Big Thief and Angel Olsen's turn towards roots after the droll delights of a decade in indie rock bode well for listeners like myself who—though I come from Appalachia—have always found deeper vessels of emotion in the wails of a steel guitar than the spacey echo of shoegaze and other subgenres of indie.

Tracks like "OUT LOUD" feel like catnip—that sweet-melodied, acoustic-tinged, soulful R&B ballad that puts seven and diminished chords in just the right places. I can't help getting swept up in the Frank Ocean/Daniel Caesar's "THE BEST PART" of it all.

Something tells me Adele really loved SAULT's AOTY releases last year and perhaps during her divorce—especially present on the LP's last track, "Love Is A Game." The nasally backing vocals, symphonic production, and choral refrain in the end all point to the earth-shattering work the UK-based collective has put out in the past year. In "Oh My God," the pre-chorus even flirts with afrobeat in the vocal style and beat. This will be what people will call ... read more

I used to belong to a subculture of mostly white, cis-het men who wanted to be John Mayer in high school. They started playing guitar around 2006—2013 and treated Mayer's WHERE THE LIGHT IS: LIVE IN LOS ANGELES as sacred text. It's likely if you're a millennial, you knew one of us. They styled their hair in that not-quite-right updo, wore v-neck tees, and played any talent show adjacent event and took it very seriously.

These days, John Mayer's legacy is doing pretty well with guys ... read more

Glam rock certainly feels like it should have a massive revival movement happening any day now. We've already got plenty of artists revitalizing soft rock and neo-disco to show for the era, after all. I found this really nice but otherwise forgettable–aside from I Am The Dancefloor, which feels like the title of a song that should have existed decades ago, and it's really good!

Yes, girl-power rockers Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson are all over Sydney Sprague's introspective jams, but her voice inflects her lyrics more closely to artists like Julia Jacklin, girl in red, and Soccer Mommy. There's no empowering. yelly hooks in her choruses like Kelly or Avril. Instead, the crunchy early-aughts rock lifts up a more unsure and claustrophobic cynic thinking about the end of the world and what happens after COVID.

Drum machines and MIDI (?) organs can, in fact, carry an LP.

Y'know, Khruangbin's great but, like, enough already.

The smooth, soulful sampling is a hip-hop tradition among lyrical maestros like Freddie Gibbs and Royce Da 5'9'. It's the kind of cozy, warm sonic-space where somehow MCs can manage to rap about the horrors of being black in America while nestled in a perfect groove you can't help but nod your head to. Lukah is from Memphis, TN—a city rich with black history and culture—and took the time to look inward for this project inspired by his grandfather's philosophical wisdom. The result ... read more

Looks like Whitney has started microdosing.

When I lived in Nashville, the look of a Friday night was a stranger's kitchen flooded with young, moppy-haired dude-types dressed like they'd walked out of 1974. These folks also made music—everybody does in Nashville, obviously—and were obsessed with emulating a new psychedelia and garage-rock that was dreamy and nasty all at the same time. Watching Pearl Charles' video for the first track "Only For Tonight" immediately brought to mind the now defunct Stone Fox pub where ... read more

The absolute biggest blind-spot this year that's been following me like a ghost—I can't hear or see it, but I know it's there. This is kitchen music, my god! I made a stew in a jiffy with these bumpy grooves scoring the chop of my knife. It's absolutely nuts that I was able to avoid this juggernaut and at the same time, completely right, since it's TJ Maxx-ready jams couldn't reach me from the confines of my home. This is what I'll play for my passengers should I ever drive Uber. We'll ... read more

Listening after today's Grammy nominations and for its mammoth of tracks, there's such little to show for it. The experience of making this album—much of it freestyled on an island paradise in Hawaii—seems like it was more fun to make than listening to it. And this was an early-year release too... the R&B records from this year aren't sticking to the popular zeitgeist except for maybe The Weeknd's AFTER HOURS and I keep wanting something fresh. A good voice just doesn't cut it ... read more

As R&B and hip-hop become more fluid with each other, it's easy to see why ambitiously structured albums work for rappers like Drake —with ample room for lyricism, different rhythmic ideas, sampling—but don't for R&B with the constraints of its genre. The incorporation of guests from hip-hop's who's-who are exciting on paper but don't yield much that's memorable overall. I actually love Ty here on his own with a smooth guitar lick and a beat later on the record. I'll be ... read more

At this point, Alicia Keys feels like a guidance counselor in a never-ending musical about lifting others up and getting up after you’re knocked down. I’ve seen this movie.

As a life-long Avetts fan, I have a predisposition to the classic format of the brothers' music—a silly, punkish, and passionate approach towards North Carolina's musical tradition of bluegrass, folk, and americana. Their music has always been around for me and for most Avett's fans, it's a big part of their lives.

This is why TRUE SADNESS and CLOSER THAN TOGETHER felt like such unsatisfying releases; one experimenting in a couple places but otherwise business-as-usual mediocrity and the ... read more

Lights off with a bowl of snacks from my local Indian grocery, I listened to this expecting either something really good or the kind of album that boasts Bon Iver's indie cred to a disappointing result—luckily, none of those things happened because this is truly a great piece of pop music songwriting that LOVER was too afraid to approach for echoes of 1989.

Hearing this album really ties together how much of a ride it is to live in in the shadow of Taylor Swift's cultural notoriety. ... read more

My favorite record of 2016 was Wet's DON"T YOU—which painted my walks every morning to my local coffee shop with the most wonderful haze of Kelly's light vocals and simple arrangements that packed the ultimate dream poppy punch. I'm finding a version of that feeling here with Kllo's MAYBE WE COULD. It's a lot like Wet's debut: emotional and weepy proclamations over simple synth chords. The big distinguishing factor is, of course, the dance beats at the foundation of every track. It ... read more

The angst is a little too on the nose for me to artistically accept what Oliver Tree is putting on here. I wasn't aware of the label nonsense before listening but it seems like it really ruined his momentum and chances of being the oddball in indie. these past few years That being said, the front half of the record is more my speed up to Bury Me Alive which left a bad white-boy weirdo hip-hop taste in my mouth for the rest of the spin. Cash Machine is my favorite.

The first track evokes the drowsy sing-song of Sylvan Esso better than most imitators of their sound. However, moving deeper into the LP, it’s clear that the themes of growing up and entering adulthood are expressed not only in the album’s lyrics but in its incomplete vision. The voice, production, and lyricism is there without the spark of the album’s first track.