The idea for Bartees Strange's new album Horror surfaced suddenly, at an inopportune moment, from somewhere deep within. Strange had just released his debut album Live Forever, and was beginning to write and work on its follow-up Farm to Table, when he received a complete vision for a whole other album. It was a terrifying vision, dripping with bloody truths and gruesome vulnerability. "A record will grab me like that… I will just be living life and then – BOOM – all this music will appear to me and I know I have to record it.," explains Strange. But creating this album would involve opening a boarded-up door to a closet filled with everything from Strange's life that he didn't know how to address. At first, Strange pushed the calling aside and finished up Farm to Table, which was released to much critical acclaim, earning best-of nods from the likes of The New York Times, Rolling Stone and NPR Music. However, it would not be long before Horror would rear its monstrous head again. Bartees Strange was raised on fear. His family told scary stories to teach life lessons, and at an early age, Strange started watching scary movies to practice being strong. The world can be a terrifying place, and for a young, queer, black person in rural America, that terror can be visceral. Horror is an album about facing those fears and growing to become someone to be feared. Throughout the record, Strange lays down one difficult truth after another, all over a sonic pastiche of music he loved as a kid. His dad introduced him to Parliament Funkadelic, Fleetwood Mac, Teddy Pendergrass, and Neil Young. Those influences merged with Strange's interest in hip-hop, country, indie rock, and house, culminating in a record that feels completely original. Strange began Horror at his home studio and went hard on the production. He did a session with Yves and Lawrence Rothman who provided a rhythmic and sonic backbone for chunks of the record. Then Strange met Jack Antonoff at a music festival by chance and they became fast friends. Strange worked on some material for Antonoff's band Bleachers, and Antonoff worked on Horror. The twosome finished the record together, working the songs raw, editing, arranging, and dressing them up in clothing bound to inspire fear. The album opener "Too Much" picks up where the last track on Farm to Table left off, quickly dunking us deep into the inner journey of Horror. "Too Much" is Horror's thesis statement. It's a sonic and lyrical love letter from Strange to himself. The song's protagonist grows from a deflated ego into a feral giant. "You're too much to hold, some days you're heaven to touch" Strange sings before being overtaken by an instrumental hook that nods to early hits by the Isleys and the Brothers Johnson. "Sober" hits on one of Strange's biggest fears — uncertainty in a romance. Poetry of the insecurities floats over the 1970s acoustic guitars, Rhodes piano, and taped-out drums, reflecting on why it's so hard to stay sober under the scrutiny of one's own mind. "Wants / Needs" is a song that seeks to shake the fears around being seen by listeners. Strange puts it, "I used to want fans, now I need them – and that's scary to realize. It's tough not knowing if you will be liked when you're doing something you love more than anything." Strange searches for a place to live and feel safe on the pastoral folk, culture-clasher "Baltimore." The Phillip Roth-inspired tune culminates with Strange settling in a city that goes unnamed except for in the song's title. A closing statement for Horror's shadow essay exists in the final track "Backseat Banton" — Banton meaning storyteller in Caribbean mythology. In life, Bartees cannot decide whether to be along for the ride or struggle to grasp the steering wheel. "Being scared has made me bigger now, bigger than I was. The darkest side of waking up is seeing who I've become. Grace is still a savior, every moment that it comes. I'm reminded of a hopeful me and how fast that I could run." Strange sings over a particularly tender moment in the song's bopping alt-pop groove. Scary movies may have been the training ground for young Strange to practice facing fear, but for grown-up Strange, it's crafting his genre-bending pop songs that manifest the perfect space to laugh in the face of Horror

Tré Burt was standing on a stage in Philadelphia in early 2023 when the latest bit of bad news arrived: His grandfather, a native of that very city, was dead. