Like any superhero team-up or buddy comedy, the formula for an RTJ song is carved in stone by now: Killer Mike the swaggering priest and El-P sardonic philosopher, threatening R-rated violence and revolutionary action over sounds rescued from hip-hop’s golden era and retrofitted for pre-pandemic festival stages. –Noah Yoo Further Watching: Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker Breaks Down His Favorite Drum Sounds But he also sneaks in the briefest of guitar interludes, once again relying on incidental audio spliced in from our real world-the flip of a tape deck switch, the click and hiss of a needle on a vinyl record-to better bring us into his own. Parker said it was inspired by his first experience with MDMA, which accounts for the rave outro and the blissful piano hooks that make it the danciest cut on this year’s The Slow Rush. On “Breathe Deeper,” you can hear Mariah Carey in the syrupy verse, the Neptunes in every raw drum hit, early Daft Punk in the finale’s acid house groove, and yet there’s no mistaking this for anything but a Tame Impala song. What makes Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker so compelling is how he melds the sounds of his favorite pop idols with a production style that updates arena rock for the age of microdosing. But in a year like this one, it breaks your heart.

Heard at any time in the four decades since its making, “Echos” would be touching. Listening to “Echos” is as poignant as stumbling upon a roadside shrine of flowers, candles, and photos, but Ferreyra goes beyond creating a memorial to Mercedes: She defies death itself and resurrects her niece as an aural apparition. At other points, the melted murmurs and shimmered syllables feel soothing and psalm-like, as though the girl’s ghost is mourning herself. In places, the young woman’s voice flickers and trembles with playful delight, sounding impossibly alive. Recorded in 1978 but released for the first time this year, the piece is woven entirely from the voice of Ferreyra’s niece Mercedes Cornu, who died in a car accident prior to its composition. Argentine composer Beatriz Ferreyra is renowned for the disorienting spatiality and shape-shifting abstraction of her electronic and tape-based work, but it’s the human scale and raw intimacy of “Echos” that startle.

Devil daggers playing choppy