It’s the presence of Williams, who co-produced the LP with her husband Tom Overby, that ties Sunset Kids together. A master lyricist, she helps Malin refine and focus his own words.

What’s most impressive about The Highwomen, handsomely produced with Nashville neoclassicist Dave Cobb, is how artfully, and matter-of-factly, it engages social issues. Credit the concentration of songwriting talent. Every woman here is at the top of her game.

In its length, quality, and economy, Close It Quietly can evoke tour de force sprees like Elvis Costello’s Get Happy! or Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Kline sings about some serious coming-of-age stuff here, but in the casual way of someone organizing their room, not getting lost in the pathways of their ennui.

Saves the World isn’t self-aware so much as frighteningly emotionally intelligent. The sensitive feelers that populate the group’s sadsack pop tales are sharp analyzers of the behavior around them, as quick to deftly psychoanalyze (see the devastating second verse of “Taken”) as they are to simply point the finger at themselves.

Post Malone curates as much as he creates, and there’s not a misplaced feature among the 10 spread across seven of these tracks.

Mostly, the tech-fetishism, pop hooks, and idiosyncratic heart work together, with Charli functioning as much as expert curator and cheerleader as main attraction.

It’s a total departure, her kaleidoscopic mix of decades’ worth of R&B, hip-hop, blues, and gospel, steeped in trippy laptop sonics and deeply personal political urgency. ... “I just want Georgia to notice me,” she sings, confronting oppression with faint hope. It’s a strikingly bold moment on a record that’s full of them.

They’re back with the fantastic new Memory, unafraid to show their scars as they find new ways to nuance a sound that beautifully takes Eighties and Nineties indie noise back to Sixties girl groups, surf-rock and California pop.

Sure, the hooks and the lyrics are as sharp as ever, too, the latter functioning as part anxious messages-in-bottles, part baroque bubblegum life preservers. It’s panic-attack pop, fretting its way through vintage good-time chord changes, and letting us know we’re not alone.

Ode To Joy shows off some of Wilco’s prettiest and most comforting songs, Tweedy’s enlarged heart transplanted back into a band — its lineup now unchanged for roughly half of its 25-year history — that’s never sounded more empathic.

DaBaby’s regular invocation of vehicular speed makes KIRK feel like one continuous, relentless flex.

uknowhatimsayin¿ succeeds as a kind of high-wire act that balances Brown’s folk hero status against his documentarian sensibilities, tragedy against comedy, bluster against self-mockery. It’s shorter than his previous albums, and also lean in a way that few other rappers could replicate. Five albums in, he remains a singular talent who only needs a few short words to tell a good story.

More than 50 years later, the fuzzed-out riffs and mellow harmonies are still intact, the lyrics just as heartfelt.

The sound’s kaleidoscopic.

A new, six-disc anniversary box set offers a holistic look at the album with demos, a completely remixed version of the record, and a live recording.

Earl’s choose-your-own-adventure raps belie the precision of his lyrics. His dense words-per-second ratio, as well as the fluid, associative logic that guides Feet of Clay, makes each song appear as a bottled capsule of unfiltered stream-of-consciousness that spills out of him like water from an Artesian well.

A fresh listen to No Other, Clark’s lone Asylum album, reminds you both of its beauty and its occasional more frustrating aspects. The songs, which stretch out to as long as eight minutes, aren’t played as much as unfurled. ... Shorn of the choir that appears on many of its songs, the outtakes are vital for the way they allow us to zero in on Clark’s singing. It’s easy to forget how robust a vocalist Clark could be

The reissue may not be a treasure trove of unheard material, but the gems that echo the sounds of the American South are comforting and familiar. And that’s not a bad thing.

Thanks for the Dance is a surprise, a sort of séance as shiva, a magnificent parting shot that’s also that exceptionally rare thing — a posthumous work as alive, challenging, and essential as anything issued in the artist’s lifetime.

For all of his vigor for partnership, is a solitary classicist, a singer-songwriter wrestling with the dynamics of desire and emotional commitment. Hyperspace is grounded in that realism.

It’s a band whose great talent has always been its aspirational one-world melodies, now sounding much more like the world.

An album where she keeps finding ways to give her artistry a new edge.

It’s a streamlined, party-ready, primary-colors take on the enduring concept of the rock & roll starman. It’s also as much as fun as anyone short of Bruno Mars is having with a band these days.

Rare is shockingly, and beautifully, upbeat.

