I spent the last 45 minutes listening to a man call his customers “my girls”, need I say more? TheSteve Madden sat down with former Stanford roommates Phoebe Gates (yes, Bill Gates’ daughter) and Sophia Kianni, and went full origin story, dupe culture, Mary Janes, Gen Z, and struggles. Even his tanning girl slid in the Burnouts’ Tik Tok comments section just to bless it all, talk about cult following. Here’s everything.
There’s nothing like a harsh wake-up call. Madden drops out of college, University of Miami, the phone rings. Not a venture capitalist, not a business angel, just his dad, telling him to figure out what he’s going to do next because the family funding was over. Brutal, but hey, we all owe him one I guess? He lands a job in a shoe store and learns everything you could learn really, which if you ask him, started with “waiting on hysterical women selling them shoes”.
At the time, he lives in small-town Lawrence, near Queens, while his friends are 21, getting their first NYC job, taking the railroad, pretending to be grownups, making fun of him for staying behind with a shoe horn sticking out of his pocket. I mean, super practical, but really?
Early Fame: Before Hashtags and Dupes, There Were Mary Janes… or Lous
The first shoe that went viral under the Madden name, was a Mary Jane, sorry, a Marylou. Early on, Madden noticed that nobody paid attention to the youth market, so naturally, he did. He tweaked the classic with some fresh little twists and the phone suddenly started ringing. Inspiration to success at its finest. There’s even a reference in “Wolf of Wall Street”. Jake Hoffman, who hung out last with Madden the day before the podcast was filmed, played him in the movie, but that came with the cost of having shoes thrown at him after 1993’s IPO during broker chaos. Glamorous, right?
The conversation went on with duping, and Madden’s hot takes were hotter than platform sandals in 2014. “I’m a f***ing pirate. In fact, I want to get a tattoo of a pirate.” Gold, literally. When it comes to designing new pieces, Madden “just has a feel for it”. He described the label as “a big stew”, stirring around the hottest luxury designs and making them their own (affordable too). Inspiration comes from the streets, back in the day, he’d stroll through the West Village, soaking in what everyone was wearing. If a shoe is walking three NYC blocks three different times, that’s basically it, but besides design, speed to market is everything to the Steve Madden company. Moral of the story is, if there’s a Gucci shoe taking over SoHo, better be sure a similar one is on the way to get the Steve Madden special.
Real CEOs Get Stress Pimples Too: Prison, Ego, Struggles
“Someone asked me yesterday, ‘What did you do? I want to be like you.’ I said I suffered a lot.” And really, that’s part of the Steve Madden story. From the 1993 IPO with Jordan Belfort’s firm, yes, the “bucket shop” scheme his childhood friends cooked up, he indeed was the product. Lesson learned though, sometimes you raise money you didn’t think you could, survive the chaos, and somehow it pays off.
Prison? Survival first, creativity maybe later. Reputation? Already questionable since 15. Ego? Constant battle. I mean, I get it, having your name tied to a multi-billion dollar empire starting from zero, surely has its ups and downs, I could imagine the fight of detaching yourself from it. I could also imagine late-night self-talks, anxiety breakouts and bad hair days, ouf.
He came back to Steve Madden, after being forced to let go, with a bunch of loyal, trusted and trusting people keeping the lights on. My favorite takeaway from this podcast would be, know what you’re not good at. It’s totally fine to suck at numbers or tech as a creative, it’s a crime not to bring in people who don’t. Hire smart, ride-or-die people. Period. Payoff comes later, and it won’t be money or success, it will be spotting a girl in your shoes in a random shared elevator. That’s CEO validation right there. Luck optional, but highly recommended.
Steve Madden, the man unofficially adopted by Gen Z, who one day just decided to go with it, is the perfect example of what happens when goals, instinct and a slightly delusional level of confidence align. Copying or not, he built an empire by watching people on the street, trusting the right ones, and surviving everything from Wall Street schemes to prison cafeterias. In a world obsessed with overnight success, he’s our proof that the real win is longevity. And let’s be honest, the true reward is still spotting a stranger in your shoes on the way to the 12th floor.
Video games grow up fast. One year you are jogging through a fantasy forest punching goblins with a tree branch. The next year you are sorting through layered skill trees, seasonal currencies, prestige ranks, and technical upgrades so intricate they might require a lab coat. None of these additions dropped from the sky. They are the product of a long push toward one thing. Reward design that feels as structured and deliberate as any loyalty program, fitness app, or digital badge system.
And in the same way reviewers at casino.org/canada/ break down which online casino options feature the most innovative mechanics, players now judge games on how well their reward systems work. Not on their volume of shiny trinkets but on the quality of the loops, the pacing, the sense of meaning. If a game offers gear unlocks, skill progression, and event bonuses, it is basically building a reward economy inside the walls of a fantasy world.
What Science Says About Why These Systems Work
Here is where things get interesting. The reward structures you see in modern games line up neatly with established gamification research. A systematic mapping study of gamification mechanics found that points, levels, badges, and challenges are the core ingredients that reliably generate engagement. Nothing mystical here. Players want feedback, goals, and a sense that something new waits behind the next swing or shot.
But timing matters just as much as the reward itself. Some games hand you predictable rewards. Others use variable schedules where you never quite know what the next loot chest will give you. That unpredictability has been shown in gamification studies to increase motivation and attention. It taps into the same behavioral learning principles that drive highly engaging systems outside of gaming.
Yet here is a twist. A study comparing random and non random reward systems in video games discovered that players often prefer non random rewards because they feel more control over their progress. Predictability is not boring if it respects the player’s time. It can actually deepen engagement because players feel they earned their upgrades rather than lucked into them.
And then there is the brain itself. A longitudinal fMRI study found that video game training preserved activity in the ventral striatum. This is the part of the brain involved in reward sensitivity. In plain English, regular gameplay kept people more responsive to positive feedback.
So when players say the ding of a level up feels good, they are not exaggerating. Their neurons are literally firing in ways that agree with them.
Gear Unlocks and Skill Progression are Reward Loops Dressed in Armor
Gear unlock systems are one of the cleanest examples of structured digital rewards. You complete missions or challenges. You gain points, XP, or reputation. You hit a threshold. And then finally you unlock the weapon, armor set, or ultra specific pair of gloves that give two percent more crit damage. Gamification research shows that these systems work because they satisfy autonomy and competence. Players decide which path to take and they see visible growth when they reach the destination.
Skill trees add another layer. You invest in abilities. You watch your character become more capable. You can specialize early or spread your points like an indecisive gambler. Psychologically this creates a state known as flow where challenge and ability match up in a satisfying, occasionally addictive way.
Event bonuses change the tempo of the whole system. Limited time modes or seasonal challenges add urgency and novelty. A gamification study of freemium style reward loops found that time sensitive rewards keep people engaged far longer than permanent ones because the player feels like they might miss out.
Why These Features Keep Players Hooked
The real secret behind reward systems is simple. They work because they are built on behavioral mechanics that have been tested across fields. Daily reward systems in mobile games for example have been shown to boost retention by as much as fifty percent. Not because the rewards are large but because the habit loop forms quickly.
Rewards also change how players interact with each other. A study on incentives and social behavior found that structured rewards shape cooperation and competition in group settings. Players compare gear, chase achievements, and talk about who unlocked what. The reward is doing social work as much as mechanical work.
The surprising part is that the most engaging rewards are not always the flashiest. A predictable but meaningful reward often beats a rare but random one. Consistency builds trust. And trust keeps people logging in even after the excitement wears off.
The Complicated Side of Rewards
Reward systems can backfire. The same study that highlighted the appeal of non random rewards showed that randomness can erode the feeling of autonomy. If a player feels they are chasing luck rather than progress, engagement drops. Another review found that predictable fixed rewards can lose value over time and reduce long term engagement.
There is also an ethical line. Some reward systems resemble gambling mechanics too closely. When rewards become financially loaded or probability based, designers need to step carefully.
Why This All Matters for the Future of Games
Technical upgrades, skill systems, and event bonuses are engineered reward machines with roots in cognitive science, psychology, and gamification research. When they work well they create progression that feels personal and earned. When they are lazy or manipulative players feel it instantly.
Games now compete on the sophistication of these systems. The best systems build meaning and the rewards shape the experience. They make you care about why you are earning it.
Over the last ten years, online casinos have become massively popular, attracting millions of players to a realm of slot games, roulette wheels, live dealer tables, and never-ending promotions. As this expansion took place, the old brick gambling myths that surrounded physical casinos have migrated online, while new ones have originated from social media, forums, and people’s thinking. The majority of these myths do not harm, yet a few could misguide players into making the wrong choices, incurring losses, or forming fallacious notions about the workings of online gaming. It is quite essential for a person who wishes to enjoy a more balanced and sagacious online casino experience to distinguish the authentic from the mere superstitions.
Myth 1: Online Casinos Are Rigged Against Players
This is the most common belief, and it has been around since the first digital casinos were made. The idea that platforms secretly adjust odds, control results, or manipulate games stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how regulated gambling works. Best online casinos Solomon Islands use Random Number Generators or RNGs, which are the sources of the most independent and unpredictable result of any spin, card, or roll. These systems are regularly audited by third-party regulators such as eCOGRA, iTech Labs, and GLI. If a real casino is found to be manipulating the results, it will have its license revoked immediately and be liable to pay numerous legal penalties.
However, players sometimes mistake manipulation for variance. Losing streaks can be so close to the skin that one can even feel them as personal, especially when they come up right after depositing money. But randomness does not serve or favor any emotions. If you are on a hot streak or hitting loss after loss, the results are still determined by mathematical probability. The casino already has a built-in house advantage; it does not have to cheat to make money.
Myth 2: Slot Machines “Warm Up” and Pay Out After a Long Dry Run
Isn’t it a fact that one of the oldest myths around casinos is the idea that machines become ‘due’ for a payout? Still, numerous players believe that this concept can be transferred to online slots, hence they keep looking for the game about to burst with a big win in the offline branch. This misconception overlooks the fact of RNG (Random Number Generator) technology.
Every time a slot—whether online or on a land-based casino—is played, the result is totally different from all the previous ones. There is no memory, no buildup, and no internal pressure to release a significant win.
Some gamers even try to find exact patterns, for instance, a slot machine that is said to give more bonus rounds during certain hours or days. Nevertheless, the reality is that it is the number of players that varies, not the machine’s performance. If many people are playing at the same time, then the chance of a jackpot occurrence is higher simply due to a greater number of spins and not because the slot is being ’kind’.
It is impossible for a cold slot to turn into a hot one over time, and a hot slot can be turned cold by the very next spin.
Myth 3: Using a “System” Guarantees a Win in Games Like Roulette or Blackjack
Online gamblers are really into strategies, and there is nothing wrong with that as they try to improve their odds. However, the myth that betting systems such as Martingale, Fibonacci, or Labouchère can guarantee profits is still mainly being held. These systems might be instrumental in bankroll management or in creating a temporary streak, but they cannot overpower the house edge that is built into the game.
Casinos determine maximum bet limits in order to stop players from using doubling systems to their advantage. For instance, if a player doubles after every loss in roulette, a long losing streak will either exhaust the player’s bankroll or cause them to reach the table limit.
In blackjack, as card counting will be complicated, if not impossible, online. Random Number Generator (RNG) based blackjack reshuffles the virtual deck after every hand, and live-dealer blackjack uses continuous shuffling machines. The notion that players can use systems to regularly outsmart the house disregards the mathematical reality: one can only make their chances better but consistent wins cannot be guaranteed.
A new wave of creative expression is emerging in digital culture, and it is arriving in the form of tiny, handcrafted worlds. Miniature art kits, once considered a niche hobby, are now reaching a wider audience of designers, gamers, builders, and creatives who are looking for something more tactile in an increasingly virtual landscape.
