The more you listen to Mustafa, you begin to realize that the juxtaposition of the gritty street life he depicts and the gentle music he makes shouldn’t be much of a juxtaposition at all. Half of the singer-songwriter’s debut project, When Smoke Rises, has been released as singles, with music videos capturing the brick and concrete exteriors of Toronto’s Regent Park housing project, where he was born and raised. In the video for “Stay Alive,” a searing portrait of his community and his commitment to it, black and brown men in chains and hoodies make elaborate hand gestures to the camera as Mustafa pleads for their survival. He offers himself to them to ensure it. “Just put down that bottle, tell me your sorrows,” he sings. “I care about you fam.” His folk-inflected music, tender and calm, and these videos, serene and defiant, honor his neighborhood with the softness so often absent in attitudes and policy towards poor people.
On “Stay Alive,” Mustafa’s friend, Regent Park rapper Rax, explains that he’s just trying to keep his head above water. “I like to hear [the song’s snippet of] my boy [Rax], who has only been equated to violence, and now people outside the community are hearing a sadness in his voice. A more holistic picture,” Mustafa said in an interview. Rax is still alive, but several people Mustafa has known are not, like rapper Smoke Dawg, pictured with him on the project’s cover, or Ali Rizeig, to whom he dedicated a single. Throughout When Smoke Rises, Mustafa’s grief for the friends he could not save is laid bare.
The 24-year-old has been trying to make sense of the calamity in his backyard since he was a child. He started to earn local acclaim for his spoken word poetry at age 12. In one breathless entry from his youth that still lingers online, he asks, “Why do people have to live in fear? Why do people have to assume that death is near?” Mustafa has evolved into a more measured writer. His new release offers a sequential narrative of grief that is as strong as it is minimal. Early glimmers of hope that Mustafa can help his friends survive become confrontations with the inevitability of loss. Those confrontations become rage on “The Hearse,” where Mustafa skillfully pivots from riding out for vengeance to looking inward for consequences: “I know what’s at stake, but you made yourself special,” he sings to his adversary. “I wanna throw my life away for you.” The project descends into sadness as Mustafa settles into his grief, owning it, and naming his ultimate desire: to get back all that’s been taken.
The power of Mustafa’s confessionals isn’t limited to their words. His singing is plain but arresting, like looking out to a lush field or up to a blue sky. On When Smoke Rises, his voice is most often smooth and restrained, making the sparse moments of emotional trilling even more poignant. Take his duet with Sampha — a perfect contemporary — called “Capo,” where he transitions from a quiet rasp to a forceful falsetto over intricate piano, signaling a breaking point in the monotony of mourning that he describes moments before. The project’s backdrop is a cascade of subtle synths, delicate guitar and bass, light drums, and gorgeous keys that ebb and flow with intention. Mustafa’s collaborators here are some of the brightest in music: super producer Frank Dukes (Frank Ocean, Drake, Rihanna) is credited on every song and heartwrencher James Blake contributes to two tracks.
Mustafa’s choice to sing of hood tragedy in folk music is effective, not only because it is beautiful and stirring, but because it feels unexpected. In popular music, portrayals of the horrors of poverty and violence often come through intense raps and atop booming 808s. This, of course, is also music Mustafa responds to, as influenced by Nas and Future as he is by Leonard Cohen and Sufjan Stevens. But Mustafa’s music, like his life, is the melding of disparate experiences that aren’t so disparate in the light. There’s a fine line between being poor in your home country and poor in a new land; between life and death; between acclaim and disregard. Mustafa, like so many black artists before him, has made public his deepest despair. In doing so, he provides a unique model of the gentleness and care his community should be held with.
When Angel Olsen runs out of space in a notebook, she doesn’t immediately buy a fresh pad; instead, she crams her latest thoughts next to her old grocery lists in the middle. It feels like less pressure to begin in media res—somewhere between the milk and the onions—than to start with a “hello, it’s me again.”
For Olsen, another album is a fresh notepad; an EP a transitional phase tucked in the margins. Since the release of her debut album in 2012, Olsen has found various ways to ease the stakes between major releases, popping her head back in without having to reintroduce herself entirely. In 2017, that took the form of Phases, a 12-track catalog of discarded songs and covers; in 2021, Aisles, a wilfully frivolous bunch of ’80s covers. With her latest album, 2022’s Big Time, in the rearview (alongside its companion EP, 2023’s Forever Means), we now have another Olsen interregnum: Cosmic Waves Volume 1, her debut compilation series. It features two halves: Side A, a selection of original songs from a range of under-the-radar artists, as curated by Olsen; Side B, Olsen’s own take on a song from each of the featured artists.
Cosmic Waves is a bolder experiment than any of her previous interstitial releases, though it’s consistent with Olsen’s career-long fascination with the act of interpretation. In Olsen’s music, love is a constant act of projection and analysis—so when the love fades, so too does the ability to read the other. “Now it’s impossible to conceive/I don’t know who can see you,” she sang on Big Time’s opening song. Cosmic Waves is, too, an act of love, reinterpreting the very act of reinterpretation. Since the project is organized around promoting lesser-known artists, its cover songs become a medium not of association but of loving introduction.
However, with Olsen’s name hanging over the compilation, it’s a struggle to hear each artist on their own terms, and the act of comparison inevitably creeps in. It’s almost irresistible not to hear each of the songs on Side A filtered through an Olsen-like rubric: In Poppy Jean Crawford, there’s Olsen’s barreling cadence and winsome vocalizations; in Coffin Prick, the prismatic light show of Olsen’s synthier moments. These two bombastic tracks are sharply followed by three slow, twilit ballads, and listening to them together feels like eating a chocolate cookie where all the chunks are lumped together on one side. But if any of the tracks demand to stand out on its own, it’s the heavy-lidded romance of Sarah Grace White’s “Ride,” a song of spartan yet swoonsome melodies that cast a contrast against the busy arrangements of the other songs. Among the artists, White comes closest to Olsen’s singularity, though that’s exactly what Olsen tries to conceal in the second half.
Throughout the covers, Olsen’s voice is an instrument consistently detached from her own body. It sounds as though it didn’t come from her throat, but from a little lamp in the room: a small flicker. On “The Takeover” she sings in an archly beautiful style, leaning into a light-headed voice and seldom landing on the plosive consonants that would make the delivery recognizably Olsen. If anything’s identifiably Olsen in these songs, it’s how she appears to be mimicking the recording techniques of her earliest releases: the kelpy reverb, the skittish strums of her simple guitar chords, the overall indirectness. There’s a great lightness to each of Olsen’s covers, an attempt to abandon the feet she has planted on the ground. But the songs are rendered so fluffily that it’s hard to hear any of their structural elements; instead, the collection sounds more like a series of beautiful ooh-ing. On “Sinkhole,” she sings in a register halfway back to herself—but just when you think she’s about to land on an Olsenism, she goes back skyward into sweet impersonality. For now, Olsen is still hovering somewhere above or between, yet to add “notepad” to her grocery list.
