Oh Wonder

Oh Wonder are one of the UK’s best-kept secrets. What started with the relatively modest ambition of uploading a track month on Soundcloud quickly transformed into two albums and two tours, more than 1.2 million global adjusted album sales and a hotly anticipated third album No-one Else Can Wear Your Crown. First single Hallelujah is a statement of intent and marked the start of their next chapter no longer DIY pop-stars-in-hiding.

This London duo’s self-titled debut made unlikely, but successful, bedfellows of soul-jazz sophistication and glitchy alt-pop. Here, they take the formula to new extremes, fusing earth-clearing wub-wub synths with cocktail-lounge piano on “Heavy.” Ultralife’s melodic sharpness, however, is its most striking quality. It will take only one listen for the love-struck title track to tattoo itself onto your brain, before the whack-a-mole rhythms and grinding synths of “High on Humans” are wrangled into a euphoric head-rush of a chorus.

Pianist-composer Vijay Iyer follows his 2021 ECM disc Uneasy — the first to showcase his trio featuring bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey — with Compassion, another album in league with these two gifted partners. The New York Times captured the special qualities of this group, pointing to the trio’s flair for playing “with a lithe range of motion and resplendent clarity… while stoking a kind of writhing internal tension. Crucial to that balance is their ability to connect with each other almost telepathically.”

Somewhere amongst the 80 head-splitting, vibe-chasing, cosmically grimy minutes of the Oh Sees’ 20-somethingth album, one might begin to wonder if chief Oh See John Dwyer will ever run out of steam. More than two decades into the band’s career, they—Dwyer and his rotating cast—still manage to find new wheat to harvest from the fields of Classic American Freakouts, from bite-sized thrash (“Heartworm,” “Gholü”) to multi-part suites of drug-den soul (the 15-minute “Scutum & Scorpius,” the 21-minute “Henchlock”) tailored to weirdos of all hair lengths. Behold a vision in which punk and prog didn’t just coexist, but spawned. Fun? Menacingly. Evil? Studiously.