Steve Lacy gives one of his most silky smooth vocal performances on this slow burning track with enough energy to propel it forward into a beautiful and crushingly tender ballad about uncertain love. The backing vocals shimmer and add an extra layer of tension that suits the mood extremely well. The instrumentation is delicate with a crystalline touch that shrouds Lacy’s voice in a grace-laced stupor of bliss and questioning hope. This is an absolute showstopper of a track that you must ... read more

sombr has gotten a lot of hate recently for being a corny TikTok artist. From what I’m reading here, a lot of you also are quick to hate him because of his Israeli heritage. But this song is actually extremely catchy, with vocal swoons that pair nicely with disco-fueled pianos and drums that remind me of Blood Orange at points.

The production is airtight, which is a huge bonus. Not a single moment is wasted and everything flows well, from the chorus to the final bridge that features ... read more

Lately there has been a trend of artists making albums that are too safe or similar for fans to feel any different about them. A majority of us are getting sick of mass-produced mainstream hysteria with little character or flavor.

So when Big Thief subverts expectations with a psych-folk twist on Double Infinity, you would expect it to be embraced. But for some reason, the opposite is happening. Fans are complaining about the new sound, the harsh and dissonant backing vocals from Laraaji ... read more

My hopes for Vanisher, Horizon Scraper being the next great conceptual rap album (as many have been talking about) have all but vanished upon watching the album movie that accompanies its plight.

Despite the production on Vanisher, Horizon Scraper being clean as a whistle, Quadeca consistently proves that more is less on track after track. The album features enough bells and whistles to keep your ADHD preoccupied for a couple millenium, but signals no more meaning beyond the dense collages of ... read more

Grief is extremely fucking complex.

Navigating it can be like a tumultuous voyage on a rocky sea towards Reconciliation Bay. Oftentimes grief is portrayed in music with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and realization that reconciliation is so far out of one’s reach it may be impenetrable, jagged rocks in its way. But for Sufjan Stevens, it’s covered in tough and sticky honey-buttered kisses and a whole lotta love on Javelin, an album recorded during Stevens’s own ... read more

I’m not sure the band Shearling themselves would be able to muster up a live recording of their debut album M**********r, I Am Both: “Amen” and “Hallelujah”…

With an extremely lengthy runtime of an hour and two minutes being squeezed into a single track, the album reads more as a free-write poetry jam than a fully substantiative album with clean breaks. This doesn’t mean it lacks cohesion within its vivid storytelling of an Appaloosa horse in the ... read more

Ethel Cain through with another devastatingly painful track that showcases her versatility as a songwriter and ethereal voice sent down straight from Gabriel’s gates.

If Preacher’s Daughter wasn’t your cup of tea, turn off the kettle and turn on Nettles instead because it’s a completely different environment. Is this still lengthy as all get out? You bet. Do Hayden Anhedönia’s vocals still swirl and shimmer in the most delicate mix possible? Fuck yeah. But ... read more

The vibe of this track was completely unexpected, and well, nearly incomprehensible.

While I didn’t expect Big Thief to move in the direction of psychedelic folk (Is that even a genre?), I’m glad they did and thoroughly surprised. The original track is a lot more sentimental and stripped back, but this version gives it more pop and a delicious fruity finish with frontman Adrianne Lenker’s lusciously heavenly vocals putting in more effort than I’ve ever heard.

The ... read more

Addison Rae and Magdalena Bay collab when?

This glittering and simmering breakbeat outlining Addison Rae’s mercurial vocals is the last thing I was expecting from this track. The flow of this track is breezy, the lyrics are sharp and to the point, and we get a brand new genre emerging—one of breezy synth-pop that recalls last year’s Imaginal Disk—as she has done with every single off this upcoming album.

Rae’s slowly becoming a master of pop in ways unforeseen. ... read more

Girl, this single is so confusing.

The soft whimper and somber tone present here is not what I was expecting from this track, given that lead single “What Was That” had a more consistent explosive energy more in line with Melodrama. While more experimental and different sounding than the rest of Lorde’s discography, I can’t help but feel this track was executed somewhat poorly.

The lyrics may be simple and slightly clichéd—“Swish mouthwash / Jerk ... read more

This track needs some CPR to inject some life into it.

