Schoolboy Q, “Numb Numb Juice”

[Interscope, March 14]

Schoolboy Q can be a bit much—cackling and malevolent, like Pusha T gone troll. But he has put this manic energy to good use across four sprawling albums full of lysergic ride-around music and sativa reverie. The 0:09 beat drop on long-awaited new single “Numb Numb Juice” should be a controlled substance—DJs are going to be abusing it for the remainder of 2019—and the track never stops from there, the beat growing queasy and Q goading himself into spiraling delirium. If you trust the lyrics on Genius, the track ends after its first chorus? Which is a way of saying that this is bottled nitroglycerin, two minutes of compressed, destructive force, 170% Q. (He slaps you into hell in the video.) If you can suffer the flat lighting of a Tonight Show performance, the new, Travis Scott-assisted “Chopsticks” is just as over-the-top, only horny, too. New album coming to slap the shit out of you soon. [Clayton Purdom]

Uranium Club, The Cosmo Cleaners

[Static Shock, March 15]

In the middle of “Michael’s Soliloquy,” eight minutes of cheeky spoken-word at the center of The Cosmo Cleaners, the focus turns away from the ascent of the group’s English-accented spokesperson and toward the recent efforts of Uranium Club itself. “They did as many of us do,” he says between stabs of trebly guitar. “The same thing, but rather a little different this time.” Since forming in 2014, Uranium Club has done that same thing extremely well, playing jagged punk with a satirical edge that tends to reflect whichever spastic smart-asses the listener grew up with. Which means I still hear a lot of early Devo in The Cosmo Cleaner’s nerves, dystopian outlook, and sexual dysfunction (“Grease Monkey” gives new meaning to the term “auto erotic”), but the album also finds the band chilling out and sprawling out while building new alcoves in their weirdo mythology. “Michael’s Soliloquy” gets a bookend in “Interview With The Cosmo Cleaners,” vignettes from a hellish blue-collar gig whose morse-code pianos and pealing guitars get whipped up into a coda that’s much more recognizably Uranium Club. The same thing, but a little different this time—and utterly unlike anything else bubbling up from the Bandcamp underground. [Erik Adams]

 
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