Tag Archives: hear-this

On first glance, it’s easy to chalk up Charlie Puth’s music as gimmicky. After all, this is the guy who spent the pandemic throwing up thirst traps on Instagram and documenting the recording of his latest album, Charlie, with spastic, random videos on TikTok and Reels. The 30-year-old even has …

Courtney Marie Andrews has spent the past decade or so fine tuning and revising her rootsy singer-songwriter formula, to great results: See the gospel-soul inflections of 2018’sMay Your Kindness Remainor the sparse heartbroken folk of her last album, 2020’sOld Flowers.The former LP helped land Andrews on stage with Dolly Parton …

In Chicago, many kids are exposed to two sides of the same coin. There are the joyful traditions, experiences, and summertime fun that define Black childhood in the city. And then there’s “Chiraq,” where G Herbo, born Herbert Wright, saw his first casualty of gun violence when he was just …

An extravagant tapestry of slick Afro-Latin pop, Ozuna’s much anticipated fifth album ‘Ozutochi’ delivers more of the laid-back grooves and nocturnal hooks that made the Puerto Rican vocalist’s ascent to global stardom look like a natural consequence. This sprawling 18-track collection has a luxurious, tropical-flower-in-bloom feel. It’s a poignant, occasionally …

Since she began releasing self-produced bedroom pop in the mid-2010s, Willow Smith has been guided by her own muse, smashing genres into one another while telling her story in painstaking detail. All the while, she’s been dragging pop into weirder, darker spaces. The wobbly 2015 bedroom-funk cut “Wait a Minute!” …

It’s been three years since Björk premiered the maximalist Cornucopia in New York, a psychedelic environmental cautionary tale that climate change has made permanently resonant (the ongoing tour is slated for Japan next year). If that project looks at our troubled planet with a macro lens, her new album Fossora …

Two decades ago, the trio of Karen O, Nick Zinner, and Brian Chase were leaders of New York’s downtown post-punk revival scene, taking on the malaise that hung over the early aughts with slashing riffs and yelp-along lyrics. On Cool It Down, their fifth album and first since 2013’s gritty …

Blackpink are the world’s biggest K-pop girl group, the essence of swagger in human form: a four-woman swirl of glam energy. Jisoo, Rosé, Lisa, and Jennie have blown up into a global pop sensation, even invading America—without the slightest hint of watering down what they do. Their hotly awaited new …

Noah Cyrus opens her debut full-length with a stark lyric: “When I turned 20, I was overcome/With the thought that I might not turn 21,” she murmurs over fingerpicked guitars and whispers of feedback. It’s a grab-you-by-the-throat introduction that is a fitting opening for The Hardest Part, a compact yet …

Rina Sawayama is everything you could pray for in a pop provocateur, circa 2022: rude, audacious, unpredictable, hilarious, blunt, with a mean streak and an omnivorous ear. The Japanese British art rebel made waves with her debut, Sawayama, a pop manifesto with her own queer glam-rock sensibility. In gems like …