Album Reviews

Joni Mitchell remembers the moment she played her new album, Hejira, for a certain country star back in 1976. “Bonnie Raitt brought Dolly Parton to town,” she tells Cameron Crowe in the liner notes for her new Archives, Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980). “And we played back the album, …

The second solo album from Finneas O’Connell opens with “Starfucker,” not a cover of the scandalous Rolling Stones tune, but something even more dubious — a melodramatic piano ballad complaint from a pop elite done wrong that oozes famous-guy self-pity. “Cartier around your wrist/I was such an optimist/But you were …

For years, the conversation around Leon Bridges focused on his ability to channel bygone eras: the way his warm delivery recalled velvet-voiced singers from the Fifties and Sixties, how he appeared right at home on production that felt like it’d been piped in from Motown’s heyday. He became a kind …

In a recent thread on Reddit that appeared in the run-up to the 10th Coldplay album, a poster asked, “Will new [Coldplay] album be a return to their roots or more commercial fluff?” Such a distinction might seem a bit odd considering that Coldplay’s early-2000s “roots” involved sculpting 1990s Radiohead …

Lady Gaga stays in character on Harlequin. It’s her companion to Joker: Folie a Deux, inspired by her role as Harley Quinn. But it’s a luxuriant album of jazzy swing, mostly standards, right in her sweet spot. Harlequin is in the swank mode of her Tony Bennett albums Cheek to …

It’s been wild to watch the rise of William Apostol, a.k.a. Billy Strings, a bluegrass prodigy turned crossover star like fellow genre travelers Alison Krauss and Chris Stapleton — but one who’s found a home in Jambandlandia, where his super-sick flatpicking guitar virtuosity has met with big fat dancing bear-hugs. …

There’s a moment on Pour a Little Sugar on It: The Chewy Chewy Sounds of American Bubblegum 1966-1971, a new box set, that pretty much captures everything wonderfully inane about one of pop’s most derided genres. Start with the beyond-silly name of the band, the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus, which …

After making a name for himself as a behind-the-scenes pop songwriter (Camila Cabello, the Weeknd), Toronto-bredMustafa introduced himself as a major voice with 2021’s When Smoke Rises, an EP-length meditation on mourning after the death of his late friend, the rapper Smoke Dawg. In the meantime, the folk-leaning singer has …

Mickey Guyton had been heralded as one of country music’s most important voices well before the release of her breathtaking 2021 debut Remember Her Name. Her incisive 2020 singles “What Are You Gonna Tell Her” and “Black Like Me” challenged the genre and its listeners with tough questions about gender …

How do you honor the legacy of an artist as brilliantly challenging as Sophie? In her lifetime, the Scottish producer rewired pop music by prioritizing the search for “the loudest, brightest thing” above all else. Her legendary run of hard-edged club singles in the early 2010s, followed by her impossibly …