Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

The fact that Willie Nelson is still touring at 91 is often celebrated as a feat of superhuman endurance — he just delivered an exceptional set at Stagecoach Festival and is on the road all summer with Bob Dylan. But Nelson’s recording output in his golden years is just as …

Listening to Pakistani musician Arooj Aftab sing can feel a little like those first few drifting moments after you pop a bedtime melatonin. The edges of the world bleed like watercolors, and your mind weaves new tales from the frayed memories of your day. That makes sense, given that Aftab …

Ten years after the release of his Def Jam debut, the Hell Can Wait EP, Vince Staples occupies an ambiguous middle-ground, stuck between platinum-certified arena status and the ephemeral virality that defines too much of the mainstream rap industry. It’s a space that he shares with a handful of others …

“I’ve been broken and then put back together so many times,” BTS leader RM told the fashion brand 032c in his final interview before enlisting in the Korean military last year. “I realized that the person I think I am doesn’t really exist.” On his heady second solo album, RM …

As early as 2018 Jamaican superstar Shenseea was telling interviewers “By next year I want to be international, and when I say that, I don’t mean just as a dancehall artiste, but an international pop star.” Just last week Shenseea wondered aloud to Spotify if she should start classifying her …

It’s been about a decade since Twenty One Pilots came oozing out of Columbus, Ohio, with their resolutely Midwestern, amicably dystopian 2015 hit “Stressed Out,” an emo-rap-industrial-pop slab of sing-songy melancholy that touched enough of a nerve to catapult the previously unknown duo into Adele/Beyoncé echelons of chart success. Twenty …

“Like a loaded gun, my love/I lost control of the wheel/Double-crossed by a neon pill,” Cage the Elephant’s Matt Shultz sings on the title track from the Kentucky band’s sixth album. The sound is familiar, a smart, subdued garage-rock swagger that’s a prime example of their ability to punch up …

Forget the Platonic ideal, Shellac have always aspired to the sardonic ideal. On a ditty cheekily titled “Chick New Wave” — off To All Trains, the noise-rock group’s sixth and final album following the recent death of its singer-guitarist Steve Albini — we hear Albini hector, “I’m through with music …

Zayn’s starting point for his fourth studio album Room Under the Stairs was an emotional low point. “Alienated” began in his home studio in rural Pennsylvania, where he wrote the majority of the record on his own in a state of both creative and physical isolation. The percussive track simmers …

The first solo album from former Slayer guitarist Kerry King is basically the “Still D.R.E.” of thrash metal. But where Dr. Dre wanted to remind his fans that he was still puffin’ his leafs, still fucking with beats, and still not lovin’ police after close to a decade’s absence, King …