Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

The 60-second earworm “Pain,” released by the producer and singer PinkPantheress on TikTok earlier this year, rides a moody flip of the early-2000s hit “Flowers,” by the U.K. group Sweet Female Attitude. In what is by now the defining story of our era, the single garnered the 20-year-old musician a …

Modest Mouse were the perfect “right time, right place” band for the early Aughts indie-rock gold rush. They had legit Nineties alt-rock bona fides (Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson co-produced Mouse’s high water mark, ’97’s The Lonesome Crowded West), and frontman Isaac Brock wrote quirky, clever songs in the traditions of …

Digital disruption has created a music business that’s sustained by saturation, producing a culture of abundance blurring into excess. Lengthy albums capitalize on this wholesale demand for more by bloating tracklists, which in turn jacks up streaming numbers. At first glance, Culture III, the latest 19-track offering from superstar rap …

When Jack Harlow was 16, he looked and sounded exactly like Andy Samberg. On “S.A.V.,” a track from his maiden high school mixtape Finally Handsome, his raps were self-deprecating and aspirational in the same breath: “Spend my whole spring break scrolling down Instagram/ Double-tapping pictures of these girls in their …

After BTS scored a long-awaited Number One single in the US with the glittery disco-pop cut “Dynamite,” you might expect the Korean group to keep the party going and double down on their chart-topping formula. But instead of an album decked with dancefloor stompers, the septet use their latest release …

For their 15th album, Public Enemy are back on Def Jam, the powerhouse label they helped build with their golden-age hip-hop classics. It’s a well-timed return to the center of the industry. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has seen a reawakening of the protest radicalism that PE …

In many ways, Angel Olsen’s All Mirrors was a quintessential pre-pandemic record: elegant music with vast orchestral arrangements, made for glitzy all-nighters spent wandering the city. Less than a year later, the ballrooms might be shut down, but Olsen has returned with something far more intimate and spectacular. Whole New …

“I’m not getting excited,” Elizabeth Stokes vows on the opening track to the Beths‘ new album, Jump Rope Gazers. “‘Cause the thrill isn’t mine to invite in.” She keeps her word throughout the record: “I know,” she later acknowledges. “I’m kind of a bummer.” Stokes’ self-deprecating and vulnerable lyrics, backed …

One of Eddie Vedder’s idols, Roger Daltrey of the Who, once said that the secret to keeping “My Generation” fresh onstage half a century after it was written isn’t nailing the song’s stutter, but believably channeling its anger. It’s a sentiment Vedder would definitely endorse; the Pearl Jam frontman’s rage …

You know this sadly familiar scenario: Band with three distinctive singers and writers — and a steady, dependable drummer who seems to get along with them all — collapses, and what follows are individual projects with plenty of sterling moments instead of a group record that will never be. The …