James Alex re-ups the Replacements' underdog thrash for a new generation, and he's so on point. [Jan 2020, p.84]

Excellent. ... The singer doesn’t even come close to finding peace of mind in these songs. Still, she knows how to make it a thrilling quest.

While it can often go dark, the vibe is empathic; Shake’s said the record was designed to comfort, and counter hate.

On the excellent High Road, she fuses all her passions together—the road she’s traveling in the title is a spiritual path, but it’s also “high” in the earthier sense.

Can be folky or synth-y, full of tunes and lyrics that follow a strange logic toward rich epiphanies. [Feb 2020, p.85]

Father of All… is a bountiful act of recovered rock memory, an effortlessly affirming argument that the first mosh pit or car radio contact high you get when you’re 13 years old can be enough to sustain you long into life. It’s a deep, deep thing, and, in a sense, a defiant and subtly political statement, too.

This box set is the type of treatment usually reserved for Beatles reissues, but because it’s Zappa The Hot Rats Sessions is a more delightfully quirky. It doesn’t contain everything, the way something like the Stooges’ 1999 box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, did, but because of the Zappa-esque details, it feels more comprehensive, for better or worse.

Honeymoon will be an immediate boon to fans of heart-on-sleeve indie bands like That Dog, Waxahatchee, Charli Bliss, and the Beths. Trifilio is a very good songwriter with a lovely, somewhat folk-toned voice, and Beach Bunny are all good musicians who’ve attained an impressive amount of musical know-how in their few years together.

Color Theory could have been a true indie-rock stunner if more of its songs hit with the same individually distinct charge as the ones on her debut. Still, Allison’s nostalgic sadness suggests a bright musical future.

Map of the Soul: 7 is their most smashing album yet, showing off their mastery of different pop styles from rap bangers to slow-dance ballads to post-Swedish electro-disco to prog-style philosophizing.

Unlike the band’s recent Faith and Grace collection, which crams the Stax material onto a one-disc compilation, Come Go With Me offers the first-ever complete portrait of the group’s most dynamic, and in some ways, most turbulent, period.

The effortlessness with which the Secret Sisters articulate their musical ambitions places Saturn Return among recent country-roots gems from songwriters like Jason Isbell and Pistol Annies. If working through their struggles has been a strange process, the wait was more than worth it.

As great as their Nineties high points, a hazy, globalist British rock that's loose and optimistically eclectic. [Mar 2020, p.87]

Suga might sound like a moodier big sister to Tina Snow or Hot Girl Meg. But as the new songs show, Megan at her most vulnerable is still tough as a tank.

Gigaton is a testament to how Pearl Jam’s own deeply held dissatisfaction still burns brighter than ever.

Lee’s sound design—the rush of Uzi getting sucked into a portal, the hum of the spaceship engine, the unsettling, pulsating rumble coming from the great beyond—co-exists seamlessly with the album’s production. It creates narrative tension and helps create a broader cosmic context for his sex marathons and shopping sprees, for the great eccentric force with which he raps and sings.

There’s a new richness to Crutchfield’s voice that smooths out the emotional extremities.

Future Nostalgia is a breathtakingly fun, cohesive and ambitious attempt to find a place for disco in 2020. Incredibly, Lipa is successful: the upbeat album that she decided to release a week earlier than planned is the perfect balm for a stressful time.

The songs are spacious with gentle buzzing, humming, and exhaling drones that slowly evolve, complementing often pretty piano music.

The music turns much darker Ghosts VI, which, by proxy, makes it the more interesting of the two. ... Unlike the first Ghosts collection, these albums feel like distinct artistic statements.

Glaspy doesn’t tear down so much expand and build upon the warm Seventies folk-rock of her wonderful 2016 debut Emotions + Math, incorporating drum loops and processed vocals into an effortless mix of swooping indie-pop (“Without Him”), industrial noise (“What’s the Point”) and Ben Folds-piano sing-alongs (“Vicious”).

McBryde’s second major-label release, Never Will, is just as daring and deep, sometimes deceptively so [as Girl Going Nowhere].

Combining crunchy nu-metal guitar riffs with a penchant for early-aughts R&B-pop production in the vein of Aaliyah and ‘NSync, Sawayama sounds like Britney Spears’ Blackout by way of Korn — and it inexplicably works.

The organic, delightfully earnest tracks blend Miss Colombia‘s avant-Latin sonic palette with revered cross-generational traditions, forging a new world of musical borderlessness that Pimienta is glad to call home.

