Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

By their third and last decade, Sonic Youth opted for their version of chilling out. Rather than reconceiving the idea and very sound of rock (the Eighties) or trying to contour their maelstrom for the mainstream (the Nineties), they spent the 2000s easing into their status as indie-rock heroes. As …

“You’ve got a higher power,” Chris Martin tells a brand new flame — and, by extension, each and every citizen of Earth — on Coldplay‘s ninth album, adding, “I’m so happy I’m alive.” He may be literally the only person who feels that way in 2021, and that, of course, …

As the producer and co-writer on his sister Billie Eilish‘s landmark 2019 album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, as well as her follow-up from earlier this year, Happier Than Ever, Finneas O’Connell has helped bring to life one of the most significant pop artists of this …

It’s easy to take the Velvet Underground for granted. Nearly four decades have passed since Brian Eno guesstimated that “Everyone who bought one of those [first] 30,000 copies [of the Velvets’ debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico] started a band,” and that maxim has been repeated so many times …

“Do we really have to grow up?” Kacey Musgraves asked on 2015’s Pageant Material, the last time the singer-songwriter was staring down impossible expectations. Back then she was figuring out where to go next after her standard-setting 2013 debut Same Trailer Different Park, which established the blueprint for daring millennial …

Josiah Wise trades in passion for commitment on Deacon, his latest full-length album as Serpentwithfeet. Since his debut Blisters EP, the choir-trained experimental artist from Baltimore has woven an extensive catalogue depicting the tenderness and lushness of queer romance, with a baroque sonic palette that would be as fitting for …

Generations makes a strong case that Arcade Fire‘s second most famous Butler brother, Will, could be the group’s pop mastermind with its quirky, upbeat rockers about modern life. He opens the record with “Outta Here,” which he built with fuzzy analog keyboards and smartypants lyrics like, “Had enough bad news/Had …

“I’m on my way, I’m going fast,” Lil Baby promised us on his debut single“My Dawg.”The Atlanta rapper was describing his excitement to get home and have sex, Three years later, the line could just as easily stand as the perfect epigraph for the breakneck speed at which has career …

Kevin Parker is a prog-rock wiz with a heart of pop gold, spooling out resplendent psychedelic symphonies in Tame Impala, a studio project that’s blossomed into a band big enough to headline Coachella. With his long hair and spacey jams, he can recall a bygone era of art-rock conjurer, those …

Before you add any other superlative to her name, Beyoncé is, first and foremost, a performer. She spent her childhood being trained not just to be a great singer but to become the type of athletic vocalist who could sing while in constant, rapid, muscle-and-bone defying movement on a stage …