One of the brands driving this shift is Anavrin, known for its detailed book nooks. Their miniature scenes recreate atmospheric locations in a way that feels both artistic and immersive, and they have gained attention across online creative communities.
A Return to Hands-On Creativity
Part of the appeal comes from a growing desire to step away from screens and return to hands-on making. Miniature kits allow builders to assemble architectural details, layered textures, and LED-lit scenes that feel like tiny dioramas. The process blends the satisfaction of DIY with the visual impact of finished art.
For artists and hobbyists, these kits provide an accessible way to explore worldbuilding without the complexity of 3D software or digital illustration. Each piece is constructed through focused, mindful steps that mirror traditional crafts such as model building and set design.
Where Art, Gaming, and Design Overlap
Miniature kits have also found a natural overlap with gaming culture. Builders compare the experience to creating environments inside role-playing games, except with physical materials instead of digital tools. The final result feels like something taken straight from a fantasy map, a manga panel, or a cinematic cutscene.
Designers and architects see them as compact studies in lighting, scale, and spatial storytelling. For creatives who enjoy working between disciplines, these miniature scenes offer a unique way to explore visual worldbuilding on a small scale.
A Growing Community
Social platforms and maker forums have played a major role in the trend’s rise. Videos showcasing intricate miniatures attract thousands of views, and creators often share progress shots, mods, and customised builds. The community celebrates both artistic precision and personal interpretation, making it a welcoming space for beginners and experienced builders alike.
What started as a niche interest has grown into a visible movement, supported by a mix of hobbyists, collectors, designers, and fans of storytelling.
Why Miniature Art is Resonating
This trend reflects a broader cultural shift. Many people are looking for creative outlets that feel grounding and personal. Miniature kits offer a blend of nostalgia, craftsmanship, and modern design that aligns with these values.
They also function as decor once completed. Whether displayed on a bookshelf, desk, or studio shelf, these tiny scenes serve as conversation pieces that represent hours of focused creativity.
A Trend With Staying Power
As interest in creative hobbies continues to grow, miniature art kits are well-positioned to remain part of the culture. They offer a balance of challenge and creativity, and they appeal to audiences across gaming, design, craft, and home decor.
For many creators, the appeal is simple. In a world filled with digital noise, there is something refreshing about building a small, detailed universe by hand.
Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1948 melodrama Woman opens with a chorus of dance hall performers professing through song a desire to fall madly in love. Among the dancers is a former salesgirl named Toshiko (Mitsuko Mito), whose criminal boyfriend Tadashi (Eitaro Ozawa) shows up backstage, instructs her to meet him the next day, and marches off with a newly gained limp. The picture ends on a nearly identical note, with the same revue company performing the same number. However, there’s a crucial difference. Before going on stage, Toshiko meets with her cohorts to issue the following advice: “You can’t fall for someone just because he loves you. If he’s a bad person, you must despise him whatever the situation.” Between these bookends is the day that prompted her to make her declaration, a day wherein she underwent the pain necessary to escape the man who’d long brought misery into her life.
Woman was Kinoshita’s ninth directorial effort and his fifth in the postwar era. Like many Japanese pictures of its age, it’s headed by characters responding to the social conditions that spawned from their country’s devastation. At the time of the picture’s release, 2-4% of Japanese lived in “temporary housing” typically comprised of scrap lumber, sheets of metal, and marsh reed screens. Food shortage and unemployment had metastasized, and crime (organized and not) was endemic to the point that a magazine editorial quipped, “The Only People Not Living Illegally Are Those in Jail.” Woman takes this historic framework and sets within it a two-person story—Toshiko’s lover is a war veteran with a history of theft and extortion—and places heavy emphasis on character psychology.
The story, written and directed by Kinoshita, is told almost entirely from Toshiko’s perspective and takes time cluing both her and the viewer into the drama. While on the train to meet Tadashi, our heroine glimpses a fellow passenger’s newspaper and—upon it—a headline regarding a robbery. Thinking nothing of it, she disembarks at Okayama Station and encounters two of her lover’s associates. But it’s not until she rendezvouses with Tadashi and observes the manner in which he studies a copy of the aforementioned news story—about how a wealthy family and two house servants were robbed at knifepoint—that she realizes he’s committed his most barbarous crime yet. We also learn that, in the past, Tadashi persuaded Toshiko to leave her store job and work in a dance hall, and that he’s regularly depended on her for money.
Toshiko gives up her initial plea to end the relationship when the conman insists he can change. Tadashi breaks into the spiel of a man claiming to have been betrayed by society: how he began life as a child like any other; how he was misled into fighting in a war; how he came to feel his country rejected him. But even though Toshiko falls for his speech and promises, director Kinoshita reveals to us—but not to her—that it’s an act. In close-ups, we see Tadashi pause mid-speech to thrust quick sideways glances at his girlfriend, gauging the success of his manipulation. The viewer realizes Tadashi is an immoral person using the war and postwar conditions to excuse crimes he’s not ashamed of. (Incidentally, my only reservation with this scene is that Kinoshita doesn’t round out the postwar theme by attributing Tadashi’s limp to a war injury; instead, it’s implied to be the result of having been shot by a policeman. At the same time, I wonder if the director made this choice simply to avoid repeating himself, as he’d already depicted a disabled veteran in 1946’s The Girl I Loved.)
Only after the couple reaches the seaside community of Atami does Toshiko see through Tadashi’s lies, which culminates in him threatening to stab her. Despite the blade pointed in her direction, Toshiko verbally lashes out. “You’re a pickpocket, a thief, and a liar.” “You’re trying to manipulate my feelings.” Claustrophobically taut shots of Toshiko showcase her eyes: once tear-soaked, now burning with anger. Her voice on the soundtrack—formerly morose—manifests in terse words conveying hatred. No longer does she beg to part ways; she makes it clear it will be so. In addition to close-ups, Kinoshita employs a filmmaking tactic favored by his contemporary Akira Kurosawa: using crowds and the environment to accentuate the mood of a scene. (Our heroine runs from Tadashi while Atami citizens stampede toward the coast to put out a fire—emotional chaos supplemented by literal chaos.) And while Toshiko’s lost faith in her lover, an earlier profession of hers—that postwar society has good people in it—is proven when the authorities and citizens save her from Tadashi.
As indicated in the above synopsis, Woman is a small story with just two primary characters and a limited number of sequences. Such material might seem better suited to the length of a short film but here remains gripping thanks to splendid performances and the efforts of a resourceful, often inventive director. Kinoshita’s wise choices begin with keeping the story brisk (a mere sixty-seven minutes), and he maintains visual interest via witty cinematography and editing: quick cuts, close-ups capturing minutiae (e.g., Tadashi’s hands on Toshiko as they hitch a ride to Atami). Early scenes feature lighting technician Ryozo Toyoshima devising startling images reminiscent of film noir, with shadows plastered on walls and dark figures strolling about corridors. As Tadashi, Eitaro Ozawa even resembles a Hollywood gangster: sneering beneath his fedora and dragging his girlfriend around like luggage. His performance is good, though it’s appropriately Mitsuko Mito who steals the show as a woman crumbling under stress before learning to stand up for herself.
The opening credits state Woman was completed in February 1947, though it wasn’t released until April the following year. I have no insight into the matter, but perhaps Japan’s postwar American Occupation authorities (who for years censored domestic movies in both pre- and post-production) gave Kinoshita’s script a pass but quibbled with the finished product. If so, I wonder if objections stemmed from Tadashi having been a soldier, as the Occupation favored stories about servicemen productively reintegrating into society. (Though, as Kyoko Hirano demonstrates in her sublime book Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952, the censors were selective in enforcing their own rules.) The picture, to my eye, doesn’t show signs of last-minute excisions—like, say, Kozaburo Yoshimura’s Temptation (1948)—so my speculation is that run-ins with the authorities, if they occurred, simply resulted in a stalled release.
Woman is notably unhappy compared to Kinoshita’s previous postwar movies—Morning for the Osone Family (1946), The Girl I Loved (1946), Phoenix (1947), and Marriage (1947)—the protagonists of whom endured varying degrees of suffering (sometimes also at the hands of tyrannical people) but emerged with some degree of fulfillment. (Phoenix’s heroine loses her soulmate to war but gains the acceptance of a father-in-law; the protagonist of The Girl I Loved doesn’t marry the person he wants but is grateful to remain a part of her life.) By contrast, Mitsuko Mito’s heroine in Woman survives her ordeal, but her attitude at the end is bleak; the story wraps with her marching off to perform a romantic song-and-dance number, but she herself displays no indication of even wanting bliss moving forward. Earlier Kinoshita films looked toward or even presented the future with optimism; Woman ends cynically in the present and, on that note, constitutes an interesting outlier in this phase of the director’s career.
Bibliography:
Dore, R.P. City Life in Japan: A Study of a Tokyo Ward. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959
Hirano, Kyoko. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992
Prince, Stephen. Audio commentary for Stray Dog. (Criterion Collection DVD), recorded in 2003
The gaming world is constantly evolving, offering new and exciting experiences for both seasoned players and those just starting their journey. With so many genres to explore, it can be overwhelming for new gamers to know where to begin. Fortunately, there are a variety of genres that are perfect for beginners, providing engaging, accessible gameplay while helping new players build their skills and confidence. Here are some must-try game genres for those entering the gaming world in 2026.
Casual Games: Ideal for Newcomers
Casual games have been a staple in the gaming industry for years, offering low-stress, easy-to-learn gameplay. These types of games are perfect for those who are new to gaming or simply looking for something relaxing to play. Casual games are often designed with simple mechanics, colourful graphics, and bite-sized sessions, allowing players to jump in and out of the game without feeling overwhelmed.
Games like Candy Crush Saga or Animal Crossing: New Horizons are excellent examples of casual games that are accessible for beginners. Casual games focus on easy progression and non-competitive play, so players can enjoy the experience at their own pace. Whether you’re matching colourful tiles or designing your own virtual island, casual games are perfect for getting acquainted with the basics of gaming without a steep learning curve.
Online Casino Games: An Engaging Way to Enter the Gaming World
For those who want to try something a little different, online casino games provide an accessible and often beginner-friendly option. These games, such as online slots, poker, or blackjack, allow players to enjoy gaming in a more casual environment when compared to their physical counterparts. Some bettors wager on local sites in the UK, which are licensed by the UKGC and meet local regulations, like GamStop, while other gamers play on international platforms that are licensed outside of the UK. International sites are not required to comply with local rules, like GamStop, and have grown popular because of their flexibility. When searching for the best casinos not on GamStop UK, gamers often look for sites that have a good reputation, large game libraries, and responsive customer service. Whether playing on a local platform or an international site, both new and experienced bettors can easily access a wide range of games.
New players can dive into online casino games with the same ease as any other genre, and with the rise of mobile gaming, these experiences are available on the go, making it easier than ever to jump into the action from anywhere.
Adventure Games: A Great Way to Immerse Yourself
Adventure games are another fantastic genre for new gamers, particularly for those who enjoy story-driven experiences. These games focus on exploration, puzzle-solving, and immersive narratives, which makes them a great choice for players who are looking for something engaging but not too complex. Adventure games tend to be more forgiving in terms of difficulty, with mechanics that emphasise exploration over fast reflexes or complex strategies.
A perfect example of an adventure game for beginners is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Its open world allows players to explore at their own pace, tackling quests and solving puzzles as they go along. For new gamers, adventure games offer an opportunity to experience a rich narrative while developing basic gaming skills like navigation, problem-solving, and resource management. Whether it’s solving puzzles or following an intriguing storyline, adventure games offer a well-rounded introduction to the gaming world.
Simulation Games: Create, Manage, and Relax
Simulation games are another beginner-friendly genre that has been gaining in popularity. These games allow players to experience real-world activities in a virtual setting, whether it’s managing a city, running a farm, or simulating life in a virtual world. The beauty of simulation games lies in their relaxed pace and the freedom they offer players. They often come with low stakes, so new gamers can focus on learning the mechanics of the game without feeling rushed or pressured.
