Album Reviews

With U.K. dream-pop pioneers Cocteau Twins, singer Elizabeth Fraser‘s appeal had more to do with the way she projected raw emotions (joy, worry, uneasiness) than the songs she sang. Instead of attempting poetry, she sang in tongues, shaping her feelings with crude but often beautiful vocal sounds, and a few …

There’s something strange about Memphis. Nestled along the muddy waters of the Mississippi River, the city lies shrouded in an aura of perpetual gloom, its skyline dominated by a mammoth, metal-clad pyramid filled not with treasures, but a Bass Pro Shop superstore. Unable to escape its murky past — yellow …

The subtle crush. The reciprocity. The perfect date. The walls around your heart slowly receding. The full on infatuation. The carnal connection. The imperfection. The dark descent. The ultimatum. The separation. The devastation. The peace. Syd, the impossibly cool writer, producer, and frontwoman of the beloved alt-R&B band The Internet, …

Camila Cabello is healing, growing, and learning from her past — that’s the message of her third solo album. At first glance, the title Familia appears to be a misnomer, as many of its songs are inspired by heartbreak. But listen closer and you’ll hear a relatable journey into what …

No one is more aware of what people think about John Mayer than John Mayer himself. The title of his eighth studio album acknowledges past accusations of sad-boy mopery. The muted pastels of the throwback cover art, complete with a simulation of the “Nice Price” sticker that Columbia Records used …

At 36, Buffalo rapper Benny the Butcher is a sort of old head in the genre, where artists with wild energy and disparate stories break young. Benny’s been working at it since the mid-Aughts, but didn’t manage to cut through the noise nationally until his 2018 mixtape Tana Talk 3. …

Although they’ve yet to be nominated for a Grammy, for whatever baffling reasons, one can only imagine the hand-wringing conversations about which category would apply to Lake Street Dive. For 15 years, they’ve been pop’s outliers: A band fronted by a lead singer with roots in jazz and cabaret, playing …

Zayn Malik kicks off his third solo album wondering, as its title indicates, if anybody is listening to him. And as you might guess, he’s pretty sure nobody is: “My brain lives with the cannabis/Can I resist the dark abyss?” he offers on “Calamity,” a silly spoken-word poem in which …

“Sometimes you gotta trust yourself,” Tom Petty sings on “California,” one of the many alternative tracks that never made the original release of Petty’s 1994 masterpiece Wildflowers. “California” is no new revelation: it’s one of several songs from the Wildflowers sessions that, strangely enough, would appear two years later on …

With civic arts support low on American capitalism’s to-do list, orchestras and composers are canoodling more frequently with rock and pop acts — who of course have their own struggles, wringing pennies from streaming platforms et al. When the outcome isn’t just simpleminded hits-with-strings reheats or half-cooked vanity concertos, it’s …