There is a moment in every serious artist’s career where they decide, consciously or not, to burn the old version of themselves to the ground. For Tom Waits, that moment didn’t arrive all at once — it came in stages, a slow immolation that began with 1983’s Swordfishtrombones and found its scorched, magnificent conclusion nine years later with Bone Machine. By the time the last note faded on that 1992 release, the lounge-lizard piano man — the rakish, Rain Dogs-era romantic — was gone for good. What replaced him was something far more unsettling and, in its own way, far more extraordinary.

Consider what Bone Machine accomplished in a single release. It served as the closing chapter of a trilogy that began with Swordfishtrombones and continued through 1985’s Rain Dogs — three albums that collectively rewired what a Tom Waits record could be. It handed Island Records its walking papers, ending a relationship that had run its course. And in 1993, it delivered Waits his first Grammy, winning Best Alternative Music Album in a category that had no business containing something this feral. The Grammy voters probably didn’t know what they were approving. They were right to approve it.

The album announces its intentions immediately. And the Earth Died Screaming opens not with a piano, not with a chord, but with the pulsating beat of bamboo rods being struck. In an interview, Waits explained that he moved the entire recording studio outside to capture what he called his “pygmy percussion unit” — the band striking concrete with sticks in the open air, a sound that is simultaneously ancient and industrial. It’s a technique he’d return to decades later, showing up most recently on “Boots on the Ground,” his 2026 collaboration with Massive Attack, where that same primal percussion logic anchors an entirely different kind of darkness. But here, on Bone Machine, it serves as a threshold — cross it, and the almost hypnotic thrashing erupts into Waits’ bark and growl, and suddenly you’ve awoken from a dream into a nightmare. You’ve been warned. You’re in anyway.

The production throughout is deliberately primitive, and not accidentally so. Waits recorded much of Bone Machine in a warehouse, using found percussion, metal scraps, and unconventional microphone placements to achieve a sound that is less rock album and more field recording from the end of the world. Drums were recorded in a corrugated tin shed specifically to get a particular hollow clang — that specific resonance of something struck inside a container that was never meant to hold music. The overall effect is cavernous and decayed, a record that sounds like it was unearthed rather than made.

And then there is the Conundrum.

Among the instruments Waits employed is a custom-built percussion rack: a large iron cross with various found metal objects hanging from it — crowbars, farm equipment, the detritus of a working life — whacked with hammers and mallets to produce a sound not unlike a jail door closing. This is the instrument of Bone Machine. This is the philosophy of Bone Machine. Tom Waits didn’t just write songs for this album. He built the machines that made the sounds that became the songs.

Clocking in at 54 minutes across 16 tracks, Bone Machine covers more emotional and sonic territory than most artists manage in an entire career. Waits has always maintained that he writes one of three types of songs — a brawler, a bawler, or a bastard — and all three are present here in abundance.

The brawlers announce themselves without apology. Going Out West is Waits’ most well-known song for good reason — a blues-drenched, all-out rocker that became famous to a generation through its prominent placement in Fight Club, covered by artists worldwide, and still capable of rearranging the furniture when it comes through a decent pair of speakers. In the Colosseum belongs in the same category, a track that sounds like the Roman arena it references brutal, spectacular, and faintly obscene.

The bawlers provide the emotional center. Dirt in the Ground is the album’s beating, mournful heart — Waits contemplating life, death, the meaning of it all, and arriving at the same conclusion every honest reckoning arrives at: we’re all going to be dirt in the ground. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to call someone you haven’t spoken to in too long. Whistle Down the Wind and A Little Rain offer moments of the older Waits, the piano-driven melancholy that built his early reputation, now seasoned with something harder and harder to name.

The bastards are where Bone Machine does its most disquieting work.

Black Wings tells the story of a Constantine-type figure in an avant-garde folk melody replete with haunting vocalizations — the kind of song that feels older than the man who wrote it, as if Waits merely transcribed something that had been floating in the dark for centuries. Jesus Gonna Be Here is an unemployed carnival barker, down on his luck, slightly drunk, plucking the last working string on his guitar as his final hopes curl and fade. These are character studies so specific and so strange that they feel more like encounters than compositions.

