Samba and chilly minimalist glitches that sound like the Sheffield experimental duo as covered by the girls from gossip Girl. The two musicians sound most exciting Rapstar*—which is far from exciting—is when they combine their voices on the title track to deliver a succinct, wry assessment of modern life: “The government's gonna fuck you/And claim you deserve it.”
Where so much original “Gen Z” music uses maximalism to capture a sense of beleaguered discontent—think Babyxsosa starting a song shouting and ending it like she's distracted by her phone—New York takes a different approach. Rapstar* it's both mundane and disorienting, right down to its form: On Bandcamp and streaming services, it's inexplicably split into two volumes, subtitled Side A and Side B, meaning you'll have to make a playlist of all the tracks to listen to in one go, or else fiddle with Spotify halfway through, like you're spinning a record. In “bronx”, Samba repeats the phrase “In the Bronx I walk” until it takes on the character of a Sisyphean struggle. on “no bra,” London-based artist No Bra mutters about “Making out with no dress” over a subliminal, mutated foot-tapping and improvised piano, providing an uneasy but determined answer to the question, “What does a does sex involvement sound like it for a generation that supposedly hates sex?' It's often irritating music, but if you're someone who's often irritated by the world around you—who, for example, wants to scream about the fact that they exist two Blank Street Coffees within 100 feet of Tottenham Court Road station—it can be somewhat relaxing, a representation of modernity that depicts life neither warped and maximalist nor bleakly dystopian, but somewhere in between.
Debuting New York, 2022 is darkly funny No sleep until New Yorkleaned heavily on electroclash and '00s signifiers—skinny jeans, the aforementioned gossip Girl Samba's voice – that it could broadly be linked to a wider reappraisal of “indie sleaze” and blog house, an idea promoted by last year's “night n day”, in which they turned the hook of “Seventeen” into Ladytron on something else. creepier and more depressing than the original. Rapstar* it still sounds a bit like “Shoes,” particularly on “kicks,” in which Samba recites lyrics about shoe addiction over a humming IDM, but it also feels less indebted to the past than earlier New York music.