The Sims 4 is a perfect example of a simulation game that’s easy to pick up and play. New gamers can build their dream house, create unique characters, and live out different life scenarios. Simulation games like Cities: Skylinesor Stardew Valley offer a similar experience, where the emphasis is on creativity, management, and strategy. These games provide an excellent foundation for understanding the dynamics of game mechanics and cause-and-effect relationships, all while providing an enjoyable and stress-free experience.
Role-Playing Games (RPGs): For Those Who Want to Dive Deeper
Role-playing games (RPGs) offer a deeper level of engagement, with expansive worlds, intricate storylines, and character progression. While RPGs can seem complex at first glance, many games in this genre are designed to be accessible to beginners, with intuitive tutorials and difficulty options to ease players into the experience. RPGs often allow players to create and develop their characters, making choices that affect the story and gameplay.
For new gamers, Final Fantasy XV or Dragon Quest XI offer a great starting point. These RPGs are known for their engaging stories and turn-based combat, which allows players to think strategically without the need for fast reflexes. The beauty of RPGs lies in their ability to transport players to different worlds, giving them the chance to shape their own adventure. For beginners, RPGs are a great way to immerse themselves in a rich narrative while developing essential gaming skills, like decision-making, combat strategies, and resource management.
Platformers: Perfect for Quick, Fun Sessions
Platformer games are ideal for beginners because they are easy to understand but still offer enough challenge to keep things interesting. These games typically involve controlling a character as they jump, run, and navigate through different levels or environments, often requiring precise timing and coordination. While platformers can be fast-paced, they tend to have forgiving difficulty curves and checkpoints, making them a great option for new players.
Games like Celeste and Super Mario Odyssey are both excellent examples of beginner-friendly platformers. Super Mario Odyssey offers a fun, relaxed experience with straightforward gameplay, while Celeste is a more challenging but rewarding option for those who enjoy precision and problem-solving. Platformers allow new gamers to develop basic motor skills and reflexes, and their straightforward mechanics make them easy to jump into without much prior gaming experience.
Conclusion: The Endless Possibilities for New Gamers
For those new to gaming, 2026 presents an exciting range of genres that cater to all kinds of preferences and skill levels. Whether you’re exploring the simple, satisfying world of casual games, immersing yourself in an RPG adventure, or testing your skills in an online casino, there’s something for everyone. The key is to explore different genres, find what resonates with you, and enjoy the experience as you develop your gaming skills. As the gaming industry continues to evolve, the possibilities for new gamers are endless, making it the perfect time to jump into the world of gaming.
In 2025, finding free alternatives to Nike Training Club (NTC) is easier than ever. The best free workout apps on iOS and Android now stream guided classes for strength, cardio, yoga, Pilates, mobility, and mindfulness without locking the essentials behind a paywall. Two client standouts, Hoola and WallPilates, make this list for different reasons: Hoola folds workouts, progress tracking, and wellness tools into one app, while WallPilates delivers joint friendly, wall supported Pilates plans that fit small spaces and busy schedules. We verified features and free versus paid access on current store listings so you know what is truly free today.
1. Hoola fitness app – holistic home workouts with AI smarts
The Hoola fitness app bundles workouts, mindfulness, and nutrition in one place. Open the dashboard and you’ll find on-demand classes for strength, cardio, yoga, Pilates, and even chair-based recovery. The app is free to download, letting you sample a rotating set of guided workouts; unlimited access sits in an optional subscription.
Hoola’s standout feature is an AI Coach that scores each session across Strength, Cardio, Flexibility, and Mindfulness, and the points feed a dynamic progress tracker in theHoola fitness app that refreshes your recommendations on the fly. Because the fitness coaching app Hoola also runs an AI calorie optimiser in the same engine, the Coach can surface workout suggestions and dinner ideas that match the goals you set. Quick breathing drills for post-HIIT recovery and a recipe feed that automatically locks to your calorie target mean you can delete the separate meditation, tracker and meal-planning apps.
Wellness goes beyond movement: quick breathing drills help you decompress after HIIT, while a recipe feed keeps dinner aligned with your calorie target, so you no longer have to juggle separate apps for tracking, meditation, or meal inspiration.
Early reviews look promising. As of November 3, 2025, the iOS listing shows a 4.8-star average from more than 90 users and promises “unlimited on-demand classes” once you upgrade. If you want a Nike Training Club alternative that folds in nutrition and mental-health tools—while still letting you try guided workouts for free—Hoola belongs on your shortlist.
2. WallPilates: wall supported Pilates you can start anywhere
WallPilates turns a plain wall into a built-in prop for low-impact strength, mobility and posture work, making a gentle counterpoint to NTC’s high-intensity circuits. The wall-supported Pilates program WallPilates lays out a 28-day progression that builds core strength and improves flexibility, and its Wallpilates fitness app workouts are rated 4.9 by thousands of users and run in 10-minute sessions that keep wrist and knee pressure low so beginners stay stable before adding mat moves. Recent roundups from Healthline and other health outlets rank wall-Pilates apps among the best at-home options for reliable, joint-friendly training you can do equipment-free. If you want structured Pilates without a reformer, this category is tailor-made.
Popular titles such as Wall Pilates: 28 Day Challenge offer personalized plans, video guidance from instructors, and progress tracking (photos, measurements), with flows designed to fit tight schedules and tight spaces. All you need is a wall. That makes it easy to stack short, focused sessions alongside strength or cardio days from other apps.
Most WallPilates apps are free to download with optional subscriptions to unlock full programs and challenges. For example, Wall Pilates: 28 Day Challenge lists in app purchases and holds ~4.5★ from ~1.8K ratings on iOS, while Wall Pilates: Fit Weight Loss is likewise free to install with premium plans and shows ~4.4★ from ~867 ratings. Try a few free sessions first; if the format clicks, upgrade for complete 28 day calendars and progressive plans.
3. Adidas Training – structured body-weight plans from a sports giant
If you enjoy Nike Training Club’s polish, Adidas Training by Runtastic feels familiar. The app delivers professionally shot body-weight sessions—full-body HIIT, targeted core, and quick mobility drills—and most of them sit in the free tier.
Structure is the hook. After a two-minute fitness test you choose a goal such as “Build strength” or “Stay toned.” The algorithm creates a multi-week plan with rest days and automatic rescheduling when you skip. A social feed lets you trade kudos or join global challenges, and connecting the companion Adidas Running app pulls cardio stats into the same profile for a single, weekly dashboard.
Fresh figures support the reach. As of November 3, 2025, the iOS listing shows a 4.8-star average from more than 22,000 ratings, while Google Play reports over 10 million downloads. Free users get the entire workout library and several flagship plans; premium unlocks deeper analytics and niche programs, but the core free guided workouts remain open. For brand-backed quality with a clear roadmap, and without opening your wallet, Adidas Training delivers.
4. Freeletics – high-intensity workouts that learn from you
Freeletics turns every push-up into data. Its AI-powered Coach adjusts reps, tempo, and rest based on your post-workout feedback, so each session feels like a plan that evolves with your progress. As of November 3, 2025, the Android listing shows more than 10 million downloads and a 4.5-star average from 257,000 reviews, proof the approach resonates.
Most workouts last 15 to 30 minutes and rely on body-weight moves such as burpees, squats, and sprints, a strong alternative when Nike Training Club no longer spikes your heart rate. In 2025 Freeletics added Coach+, a chat layer that answers technique questions or offers injury modifications on demand.
The free tier unlocks hallmark workouts like “Aphrodite,” “Metis,” and community challenges. Upgrading buys full adaptive plans, yet you can build a potent routine by pairing these free guided sessions with your own runs or rides. If you want AI-driven intensity, along with the bragging rights that come from finishing 150 burpees, Freeletics delivers.
5. Peloton App Free – studio-quality vibes without the price tag
Peloton App Free launched in May 2023, giving non-bike owners access to a rotating library of 50-plus on-demand classes across 12 workout styles, including strength, cardio, yoga, and meditation.
The catalog refreshes every few weeks, so new bootcamps or barre flows appear while older sessions retire. To bridge the gaps, the Gym feature offers printable plans with demo clips you can follow at your own pace. Social touches stay intact: milestones, friend follows, and post-class stats all function on the free tier.
Current numbers back the buzz. As of November 3, 2025, iOS users award the app 4.9 stars from 794,000 ratings, while Google Play lists 4.1 stars, 14,900 reviews, and more than 1 million downloads. Live classes remain paywalled, yet if you want free guided workouts wrapped in studio-grade production, Peloton’s entry tier makes a strong addition to your routine.
6. FitOn – a studio-style class library that never runs dry
Open FitOn and you step into a buzzing digital studio. New classes appear daily—HIIT blasts, sculpt sessions, yoga flows, dance cardio, and guided meditations—streamed in crisp HD by trainers who feel like they’re in your living room.
Scale is FitOn’s flex. The library already tops 1,000 on-demand videos and keeps growing. As of November 3, 2025, Google Play shows more than 5 million downloads with 96,000-plus user reviews, while iOS users award the app 4.9 stars from 282,000 ratings. Short on time? Filter for six-minute express routines. Want a challenge? Queue a 40-minute bootcamp.
Personalization is quick: pick your goals and preferred styles, and FitOn builds a weekly plan, rescheduling automatically if you miss a day. Community touches matter too: invite friends, stack classes into joint challenges, and trade virtual high-fives after every sweat session.
Cost is simple: the workouts stay free. An optional PRO tier adds meal plans and wearable integrations, but every squat, plank, and downward dog remains outside the paywall. If you need a Nike Training Club alternative packed with free guided workouts and endless class variety, FitOn is an easy download.
Conclusion
In 2025 you can build a complete home routine with free alternatives to Nike Training Club and never run out of quality classes. Hoola stands out if you want workouts plus progress tracking, breathwork, and simple nutrition in one app. WallPilates shines for low impact, wall supported Pilates that strengthens the core and improves posture in small spaces. Pair a high intensity option like Freeletics or a rotating studio catalog like FitOn or Peloton App Free with gentle WallPilates sessions for balance. Start with the free tiers, track how you feel, and only upgrade once you know what you will use. The best free workout app is the one that keeps you consistent.
Frequently Asked Questions
1) Are these really free alternatives to Nike Training Club, and what sits behind the paywall? Yes. Each app in this guide offers free guided workouts you can start today. Most place extras behind a subscription such as advanced programs, downloads, or wearable integrations. Start with the free tier and only upgrade if you want structured multi week plans or deeper analytics.
2) Which free workout app is best for beginners or low impact training? WallPilates is ideal for joint friendly, wall supported Pilates that builds core and posture with simple progressions. Hoola is another beginner friendly pick thanks to short classes, breathwork, and gentle mobility sessions that pair well with its progress tracking.
3) Can I follow a complete program at home without equipment? Yes. Freeletics, FitOn, WallPilates, and the classic 7 minute circuit all offer body weight options. Add a mat and a sturdy wall and you can run full strength and mobility blocks from your living room.
4) Which apps include nutrition, mindfulness, or recovery tools? Hoola combines workouts with goal based recommendations, breathwork, and built in nutrition guidance so you do not need separate tracking or meditation apps. FitOn and Peloton offer recovery and mobility sessions you can stack on training days.
5) I do not own a bike or treadmill. Will Peloton App Free still work for me? Yes. Peloton App Free rotates on demand classes in strength, cardio, yoga, and more that require little to no equipment. You can sample instructors and formats first, then decide if a paid tier makes sense later.
Flea has announced a new solo album that will be released next year on Nonesuch Records. As yet untitled, it finds the Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist returning to his first instrument, the trumpet, and it’s being previewed today by ‘A Plea’, which almost sounds like it could have made Geordie Greep’s own solo debut. Check it out via the music video, directed by Flea’s daughter Clara Balzary and featuring choreography by Sadie Wilking, below.
