Album Reviews

Though the Argentine artist Nicki Nicole has a found a niche fusing silky R&B with hints of trap and reggaeton, her new album Parte De Míopens in an unexpected way: with a gossamer piano ballad, dripping with longing and loneliness. The song is guided by her delicate, almost bruised vocals—which …

Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth are an odd coupling — he’s prone to loose, decadent, druggy overtures while she actually screams primally — and their differences become even more apparent on Utopian Ashes, a concept album of sorts that they made together about two lovers’ preamble to …

In 2018, Lucy Dacus kicked off her album Historian with a startling admission: “The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit, I had a coughing fit.” That line was followed by six minutes of eviscerating lyrics and guitar riffs, making for a towering indie-rock moment right up there with the …

Way back when, Dylan and the Beatles demonstrated how musicians could evolve dramatically, overhauling their sound on record once or even twice a year. They were hardly alone, but few others shape-shifted during than era like Tim Buckley. By 1968, the L.A.-via-Orange-Country troubadour was moving beyond the keening-balladeer mode of …

The first Heart single to feature Nancy Wilson on lead vocals was “These Dreams,” with an iconic video that featured the guitarist and her sister Ann with peak Eighties hair, silk blazers, fog, and some more hair. But flash-forward to the present — with all that glam preserved on a …

For the past decade-plus Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, who records as The Weather Station, has been offering up piercing introspections on a series of decreasingly folky albums, beginning with the bedroom roots of 2009’s The Line. From the very start, Lindeman has put her own off-kilter, stark spin on traditional …

In 2019, a new singer-guitarist from London with the intriguing name Beabadoobee released “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus,” an immediately addictive swirl of buzzing guitars and lyrics about her blue hair and mutable moods and sitting at home crying to Pavement while loving every minute of her journey from …

It makes sense that Ryan Kattner of Man Man would release his best album to date during a pandemic. His band persona, Honus Honus, is perpetually down on his luck — bizarre and lovelorn, lonely and insane — haunted. In short, he’s all of us right now. Dream Hunting in …

Somewhere inside every album Beck has made since Mellow Gold — his 1994 surprise attack of slippery irony and hip-hop bravado — is the solo folk-blues singer caught on that year’s One Foot in the Grave, writing about despair with a surrealist edge while turned toward hope. That is the …

An Afrofuturist Kate Bush with some fierce pole-dancing moves, FKA Twigs lept from kinetic music video extra to among the most electric of electronic pop acts with her debut LP1 five years ago. On Magdalene, her long-brewing followup, she moves to the next level, making music that resists being pinned …