WILTLM: April 2026
Earl, MIKE, SURF GANG, Sideshow, Lerado Khalil, Star Moles, Swaya, livwutang, Keily Rude
WILTLM stands for What I Listened To Last Month. The first week of every month, I look back at the last and rhapsodize about some music I heard for the first time.
Been traveling non-stop in May so this recap of April’s listening is arriving a little delayed. Got a lot of cool pieces/projects in the works that will hopefully see the light of day soon, so keep an eye out for them. Also, this is the first edition of WILTLM (and the newsletter period) to feature a guest contributor, which was a lot of fun to coordinate and work on. More of that coming as well. If anyone else would like to put their own words here, reach out to me at bigtentrecords000@gmail.com. I have some budget for contributions, which is cool. As for the music, well, I have my album of the year until further notice, someone at work put me on to a Philly songwriter who sounds like a cross between Cameron Winter and Adrianne Lenker (I’m not joking and you will agree), and a couple of New York DJs turned in some excellent mixes.
Lerado Khalil - BLACK FLAG
This is a guest post by my good friend Tommy Pelletier who I asked to write about Lerado after he texted me that “he uses rap the same way Aphex Twin uses electronic music.”
Lerado Khalil came across my YouTube algorithm 7+ years ago at this point. My first exposure was the LMK video. There’s a dual purpose to hitting this point right off the bat: 1) to stroke my ego by flagging that I “found him first,” and 2) to establish ethos by showcasing the duration that I’ve been admiring Lerado’s journey into becoming a prominent figure in the alt rap scene. Over the next amount of words, I will try to back up my substance fueled take that “Lerado uses rap the same way Aphex Twin uses electronic music”, particularly through the lens of his latest release Black Flag.
How often do you press play on a new track with certain projections of what it will be, only for them to be deemed moot within the first 10-20 sec? With your Attention Span Defense Systems (ASDS) failing, you get pulled away by a momentary distraction OR the depths of your doom scroll. After getting back on track (with said new track), your first thought is “WTF am I listening to?”
Lerado and Aphex are no stranger to this phenomenon. Both artists possess a deep discography with listening curves that challenge even their most seasoned fans. However, these barriers further contextualize their art, creating a feedback loop of discovery for those who are willing to put in the labor. Additionally, there is a downstream impact on their peers. Lerado’s is smaller and harder to track, but I challenge anyone to point out the difference between Earl Sweatshirt’s Utility and Lerado’s Scenic Route. There is certainly a spectrum of things being actually shit vs genuinely genre pushing, but both Aphex and Lerado reside firmly in the latter.
“Onenthesame” - A dreamlike melody that goes through pitch shifted distortions. Lerado’s vocals are drenched in autotune, pleasantly reminding me that I’ve never cared whether I understand what he’s saying or not.
“Rinsed” - Completely off the grid beat despite the snare periodically on the 3rd hit. Lerado’s signature rushed delivery provides the glue that holds the whole track together, but he also mixes things up with a range of melodies and flows. His desire to test new boundaries on this project is a welcomed development, creating space and contrast for the times when he dips back into monotonous and guttural streams of thought.
“Touch n Go” - Hazy dark synth clouds amid a boosted 808 put this track in a friendly and familiar place within Lerado’s existing catalog. Much love to ## UHH.
“Bridge the Gap” - Clams Casino, one of my favorite producers of all time, provides his signature cathartic sound here with Lerado’s voice occupying a place in the mix that scratches your ear. “This makes so much sense”- me on my first listen
MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, & SURF GANG - POMPEII // UTILITY
I remember telling anyone who would listen back in 2018 that Earl’s Some Rap Songs sounded just like MIKE. This was back in a time when the now venerable Queensbridge rapper was still a well-kept secret in the underground (Pitchfork BNM aside) in part thanks to his incredibly SEO-unfriendly nom de plume (it was impossible to pull him up on Spotify until maybe 2021). People would look at me askance until I played them a track off Renaissance Man and then eventually nod their heads in agreement. 9 years later though, Earl is waxing MIKE. The run from MAY GOD BLESS YOUR HUSTLE to Beware of the Monkey was generational but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that MIKE’s teflon status as rap’s savior hasn’t begun to lose some of its luster. The chinks first appeared on 2023’s Burning Desire which largely stuck to the same dusty soul-loop formula as his previous releases, but for the first time began to feel like a retread rather than a slow and careful unfolding. Showbiz! arrived a little under a year and a half later (the second longest wait between solo MIKE efforts) and applied some spit shine to that same sound, but the results were mixed with a strong first half up there with the artist’s best, followed by a subdued and meandering back end that eventually wore out the tape’s welcome. The bright spots during this time were the two Pinball releases with Brooklyn beat aficionado Tony Seltzer whose booming, trap-adjacent production offered a welcome change of scenery for MIKE’s trademark mush-mouthed delivery. So it was with optimism that I headed into this double-sided collab tape with SURF GANG, hoping that the collective’s shadowy cloud rap sound would perform a similar feat of revitalization. Unfortunately however, the two cancel each other out in a formless somnolent haze as both MIKE and SURF GANG sound asleep at the wheel across their 15 tracks together. Ultimately it’s Earl who cuts through the malaise, his SoCal unbotherdness neutralizing the “too-cool-for-school” obtuseness of Harrison, eera and evilgiane’s beats.
