Over the past 10 years, Charley Crockett has released 15 albums, some just months apart. His latest, Dollar a Day, arrives only five months since March’s Lonesome Drifter. But this cycle, at least, doesn’t feel the least bit rushed or half-baked. Rather, the Texas country singer has found his groove. …
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Folks have been talking about the dissolution of the album format for years now, as streaming culls out singles and embeds them in appropriately themed playlists. The experience of listening to an LP in order has become kind of a novelty for some – the cohesion of each song bleeding …
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Bad Suns have been operating on two sides of an internal divide. On “Communicating,” the brisk lead single from their fifth studio album Accelerator, frontman Christo Bowman describes it succinctly: “Body and mind on separate vacations.” Physically, they’ve been soaking up the California sun, basking in the warmth of bright …
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Reneé Rapp has drastically switched up her game since her excellent 2023 debut, Snow Angel — and it’s a glorious noise to hear. She spends her second album, Bite Me, enjoying what a rowdy-and-proud mess she is, for one of the year’s most delightful pop blowouts, an uproarious 33-minute celebration …
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Rebecca Schiffman is an indie-pop songwriter who’s been on the scene for a couple decades already, making noise in New York in the early 2000s. But she gets deep into grown-up problems with her fantastic fourth album Before the Future. It’s a sly, candid sleeper of an album, where Schiffman …
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Among the brilliant first four Talking Heads albums, More Songs About Buildings and Food has always been a dark horse candidate for the all-around greatest. Released 47 years ago this month, it sounds more electable now than ever. With its lean muscularity, panic-attack propulsion, weird ambiance, highwire anxiety, paranoid prescience …
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Tyler Childers has always seemed comfortable in his contradictions. He’s an old-soul traditionalist whose throwback ballads regularly go TikTok viral, a recovering alcoholic who still releases some of the 21st century’s best drinking music, a stadium-sized star who hasn’t performed his most popular song in a half-decade. For the past …
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Don’t Tap the Glass is Tyler, the Creator’s second album in less than a year and, at only 28 minutes, notably less robust than its predecessor, Chromakopia. But all the elements of his work are here: the swaggy boasts, the effortless shifts from deep-voiced rapping to winsome, slightly off-key singing …
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Hip-hop is no longer solely youth culture; it’s just culture, with cross-generational scenes full of artists intent on capturing their era’s zeitgeist. But Raekwon The Chef’s latest solo album, The Emperor’s New Clothes, was unquestionably tailored for the 35-and-up hip-hop heads who descended upon Madison Square Garden to see the …
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On “3x,” a standout track from London-based musician Jim Legxacy’s new mixtape Black British Music, the 2016 UK rap classic “Wanna Know,” by Dave — who is also featured on the song — serves as a thematic core. Legxacy’s vocals, sparkling and ethereal, suffused with emotion but never saccharine, give …
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