Deerhoof Kokoye

Over the past couple of years while making their new album, Deerhoof have been asking themselves if there was any music they could create that expressed how our rapidly emerging future might actually feel. The band envisioned an album about people haunted by memory of a lost world and of every failed attempt to save it. People already living outside the system, already having practiced new ways of life required for survival - these hopeful heroes are Deerhoof's inspiration. These are the FTCA. Faithful listeners will recognize a certain alienated but transformational figure who shows up in Deerhoof songs going back to their earliest days.

Over eighteen boundless albums as experimental as they are pop, Deerhoof has continuously quested for radical sounds and daring storytelling. 2020’s Future Teenage Cave Artists explored fairytale visions of post-apocalypse, welding intrinsic melodies with absurdist digital recording methods. Its sequel Love-Lore, a live covers medley, channeled futurist mid-century artists Parliament, Sun Ra and Stockhausen, to name a handful into a patchwork love letter to the anti-authoritarian expressions that inspire the band.

Did you know that miracles happen every day? We don’t always see it that way. We look at the state of the world and think, “It’ll be a miracle if we make it out alive.” But miracles are what humans do. We’re Earth’s most inventive and unpredictablespecies, when we’re allowed to be. Also the most destructive. Miracle-Level is Deerhoof’s mystical manifesto on creativity andtrust. It celebrates the infinite small wonders of existence that spontaneously present themselves, when not obstructed by our death-driven masters.

Yoko Ono's catalog isn't easy to navigate or even define at times. Even when John Lennon was on board as a collaborator – band member, producer or cheerleader – her music could be willfully difficult and stubbornly uncommercial. She's a singular artist, maybe more so than her late husband and his famous band, which makes any tribute to her vast recorded work an uphill charge not exactly suited for the easily intimidated. The 14 brave souls who tackle Ono's music on Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono can't truly replicate her distinctive path, and much of the source material hinges on her artist's right to explore those paths via routes of her choosing. In other words, they're not songs in the traditional sense. There have been some interpretable tracks over the years: "Who Has Seen the Wind?," "Listen, the Snow Is Falling" and "Walking on Thin Ice" are close enough to pop music.