Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

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 …

When we first encountered U.K. trio FLO on their debut single “Cardboard Box” in 2022, they were singing circles around an unfaithful man while packing his things to kick him to the curb. The record channeled Nineties R&B with scholar-like expertise and established them as an indisputable one-to-watch. On their …

In 1973, the world saw George Harrison as the Beatle who was winning the break-up. He became a solo superstar with All Things Must Pass, his big triple-vinyl extravaganza, then his noble and star-studded Concert For Bangla Desh. He’d finally broken free of the Fabs and gotten everything he’d ever …

When Jamey Johnson released his label debut The Dollar in 2006, he was a clean-cut hat act still holding onto a little spit shine from his service in the Marines. Two years later, he’d grown out his hair and beard and effectively brought outlaw country — in both look and …

Music always carries memory – of other songs, of beats and melodies and the where-and-when of how they imprinted themselves on us. “You were singing at twilight/With your fingers moving/And I’d heard the same song in a dream,” sings Phil Elverum on “Huge Fire,” near the beginning of his epic …

Is Eternal Atake 2 a return to the essence of what we love about Lil Uzi Vert and “back to square one,” as the non-binary artist recently told RS’ Jeff Ihaza? Or is it a retrenchment from the wilder impulses of their admirably experimental yet unevenly executed Pink Tape? The …

Tyler, the Creator’s life is a movie. Or, at least, that’s the impression he’s given us over the course of nearly 15 years. His debut mixtape, 2009’s Bastard, introduced us to its cast of characters — from Tyler’s pitched-down voice, serving as his therapist, Dr. TC, to Wolf Haley, or …

The words “long awaited” don’t begin to do justice to the new Cure album. Songs of a Lost World is an album that’s been promised, rumored, dangled, teased, longed for, despaired of, imagined. Cure fans have spent 16 years lighting candles and praying for this one, as Robert Smith has …

Halsey has been so many different people over the past decade. The teenage pop rebel who spoke for a generation of “New Americana.” The Shakespearean conceptual artist who turned Romeo and Juliet into Hopeless Fountain Kingdom. The world-beating auteur of Manic. The industrial hate machine blasting Nine Inch Nails-produced aggression …

“Looks like downhill from here,” Mia Berrin quips at the top of Pom Pom Squad’s second album, Mirror Starts Moving Without Me. It’s an apt opening for a project steeped in hellish Alice in Wonderland imagery and named after the uncanny horror movie trope where a character’s reflection moves out …