‘A Plea’ urges listeners “build a bridge, shine a light, make something beautiful and see somebody, give it to somebody,” according to Flea. It features him on electric bass, vocals, and trumpet, backed by double bassist Anna Butterss, guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Deantoni Parks, percussionist Mauro Refosco, alto flutist Rickey Washington, and trombonist Vikram Devasthali. Chris Warren contributes vocals, as does the song’s producer, Josh Johnson, who also plays alto saxophone.
Flea described the song’s lyrics as “yearning for a place beyond, a place of love, for me to speak my mind and be myself. I’m always just trying to be myself.” He added, “I don’t care about the act of politics. I think there is a much more transcendent place above it where there’s discourse to be had that can actually help humanity, and actually help us all to live harmoniously and productively in a way that’s healthy for the world. There’s a place where we meet, and it’s love.”
Critics listen to a lot of new music every day, which means they get to spend every December – or November, since that’s when several year-end lists have started popping up – harping on about how some of their favorite albums couldn’t make the cut. For the first time in my five years as music editor of this publication, we’re expanding the annual best albums list to highlight 100 rather than 50 albums – and there are still many records I’ll be coming back to that just aren’t included. The always slightly arbitrary nature of ranking means that albums that are relatively low on this list, including by previous AOTY holders, might have been higher during a less eventful year. What’s certain is that no two albums here are quite alike, and you’ll find at least one thing that might have slipped under your radar. Here are the 100 best albums of 2025.
100. Star 99, Gaman
On their sophomore LP, Gaman, Star 99 are still making punchy, exhilarating songs while pushing beyond – though not necessarily past – the twee sensibilities of their 2023 debut Bitch Unlimited, making way not just for the confrontational nature but the poetic nuances of their songwriting. As Saoirse Alesandro and Thomas Romero trade vocals, revealing the core emotions that bind their songs – insecurity, resentment, isolation, often fueled by the fire of generational trauma – you get less of a sense that these are separate people bringing songs to the table than just two friends, in a band, facing similar strifes – and getting through them. Which is, definitionally, the art of gaman. Check out our Artist Spotlight interview with Star 99.
Featuring nearly the same backing band as last year’s Kabutomushi EP, Mei Semones‘ full-length debut deepens her seamless blend of dreamy bossa nova and jazz-inflected indie rock, maintaining a gorgeous atmosphere while dynamically maneuvering from one odd feeling to another. There’s so much heart and charm in it, though, that no part of its eclectism feels alienating. “There’s something I like about it,” she sings of the ‘Dumb Feeling’ that opens the album, then spends the rest of it elaborating in a musical language entirely her own. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Mei Semones.
Different Talking is the first album Frankie Cosmos recorded as a unit with no outside studio producers, tracking it at a house in upstate New York that they all lived in for a month and a half. Which, in a funny little way, means that it is the first self-produced Frankie Cosmos since Greta Kline first started posting sparse folk-pop songs on Bandcamp. More than reevaluating the meaning of home-recording at a different point in life, of course, Different Talking considers and embodies home, grief, and all those microcosmic, universe-expanding feelings the heart seems to produce in circles as the world flashes by. “We can all agree/ That time is both frozen and moving faster than we can see,” goes a song titled ‘One! Grey! Hair!’. We can all agree, and Frankie Cosmos can play to its rhythm. Read our inspirations interview with Frankie Cosmos.
There might be a self-reflective throughline across Danny Brown‘s latest effort – and first since becoming sober – but it doesn’t hinge on the introspective, natural flows of his last album, Quaranta. Instead, it feeds off the communal energy of a crew of cutting-edge, hyperpop-adjacent artists who help the 44-year-old affirm not just his status and lyrical dexterity, but the reason he keeps falling back in love with music. “You wondered what made things enjoyable when you were younger,” Angel Prost, one half of Frost Children, intones at one point. More than just wondering, Stardust – easeful and electrifying, relaxed and glitched-out – simply revels. Read the full review.
While Sword II‘s debut album, Spirit World Tour, focused on abrasive experimentation, the Atlanta trio’s follow-up finds them honing in on their collaborative songwriting: still eclectic and radical in spirit, only this time channelled through lush arrangements, greater lyrical clarity – not to mention longing – and warmly inviting harmonies. As blissfully disorienting as it is renewed with purpose, the new album was recorded in a basement of an old home they rented where the wiring was so faulty they had to use acoustic instruments to avoid electric shocks. “You’re so puzzled/ Trying to believe in something/ On your own,” they sing on ‘Halogen’. But together? That’s a whole different world of possibilities. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Sword II.
For their mesmerizing second album, Magic of the Sale, Teethe‘s recording process, split between their current home bases across Dallas and Austin, stayed virtually unchanged: tracking demos and uploading them to a shared folder. This time, though, the group of trusted contributors that helped bring to life their tender-hearted melancholy and warm existentialism widened: Charlie Martin of Hovvdy, performing additional piano; Wednesday/MJ Lenderman’s Xandy Chelmis on pedal steel, producer Logan Hornyak of Melaina Kol, and Emily Elkin on cello. “Hear your words like photos felt in sound,” a muffled voice sings on ‘Iron Wine’, stirring a wave of distortion. “Holding what our eyes can’t make up now.” Magic of the Sale sounds like slowing down the blink of an eye, where the smallest, most precious emotions seep into view. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Teethe.
When it comes to love, Hatchie knows that even the fleeting stage of infatuation encompasses more than just ecstasy. “Something lingers in the sea between/ Much more than this midwinter kiss,” she sings on ‘Sage’, a highlight on her new album Liquorice, which triangulates the dizziness, desperation, and disillusionment of young romance like it’s something you can bite into, savouring every layer. Recorded at Jay Som’s home studio in Los Angeles, Liquorice brims with nostalgic influences, but Pilbeam’s maturing perspective – she’s 32 and married to her longtime collaborator Joe Agius – makes it feel worlds away from the project’s beginnings almost a decade ago. “I’m still stuck with these pathetic dreams,” she sings on the closer, a sentiment that could suck the life out of anyone. For Hatchie, it’s all colour. Read our inspirations interview with Hatchie.
Parader is torn between Keaton Henson‘s present reality of living in the English countryside and the fragmented memories that reverberate through it; fittingly, production duties were split Luke Sital-Singh, who grew up with similar emo and hardcore influences as Henson, and Alex Farrar – in his words, “the king of that loud, snarky American DIY sound” – who helped him tap into a grungy, guttural, arguably American confidence that used to be as formative as it was aspirational, even mythical. “Do I really have any business now/ Singing this song and sounding like I did when I was eighteen?” he sings on ‘Past It’. Singing to him, maybe, the part he knows would be stoked about being part of the whole parade. Read our inspirations interview with Keaton Henson.
From their first rehearsal together, it took less than a year for bloodsports to record their blistering debut LP, Anything Can Be a Hammer. Produced by Hayden Ticehurst, the album innervates the band’s slowcore foundations, its volatile songs often beginning with spare, somber guitar parts before bursting with noise, though never exactly in the direction you expect them to. Murphy’s lyrics teeter between sweet stream-of-consciousness and nightmarish dejection, blurring the line between fragility and confidence. “It forces an odd reaction/ Coarse and affirmed/ Cuts like a razor,” he sings almost self-consciously on the closing title track, which might leave you feeling the same way: no less alone, but strangely moved by the ever-evolving chaos. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with bloodsports.
“I got caught in the teeth of the thoughts that keep me awake,” Stefan Babcock sings on ‘Paranoid’, a blistering highlight off PUP‘s Who Will Look After the Dogs?. Gnawing at intrusive thoughts is baked into the Canadian punk outfit’s DNA, but the despair that pervades the follow-up to 2022’s The Unraveling of PUPTheBand is so visceral that it threatens to throw the band’s signature mix of darkness and snark way off balance. Babcock wrote more, and more alone, than he has for any other PUP record, and while learning to be aware of his headspace was a crucial part of the process, inspiration also struck by practicing the things that grounded and distracted him. Read our inspirations interview with PUP.
Named after a song by ‘90s post-hardcore outfit Radio Flyer, Rocket‘s debut album was recorded between 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606, but rather than calling in a big-ticket indie producer, guitarist Desi Scaglione helmed the process himself. All but one of the record’s early singles were tracked at Studio 606, pushing forth its most thunderous and anthemic qualities; but what makes R Is for Rocket such a refreshing, fully-realized debut is its emotional range and earnest experimentation. “I wanna be the one to make it out of your dreams,” Alithea Tuttle repeats on ‘Another Second Chance’, as they all sound like they’re living their own. Read our Artist Spotlight interview.
Jenn Wasner’s radiant new album under the Flock of Dimes moniker creates a warmly inviting, deceptively straightforward environment to accommodate its complex ideas around addiction and co-dependency. Two decades into her career – with several solo records under her belt aside from her work in Wye Oak and collaborations with Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, and many others – the simplicity of its songs can feel subversive, and, more importantly, the only way to really sit with and wrench the truth out of them, paradoxical as it may seem. As she reminds herself on ‘Defeat’, “I’m inside it, after all.” Read our inspirations interview with Flock of Dimes.
After releasing their sun-kissed, soulful debut Evil Joy in 2021, Fust – now a seven-piece featuring songwriter Aaron Dowdy, drummer Avery Sullivan, pianist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, fiddlist Libby Rodenbough, and bassist Oliver Child-Lanning – decamped to Drop of Sun to record Genevieve with producer Alex Farrar, with whom they reunited for their astounding new album, Big Ugly. Named after an unincorporated area in southern West Virginia, around which Dowdy’s family has deep roots, the record is conflicted yet aspirational: homey while grappling with the mystery of home, hopeful when hope rests between the promise of a new life and relenting in old, slow, ragged ways. As the title may suggest, it wrings beauty out of the most unexpected places, honing in the band’s knack for making small feelings appear monumental – that is, closer to their true experience. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Fust.
“I’m undressed, paperless, filter gone,” Stella Donnelly sings on ‘Year of Trouble’ as she begins to confront the loneliness of a friendship falling apart. She does dress up other songs, like its brattier counterpart in ‘Feel It Change’, but that nakedness is what helps the record move from one chapter to the next, like taking heartbreak by its daily swings. Searing and unguarded, Love and Fortune is not just a record about bridges burned and straining for reconciliation, but a reclamation of the dozen selves pecking for attention in the midst of solitude. “Take back my little life, and push you away/ I set myself on fire, for someone else’s flame,” she sings on ‘W.A.L.K.’. More than careful not to reignite it, by the end of the ride, Donnelly sounds caring, kind, and turns out, more than a little fortunate. Read our inspirations interview with Stella Donnelly.
Kali Uchis’ records tend to feel like a breeze, even when the Colombian American singer-songwriter drifts between styles and languages. But Sincerely, seals itself into her very own paradise. Though it elicits many of the same pleasures as 2024’s Orquídeas, it feels like a world apart: the album boasts no guest features, with the majority of the songs growing out of voice notes and sung entirely in English. Its dreamy, timeless euphoria may scan as one-dimensional, but there’s delight in hearing Uchis luxuriate in the transformations of her life, still admitting insecurities while letting the good parts bleed together. Her music often feels sun-kissed; here, she soaks it all up. Read the full review.
“I’m so sorry,” Kassie Carlson proclaims on the opening track of Guerilla Toss‘ new album, emphatic enough to instantly register as irony, “I came to party.” She gets lost as her head throbs on the way to another party on ‘Red Flag to Angry Bull’, where her friend is “Telling me he’s gonna eat the sunshine/ Though he isn’t walking in a straight line.” The burst of positivity is hallucinatory, intoxicating, and downright maddening, yet it also makes complete sense considering how and where the experimental rock band made You’re Weird Now. The album keeps twitching and triumphing in its communal cacophony, precise-engineered to convince you that even if today feels a lot more like a hellhole than a party, you are certainly not alone in it. Read our inspirations interview with Guerilla Toss.
