#album-review

#album-review

Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them.

In a band where a guitar and a saxophone can use one another as camouflage, what good is absolute allegiance to six strings, anyway? Extra Stars is Uhlmann's most inquisitive and assured record yet, a 14-track playground where he uses every instrument at his disposal to pursue an obsession with curious sounds and the memories and emotions they can quickly conjure.

Ora Cogan makes songs the way diviners cast charms. Her music moves on instinct but carries the deliberation of ritual, each gesture placed where feeling cuts closest to the bone. On Hardhearted Woman, her ninth album and debut for Sacred Bones, she casts an invocation for anyone determined to remain wild in a world where it's easier to calcify.

If Ederra was previously a journaler processing experiences within the bound margins of the page, here we're privy to the thoughts as they pop into her head. "I'm in the business of feeling," she declares early on, establishing the limbic mood. Ederra's not as frenzied a writer as KeiyaA, who likes to structure verses like spiraling thoughts, but the shift in approach makes her more fluid.

Working in the vein of "laptop twee" acts like friends& and Worldpeace DMT, who fuse the genre-smashing maximalism promised by hyperpop with the whimsical optimism of '00s buzz bands, the material on their 2025 album Shy at first is as dense and dynamic as the songs you try to compose in your imagination.

The gift of skaiwater's best music is its unique shape, blown-out underground rap styles carefully folded into delicate origami. Forget every preconceived notion you might have about 'rage rap' and put on 'rain'-it's so pretty, a butterfly fluttering around a bomb site. On that album, skai harnessed beat drops like wrecking balls crashing into the walls of their heart.

From the first single "I Just Might," a pleading request that his lover be able to move on the dancefloor at his level, it's clear that Mars is inviting more comparisons to groovier hits of yesteryear than usual. It reminded me of both Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet" and Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing," hitting the same melodies or gang vocal inflections.

West builds most of the songs around a single repeated chord, strummed high up on the neck. Her band populates the arrangement with everything else she needs-bass licks, chord changes, dynamic surges-while West sends her voice into the song's darkened corners and curls her mind around whichever odd idea grips her.

In 'Bad Moons,' the unpredictability lies not in the lyrics like usual, where Mike Kinsella admits he's 'just two little boys in a trench coat' in that languorous voice he can't shed. Instead, the lasting impression comes from his bandmates' graceful turns through delicate post-rock. Aqueous harp and piano eventually give way to a fishing net of guitars, each minimalist line woven tighter than the next.

The Finnish conductor and violinist is talking about Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, a work of such innate Britishness that it regularly tops UK classical music popularity polls. Kuusisto's Lark isn't RVW-lite, however, but a penetrating, convincingly honest account that strips the music back to its essential roots in the English folk tradition.

Almost four decades into their career, Deftones might be as big as they've ever been. Sure, they were hitmakers of the CD era, but these days they're selling out Madison Square Garden, running their own highly successful (and surprisingly well-programmed) music festival, and - most importantly? - they're massive on TikTok. Despite all of the buzz, though, the band has taken its sweet time dropping new music.

The polish doesn't constrict or corrupt Headlights; everything that might appear as an indulgence only expands the range of an artist who's basically a genre unto himself at this point.

"This world betrayed me. Nah I'll never forgive this world for who it made me."

Justin's surprise, mediocre new album, is filled with lyrics about his complicated relationship with his wife, but they all skew toward 'I still love you.'

It can sound trite, but the ability to love is so powerful and brave... Princess of Power is about teaching yourself—or re-teaching yourself—how to love.

Peter Buck's criticism of Around the Sun reflected the band's struggle post-Bill Berry, with lifeless tracks overshadowing some quality material, though gems still exist.

To really die you have to die three ways. Townes Van Zandt discovered this after overdosing on model airplane glue. He was declared DOA at the hospital where, to hear him tell it, he sat for an hour and a half while doctors debated just how dead he was.