Sideshow - TIGRAY FUNK
This is the real 30+ track 10k project to write home about. Sideshow has been on the come-up for me the past few years. I first took interest after JAM, his collab tape with SF producer Alexander Spit. The quick 7-track offering felt like a miniature Madvillainy or Pinata as Spit’s eclectic, sample-heavy sound injected pep into Sideshow’s devil may care attitude. 2024’s F.U.N. T.O.Y. showcased grander ambitions with more personal lyrics and slicker production, but the execution finally caught up on TIGRAY FUNK. From the moment you hear a young black boy ask “Has God ever told you to let this white man rule you?” on the intro track, you know it’s on. From there Sideshow mans a wide range of sputtering, gas powered beats from a slew of top-notch underground figureheads including SURF GANG, Tony Seltzer, Popstar Benny, Laron, and more. His topics of choice include drug addiction and violence, but he paints each with such casual mundanity that they lose any trace of exoticism and become the types of slow, then sudden, deaths that confront us all on a daily basis. The brilliance of a line like “They close to dying like a mile away/Fuck a mile just a fucked up smile away” off “BLAME BURNAYS” is the way it collapses the gap between interaction and conflict, positing the latter as an inevitable byproduct of the former that’s asymmetrically more deadly for some than others. Later on “WRETCHED OF THE EARTH,” atop an 808 that’ll push any subwoofer to its absolute limit, Sideshow divides the world in two with a simple question, “Do you love me/Or do you don’t?” Its the ultimate arbiter of our social reality, the final and most meaningful line of demarcation that determines our expectations of the future in the course of any confrontation. Again, the banality of the statement signifies its truth.
Swaya - No Bells w/ Swaya 100426
I can’t lie, more often than not this post-club, no-wave, ambient stuff that cropped up during the pandemic goes over my head. It sounds pretty and all, but a full mix inevitably, eventually, fades to a background noise of tender vocal chops and crinkly textures that my brain quickly tosses in the waste bin. Not so on this plush NTS mix from Brooklyn artist, producer, engineer, and DJ Swaya. A frequent Tony Seltzer collaborator who’s also responsible for “HAPPY MACHINE” off TIGRAY FUNK, her work here clicked right away, drawing a through line from golden-era sound system dub to French hypnagogic pop to transcendent UK Funky to Delaware outsider rap to mellifluous baile funk. Connecting it all is an ancient subterranean rhythm that’s been shuddering and quaking its way through the universe since the big bang. “Life is vibration” Swaya seems to say, “let go and atomize.”
livwutang - ｆｅｍｍｅ ｖｏｃａｌ ｄｕｂｓｔｅｐ
Here’s another excellent mix by another excellent NYC selector, livwutang. The concept behind this one is more specific than Swaya’s multi-dimensional sweep, collect the best dubstep tracks featuring femme vocals since the genre’s inception 20ish years ago, and lay them down slick and moody in a 2-hour gauntlet. The tradition of disco divas and soul songstresses lending their pipes to house music is well-known, but I never knew the bag went this deep on the heavier end of the spectrum as well. Not only does wutang create space for an oft-overlooked side of the genre, but in doing so she also links its origins back to the trip-hop and downtempo music of the late 90s and early 00s. Hearing such light and airy melodies atop all this grim and murky bass music, I couldn’t help but think of Portishead and Massive Attack, and how their own shadowy veneers laid the foundation for so much of this sound.
Keily Rude - “role model”
This might be the best coming-of-age song I’ve heard all year. Rude captures the emotional roller coaster of youth as well as any Sylvia Plath fig tree metaphor. Moving from an early infatuation with drugs at 15, to getting lost in young love at 18, to crashing out with suicidal thoughts at 19, the chorus mimics the speed at which life comes at you in those early years of not-quite-adulthood. Producer bkwds turns in a dreamy beat that sounds like the type of thing you might vibe out to on a sunny day in the park with some friends, just goofing around and soaking in the time you’ll never get back. Don’t worry, Rude makes it out the other side just fine, swerving through all the potholes and finally getting money at the late age of 22. The song ends with its own version of Frank’s mother’s anti-drug voicemail from “Be Yourself” as another older woman extols the same D.A.R.E. wisdom to Reed. A lesson for another time perhaps.
Star Moles - Highway to Hell
Sometimes life can feel like a fairytale, but not the sweeping arch of the hero’s journey, rather in the little details that resemble whimsies meant for a land of knights, castles, and dragons. Philly singer-songwriter Star Moles has a knack for these observations, her songs are storybooks filled with characters of Dahl-ian fabrication: the “four-star postmaster general,” or the “vest-wearing archangels armed with clipboards,” for example. Magic is real too, of course, just don’t ask her to explain it. And time, that swirling, slippery element that appears at root of even the most fanciful yarns, is still the ultimate measure of our lives. The best songs on Highway to Hell gambol along with a humorously slipshod energy that embrace mistake-making as an every day act of living, perhaps even its defining form. As much as we like to trick ourselves into an illusion of control, a more discerning glance at the minutiae of our days reveals little more than a long running comedy of errors. Even our most well-worn phrases have glaring logical fallacies that directly contradict their understood meanings: “I need you like I need a hole in my head/I need a hole in my head/How else could I sing?” Duh! Album opener “The End” (a fuck-up in and of itself) begins with Star Moles repeatedly putting her shirt on backwards and howling that if she does it one more time it’ll be “the darkest Tuesday in a thousand years.” On this track in particular Moles’s voice takes on the loose, quavering quality of Cameron Winter’s, and indeed, the two share a similar self-conception as bumbling oafs who are only getting on by the grace of God.