Album Reviews

This year’s Black Friday Record Store Day had its usual share of curios: a version of Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft with her vocals isolated, Rage Against the Machine’s 2000 set at the Democratic National Convention, a collection of outtakes from Yes’ Fragile, a previously unreleased 1991 Van …

In 2024, the world of rap has belonged to Kendrick Lamar. It’s not just that he scored two Number One singles, one alongside Future and Metro Boomin with “Like That,” and a second on his own, “Not Like Us,” — and perhaps a third on the way before the year …

Let’s say you’re an American Beatles fan in the Sixties, Seventies, or Eighties. You chat with a British fan about your favorite albums. But you have no idea what they’re talking about — what is Beatles for Sale? Or With The Beatles? Meanwhile, they’ve never heard of U.S. classics like …

Longtime Afrobeats enthusiasts have literally watched Wizkid grow up before our eyes. He was around 19 years old when the lead single from his debut album Superstar made headwinds in 2010. Back then, he was making music saturated with the buzzy synths and frenetic energy of the hyper-digital sound of …

Nobody Loves You More, Kim Deal‘s first-ever solo album, has been a lifetime in the making. The trailblazing singer-songwriter, whose recordings with the Pixies and the Breeders drafted blueprints for the Nineties alt-rock explosion, has always released albums at unusual intervals, La Jetée-like snapshots of her state of mind. She’s …

Death comes for us all, but not before time makes fools of us first. And when you really get down to it, that interminable time in between, life — all-consuming, enthralling, devastating, and dynamic as it may be — is largely spent dying. Mahashmashana, the new album from Father John …

Brooks & Dunn haven’t released an album of new material since 2007’s Cowboy Town, but when you have a catalog as impressive as theirs, it can be okay to coast on past glories. Especially when many of today’s hottest artists — Lainey Wilson, Morgan Wallen, Jelly Roll — are willing …

Rauw Alejandro is already a star. But his new album,Cosa Nuestra,named after a classic 1969 LP by Puerto Rican salsa icons Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, sees Alejandro striving for something grander: to put himself in the same timeless Puerto Rican canon as his idols. It’s an album inspired in …

Gwen Stefani’s voice burns white-hot at the center of any project she’s involved in, whether belting out the lighter-worthy chorus of No Doubt’s neo-power ballad “Don’t Speak” or leading girl-power cheers on her peppy solo cut “Hollaback Girl.” Her still-agile mezzo-soprano is the main attraction on her fifth solo album …

From the very beginning of his fifth albumShawn, Shawn Mendes makes it clear he still doesn’t know who he is. Opening track “Who I Am” is riddled with the anxiety and disillusionment of a quarter-life crisis: “Got a lot of talk in my brain right now…Everything’s hard to explain out …