Austra‘s majestic fifth album traces her journey of grieving the end of a relationship by translating its chaotic emotions through the lens of Greek tragedy, the euphoria of Eurodance, and science fiction that overwhelms with its humanity. These filters do nothing to restrain the purity of Katie Stelmanis’ performances, embodied equally in their humour, brokenness, and hope. “I don’t wanna cry about you forever,” she sings on ‘Look Me in the Eye’, not hiding the time it’s taken to get there; savouring the yawn instead of rushing into a new day. Read our inspirations interview with Austra.
Written after she relocated from Los Angeles to New York, Eliza McLamb‘s sophomore LP as wry and introspective as her Sarah Tudzin-produced debut while leaning into feelings of absurdity and chaos; not just taking stock of the changes in her early 20s, but unpacking the self-narrativizing patterns behind them. “Writing it down and making it real/ Skipping the step where I remember to feel,” she sings on the title track, reconciling by holding the stories lightly and reminding herself the present is all she has: boring and difficult, sacred and eternal. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Eliza McLamb.
Sometimes, even beautiful words aren’t right for a piece of music that can transport you on its own, a skill Meg Duffy cultivates by going long periods of time making only instrumental music and playing in other people’s bands – previously Kevin Morby, now Perfume Genius. While Hand Habits‘ Blue Reminder is wonderfully arranged and subtly cinematic, the lyrics feel all the more carefully intimate, the phrasing more precise, the singing more confident – if only to serve the unspoken feeling of the song. “We don’t need to Talk Talk,” they sing early on, sneaking in a double entendre, “too much.” Which is enough to say they’re hungry for more. Read our inspirations interview with Hand Habits.
After finishing his tour in support of 2023’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, Trevor Powers stumbled upon a shoebox of home videos from his childhood in his parents’ basement. It’s no surprise, given his textured, self-reflective approach to songwriting, that audio samples from the tapes would end up on his next album as Youth Lagoon, Rarely Do I Dream. Powers’ most powerful tool, however, isn’t nostalgia but juxtaposition, which he employs to harden the line between the innocence of childhood and the violent currents of today, between juvenile dreams and intoxicated fantasies, obliviousness and imagination; and to diffuse it, too. It’s relentless and revitalizing – proof that whatever Powers does next might look to the past, but will hardly look like the thing that came before. Read the full review.
The Weather Station’s work has earned praised for its seamless elegance and fluidity, especially since Tamara Lindeman expanded the project’s folksy origins on 2021’s breakout Ignorance. But never has the Toronto-based singer-songwriter paid attention to the seams – the parts of life and art that, as she acknowledges on the closer ‘Sewing’, most people are willing to ignore – as she does on her visceral new album, Humanhood. Affording space to both the sophistipop grandeur of Ignorance and the free-flowing intimacy of its companion LP, 2022’s How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman and her remarkable band trace the process of dissociation, laying out the broken pieces and the possibility of reintegrating them, the shakiness of truth and all the purpose it provides. Humanhood keeps moving like that, imperfect but enlightened, the music an “undulating thing,” as Lindeman puts it, “this blanket I seem to be making from pride and shame, beauty and guilt.” Read the full review.
Produced by No Age’s Randy Randall, the debut album from the Chicago trio is buoyant, destabilizing, and incandescent, splicing together bursts of power-pop, dance-punk, dub, and concentrated noise with the playful, organic immediacy of a group constantly tuning into each other as much as their influences. Lifeguard’s music may occasionally sound unsettled or claustrophobic, but it’s never totally, well, guarded; as a collective and part of a broader DIY community, their goal is to keep opening it up. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Lifeguard.
The music MIKE makes instantly feels like an intimate dialogue, and Showbiz! is no exception. Between his richly lackadaisical delivery and hypnagogic use of samples, the looseness and fluidity of the New York rapper-producer’s approach keep the listener engaged but never more than arm’s length away. Yet what remains beyond grasp for MIKE, always at an odd distance, is the perfect sense of home, something he keeps searching for across the LP – though “home” is where he recorded all of it, in phases after stretches of touring. Similarly, he muses on the idea of breakout success more than simply lounging on it. “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant,” he raps on ‘Artist of the Century’, an apt summation of the whole project.
Emily Sprague has no trouble baring her soul out in her lyrics. Intimacy, like tenderness, has and never will be a difficult thing for the Florist enterprise, or “friendship project,” as they call it, which includes Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker, and Felix Walworth. The challenge, bigger than ever on their first album since their resplendent 2022 self-titled effort, is sounding at peace with a world hurtling towards catastrophe; staying soft, friendly, and curious when grief continues to bear its mark on you. But the music can also only be as delicate as the line between the threads of consciousness Sprague bounces between – waking, altered, existential – thin enough to let light slip through yet expansive enough to get lost in. For all its quiet optimism and awe, Jellywish is never quite restful or easygoing; much in the same way that, for all its introspection, it never truly stands alone. Read the full review.
On their first album in 23 years, Pulp are still caught up with the inexplicable nature of beauty and love. But for perhaps the first time in the group’s history, Jarvis Cocker seems less fazed by those things, homing in on the feeling and spelling out the ineffable, sometimes literally, as on the early single ‘Got to Have Love’. More is the product of waiting, not taking, a long time to make something – of your fears, of missed opportunities, of time itself. “The universe shrugged, then moved on.” And then it hits you. In the wake of longtime Pulp member Steve Mackey’s death in 2023, as well as the passing of Cocker’s mother early last year, the follow-up to 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life feels effortful yet elegant in its insistence on expressing love, not just the kind that endures, but the ones that disintegrate or never even really existed. Read the full review.
Greet Death co-vocalists Logan Gaval and Harper Boyhtari have been friends since elementary school, spending much of their preteen and adolescent years in the same basement in Davisburg, Michigan where they recorded their first album in six years, Die in Love. But while the record was written during a period of profound change and loss, and starts riotously with the title track, much of it sounds relaxed in its melancholy, not quite resigned but strangely comforted by the inevitable embrace – the idea that, “At the end of the day, we’re lucky to lose people we care about,” as Boyhtari said in press materials, a sentiment echoed in Boyhtari’s chorus of, “Emptiness is everywhere, so hold each other close.” Read our inspirations interview with Greet Death.
It’s one thing to write music from the stomach versus the heart, as was Will Wiesenfeld’s intention for Gut, his first Baths album in seven years. It’s not a guarantee the songs will actually hit like that. In Gut’s case, though, there’s really barely any separation between the philosophical and the guttural, the feeling and its translation, eschewing the fear of being lost in both. Since releasing his first album under the moniker, Cerulian, in 2010, Wiesenfeld’s work has always been characterized by an unshakeable and downright mimetic physicality, boundless in its erosion of boundaries between real and fantastical worlds. But the self-released Gut – which features live drums on more than half its tracks – is newly unfiltered and unruly in a way that carves a path forward for the project. Read our inspirations interview with Baths.
45 Pounds is as trashy as it is taut, as harsh as it is relentlessly hooky. It’s a combination that brings to mind contemporary purveyors of controlled chaos such as Gilla Band and Model/Actriz, though what’s remarkable about the New York-based experimental outfit’s corrosive, improvisational blend of punk, hardcore, and electronic music is how fully realized – and funky – it sounds on their debut full-length. Zack Borzone’s vocal chops manage to stand out amidst the discombobulating interplay between Jack Tobias’ radiant synths and Sam Pickard’s frenzied percussion, which peaks on the penultimate track ‘Blackout’. It sprints forward while keeping you on your toes.
72. Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Don’t let the title – itself a nod to a John Cheever short story – fool you: the deeper you listen to For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), the harder it is to pigeonhole it. It’s less for any kind of female archetype than it is about a certain brand of foolish masculinity it frames as both timeless and contemporary. It’s about Michelle Zauner, too, a singer-songwriter and author who, following the pop-inflected glee and success of Jubilee, her 2021 breakthrough as Japanese Breakfast – not to mention her similarly lauded memoir, Crying in H Mart – felt the need to shuffle through a cast of fictional characters variously removed and reflective of her own pensiveness. Her nuanced, moody vignettes are matched by richly baroque and luscious production courtesy of Blake Mills, who lends mountainous resonance even to the subtlest songs. Read the full album review.
While he continues to build an impressive resume as an engineer, Asheville musician Colin Miller found time to make and release Losin’, the heart-wrenching follow-up to 2023’s Haw Creek. Featuring MJ Lenderman on drums and guitar, as well as his Wednesday/The Wind bandmates Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys, aux percussion) and Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), the album was recorded at Drop of Sun with producer Alex Farrar. There are a couple of layers to its title: the record untangles a period of intense grief following the death of Gary King, who owned the Haw Creek property and served as a father figure to Miller; it’s also a literal reference to trying to win the lottery in hopes of buying the home, which he rented for 13 years. Even when the pain swells, echoing in every note his friends play, Miller keeps up the effort – if not for the unattainable, then simply to keep the engine running. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Colin Miller.
There was one thing Westerman and producer Marta Salogni could not escape during their five-week residency in the Greek island of Hydra: the searing heat, which forced them to work through the night. There’s a dazed, liminal spontaneity to the record that offsets its conversational tendencies, much like its unadorned moments are balanced out by the sweltering light of ‘Adriatic’ or ‘Weak Hands’. In the dark, sleepless hours between recording and not, you can imagine the artist gazing up at the sky: “Home found/ Then forgotten/The gamble,” he sings on ‘About Leaving’, “Awake, and looking starward.” Read our inspirations interview with Westerman.
DÍA is no less self-reflective than Ela Minus’ breakout debut, 2020’s acts of rebellion, a record whose fragile, blurry intimacy was tied to a year of pandemic isolation. Though it revs up every strain of electronic music the producer and singer-songwriter, born Gabriela Jimeno, likes to toy with – from icy synthpop to sinewy ambient to brazen electroclash – the new album only vows to dig deeper. In hindsight – and by expanding the setting of her creative process to include not only her native Colombia but also the Mojave Desert, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, and London – she grew warier of the blind optimism that spreads through the genre and sought to punch through the façade of her own project. “Writing DÍA I thought, ‘Wait, who am I really?’” she said. Definitive or not, the answer it provides is heartfelt, gritty, and self-affirming. Read the full review.
Trash Mountain is named after a pink house sitting on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington, Vermont’s Old North End, which Lily Seabird has called home for several years now. Rough-hewn yet warmly realized, the album centers on Seabird’s captivating voice as it lingers on a moment, trembles in grief, or sighs around a melody for just that bit more relief. “Where the wind blows everything I try to remember and forget/ On the edge of town/ Where when I’m home I rest my head” is how she describes Trash Mountain, recording to bask in its comfort a little longer. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Lily Seabird.
Plenty of popular music has taught us that fame can be isolating, but Brendan Yates has been singing about loneliness way before the breakout success of 2021’s Glow On. What’s changed with their new album Never Enough, which has received a more muted but still loving response, is the vantage point. “This is where I wanna be/ But I can’t feel a fuckin’ thing,” Yates declares on its track ‘Sunshower’. While seeing them live in the wake of Glow On provided a rare example of how jubilant and light-hearted moshing can be, the remarkable thing about seeing them at the same festival right after the release Never Enough was how similarly riled-up the audience could get despite the overriding melancholy of the new songs. Never Enough sounds a hell of a lot like Glow On, except the rip-roaring songs are phased out by tastefully meditative synth passages, or playfully augmented by horns. It still works, above all, because the underlying sentiment rings true.