Her best LP since 1998's landmark Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. [May 2020, p.89]

At 15 tracks, Petals for Armor can occasionally feel redundant; two or three songs feel like retread territory that was better explored elsewhere, and there’s only so many metaphors you can create for flowers. Still, the album’s final third, while the most pop-oriented section, is also its most interesting. ... It’s the sound of an artist blooming into some the best music of her career.

Dream Hunting may not be traditionally lovely, but it lives and breathes. And that’s really all we can do these days.

It both feels like a continuance of the band’s classic Eighties sound and it’s actually good.

His most ambitious music yet on his fifth LP. ... These are age-old ideas, but they don’t feel that way when he’s singing them. It’s par for the course for an artist who specializes in embodying pop archetypes, and making them new again.

Mostly, Gaga has focused Chromatica’s spectrum on the kind of body-moving music that comes naturally to her. Dance music will always be her salvation, and her pop renaissance couldn’t come at a better time.

RTJ4, which the band rush-released a few days ahead of schedule, is laser-focused. ... Mike unloads on racist cops, systemic poverty, corporate media, and other eternal enemies. But the album never feels preachy, because the music bounces as much as it brays, with an elastic flow and deep history.

They’ve upped their game even further on Sideways to New Italy, and the result is a perfect summertime indie-rock record.

Her lyrics are often uncomfortably revealing, as she peels apart her feelings about love, sex, sin, femininity, masculinity, Catholic guilt, and violence and how they all define her — often on the same song. She’s a rare artist who thrives on overthinking everything (hey, she is French) and the album’s general grandiosity never feels obnoxious.

Punisher is more sure of itself than its predecessor, thanks to Bridgers’ sharpened and studied songwriting. Her couplets, even more biting this time around, are either brutally self-directed (“I’m a bad liar/With a savior complex”) or just quietly dazzling.

It plays out like the Instagram Live DJ sets and password-protected Zoom parties occurring nightly all over the world, something intimately comforting and oddly unifying when people so desperately need it.

The album is an immediate gem in their still-expanding catalog; it’s a resonant reflection on pain, depression, love and home that forsakes some of their big, drum-heavy pop leanings for a smoother, more inward experience.

With Jump Rope Gazers, the Beths — Stokes, Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck — prove that despite a global pandemic, it’s still possible to have a good time. They might not be excited, but we sure are.

All of the pieces in the box set complete a puzzle that explains how McCartney found himself again and hit the stride that has propelled him to the present day.

Giving both of these records some distance allows for the songs to have breathing room, and for Whole New Mess to stand on its own.

The ska-reggae legend sounds stronger than ever on Got to Be Tough, his first album in more than a decade.

Goats Head Soup didn’t — and still doesn’t — sound like what one would have expected from the Stones after Exile. ... The alternate mixes of a few of its songs don’t add terribly much, but the same can’t be said of an instrumental jam on “Dancing with Mr. D,.” which lets you eavesdrop as the band locks into a groove and jams without Jagger. ... The Brussels Affair bristles.

Americana firebrand makes a grand rock & roll record worthy of her Bowie jumpsuits. [Sep 2020, 68]

Hearing it reimagined 50 years later, the album’s themes — transcendence, renewal, breaking free of materialism — resonate even more than they did all those years ago.

Blue Hearts gushes more piss and vinegar than Stanley Kubrick could fill a hallway with, but what makes it jaw-dropping is the precision with which Mould has focused his ire on conservatives, evangelicals, homophobes, while leaving room for some self-criticism as well. ... Blue Hearts often feels like a lost Hüsker Dü album with Mould howling invective over his buzzsawing guitar.

Pecknold has come up with a pleasing album about letting go and being thankful for what we’ve got, be it love in a time of quarantine or an old Silver Jews record.

While SM1 was ineffable and mystic, Savage Mode II spells out its influences and its place in the canon of Southern rap.

The most interesting stuff here is in the Blackberry Way Demos, some of which came out on a previous expanded edition of the album. ... Even the collection’s rough mixes — usually the most over larded part of a box set — offer new insights.

Springsteen sounds at peace. Although the LP doesn’t sport the same youthful urgency as the recordings he cut in the Seventies and Eighties — there’s no “Badlands” or “Cover Me” here — you can hear how the anger and depression of his tougher times and his many split personalities delivered him to stability, and the most fascinating parts of Letter to You are when he comes out of the shadows to admit that he realizes it, too.