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. For years, Tommy Burt had struggled with early-onset dementia, slipping away a bit more each time Burt saw him. Burt even began recording his grandfather, letting his tape recorder roll as they had some of their final conversations. He wanted to preserve those moments, however repetitious or fragmented they might be, before the opportunity vanished forever. In fact, Traffic Fiction—Burt’s third album on Oh Boy Records and an unexpected musical reinvention rooted in his new and idiosyncratic version of classic soul—also preserves their relationship by committing another key piece of it to tape. The soul that animates so many of these 14 tracks? That was the music shared by grandfather and grandson. Burt’s California childhood was not easy. His parents split when he was young, so he would often shuttle between their houses in Sacramento and the Bay Area. He was a bit of a wild child, too. From time to time, though, he would accompany his father to work at a plant nursery, riding shotgun in a 1975 Cadillac Seville as they listened to The Delfonics and Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and The Temptations. Those drives were his sanctuary, that music their blessed score. But as Burt became a musician himself, he was a peripatetic troubadour, tapping into American folk and blues partly as a matter of necessity—it’s not sensible to busk, after all, with some sophisticated band at your back. Bits of those other roots and compositional ambitions finally emerged on 2021’s You, Yeah, You, the vivid result of Burt’s first proper studio sessions. On Traffic Fiction, they are in full bloom, from the sweet country-soul surrealism of the title track to the skywriting rock of “2 For Tha Show,” Burt as urgent and commanding as he’s ever been. Traffic Fiction is the sound of Burt confidently bending a sentimental past to his present will. To get to this new alchemy of soul, dub, and more than a little punk, Burt returned to the basics—self-recording in sequestered silence. During a Canadian tour, he set aside a few days to stay in a friend’s spare apartment and write, renting enough instruments from the affordable gear emporium Long & McQuade to build a makeshift studio for his GarageBand demos. The title track soon emerged, its effortless magnetism prompted by a poem he’d written about stupid city congestion and a piece by saxophonist and singer Gary Bartz. Burt recognized he had found the sound of the next album, so he booked another rural cabin in Canada for 9 days and rented more guitars, basses, and the same keyboard he’d bought during the You, Yeah, You sessions. For the better part of a lifetime, Burt had told himself he didn’t have the chops to sing like those childhood heroes from the Cadillac days. But now, as he built his one-man-band demos before returning to Nashville’s The Bomb Shelter to work with a trusted band of pals and esteemed producer Andrija Tokic, his versions of those sounds poured out in circumspect love songs and joyous tunes of existential reckoning. His grandfather was dying. The world was struggling with a pandemic and the specter of a third world war. But Burt gave himself permission to have fun and be funny, to let these songs lift him and, eventually, maybe others, too. Traffic Fiction indeed feels like a buoy amid these turbulent times, something that pulls us above the wreckage. The love-or-something-like-it songs are crucial. With its rocksteady motion, rainbow keys, and slippery riff, “Wings for a Butterfly” is Burt’s honeyed plea to at least try a relationship out. Like The Beatles rebottled in Muscle Shoals, the brilliant “To Be a River” crescendos in a litany of all the things Burt knows he can be for someone—“your favorite word, a letter you read.” It is pure infatuation. Even ostensible breakup songs luxuriate in the wonder of existence. “Santiago” recounts an overseas tryst that ended too soon, Burt jubilantly narrating moments of mirth and lust over go-go keyboards and a beat so simple and propulsive The Ramones would have loved it. And during “Piece of Me,” Burt turns the sting of ending it into an anthem of wishful thinking alongside sashaying organs and rail-grinding guitar. Maybe one more chance is all he needs? “You like me better when I’m in pain,” he sings slyly. “Well, baby, just look at me now.” Amid these warped jewels of psychedelic soul, you’ll find yourself pulling for Burt, hoping the world can come to its senses on his behalf. Burt first earned notice for his imaginative and trenchant social protest songs, where he’d capture some corrosive element of American life—unchecked capitalism, unwavering racism, so on—in a compelling snapshot. Traffic Fiction isn’t that kind of album, necessarily, though his defiance hasn’t disappeared. Referencing his ancestral homeland of Promised Land, South Carolina, “All Things Right” scorns apathy and bureaucracy, the way we strand each other via our own pursuits. “I’ll never be free/but I can pretend,” he snaps with verve during the verse of “Kids in the Yard,” a mighty theme of self-empowerment. Burt finds the joy even here, pushing past problems rather than succumbing to obstacles. And isn’t that a crucial role of music, especially now—to show us how to handle our burdens with aplomb and vision, to model the behavior of persevering with élan? At three points during Traffic Fiction, Burt interweaves bits of those recorded conversations with his late grandfather, Tommy. They talk about Stevie Wonder, Burt’s career and the fatigue it can bring, and, finally, the sense that he’s carrying on a family tradition through these records. It’s a reminder not only of what Burt experienced while making Traffic Fiction but also of what he overcame. He found strength in the soul of his youth, and, for that, he’s never sounded stronger.