Linear progression is generally a myth, yet one often projected onto artists, who must continually level up their sound without straying from their original vision. The Beths have indeed tightened, coloured, and expanded their approach since their 2018 breakout Future Me Hates Me, and while they’re not quite making a statement about their own trajectory with Straight Line Was a Lie, the titular realization extends to the way they handle both lyrics and instrumentation: careening between the immediacy, anxiety, and tenderness of their previous albums, but leaving space for different shades of weariness and anhedonia, a void that doesn’t dull so much as activate a new side of New Zealand quartet’s sound. “Let me be weak/ With a sad tear drying on my cheek,” Liz Stokes sings on ‘Best Laid Plans’, closing out an album all about gathering the strength to let it roll down. Read the full review.
65. Hayden Pedigo, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away
I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is hardly a solitary affair. Along with William Tyler collaborator Scott Hirsch, Pedigo brought together a group of musicians that includes violinist Nathan Bieber, pianist Jens Kuross, pedal steel player Nicole Lawrence, and “phaser suggester” Forest Juziuk. But while the arrangements are richly spacious and uniformly warm, Pedigo ensures nothing overshadows the simple majesty of his fingerpicking, which hums to its own rhythm. Written on a 20,000-acre in Wyoming, Pedigo shades in the vacuum of memory like there’s just as much beauty in forgetting as remembering, in observing landscapes through a window and noticing them blur together in your mind. Without saying a single word, no album in 2025 could make you more at ease with the passage of time.
Over the past decade or so, U.S. Girls have carved a lane as one of the most critically acclaimed alt-pop projects thanks to Meg Remy’s graceful, razor-sharp, and increasingly accessible songwriting. But what if, as Remy puts it on the final song of their new album Scratch It, “to live is to lose face”? For the Toronto-based artist, the question extends from a loose catalog of shame, vulnerability, and powerlessness often relating to her life as a performer, but also a diffusion of that same identity through the fuzzy, fascinating lens of history. Recorded on 16-track tape in Nashville with Dillon Watson on guitar, Jack Lawrence on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, and Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys, it’s unburdened and free-flowing, suggesting there’s so many ways to make a U.S. Girls record; and so many ways, of course, to live and grow yourself without losing it.
Following 2021’s kaleidoscopic one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, relentless touring forced Ada Lea to restructure her life and priorities as a musician, which is not to say she stopped writing songs – in fact, she wrote over 200 over a period of three years, 16 of which made it onto the new album, and most of which originated in the Songwriting Method, a community-based group she kept up that required submitting songs with a deadline. On songs like ‘it isn’t enough’, you can almost hear her rushing to get a song down before midnight, singing, “Today I lost/ Today is gone/ Today I really fought.” Far from impatient or forced, however, when i paint my masterpiece sounds unhurried and precious, glad not to have slipped into past tense. Read our inspirations interview with Ada Lea.
The follow-up to 2022’s Classic Objects, named after a fragrance made by Maruice Roucel for the French perfumerie Serge Lutens, doesn’t dwell on Jenny Hval’s love of perfume but draws on it as a means of interrogating her relationship with performance. Though ISM has evocative properties for Hval, she was more directly inspired by a comment she came across online that it “would be what the ghost in Hamlet could wear.” It resonated with her, she said, “because it was how I thought of myself as an artist — a ghost from a time when music mattered, still hammering away — and my record, which to me was sounding ghostly and was invaded by hazy, smoky and powdery textures.” Vaporous and haunted, Iris Silver Mist is also gripping and sensuous enough to convince you that it still matters, here and now. Read the full review.
In the first hours of 2023, S.G. Goodman found herself explaining the old practice of ‘Planting by the Signs’ to the two people left in her living room after a New Years Eve gathering: her friend and mentor Mike Harmon, and his partner of twenty years, Therese. The Foxfire books, which richly lay out the ancient beliefs, were stacked beside them, and Goodman already knew she wanted to base her next album around what was intrinsically passed down to her through her Kentucky upbringing: the implicit importance of timing everyday acts in accordance with the cycle of the moon. The concept seeps into every corner of her poised, poignant new album, so much so that it is named after it – and even if the listener remains ignorant of it, there are traces of a kind of elemental power in its striking, dreamlike production, courtesy of Goodman and longtime collaborators Drew Vandenberg and Matthew Rowan. Read our inspirations interview with S.G. Goodman.
Catchy and aggressive from the get-go, Smut‘s music softened on How the Light Felt, their second LP and first for Bayonet, where catharsis was tinged with melancholy and draped in various shades of shoegaze. They cut back on the haze on their latest album, Tomorrow Comes Crashing, still well-versed in the nuances of dreamy music but dialing the intensity back up when necessary – earnestly vacillating between the confidence and self-doubt, even when the latter fuels some of their most visceral performances. Invigorated by the new lineup and a keen-eared producer in Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma), Smut recorded the album in Brooklyn just shortly after Roebuck and Min got married back home – and they play their hearts out. However much nostalgia is still baked into Tomorrow Comes Crashing, the future is what keeps them pulsing. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Smut.
“I never lie in my songs,” Cass McCombs repeats on ‘I Never Dream About Trains’, a highlight from Interior Live Oak, his 11th album, which means he has certainly released over a hundred. Lest you take his words at face value, the odd specificity of the ensuing lyrics should elicit some skepticism (“I never dream about holding you tight/ On the sand in Pescadero”). What he sings on the previous song, though, is much closer to the truth: “I mean everything I say, or something quite like it.” The meaning of Interior Live Oak, a 12-song double album that follows 2022’s excellent but much more concise Heartmind, remains elusive, but McCombs manages to weave it all together, singing through a cast of unreliable narrators that only cement his own musical consistency and earnestness. They are dancers and cynics, real and imagined, brutally honest and spiritually truth-bearing. If they all, at times, seem buried in sleep, that’s because dreams, they say, have no lies to hide. Read the full review.
The title of Humour‘s debut album is taken from a line from discarded songabout Andrea Christodoulidis’ decision to start learning the language as a second generation Greek, and though he spends most of the album screaming in an American accent that bears out the characters he’s inhabiting, you can hear him speaking it a bit in conversation with his father on the eponymous track, where they read Andreas Embirikos’ poem On Philhellenes Street. “This searing heat is necessary to produce such light,” he writes of the overwhelming weather in Athens, not unlike how Humour’s alluring, dreamlike hooks and tender revelations radiate through their blistering post-hardcore. Christodoulidis amalgamates personal, familial, and mythological stories much in the same way the group bridges styles, resulting in a record that is as fiercely heartfelt as it is surrealist, and, well, humorously absurd. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Humour.
After more than a couple of influential records in the increasingly saturated shoegaze genre – 2021’s self-titled LP, 2022’s a blip, and 2023’s in/out – Total Wife did the opposite of fading into obscurity, signing to Philadelphia label Julia’s War and cementing their status with their latest, come back down. It’s a breathlessly inventive and unconventionally dreamy record whose tides are difficult to predict or even identify – mind-melting guitars that get blown out and repurposed as synths, vocals whispered right beside your ear then chopped to oblivion, and a fluid rhythmic backbone evoking, to quote their song ‘rest’, “the beat in between my restlessness.” Pitched between jittery alertness and the edge of sleep, come back down is also a riveting expression of the duo’s dynamic compositional and lyrical instincts, a force that grounds the record in its malleable, blurry transcendence. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Total Wife.
keiyaA was feeling numb as the hype around her last album, 2020’s Forever, Ya Girl, began to die down, when she came across a post by writer Mandy Harris Williams: “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.” He was citing the concept in physics that became the title of, and poetic fuel for, the Chicago-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s latest album, hooke’s law. Building on the avant-R&B vision of her debut, it’s a dazzling portrait of jadedness unlike any in the genre while remaining absolute playful, both in its lush experimentation and silly one-liners. It’s not claustrophobic, exactly, so much as club music from the bottom of an emotional well. “I toast to lighten up the pain,” she offers on the closing track, “Until we meet again/ Start again.”
55. Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Subtlety is a virtue in the singer-songwriter world. In the face of a dying earth, however, and energized by collaborating for the first time in a writing capacity with her live band, the Attachment Theory – Devra Hoff on bass and vocals, Jorge Balbi on drums and machines, and TEEN’s Teeny Lieberson on synth, piano, guitar and vocals – Sharon Van Etten has made one of her boldest and biggest-sounding records to date. Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory is as thunderous as it is propulsive, disquieting in its storm of existential questions but deliberate in how it sequences them; sounding like doubt at times, despair at others. But at its most resonant, Van Etten’s voice soars with pure wonder, unburdened by judgment or an easy way out: “Oh, what it must be like.” She’s singing about Southern life here, but really, about compassion – one of the few things that still doesn’t come attached with an expiration date. Read the full review.
Building on 2023’s Live at Bush Hall, Forever Howlong leverages Black Country, New Road’s fluidity as a band with a heightened level of precision and strikes a subtler balance between sonic lightness and emotional intensity. With vocals, and largely songwriting, now split between Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw, the album serendipitously, yet potently, coalesces around a female perspective, but the experiences they relay reach far beyond these three women. It’s in the loneliest moments that you hear them band together, all playing out time. Read the full review.
53. Asher White, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living
More than continuously toeing the line between styles, between coherence and abstraction, Asher White’s music has evolved to prioritize confessional transparency over purity, complexity over wilful obfuscation. That may seem counterintuitive when talking about her latest album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living – her 16th overall and first for Joyful Noise – itself an unconventional and anxious reaction to a potential breakout moment, pushing her approach to its eruptive, feastful limits. More than just revealing, its recklessness opens the door to a fascinating place that’s bound to change shape with each subsequent release. If you’re dedicated enough to follow its twists and turns, you’ll want to come back for another look. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Asher White.
Diving into Weatherday’s latest outing, Hornet Disaster – which stretches over an hour and 16 minutes – is a daunting task, but the Swedish experimentalist sounds more exacting, determined, and addictive than ever. Six years after Sputnik’s debut LP under the moniker, Come In, and just a few after an impressive split EP with Asian Glow, the 19-track LP’s replayability justifies its overwhelming length, while the density of its noise-pop is made legible by intense and equally uncompromising emotion. “Our heartbeats in sync/ Our only real link,” they sing about halfway through the record. After just a single listen, you can’t help but clap along, enmeshed but blissful in the shared chaos.
You don’t always know what Horsegirl are singing about, but you know someone in the group does. Perhaps more than anything, their sophomore album, Phonetics On and On, delights in and charms through its deceptively childlike and unwaveringly playful language, which spins choruses out of practically every variation of “da da da.” Having moved from Chicago to New York between albums, the trio enlisted musician/producer Cate Le Bon to pare down and declutter the sound of 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance while amping up the absurdity in the subtlest places. Through the uncanniness and restraint, though, shines naked emotionality. “It’s oh so plain to see,” Nora Cheng sings at the very end, “How often I think sentimentally.” Whether repeating or tangling up the same words, Horsegirl make you want to sit down and listen. Read the full track-by-track review.
Sparks fly all over Sounds like…, Florry’s second album with Dear Life Records. It’s impossible to deny on the record’s euphorically charged, lyrically intriguing opener, ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’, but there’s plenty of magic to be found as the Vermont-based septet loosens up on the rest of the record. Like pretty much every album coming out of Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios, this one, co-produced with Colin Miller, sounds lived-in and magnetic. There is a rawness, at times even an explicit emptiness, in bandleader Francie Medosch’s lyrics, but it’s hardly something to stop the band dead in its tracks. “I was hoping to use this song to talk about/ Something that had been going on but I could not get it out,” she sings on ‘Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone’. Something like it, still, spills out.
Perhaps the follow-up to Hotline TNT’s 2023 breakout Cartwheel wouldn’t sound so bright, anthemic, and grandiose – in other words, uninterested in sticking to stylistic trappings – had the lovely sentiments of its predecessor not been amplified by devotion and confidence, not to mention the dynamism of Will Anderson’s touring band joining him in the studio. After many months of the road, the frontman was eager to return to the familiar, for him, introverted process of making another album, but guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, drummer Mike Ralston, and producer Amos Pitsch convinced him otherwise. If nothing else, Raspberry Moon is evidence that at least sometimes, such a leap of trust – for the people in the songs no less than the ones making them – pays off. Read the full review.