Perhaps the most disquieting of the collection is Murder in the Red Barn — a nearly spoken-word affair that seems to find Waits channeling the psychotically insane Renfield from Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, released the same year. The coincidence, if it is one, feels too perfect to be accidental.

And then, sandwiched between this menagerie, sits The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me — a spoken word track that is either the album’s most darkly comic moment or its most genuinely unsettling, depending entirely on where you are in your life when you hear it. The musings of a man on the edge who cannot accomplish what he came to do, because the ocean, for reasons of its own, keeps spitting him back. I’ll go in up to here / It can’t possibly hurt / All they will find is my beer / and my shirt. It’s funny until it isn’t. It isn’t for very long.

Waits has always been a writer who understood that the space between genres is more interesting than any genre itself. Bone Machine lives entirely in that space — too abrasive for country, too literary for rock, too American for avant-garde, too strange for any category that needed a Grammy name to hold it. It is raw in the way that things are raw when someone stops caring about the finish and starts caring only about the truth of the thing underneath.

This is not the album you begin with. That task is left more comfortably to the slightly adventurous Rain Dogs or the accessible warmth of The Heart of Saturday Night. But for the initiated — for those who have already followed Waits through the carnival and the bar and the dark street outside — Bone Machine is the destination. It marked the beginning of a stellar second act that found its current conclusion in 2011’s Bad As Me, a run of records that collectively constitute one of the most extraordinary late careers in American music.

They say live fast, die hard, and leave a good-looking corpse. Bone Machine is the personification of that idea — 54 minutes of controlled demolition, a man tearing down everything he built so he could see what was underneath.

You’ve been warned. Give it a listen anyway.

If Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros Up from Below were a movie it would be The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai — gleefully weird and weirdly cheerful about it. A rotating cast of ten to thirteen musicians anchored by frontman Alex Ebert, the band released their debut album in 2009 drenched in analog warmth and the Laurel Canyon spirit of the 1960s.

But let’s back up a minute as perhaps we need a bit more context – you’ve never heard of Buckaroo Banzai you say, you’re forgiven and, well, I’m glad you asked. The movie centers on the efforts of one Dr. Buckaroo Banzai, a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot and rock star. To make a long story short, Banzai saves the world from inter-dimensional aliens and then goes on to play one helluva rock show. So … wonderfully weird, God-like figure saving the world, frontman in a rock and roll band … Check, check and CHECK!

Let’s get back to Edward Sharpe.

After years of the Los Angeles party life and subsequent drug addiction, Ebert, the then frontman of Ima Robot, broke up with his girlfriend, moved out of his house, and spent time in rehab. During this time he began writing a book about a messianic figure named Edward Sharpe who was “sent down to Earth to kinda heal and save mankind, but he kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love.”

The nascent book eventually became lyrics as Ebert started assembling close friends. The foundation of the band began to take shape – what was one man’s vision of a worldly savior became a full-fledged desert choir singing hymns of brotherhood and devotion.

Drop the needle on “40 Day Dream”, the record’s opening track, and the hypnotic clack-clack-clack instantly draws you in as the sweeping orchestration takes over and suddenly you are under the spell of this band. In an interview with Jonk Music, guitarist Christian Letts talked about the recording sessions and the genuinely organic nature of the band’s process.

“It never felt like a grueling task,” Letts, who’s known Ebert since childhood, said. “This is a case of a group of people coming together at the right time. I don’t even think of it as a band, I think of it as a family.”

Every family has its heart. For Edward Sharpe, that heart had two chambers.

Buckaroo Banzai had Penny Priddy and Dr. Sidney “New Jersey” Zweibel; Ebert had Jade Castrinos and Heath Ledger.

This is one of those once upon a time in Hollywood type scripts. Ebert recounts seeing Castrinos across the street at a Starbucks and knowing immediately that he needed to have a relationship with her. Castrinos quipped they were both on their MacBook Pros, she looking at a L.L. Bean catalog. Whatever the circumstances, their relationship would become the emotional heartbeat of the album with their duet “Home” becoming not only the album’s signature track but also one of the most charming love songs ever written. And here is one of the few places I would quibble with the direction of this album. Home is track six on the album buried as a deep track. Carries On, which in my mind should be the exclamation point on “Home,” comes before it, sitting at track four. “Carries On” is a devotional of longing, a plea for love’s continuation that feels like the natural emotional aftermath of “Home.”

