BadBadNotGood - Mid Spiral (2024 XL Recordings 2LP, Vinyl)

BadBadNotGood - Mid Spiral | 2 x Vinyl LP - XL Recordings (XL1450LP)

BadBadNotGood are the band that taught a generation raised on hip hop to love jazz. The Toronto group started out a decade and a half ago playing instrumental versions of Odd Future tracks, went on to make records with Ghostface Killah and Kaytranada, and somewhere along the way became one of the most popular instrumental groups in the world, jazz-schooled but built for the beat generation. Mid Spiral, from 2024, is their most ambitious statement, a double album laid out in three parts, Chaos, Order and Growth, that moves through jazz-funk, library music, soul, lounge and cosmic fusion across eighteen tracks. The expanded band, with Leland Whitty's reeds and woodwinds, Chester Hansen's bass, Al Sow's drums and Felix Fox-Pappas's keys, plays with a looseness and warmth that keeps the ambition grounded. It is their most mature and, in places, their most beautiful record, less a set of singles than a long, flowing suite designed to be heard end to end. Groove-driven, richly arranged and endlessly listenable, it is BadBadNotGood at the height of their powers.

For a store built on jazz, BadBadNotGood matter beyond their own records. They are one of the main routes by which younger listeners find their way to the music, the kind of band whose fans go looking for the Blue Note and CTI records that shaped them. Mid Spiral is both a fine record in its own right and a bridge, and it belongs in any collection that takes contemporary jazz seriously. This copy is the black vinyl double LP on XL Recordings, catalogue number XL1450LP, pressed in the Czech Republic and mastered by João Carvalho, and it comes with the 12-inch art and tracklist insert.