The Antlers’ new album, Blight, widens the scope of Peter Silberman’s songwriting by reckoning with environmental catastrophe, taking cues from a range of science fiction media. But it begins in a homey place: the unsparing intimacy of Silberman’s voice, admitting to the ways he’s contributing to the destruction by simply going about his day, the way you might be when you first press play on the record: having a meal, ordering it. If you have mourned with the psychological devastation of 2009’s Hospice or 2011’s Burst Apart, it is disarming and powerful to hear his soulful whisper carrying the same weight in this conceptual framework. Though when Blight spirals toward a series of ambiguous apocalyptic events, it once again feels not conceptual but psychological, the sound of ecological anxiety – corrosive, wordless, outstretched – turning what could be a familiarly delicate (by the Antlers’ standards) listen into an eerily fragile one. Read our inspirations interview with The Antlers.
The third and titular rule of Don’t Tap the Glass is the most ambiguous, which is somewhat reflective of the overall balance the record strikes: it’s a straightforward rap-party project whose kineticism is undeniable, but, arriving less than a year after the densely packed Chromakopia, it also can’t help but attach itself to Tyler’s self-mythologizing canon in mature, often meta ways. The albumshould keep longtime fans engaged long after the party’s over, but for at least the 29 minutes that it’s on, it both lifts you up and cools you down. Good dance music not only gets your body moving, but makes you forget yourself for a moment. For an artist as conscious of his ego as Tyler, the Creator, that’s no small feat. Read the full review.
With a title like Bugland, it feels lazy to call No Joy’s new album playful. It’s really the way Jasamine White-Gluz’s work registers as a playground that’s so thrilling: a place that triggers fuzzy memories, a fantastical portal, a wild abstraction with no equivalent in the real world. Beyond their shared musical interests and boundless genre-hopping – having the most fun in the islands of nu metal, shoegaze, and pop music – it’s where her approach intersects with Fire-Toolz’s Angel Marcloid, who co-produced the Motherhood follow-up not just with wide-eyed maximalism but true enthusiasm. It’s a wonder to hear them play and burst into a swirl of emotions mostly antithetical to the project’s name, to linger and rush out of them – maybe cutting the word in half does it more justice – fully.
Great Grandpa‘s music sounds so splendid, the lyrics so fantastically poetic, it’s easy to undermine their intimacy. “It’s closer when I see you, damn,” goes the hook on ‘Emma’, a highlight on their latest album Patience, Moonbeam, and they return to that damn for a cathartic explosion on the single ‘Doom’. The band’s first album in six years yearns and plays around for a sense of euphoria, and even if it sometimes falls short – of the feeling, not reeling you in – their synergy achieves a kind of unburdening that feels like a gift. “All dark things in time define their meaning,” Al Menne sings on ‘Kid’, making Pat and Carrie Goodwyn’s mournful lyrics sound tenderly affirming. “And fold sharp ends/ Into their mouths.” Read our track-by-track interview with Great Grandpa.
Way before it was meticulously sequenced, Sinister Grift – Panda Bear’s first record to feature all his AnCo bandmates, with notable appearances from Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede (Lennox’s partner), and his daughter Nadja – began with Lennox and his co-producer and lifelong friend Deakin (Josh Gibb) laying down material in his newly built studio in Lisbon. Like its ecstatic take on heartbreak, the record reconfigures country tropes, classic rock chords, and reggae rhythms without quite distorting or diluting them. It sounds at ease with its menace and disconcerted by its playfulness, and these are all words you can twist around every time you press play.
As far as Oneohtrix Point Never records go, Tranquilizer’s most immediate antecedent is Replica, an album that’s almost a decade and a half old. While that collection saw Daniel Lopatin wistfully repurpose sounds from bootleg DVDs compiling TV commercials from the ‘80s and ‘90s, Tranquilizer mines from a set of commercial sample CDs preserved on the Internet Archive. The flimsiness of that maintenance – the page was taken down, then suddenly came back – is part of what inspired the producer and differentiates his follow-up to Again, the way swathes of potentially soulful music can be lost to and resurface through time. Read the full review.
It’s been five years since the Ophelias’ last album, Crocus, but its follow-up, Spring Grove, is by no means a post-pandemic document. Spencer Peppet’s lyrics burrow much deeper into past wounds, burdened by dreams that recur without end or explanation, blurring the line between the present moment and what’s clearly come to pass. When the titular Spring Grove cemetery comes up, it is in reference to the summer of 2014, yet as if neither person would now be the first to speak. “The feeling of you haunts me and I/ Know that I can recognize that,” she confesses on new single ‘Cicada’, and the whole record gives it shape even when the ghosts cease to follow. Read our interview with the Ophelias.
Deftones’ 10th album – and best in years – deftly balances their signature brutality and lushness. The follow-up to 2020’s relatively muted Ohms was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who previously worked on 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan, and reminds us that no band can make cataclysmic music sound quite as sumptuous. On standout ‘milk of the madonna’, Chino Moreno invokes bloody rain, thunder, quaking winds, and most of all fire, sounding utterly consumed yet invigorated by the pummeling force of the instrumentation. “The display ignites your mind,” he sings. How could it not?
40. Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
Ethel Cain‘s latest album is billed as the prequel to her 2022 breakthrough Preacher’s Daughter, a debut album that served as the beginning of a trilogy following three generations of women. If Willoughby Tucker “closes the chapter” on Anhedönia’s alter ego, as she has claimed, it’s an unwaveringly tender and astounding portrait, caught between nostalgia and dreams of violence, tangled yet steadfast in its romantic beliefs. And while she has framed the ambient-leaning Perverts as a standalone project, it also acts as a musical bridge to the new album, which balances her atmospheric and narrative world-building. Cain can’t help but draw a line from love straight to death, but not without submerging herself in it. Read the full review.
The title of Agriculture’s astounding new album is lifted from the statement that’s printed onto their T-shirts: “I love the spiritual sound of ecstatic black metal by the band Agriculture.” On the follow-up to their 2023’s self-titled LP, the Los Angeles band toys with the technical boundaries of the genre and stretches its transcendent power, partly by digging through the muck of how it feels to love its intense extremes. Shifting between and blurring the visions (and vocals) of main songwriters Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson, its waves are unpredictable but frequently exultant in their chaotic spawl. The most fitting metaphor arrives on the closing track, which ends with the proclamation: “Sometimes I’m lifted and sometimes they crash down on me/ I’m totally out of control/ With a mouth full of water.” Rad the full review.
During the pandemic, facing complications from myalgic encephalomyelitis and long COVID, Jasmine Cruickshank underwent heart surgery and was bed-bound for almost half a year. It was then that she decided to come out as trans, end her abusive marriage, and escape to Manchester, where she found – and was able to write through – her queer community. Backed by an all-trans band, jasmine.4.t. became the first UK signee to Phoebe Bridgers’ label Saddest Factory Records, and Bridgers, Dacus, and their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker all produced her remarkable debut full-length, You Are the Morning. Treading the line between intricate, tender-hearted folk and stormy indie rock, the album swoons with the rush of new love, spins catharsis out of the wildest lows, and reimagines the past into a light-filled future. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with jasmine 4.t.
First, Bon Iver reframe the entirety of last year’s SABLE, EP by repurposing it as the prologue to their fifth studio album. Throughout it, Justin Vernon puts a lot of stock in that prefix: things are perpetually jumbled, but they can be remade, maybe even replaced. Each new path buzzes with possibilities, but fABLE does away with the fear and paranoia these can stir up, attaching itself, miraculously, to an abundance of joy. It’s clear-headed and radiant, drawing upon elements of soul and R&B that Vernon has harnessed before, but never with such refreshing immediacy and purpose. “Seek the light,” he urged all those years ago, and damn it if he won’t keep looking. He’s in such good company, after all, and it’s showing more than ever. Read the full review.
For nearly an entire hour, Through the Wall barely changes up its groove. Remaining sultry and poised, Rochelle Jordan’s incadescent, scintillating new album anchors in a tasteful fusion of R&B and deep house that many attempted but none executed as faithfully as, the Los Angeles-based, British-Canadian singer-songwriter this year. Hooking you in with some of the most tempered – and temptatious – pop choruses of the year, Jordan doesn’t try to prove you won’t hear a better club record this year. She just swings into action, eager to take up space.
Samia introduced her third album by tracing a line between the inexplicable phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation – ‘Bovine Excision’ – and her own experience of womanhood. Though there are pockets of Bloodless that remain a mystery no matter how many times you listen or scrutinize the lyrics – too many poetic turns of phrase, contexts erased, men blurring together – the bigger draw is Samia’s unique ability to turn the inexplicable into the phenomenal; to make beauty out of a void, not necessarily by filling it. It may leave you with more questions than it answers, yet it astounds and surprises you at every turn. The songs rip straight through the heart – even if you have no idea how they even got there.
More than a surefire hit that’s capable of carrying a whole album, ‘9 2 5’ serves as a thesis statement for The Passionates Ones, whose title should stave off those without that kind of fire in their hearts. Slotted right in the middle of the record, it paints a typical portrait of an artist struggling to overcome systemic challenges to “manifest a vision,” while everything around it explores more personal, nuanced shades of it: “I dreamed this life, now I’m scared to live it,” Marcus Brown admits on ‘It’s Time’. Flitting between R&B, jazz, funk, and hip-hop, Brown’s eclecticism ensures the songs are radiant enough to prevent the fear from taking over – so they all shine just as bright.
On the first song of their self-titled debut album, Wet Leg were feeling uninspired, beaten down, and zoned out, equating it all to the same oddly desirable state: ‘Being in Love’. Three years later, the Isle of Wight five-piece – helmed by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers – open their sophomore album by reevaluating: being in love isn’t a thing you “kinda like.” It’s an emergency. It makes you sound ravenous, maniacal, silly, and melodramatic, all adjectives that describe moisturizer even as Wet Leg maintain their deadpan humour and offbeat aesthetic. Yet the record, once again produced by Dan Carey, softens into and soaks up its pleasures and contradictions, the way it can appear fantastical even as the sobering reality kicks in. What ‘Being in Love’ describes as “some kind of fucked up trip” is just “happy comatose,” which isn’t a bad slogan for moisturizer. Apply gently; it just might do you good.
Luminescent Creatures takes its name from the closing track of Ichiko Aoba’s previous effort, 2020’s Windswept Adan, an enchanting and richly rendered record that expanded both the Japanese singer-songwriter’s palette and audience. Working with arranger Taro Umebayashi and creative director Kodai Kobayashi, Aoba’s ambitious vision for that project included a script for an imaginary movie, telling the story of a girl who is exiled to Adan Island. By the end, Aoba wrote in the album’s companion book, “the body of the girl had vanished instead, transformed and reborn into a variety of living things.” That may leave the island uninhabited by humans, but Aoba has no trouble furthering the fantastical journey, breathing music into all other life forms that permeate the universe she’s built around it. Read the full track-by-track review.
Essex Honey is probably too eclectic to sound like the music you grew up with, but it certainly feels like it. “Regressing back to times you know/ Playing songs you forgot you owned,” Dev Hynes sings on ‘Westerberg’, a key line on an album that digs through memory by interpolating songs from acts including the Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Everything But the Girl’s Ben Watt. Just as evocative are the variably abstract passages of piano and cello, the first instruments Hynes ever played. Foggy, fatigued, yet clear-eyed, Blood Orange’s first record since Angel’s Pulse vaguely revolves around returning to a formative place in the wake of grief, struggling to hold anything in its grip. Yet slipping through the cracks, and the sadness, are memories that offer relief even if you can’t quite place them, as well as a cast of familiar voices that may seem distant but help in embracing it.