“Jade” is track five, the bridge of the trilogy. I would have rearranged these, Jade, Home, Carries On … the object of affection, the coming together, the deeper reflection, truly a hero’s journey of the classic Jungian framing. The couple eventually split, Castrinos left the band under difficult circumstances, and the song that sounds like the purest expression of love was written by two people whose relationship didn’t survive. Ebert later wrote a companion solo song called Truth, opening with “the truth is that I never shook my shadow.”

And then there’s Heath Ledger.

Around the same time that all this shit is going down with Ebert, Ledger had become involved in a project known as The Masses. Founded by Matt Amato and Jon Ramos in a Manhattan loft in 2002, the outfit moved to Hollywood in 2006, where Ledger got involved channeling money and energy into the project. But this wasn’t a company in any traditional sense, this was a creative commune. Ledger and his peers came together around a shared notion, taught each other how to shoot, light, and edit, plotted out music and record labels all in an effort to develop a little engine of creativity. And here’s the glue - Amato had already directed a music video for Ima Robot — Ebert’s previous band — meaning Ebert was already part of The Masses orbit before Edward Sharpe existed. When Ebert got sober and started building something new, he wasn’t walking into a stranger’s world. He was coming home to his people.

But it gets deeper.

In interviews, Ebert has revealed the band was to release their first album through The Masses, with Ledger advising them artistically — specifically telling them to stay true to their demos and not “re-record it better.” Ledger helped shaped the album's philosophy. He died in January 2008, the album came out in July 2009. He never heard it finished.

And deeper.

Ebert and Ledger had been developing a musical together, and Ebert has said they were talking about it in depth the night Ledger died — and that Ledger was genuinely excited about it. Ebert has said he still wants to finish it someday in Ledger’s memory.

I am an unabashed fan of this truly sublime album … the same cannot be said of subsequent Edward Sharpe releases. The magic just simply isn’t there. This wasn’t a case of catching lightning in a bottle -- this was planetary alignment. A man had to hit rock bottom and reinvent himself as a fictional messiah. He had to spot a woman on a street corner at exactly the right moment in both their lives. A Hollywood star had to decide to become an arts patron and then die before the music he helped fund ever came out. Twelve people had to pile into a Laurel Canyon house with a 1979 tape machine and play like they had nothing to lose. Mercury in retrograde indeed.

When Portishead dropped their debut album Dummy in 1994, little did they know they were about to start a revolution while laying the groundwork for a whole new genre along the way. This was the same year Oasis released Definitely Maybe, Green Day pushed out Dookie, Weezer was pulling on sweaters, and the grunge scene was in full force.

Dummy was different from anything coming out in that era. Where Soundgarden’s Superunknown (1994) was loud and crunchy — the sound of a band solidifying their walk towards rock legend status — Portishead’s release was brooding, moody, deeply atmospheric and the near opposite of everything flowing out of the alternative radio airwaves at the time.

Comprised of Beth Gibbons (vocals/lyrics), Geoff Barrow (producer/multi-instrumentalist) and Adrian Utley (guitarist/multi-instrumentalist), the group formed in Bristol, their iconic name arriving by happy accident. In an expansive interview with KEXP celebrating the 25th anniversary of the album, Barrow described the moment their eventual A&R man, Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, was sitting on the toilet reading a copy of Music Week and noticed a line explaining that Neneh Cherry was working with the guys from Portishead — the small coastal town where Barrow grew up.

“We didn’t have a name then, and that’s how we got the name Portishead,” Barrow said.

A music trade publication had jumped the gun and named them after their hometown before they’d settled on anything themselves, and it stuck. Not quite the glamorous origin story you might expect for such an evocative name, but it has a certain charm to it. More importantly, the name ended up suiting the music perfectly — that sense of a grey, coastal, slightly melancholy English town feels entirely fitting for the atmosphere of Dummy.

