With her surprise LP, Flowers For Vases/Descansos, Hayley Williams has forgone further pop experimentation, instead clinging to a raw recitation of profound, suffocating sadness. The Paramore singer’s sophomore solo effort, released on Friday, employs little more than austere acoustic guitar and piano interludes across its 14 new tracks, which lament well beyond the waves of […]
After 25 years—and 10 big ol’ rock albums—the only concerning factor regarding new Foo Fighters material should be this: How will it play live? Can the skyscraping choruses be sung by 40,000 fans at Dodger Stadium — even those who haven’t picked up a new Foos record since 2005? Is there space for Dave Grohl, […]
Somehow. Somehow, as the most psychologically daunting year of our lives refuses to loosen its grip, Taylor Swift continues to create with abandon, relentlessly surprising a fan base that hangs on her every tweet and emoji. Somehow, the pop monolith has done it almost entirely in isolation, sharing heaps of digital files with her latest […]
North Carolina’s Clearbody are starting fresh. Formed as Dollhands in 2019, the band shed their gritty sound, went through a lineup change and renamed themselves. The songs became fuller, the production richer. One More Day, their first album as Clearbody that will be released on Smartpunk, shows a band that took the necessary steps to […]
“It was ALL erased,” Miley Cyrus wrote in a letter to fans last month, explaining how the 2018 wildfire that destroyed her Malibu home took with it her unreleased seventh album. The LP would have slotted in around a trilogy of EPs, the first of which, She Is Coming, dropped in May 2019. But Miley […]
Sultry and uninhibited, Positions is Ariana Grande’s first album to unequivocally give no fucks. Now well beyond the maelstrom of tabloids and tragedy that fueled 2018’s Sweetener and 2019’s Thank U, Next, the superstar is more popular than ever. And through her rigorous release schedule — three high-profile LPs in 26 months is no small […]
Hysterically grand and unshakably earnest, Imploding The Mirage is exactly what the Killers need it to be — an easy bridge to the next arena tour (whenever that may occur). The band’s sixth LP disrupts none of its predetermined big-rock boundaries; it alienates no fans. It delivers a belting, fan-service single in “Caution” — to […]
The great fascination enveloping folklore, Taylor Swift’s mossy, surprise eighth LP, lies not within the album’s steadfast execution but the attempt itself — that during a global crisis which has paralyzed entire nations, a pop monolith would venture to swerve from her honey-soaked Lover’s lane and rumble deep into the forest, fixated on sonic reinvention. […]
As the 2000s became the 2010s, no artist looked more poised to transform the landscape wholesale than Mathangi Arulpragasam, whom most millennials know as M.I.A. A brilliant Sri Lankan musician, political disruptor, and cultural synthesizer from London, she made music almost entirely about being exiled by birthright, about her complicated relationship with societal upheaval having […]
For six decades, Bob Dylan has proven completely peerless. His lyrics especially have redefined risk-taking and boundary-pushing in popular song. His eyes have always been on the horizon. On his 39th studio album, he looks inward to explore the undiscovered country of his own heart, mind, and creative process. Rough and Rowdy Days is a typically […]