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 …
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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 …
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Like most singers new in town, Brittney Spencer spent the bulk of her first decade in Nashville paying dues. She busked to passersby, sang backup for Carrie Underwood, and carved out a space for provocative songwriting in the city’s Christian worship-music community. Then, in 2020, in the wake of country …
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21 Savage’s third solo album, American Dream, begins with his mother, Heather Joseph, describing her family’s emigration from Britain to America during his childhood. “Every path that I walked was for my son,” she tells us. (Big Rube of Dungeon Family fame penned her introduction.) It’s a concept many others …
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F ew artists can set a scene like Kali Uchis. Each of her albums has proven that she’s a master of mood boards and a queen of aesthetics: Her 2018 debut album, Isolation, was a lush world of retro R&B best enjoyed on a heart-shaped couch; 2023’s Red Moon in …
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Three decades ago, Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong was sarcastically singing “Welcome to Paradise.” Now at age 51, he’s staidly singing “Welcome to my problems” on “Dilemma,” a plaintive, swinging rocker on Green Day’s 14th LP, Saviors, which owes a debt to Fifties rock and the Ramones. “I was sober …
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Sequels can be big business, but they can also be tricky. While they build off already-existing reputations, they can also set up grand expectations, comparisons between then and now are inevitable, and the patina of nostalgia can sometimes make the “then” seem superior to the “now” by default. Pink Friday …
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When Tate McRae broke through in 2020 with the brooding bedroom pop of her debut single “You Broke Me First,” the then-17 year-old Canadian singer stormed TikTok with such an innate understanding of how other teenagers were consuming music that RCA Records didn’t just sign her, they restructured their marketing …
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Myke Towers has positioned himself as one of the top Latin rappers and reggaetoneros. With his fourth album, LVEU: Vive La Tuya…No La Mía, the Puerto Rican artist proves that he’s an all-around Latin pop star. Towers finds a happy medium between the rap and perreo of his previous albums …
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There have been hundreds upon hundreds of ambient music albums released this year, but there’s only one released by an elite-tier rapper with a 13-times-Platinum record under his overalls. In the 16 years since the tectonic-shifting Outkast went on hiatus, fans of the duo’s André 3000 have been clamoring for …
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