But what made the album special in a year of special albums? Even having lived through that year deeply immersed in music, it’s hard to wrap one’s head around just how many records were coming out that would go on to become iconic in their own right. While one could draw sonic parallels between many of the releases that year, absolutely nothing sounded like Dummy. Much of that uniqueness can be traced to the painstaking recording process the group undertook while working on a shoestring budget.

The album famously built its sound by sampling obscure library music, film soundtracks, and jazz records — but with a twist. Rather than sampling directly, Barrow and the team would often re-record the samples live, then sample their own recordings to get that degraded, worn quality. This gave the album its distinctively dusty, aged texture. To achieve that lo-fi, haunted feel, they deliberately ran recordings through old equipment, added tape hiss, and used filtering to make things sound like they’d been played off a battered vinyl record. The crackle and warmth is largely manufactured rather than incidental — but damn does it sound good.

The band also had an unusual origin story of their own. Barrow had been working with Neneh Cherry on her second album Homebrew (1992), hired by her husband Cameron McVey. It was in Cherry’s London kitchen, of all places, that Barrow and Gibbons first began sketching out what would eventually become Dummy — stealing time between sessions to develop their own ideas. Bristol’s music scene in the early nineties was small and deeply interconnected, and that proximity to Cherry’s world, to Massive Attack, to DJ Andy Smith’s extraordinary record collection, fed directly into the DNA of the album.

And then there is Beth Gibbons. To understand what makes her remarkable, it helps to remember the landscape she emerged from. At the same time Dummy was released, female artists were staging a full-on coup in the music industry, smashing through in ways they hadn’t in the past. Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star was brooding her way through So Tonight That I May See (1993). Tori Amos was lighting the world on fire with Under the Pink (1994). PJ Harvey had delivered the ferocious Rid of Me (1993). Liz Phair had rewritten the rules with Exile in Guyville (1993). These were extraordinary, distinctive voices — and yet Gibbons sounded like none of them. Her delivery combined raw, slightly fractured vulnerability with a kind of torch song theatricality that felt like it came from an entirely different era. To find a true analog you have to travel back to Billie Holiday or Nina Simone — singers for whom the performance cost something, where every note felt like a confession. Two songs in particular show exactly what Gibbons brought to this record.

Glory Box is, in this writer’s contention, Portishead’s signature song. While not the biggest commercial hit on the album, if you were to ask a hundred random people about the band, this is the one they’d probably come up with. Built around a smoldering Isaac Hayes sample, the track is one long slow burn, and Gibbons’ performance is absolutely devastating. From the coy, slithering opening to her full-throated delivery of the line “For if this is the beginning of forever and ever, it’s time to move over” near the denouement — if you have a romantic bone in your body, this song will leave you on the ground, exhausted from the emotional journey.

If Glory Box is the signature, then Roads is Dummy‘s heart and soul. The song was never released as a single — a deliberate choice that speaks to everything Portishead valued as artists. Releasing it, remixing it for radio, marketing it as a hit would have compromised the very quality that makes it extraordinary. By leaving it as an album track, they forced listeners to find it themselves, to discover it in context, which may be precisely why it has endured with such emotional force. Roads is also unique in the Dummy catalogue in that it contains no samples whatsoever — unlike virtually everything else on the record, it was built entirely from live instrumentation, stripped down to sparse piano, strings, Adrian Utley’s weeping guitar, and the power of Gibbons’ unsettling, forlorn voice. For this writer, it is the song that brings her vocal talent to its greatest use. From the moment she begins singing, her vulnerability is palpable, her need urgent and deeply sincere. The lilting vibrato only adds to the emotional impact — is she scared? Anxious? None of that matters. You’re left absolutely wrecked, and somehow ready to slay dragons for the person singing.

When they say they don’t make them like they used to, that is especially true of Dummy. More than thirty years in the rearview mirror, the album continues to resonate — perhaps even more so with today’s audience than when it was first released. Authenticity, passion, and genius never go out of style, and Portishead’s debut remains living proof of that every single day.