Here we get the usual cut-and-dry, twisted and humorous lovey-dovey lyrics Wet Leg are known for, but they feel more flat and emotionless than usual through a somewhat whiny and discombobulated delivery with no sense of purpose. The writing is plain boring at points, too: “Is it love or suicide? Is it love?” is sung in a drawl until the chorus. It feels overly generic for a track so tragic and topically disturbing.

Further ... read more

Model/Actriz makes being queer a badge of honor through their violently dark and eccentric blend of guitar-and-drum heavy industrial noise. Their debut album Dogsbody perfectly encapsulated the rough and jagged experiences a gay man will face by blurring the edges between sweetness and harshness.

Constantly moving and dancing through a number of industrial overtures, Model/Actriz’s sophomore album Pirouette takes on a similar, if slightly stiffer palette. Instead of being a subtlety, ... read more

It seems like there is a time in every rockstar’s life where they have to face the press.

For orchestral indie-rock powerhouse Arcade Fire’s frontman Win Butler, the time was August 27, 2022, almost three years ago. Butler was accused of engaging in sexually inappropriate conduct and being overly flirtatious with three women and one genderfluid individual in a scathing Pitchfork article. This drew a lot of previous fans away from the band, crippling the band’s integrity ... read more

This may be the most incredible introduction to a band I’ve ever had.

I’ve seen the name Maruja floating around on Internet message boards for a while, but I’d never really cared enough to check the band out. Well, that was a huge mistake because I’d really been missing out.

This latest single from the band is an overwhelmingly passionate anthem of bitter political distrust and call for revolution that is grandiose, earth-shattering, and magnificent beyond any stretch ... read more

Viagra Boys is a funnily caricatured name of what the Swedish punk band embodies at its core: a sense of impish immaturity created by dangerous political rhetoric that preys on young men and churns out sensitive boys that can’t walk 10 feet without finding something to get offended about. It’s ironic as all get out and the band embraces it with groovy riffs and lyrics that straddle the line between self-awareness and complete ignorance with guilty pleasure and ease.

Viagra ... read more

This may be one of the most underwhelming pieces of art to drop this century.

On his 7 piano sketches EP, André 3000 yet again serves us anything but the rap that his fans have been begging for for years, maybe in an attempt to subvert expectations for a third time, or maybe he wants to start fresh and create freely, no genres bounding him from being himself. While I can acknowledge the message, there is nothing creatively impressive or avant-garde about this project.

Weighing in light ... read more

I haven’t been following Ed Sheeran’s work as of late, but the last I heard from him didn’t impress me much. Well, color me all shades of blue because this song hit me like a ten-ton truck of sorrow and despair.

The song is very sweet and sentimental. At first, there’s not much going on, but as the song goes on, Sheeran’s voice becomes intensely emotive. He uses his phone as a nostalgic plot device of distress and grief. I was not expecting the lyricism to take ... read more

I had no clue Maroon 5 was still making music, so I was jump scared when I saw this pop up in the Latest Songs tab of my Apple Music.

I was also jump scared by the music. It’s not very good.

Adam Levine’s voice is soaked in so much AutoTune that it sounds like a cheap AI ripoff. And he’s trying so hard to emulate the 2012 Overexposed days of the band when they could still make catchy tunes like “Payphone” and “Fortune Teller.” But this isn’t ... read more

Fontaines D.C. fails to live up to their contemporaries with their sound on latest album Romance: Here there’s not enough instantly catchy and introspective pop to conjure up a Declan McKenna or a Sam Fender. Also losing out on the punk edge that their previous release Skinty Fia had, they’re no IDLES either. Sure, they don’t have to live up to those acts. But it would be nice to see them taking some notes.

Instead, we have quite a few unfinished drones and power anthems ... read more

Cameras are the main motif snapping up a majority of the Perfume Genius’s Glory. And most of the time they are making someone some degree of uncomfortable.

Where cameras capture moments in life that would otherwise go unnoticed, Glory captures the indelible sounds we can barely register with our mortal ears through clicks, beeps, swoons, swoops, key changes, and a whole lot of atmospheric ambience. Frontman Michael Hadreas does this through carefully collected lyrical snippets and vocal ... read more