My Woman is a record coated in the sounds of radio’s past, a potpourri of classic rock gestures and doo-wop sway, yet Olsen’s mindset is anything but nostalgic.
Huerco S. claimed he wanted to make something timeless. Both genuinely and emblematically, he’s done just that.
It continues her infatuation with love, loneliness, betrayal, hunger, and the afflictions from both sadness and happiness.
Barwick’s music is lyrical, wordless, a poetics of negation and repetition. The scatter-worlds of play, ambiguity, and never-empty space. So it breathes, conjures.
These tracks sound equally as engaged and provocative as anything on last year’s masterful DS2.
For all the scorn and fireworks, LEMONADE is maybe most remarkable for its capacity for healing ... It’s a work that relishes in the movement of emotionality, the contradictory wrecking-ball feelings that spring from disappointed love, that could turn you to drought if turned from. And it never loses its focus.
Despite the complexities that make this such a multi-faceted and intrepid addition to the Modern Love catalogue ... Too Many Voices is an immersive experience that builds on the artists’ past without once holding them back.
Doubt, disbelief, and uncertainty are conjured across Love Streams, both as bludgeoning buildups and tumbling segues.
blisters is a shadowbox of foregrounds and backgrounds, plainspoken address versus skyward invocation, the injunction of intersecting folk performance styles (spiritual, musical theater, pop R&B) into the sparring tectonic movements of neophytic hyperobjects.
Jeremih’s a night owl, not a lark, and on Late Nights: The Album — his first in a lustrum — he retreats even further from the spotlight he seemed predestined for, carefully crafting an album that surprisingly finds tranquility in the 28-year-old’s thrill-seeker ways.
Crampton’s work adopts its own distinct language, and Demon City uses that language to relate, in her words, an “epic poem” — a resonant narrative of apocalypse and transformation.
Not quite abstraction and note quite representation, $uccessor is marked by its persistent attendance of texture and relationship in sound, placing them high above rhythm and melody.
Wrapped in a overwhelming number of influences, Oh No vaults across an infinity of cultural milieus to find itself. Soft and sensual, alone in a room of millions, Lanza weaves past and present, dance and desire as one in a dizzying, strenuous aesthletic attempt at its future.
ANTI is folk music played in a video-drome circularly projecting a 360° image of sprawling, semi-wilderness on fire as a compassionate, loving apocalypse.
Like the works of its humble forebears Lil B and the venerable Soulja Boy, Lil Boat is the kind of music that does not need to make a case for its own value, only judged on the intangible, absurdist metrics of its self-contained universe.
Pop music is often at its best when it seek to challenge its own established tradition, and imbued with a timeless feminine cultural residue, Vroom Vroom does just that. This is pop music reinventing itself, reasserting its autonomy.
The themes run from menstruation to vampires to capitalism to loneliness to pap smears, and any thread you pick can take you to the core. You have been invited in.
His response to the crisis-ordinary is to take his time, to ask us to be patient. The first two songs on Endless aren’t even Frank Ocean songs, and the rest blur together with an anti-programmatic sort of dream sequencing.
Blonde is of instances, of stretches and yawns, creativity in recreation, invisible labor, a time-lapse collapsed into one space.
Entrañas is the unnameable us, the fireworks and the semi-automatics. It seeks uncovering and discovers trauma. It is elegy and bruise, sound and echo. It screams in the face of silence.
“No, art is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”