About time, honestly.

Not atrocious, per se, but for an album so perceived to be one her all-timers, I could never take to it as much as the punchier "Like A Virgin" or the much more totemic "Like A Prayer" either side of it. I think the real problem is that the back-half just isn't good.

La Isla Bonita, handily one of my least favourite Madge singles, is bland and uninteresting shallow beach-music it is difficult to care for. Jimmy Jimmy is the most "anyone else could've been ... read more

I was 14. Back then, I'd tell people I "wasn't really a music person".

I had friends who were into all-sorts. Pop, pop-punk, alt-rock, (groan) dubstep, EDM, hip-hop. I never found it especially offensive or anything, but the inclination just wasn't there.

PRODUCT changed my life, in that regard. The idea that music could, should, would sound like this. So unapologetically maximalist. Unashamedly barbie-doll-plastic but simultaneously so sincere and earnest. The ... read more

The further we descend into a global technofascist hellscape where comfort has become synonymous with a bland blanket of uniform hollowness, and persecution has never been so blatantly obvious and easy to ignore, the more clearly this record calls to the part of my soul that is anchored to what was and what could have been.

A decade ago, Gwenno crafted this magnificent LP, capturing in ethereal tones the world that had elided our grasp and issuing a dream-coated warning about what more there ... read more

This is a *phenomenal* single. Some of the bars in this include:

"L.A. fires won't happen if a bitch just squirt"

"I'm Lady Gawk-Gawk, who the fuck is you?
It's givin' Lady Gaga, standin' in her shoe
She love tall inches and I do too"

"Wanna bust on my face, I'ma dodge that cock
He gonna miss this face like when Trump got shot (Hahaha)"

and yet, somehow, none of this comes even close to the absolute perfect insanity that is the ... read more

Sheryl Lee Ralph does have the bonafides, musically. A lot of this current generation will no doubt recognise her first as an Abbott Elementary star, but her truest early success as an original Dreamgirl should scare away any doubt that her vocal and musical abilities were in top form in 1984.

So why, then, does she sound unconvincing at best and actively incompetent at worst on this record?

My theory: In her push to do that very PopnB eighties lady-vocalist lightweight schtick, we wound with ... read more

As good a time as any, I suppose, to give this gorgeous record what it is due.

There are lots of highlights to flag, naturally, but for the sake of brevity: Mine would be the wistful "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)", which conveys the whole gamut of what love is from beginning to end with that perfect vocal delivery and the simply beautiful instrumentation which so effectively twins it.

Rest easy, Brian Wilson. Thank you.

And here I thought Armour was an embarrassing low-point in her singles discography.

But no. Somehow we get this half-way done notes app jesus-freak track recorded on a Nintendo DS. It's the worst her flow has maybe ever been, the children's choir instrumental is just horrendous, and the mixing genuinely sounds like it doesn't exist.

She at least sounds like she's bringing an attitude to this one, which is more than I can say for a lot of her output recently, but that just ... read more

I tried, Marina. I really did. But this is literally just an *already* sub-par pop album stacked with millennial cringe and with vocals overprocessed into wet gloop. Production sameyness and car-crash songwriting compound both of these problems to such an extent that it becomes actively difficult to listen to this trainwreck all the way through.

Try again.

How anything could possibly surpass this for AOTY is completely beyond me.

You'd think an early self-penned series of tracks recorded entirely in someone's kitchen, accompanied only by the artist's own light strum-and-pluck efforts, would be fairly unremarkable save for the biography of the artist.

Think again. The humour, sadness, wit, and beauty here stand out regardless. Endlessly fascinating, too, is this distillation of singer-songwriter-isms as we've come to know them without any of the mainstream foregrounding in the pop, blues, or even ... read more

A very strong contender for best dance-pop record of the century. Possibly because I was born in '01 and my mother was in her early twenties when this dropped, but I have a lot of fondness attached to this CD (remember those?)

One of the first records that springs to my mind when I think disco, and yet the story is obviously a lot more complicated than that, because this is also basically a rock record. That they so seamlessly pulled off a product like that in a pre-poptimism world and ... read more

"Genius Of Love" and it's absolutely enormous legacy across basically every genre going would be enough to fill pages and earn this album several gold stars. That it also has the ear-lodger "Wordy Rappinghood" and the hypnotically dreamy "Lorelai" is just the cherry on top, even if the rest is relatively forgettable.

Who knew white nerds rapping could sound as good as it does here?

I don't know what you were all expecting. The Big Album was such a clear-cut 5.5/10 as it was, and that was her ceiling. This is a fairly mediocre pastiche-of-a-pastiche-of-a-pastiche of 80s synthpop. Chappell Roan xerox.

Pleasantly upbeat, though, I guess.

The same except they somehow concentrated it down to all of the worst parts and then threw in an itty bitty Ice Spice verse she sounds like she's sleepwalking through. Still shite. Goodbye.

This record is going to go down as probably the most overrated of 2025. Maybe of the Pop Decade.

It's got often pleasant, sometimes even genuinely very good production, and I applaud Ms Rae for knowing her wide-range of influences and keying them into what it is that she is doing. Mores the pity, then, that she is neither lyrically nor vocally able to match that versatility on this LP.

It's hard to escape the fact that "Addison" is a record on which half of the available ... read more

THE BRITNEY REVIEWS #5: BLACKOUT

Britney's fifth studio album, her second without *any* Max Martin touching her tracks, and the one most people probably remember for having been recorded and released in the eye of her own personal storm. But we're not here to talk about that, though there are tracks on which it does loom large ("Piece Of Me" is not particularly subtle, with its lampooning of the hyper-scrutiny surrounding her).

No, we're here to talk about Miss ... read more

As sure as night and day, these two are going to release an incredibly pretty italo-disco album from the late eighties a few decades later

Shapiro's vocals are what do it for me more than anything, as ever. Soft, airy longing is what she does best.

Nico melts the icy landscape of "The Marble Index" and reveals something so much more desolate, barren, and inhuman underneath. Not unlike a desert, there's a warmth here, but not one you would ever confuse with comfort.

Deeply disorientating masterpiece.

Tiktok is a mystery to me.