Badlands is the debut vinyl album from Dirty Beaches, a one-man project out of Montreal via Hawaii, China, Taiwan and a bunch of other disparate locales. Part cassette culture Elvis, part Alan Vega alienator, this guy's doing for rockabilly what Ariel Pink did for funk-pop nostalgia. "Badlands is about a man who is possessed by the road. My mother used to say to me, 'You walk at night often enough, sooner or later you'll run into a ghost.' I think it's very true, as the devil comes in all forms. Just here to fuck your shit up. Side A is all bangers, with songs about leaving, being chased on the road and driving a burning car into oblivion. Side B is ballads and dirges laced with murder and lament." -Alex Zhang Hungtai

"[A] sense of displacement, combined with an ear for cinematic sounds-particularly the eerie, stylized noir of David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wong Kar Wai-fuels his work, which squeezes the sounds of early rock'n'roll and 1950s music through a lo-fi, distortiondrenched filter. This set of influences, which extends to the minimal thrust of Suicide and the Cramps' manic rockabilly, feels unique, simply because it's been largely untouched by indie music during the past decade or so.... Of course, mining a cool set of inspirations doesn't itself make for a good record. What Hungtai excels at, in addition to building evocative mood and atmosphere, is a sort of conceptual, film-like storytelling shot through the lens of these bygone eras of music." - Pitchfork