Tag Archives: hear-this

From the moment it arrived from England last year, the Last Dinner Party’s “Nothing Matters” was the kind of rock (or “rock”) record that didn’t seem to exist anymore. A beautifully sneaky single, the band’s ode to an illicit encounter opens like the sound of ABBA with a hangover. Then …

The release of a new Radiohead album is greeted in certain circles as a kind of holy occasion, a time to drop everything else going on in your life and commence Deep Listening. We have not witnessed such a hallowed event since 2016, when Radiohead droppedA Moon Shaped Pool,and a …

Like its two recent multi-disc predecessors,JoniMitchell Archives — Volume 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975)collects live and studio vault tapes from a particular era in Mitchell’s career. This one gets off to a seemingly unbeatable start. Much of its first quarter is devoted to an entire live show from Carnegie Hall …

Jeff Tweedy writes so well about his own music-making, there sometimes seems little worth adding: see his bestselling books (the annotated playlist World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music is due November) and his Starship Casual Substack (NB: the July 4 riff …

Across the roll out of her debut studio album, Jaguar II, Victoria Monét has been a jokester and a party girl, all while proving that her skill is nothing to play with. The 34 year-old is a real triple threat who writes, sings, and dances with social media appeal that …

The debut full-length fromMean GirlsandSecret Life of College Girlsstar Reneé Rapp begins with a striking image: “Taste the blood in my mouth,” she coos at the start of its opening track “Talk Too Much,” an extreme close-up of a neurotic mind in what might be love. Spindly guitars and crisp …

L.A.-via-Chicago rap poetFatimah Nayeema Warner took off with her 2015 mixtape Telefone and her 2018 albumRoom 25, with a rude-girl wit all her own. As she famously boasted, “My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism.” It’s been a long wait, but Sundial is exactly what you were praying the new …

The trap-infused spin on the traditional Mexican folk song known as corridos tumbados has become one of the biggest genres of the year on a global level. And a large part of that success is due to the music of Natanael Cano, who has largely been responsible for establishing the …

The story of Stax records has long been smoothed over andsculptedinto a neat bundle of Southern aphorism and marketing copy: The Memphis home of “Soul Man” andShaftand the Staple Singers was the more authentic (insert adjective like “gritty” or “greasy” or “Southern-fried” here), counterpart to the pop-oriented Motown; a rare …

If you know of Geese, then you probably know their origin story: A group of school friends from Brooklyn record an album during the pandemic as a last hurrah before shipping off to college; Partisan Records (home of British rockers Idles and the Irish post-punks Fontaines DC) signs the band …