In the years since Petty released his 1994 classic album, he slowly revealed, on-stage and in interviews, more about the darkly personal inspirations for the record, this retrospective box does the same for the sprawling, bursting creative process that went into making Wildflowers. It’s the definitive artistic statement that newly illuminates one of the most fruitful, inspired periods of the American legend’s career.

Painful memories are twirling around in Lenker’s head on Songs. It’s an album that lives up to it’s name by capturing the basic, natural truth of her art.

Full of delicate folk mopers, lighthearted country romps, and genuinely sweet love songs, as well as his best guitar playing in years. [Dec 2020, p.70]

Although gems are scattered throughout The Early Years, its last two discs — a homemade demo followed by two 1967 sets at the Ann Arbor club the Canterbury House–are the keepers.

Megan’s own flow is musical enough to offer its own hooks without outside ornamentation. A track like “Body” shows Megan’s pop strengths as she stretches the title into a stream of ody-ody-odys so bouncy you can practically see booties popping to the beat.

McCartney III isn't ambitious like Egypt Station - like his first two self-titled solo statements, it's a spontaneous palette cleanser after a labored studio project. [Nov 2020, p.69]

Unlike her previous album Younger Now, where Cyrus dabbled in a rootsier sound without much substance, she actually has a lot to say on Plastic Hearts.

This time, they go lighter on the samples and heavier on post-trip hop soundscapes and contemporary singers, making for recombinant pop that feels joyfully seamless and organic.

El Último Tour Del Mundo isn’t by any means a repudiation of the genres that have made Bad Bunny a star; if anything, it’s proof of how far they can stretch.

Playboi Carti—Gen Z’s answer to Nosferatu—performs emotions, toggles between them, and disguises them with a disquieting ease. He has never been more enigmatic.

Though brief, with a runtime of just over 30-minutes, the EP shows Sullivan crafting a complete constellation of love and loss.

The Foos’ 10th album is upbeat even by their uniquely well-adjusted standards, returning to their core Nineties alt-rock sound minus any gimmicks, detours, or shenanigans. From the first track, “Making a Fire,” the album is brighter and more optimistic than anything they’ve ever done.

Ignorance, solidifies the 36 year-old as one of the most audaciously inventive auteurs working in the broad singer-songwriter tradition. This ten song collection broadens the Weather Station’s sonic palette by foregrounding fluttering flutes, crisp orchestral sections, and, most importantly, a propulsive rhythm section.

Like Akomfrah’s Data Thief, Madlib sees the connections between the past and future. On Sound Ancestors, he manages to give us a sense of what those connections feel like.

There’s something about the way she presents her diary entries that makes her more than just an exhibitionist. She’s not afraid to sing about her innermost feelings, things people would never say out loud. In fact, she sounds comfortable belting out about how broken she is, and it’s that courage that makes the mood of the record complete.

What results is a fully realized artistic statement without a skippable track, even if a few songs trail off a bit toward the end — almost as if Baker knows the rush of cathartic energy has left everyone involved a little exhausted, including herself. And that’s just fine, because this is enough reality for a lifetime, let alone one record.

For as sparse as it sounds, there’s great depth to Carnage.

June has never sounded more fully and thrillingly herself than she does on her latest album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, which merges pop ambition, folksy open-heartedness and blues wisdom.

As a whole, 77–81 presents Gang of Four’s brilliance while putting it on context.

At 10 compact, differently beautiful songs, Driver is the work of an artist entering the springtime of their brilliance, as good as singer-songwriter indie-rock can get. It’s the kind of record you can’t but feel lucky to live in.

While it may not have as many grandiose showpieces as its older sibling – no nine-minute “Venice Bitch” to be found here – Chemtrails is every bit as sharp and prescient of a cultural artifact from pop’s premier Cassandra.

Eighty-year-old sax great Sanders pushes his sound to its most heavenly extreme. [Apr 2021, p.73]

It’s the cheekiness and humor of Deacon that really shines, without sacrificing the complex theatricality that has made Serpentwithfeet such a standout project.

It's her incisive songwriting that makes her fifth LP a treat. [Apr 2021, p.73]

The new versions somehow sound less slick than the original. Her voice feels lower in the mix this time around, but for the most part she’s gone to extreme lengths to mimic the polished Nashville textures and soundscapes of the first Fearless. ... The final half-dozen originals — all previously unreleased — are revelatory glimpses into Swift’s working process.

The record feels like a culmination of all her experience, suffused into an album that threads decades of music and heritage into a thrilling, organic whole.