The British dance and pop producer Fred again . . is a DJ who plays clubs and raves and also a hit-making pop producer who, working with Ed Sheeran and Stormzy, among others, was responsible for a full one-third of 2019’s British number-one hits. Think of him as a little …
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The Spanish guitar goddesses in Hinds have been through it lately, and they bet that you have, too. They begin their fabulously resilient Viva Hinds with “Hi, How Are You,” a garage-rock strut with some call-and-response about shaking off some bad luck. Ana Perrotte sings, “Hey, you okay?” Carlotta Cosials …
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Scant months after Q-Tip publicly debated the dubiousness of an “adult-contemporary hip-hop” category on social media comes a completely Tip-produced new album by his Queens neighbor LL Cool J — the 56-year-old rapper-actor’s 14th since his 1984 debut as a teenager. In a year when both Rakim and Masta Ace …
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The most intriguing song on Luck and Strange, David Gilmour‘s first solo album in nearly a decade, is a dark-mirror reflection of his own artistry: a rendition of the Montgolfier Brothers’ sardonic 1999 dream-pop song “Between Two Points,” sung by his daughter, Romany. The original song was a slow-building echo …
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Over the past few years, Asheville, North Carolina, singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman has become every indie-rock fan’s favorite dude — the Craig Finn or Stephen Malkmus or Jeff Tweedy of the mid-2020s. He plays guitar in the great North Carolina band Wednesday, and in 2022, he put out the fantastic breakthrough …
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Doechii — a fierce and fearless lyricist with a natural ability to shape-shift — became Top Dawg Entertainment’s first female rapper right on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s departure from the label. That could have set her up to be an heir to an impossibly gilded throne. It would make …
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Nick Cave has spent the last six years in conversation. Through his Red Hand Files Website and his touring Q&A series, the 66-year-old punk-rock icon has waxed poetic with his fans about grief, aging, and forgiveness. And after dropping the Bad Seeds’ last record, the devastating Ghosteen, in 2019, it …
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German DJ and producer Zedd hasn’t released a full album since Barack Obama was president, but his ambitions have hardly been kept in check. “The Middle,” his 2018 collaboration with Maren Morris, sharply declared his crossover aspirations (even if its followup, “Make You Say,” dissipated into a puddle). And now …
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There’s never been a pop-girl summer anything like 2024 — ever — and Sabrina Carpenter is one of the crucial reasons why. With “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” she can claim two prime Song of the Summer contenders. But she caps off her amazing ascendance with Short n’ Sweet, her …
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“Every day’s a blessing/Every day’s a problem,” Sarah Tudzin sings on her fourth album, Power. If the sentiment is ambivalent, the sound is anything but: a sharp power-pop bounce that opens up into a radiant chorus. Tudzin, a Los Angeles singer-songwriter-producer-multi-instrumentalist who has been recording as Illuminati Hotties since the …
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