Tag Archives: hear-this

Babehoven’s Water’s Here in You begins with singer Maya Bon on bended knee, hands outstretched. “I forgive you,” she sings atop cascading harmonies and persistent guitar strums, extending an olive branch to an estranged family member who has fallen ill. The track, “Birdseye,” is a sobering meditation on reconciliation and …

Claire Rousay has spent the past few years building her own adventurous style of electronic collage, calling it “emo ambient.” Sentiment is her self-described pop album, building her late-night diary entries out of synth textures, warped melodies, robot AutoTune vocals, rock guitar weaving in and out of the mix. But …

Rosie Tucker sure knows how to grab your attention with an opening line: “I hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work to get me the thing I ordered on the internet.” That’s just one of the anti-capitalist zingers in the brilliantly titled “All My Exes Live …

“Gang shit, I invented that, huh?” asks Schoolboy Q on “Pop,” a track from Blue Lips, his first album in nearly five years. It’s clearly an overstatement. But give the former Hoover Street Crip credit: Back in the early 2010s, he fused the open-eared, genre-less sensibility of Tumblr rap with …

Faye Webster measures love by what is lost. She loses track of time from endless daydreaming, she loses her sense of self when reminiscing over an ex. On 2019’s “What Used To Be Mine,” she doesn’t just miss a former lover, but the places that defined their relationship. The Atlanta …

It’s been five years since Mannequin Pussy released their critically-acclaimed album Patience, which proved just how versatile and unapologetically intense these Philly punk rockers could be. From perfect break-up anthems like “Drunk II” to screaming ragers like “Cream,” the band ventured beyond the noise rock heard in Fishtown dive bars …

It’s been a decade of reinvention for Hurray for the Riff Raff, the recording moniker of singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra. After years of street-busking and self-releasing acoustic records, Segarra cemented their status as an old-timey roots standard-bearer on 2014Small Town Heroes. But over the course of their past two albums–2017’sThe Navigatorand …

Michael Gordon isn’t one for subtlety. The songs that the New Jersey artist makes as Mk.gee froth and fizz and occasionally freak out, making their unwieldy production not just noticeable, but an integral part of the songwriting. Take “New Low,” the brisk two-minute opener to his exceptional debut album Two …

Les Amazones d’Afrique began in 2017 as a sisterly supergroup of singers from the West African region of Mali. Founded by Mamani Keïta, Mariam Doumbia (of Amadou and Mariam), and Oumou Sangare, and convened by French music-industry veteran Valerie Malot, the collective came together through a shared musical vision, as …

Everybody loves a good indie-rock origin story — like Paul Westerberg holding it down as a janitor in the office of a Minnesota senator before joining the Replacements, or Dayton, Ohio’s Robert Pollard teaching grade school while biding his time before Guided By Voices became a thing. Here’s a new …