Matt Mitchell
The Danish singer-producer’s fourth album is feverishly nostalgic yet potent with retrospect, taking cues from ‘90s trip-hop and an ancestry of R&B. The music flirts with hi-fi spotlessness while noodling gently in the pockets of imperfection.
1y
On her debut album, the Brooklyn-based musician executes impossibly consistent swells and plunges of jazz-inflected art-rock while sitting just out of frame, flourishing in the company of her band’s kindred strangeness.
1y
The newest album from the Nashville guitarist forgoes the restless psychedelia of his previous effort, collaging the purposeless play of Cage and finger-picking of Fahey into a flavor unbound to just one page of the American folk songbook.
1y
The singer-songwriters’ first collaborative album together is a sugary take on a long-worn country template. The stories they sing are necessary, even when the music plays it safe.
1y
On their third album, Jane is a self-referential tornado rummaging around in a maximalist ether, embellishing micro-genres and splitting continuums into their own playground of crushing techno, EDM, and blazing hyperpop.
1y
The songs on the Montreal rapper-producer’s fifth album are caustic, knotty monoliths, as she bedecks her sacrifices with challenging, orchestrated, and cathartic resignations.
1y
Like all of Holley’s albums, Tonky is poetry set in motion through fluid, emotional music composed by Jackknife Lee. The artist’s language is rhythmic and his stories are concentrated, even when they span centuries and chronicle memoirs of slavery, abuse, ancestry and change.
1y
The New York band’s first offering is a grotesque, eccentric reverie of feels-bad-man doom music. The songs are uncomfortable, foolish and, above all, brassy.
1y
Hearing the loose, uneven ends of these 11 songs might raise suspicions that Vundabar were a pre-COVID anomaly, but the album still boasts not only their oft-brilliant, angular guitar playing and odd, unpredictable vocal showings, but slow signs of reinvention.
1y
Animal Collective's Noah Lennox distorts the context of these 10 rock songs with elements of reggae, dub, hauntology, drone, cowboy chords, yesteryear pop centrifuge and dampened, diet ska.
1y
The singer’s sophomore album is generic, out of vogue and woefully misguided, rinsing contemporary pop music’s strongest laurels with half-hearted, half-baked gestures of drum’n’bass and hyperpop.
1y
The Japanese-Canadian musician’s sophomore LP is a breakup exercise full of epic, idiosyncratic stories of farewell and mourning cut up into an all-encompassing and all-evading menagerie of trip-hop, psych-folk, prog-rock, glitch-tronica and dubby fusion.
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The French musician serves her music with nostalgia, desire, and distance. You can hear the air slipping past every note she and her producers play, evoking visceral intentionality all the way down to the 808s, Auto-Tuned strangeness, and internet-honored cameos lurking within.
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On her sophomore release, the Minnesota rapper, singer and producer places a wreath of macabre, femme fatale bon mots and in-your-face, pyrotechnic instrumentals onto a pop lexicon sorely in need of a stupefying makeover.
1y
The Compton rapper’s masterful sixth LP is a surreal, hypnotizing, danceable trip through a hip-hop prophet’s own ego death and immediate, braggadocious, finessing renewal.
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Tyler, the Creator’s story inside of those sepia-toned cardboard walls of CHROMAKOPIA bursts with color and, miraculously, shows us more of him than all of his previous albums combined.
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It’s a beautiful, lawless formula constructed by two mad scientists who also happen to be best friends. They let comfort turn into contrast, as bravado bursts into abandon.
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Six years after going viral for singing Hank Williams in an Illinois Walmart, the 17-year-old’s debut album strikes an expected balance: songs that demand too much from his under-developed pipes and songs that nurture his God-given talents.
1y
The Dublin quintet’s fourth LP is an essay of mosh-pit guitars careening into baggy desires and stringed visions of mercy, arriving like a stroke of violence that stretches itself around the cinema of living.
1y
The guitar auteur and labelhead’s sixth studio album is not only one of the best course-corrections in recent memory, but it's a back-to-basics lesson in excellence from the one guy you ought to trust in making a top-to-bottom rock ‘n’ roll classic.
1y
The Kentucky-born, Nashville-bred, and Paris-based country messenger’s first LP under his new name isn't a comeback—it’s a recalibration firing on all cylinders. The album’s only imperfection is that it ends.
1y
The Chicagoans rewrite their own momentum on their newest EP, sewing elements of a 25-year career into six refreshing vignettes.
1y
The Portishead vocalist/lyricist took a decade to concoct her first-ever solo studio album and came out with bleak, orchestral, funereal songs about motherhood, mortality, and everything caught in-between.
2y