As the most pioneering band in modern shoegaze, TAGABOW could capitalize on a fantastical, watered-down version of a sound that’s only getting more popular, especially on their first LP for a bigger label in NYC’s ATO Records. They could shroud everything in glitchy layers of artifice and mutter poetic lyrics that mean nothing for the rest of their careers. Douglas Dulgarian’s way of avoiding that was making a record he’s deemed “too real” – confessional, euphoric, and achingly, nauseatingly beautiful. “I finally feel the comforting, familiar feeling of potential sleep rising up through the bile in my throat,” he says on the first song of a record filled with truths that are hard to stomach. But there’s hardly a feeling of finality to it – against all odds, it’s another fruitful beginning. Read the full review.
Jane Remover could have spent several albums coasting on, even softening, the blend of shoegaze and bedroom pop that made 2023’s Census Designated a success. Instead, the experimental artist cemented their status by pushing everything – including the limits of those genres, but also rap, pop, and club music at large – to the red. Revengeseekerz puts its money on the feverish excess and self-referentiality that could deter fans who came on board with the last album, but the unbounded rawness that rises to the fore makes this record an absolute blast. It’s explosive and dexterous in ways that put the self above everything: “Might close up shop,” Jane sings ‘Fadeoutz’, “if it means I can live my life.”
Sudan Archives’ lavish, ambitious world keeps expanding on THE BPM, but not at the expense of vulnerability – quite the opposite. Broadly speaking, the virtuoso’s third LP is as inventive as her 2022 breakout Natural Brown Prom Queen, but it also at times feels like a totally different album: wilder and more confounding its musical swings, more existential in its post-breakup candor. Sudan and her collaborators’ production is hypnotic and breathless with ideas without ever falling out of sync with the singer’s emotional overflow. “Sometimes I can get real low but I am high right now,” she sings on ‘Los Cinci’, prizing every point on the spectrum equally.
On Maria Somerville‘s 4AD debut, Luster, there’s hardly a line between pristine songs and spacious atmospherics. The Irish musician is an expert at diffusing it, just like her curiosity towards the natural world wafts into her internal one. The follow-up to 2019’s All My People is lush, liminal, and luminous, all those “l” words that earn the record its title. Even at its most reserved, it expands beyond the sense of solitude it seems to be inspired by, rendering it one of the most inviting – and best – dream pop albums released this year.
“The foolish hope of great eternal beauty,” Anna von Hausswolff sings on ‘Facing Atlas’, reaching her highest register, “This shit breaks my heart.” As epically ambitious as the Swedish musician’s latest effort is, it’s no more high-minded than any other depiction of heartbreak, except in framing it as the equivalent of the sky splitting in two. The atmosphere is so imposing and dense it justfies the unyielding desparation in von Hausswolf’s voice, which hardly ever relaxes. Why would when it seems like the only thing that can power through the cacophony? In starting over, the singer finds better places to store her pure, frantic hope.
“I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” Lorde sings on Virgin’s opening track, ‘Hammer’. That doesn’t mean she’s not searching, but on the pop star’s first album in four years, she embraces that feeling. When she sings of the “peace in the madness over our heads,” it’s not reflective of the kind of healing journey that polarized listeners on 2021’s Solar Power so much as beginning to accept it in messy, sometimes subdued, occasionally blissful fashion. While Lorde’s shortest album to date, it is far from her least impactful, mirroring the fluidity she’s discovering in her gender expression and carrying wounds both self-inflicted and relational: hazy yet thorny, guttural yet ambiguous, that self glitching in and out of view yet somehow sounding impervious in its vulnerability. Read the full review.
Though Kathryn Mohr‘s music remains insular in nature, every record she’s made since 2021’s As If has required some sort of separation from home: she laid down her 2022 EP, Holly, produced by Midwife’s Madeline Johnston, in rural Mexico, whose desert environment had a palpable influence on the music. Her debut full-length, Waiting Room, was not only self-recorded but also conceived over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, as Mohr wove together songs in a windowless concrete room of a disused fish factory. The effect of the place is captured visually on the album cover and sonically through Mohr’s use of field recordings and imagistic writing, but the record only burrows further inward, at once liminal and confrontational, embodied and otherworldly. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Kathryn Mohr.
The world of Destroyer‘s Dan’s Boogie is one of sweeping beauty tumbling towards erasure. “‘There’s nothing in there/Everyone’s been burned,” Dan Bejar sings on ‘The Ignoramus of Love’. “I remix horses.” That third line, which nods to the Bill Callahan song ‘I Break Horses’ and reimagining Patti Smith’s Horses, is evidence of how other pieces of music – as well as film and literature, the boundaries being so blurred in Destroyer’s estimation – permeate Bejar’s subconscious lyrical process. You can’t always trace a direct connection between them as a listener, but you also can’t shake off the way a particular tangle of words, sounds, or images might have bled into Bejar’s madcap expression. It’s Destroyer at their most undiluted and fearless, and the results are both satisfyingly murky and illuminating. Read our inspirations interview with Destroyer.
22. Amaarae, Black Star
“I’m a material bitch,” Amaarae declares on ‘100DRUM’, “but I know the worth of a mind.” On ‘B2B’, she repeats the word “heart” more times than probably any body part mentioned on her new album. And yes, it’s called Black Star and Naomi Campbell appears on one song, but its best track is probably the PinkPantheress duet, which says a lot about its yearning emotionality. Black Star is as exuberant, reckless, and lavish as the Ghanaian American visionary’s major label debut, Fountain Baby, but it’s also mindful and sensitive as it expands on her globalist, Afrodiasporic vision of club music. The more time she spends in the club, the softer – yet no less inventive – her music becomes. You can get off a dozen different drugs, she knows, but no high can match that of a love that outlasts the rush. Read the full review.
As if titling a song ‘Fame Is a Gun’ isn’t enough provocation, Addison Rae opens it with the lines: “Tell me who I am/ Do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?/ Don’t ask too many questions/ That is my one suggestion.” It’s tempting to intellectualize Addison in the context of the TikTok-dancer-turned-pop-singer’s personal narrative, or the references she wears on her sleeves – Lana, Britney, Madonna – or even the stream of singles that sold more and more people on the prospect of Addison. But tune into Addison and it becomes clear that innocence is a synonym for sincerity, which is the main reason its every move and mood – euphoric and wistful, woozy and downcast – feels seamless; though working with the writer-producer duo of Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser across the record adds to the cohesion. Rae luxuriates in it all even as she maintains an air of detachment. She cares, of course – just don’t think too hard about it.
Up until now, Smerz records have tended to pique my interest, even amaze, then soon slipped from my mind. But Big city life, the Norwegian duo’s fuzzily glorious new album, clicked in immediately – and demanded repeated listens. Evocative of their experiences in New York and their hometown of Oslo, the record – playful and, to borrow one of the track titles, feisty – resonates on a wider scale. Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s eccentricity remains intact, layering one ambiguous feeling after another, but never without pulsing forward. “I’m realizing lately/ That I won’t feel like this again,” is the closing sentiment on ‘A thousand years’. Might be half-remembered, even imagined, but never anything less than real.
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately was the title of Perfume Genius’ 2020 studio album, and of course, there’s always the fear of burning out. ‘It’s a Mirror’, the confident lead single from his astounding new album Glory that marked a shift from the diffuse grooves of 2022’s Ugly Season, still bows down to the feeling of “a siren, muffled crying/ Breaking me down soft and slow.” But if there is a weariness seeping through the familiarly lush and vibrant tapestry of Glory – which reunites Mike Hadreas with producer Blake Mills, while elevating his backing band of Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Greg Uhlmann, Tim Carr, Jim Keltner, and Pat Kelly – it’s not at the expense of catharsis, freedom, or indeed glory. The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air. “My entire life… it’s fine,” he sings on ‘No Front Teeth’. The affirming going to keeps hanging in the silence. Read the full review.
A selfie utilized as an album cover might be the first thing that strikes you about Blurr, making it no surprise the album carries the intimacy of a voice memo – and often sounds like it was recorded directly onto a cell phone. More than staring at yourself in the mirror or inside the screen of a tiny computer, however, Joanne Robertson’s latest release feels like shutting it off and catching your reflection in the blackness. Without any percussive accompaniment, it is full of rhythm, the coiling between her voice and guitar invoking the soul humming through the body: tender and tactile despite its fuzziness, temporal while stretching toward infinity. Oliver Coates’ string contributions, astonishing and meticulously placed, fill out the canvas as if in absolute certainty that endless place is not just reachable, but colours out the solitude.
Following last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd, Hannah Frances‘ fifth LP is another dazzling invitation into the singer-songwriter’s deeply interconnected world. Continuing her collaboration co-producer Kevin Copeland, Frances expands the earthy intricacies of her last album by leaning into graceful, winding maximalism; if her previous album was a solemn excavation of grief, familial dysfunction, and a turbulent upbringing, Nested in Tangles spirals outward instead of burrowing further in, creating a lush environment through which past and present selves can move and change shape. Gnarled, playful, and ultimately therapeutic, it knows when to breathe fire and softly exhale, nestle and branch out. “Recollections move through in sudden shifting shapes,” she intones on the final track, “I release into the unburdening.” Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Hannah Frances.
If the words Waxahatchee, Swearin’, or P.S. Eliot mean anything to you, the debut from Snocaps might be the best musical surprise of the year. It’s the return of the Crutchfield twins, whose first band, the Ackleys, made waves in Birmingham, Alabama when they were just 15. Allison sometimes plays as part of Waxahatchee, Katie’s biggest, now Grammy-nominated project, and they’ve promised to perform material from P.S. Eliot, their second band, on tour. They split their self-titled album’s tracklist evenly, ricocheting between their diverging (but never discordant) songwriting instincts. Backed by two musicians Katie worked with on her latest album, Tigers Blood, MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook, Snocaps is as warm and spontaneous as it is thorny and subtly miraculous. Read the full review.
In an interview promoting his new albumGuitar, which was released on the same day as Water From Your Eyes’ It’s a Beautiful Place, Mac DeMarco – the archetypal indie rock prankster, a label also applied to the NYC duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos – talked about “the Robin Williams effect.” He explained, “Robin Williams is all fun and games, and then you watch Good Will Hunting and you’re like—fuck. It’s good.” Funnily enough, Amos joked that Williams is “a silent member of Water From Your Eyes” in press materials because a poster from the Mork & Mindy era hangs in his bedroom, where he still makes all the music for WFYE, which now sounds bigger than ever. But the Robin Williams effect is also not a bad way of describing It’s a Beautiful Place, which is characteristically silly, freaky, and clunky – because what’s more awkward than making sci-fi indie rock about cosmic existentialism – until its vast emotional range hits you. Read the full review.
When Dijon sings that he’s on fire, you believe him. But it’s different from any other artist trying to sell the idea that lasting love has the power to obliterate all your insecurities. It’s chaotic, Dijon Duenas affirms, making swooning, infectious, dazzling R&B music that can sound on the verge of a breakdown even – or especially – at its most ecstatic. With help from Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Michael Gordon, the Los Angeles-based musician and producer has no issue fragmenting his most immediate hooks or rendering his voice unrecognizable when he’s most breathlessly trying to express himself. Whatever inspiration it owes to the past, Baby suggests you can no longer make beautiful, revelatory pop music without sounding at least a bit precarious or unwieldy.
Don’t let that cover artwork throw you off – take it as a warning sign. Though informed by sobriety, that newfound perspective edges the London-based electronic producer into an even more abrasive direction than her ketamine-fuelled 2021 debut, im hole. Because the reality of sobriety – its very soberness – can be even more horrifying, like a blinding light on the rear-view mirror where total fuckery is just a gasping breath or nightmare away. “I’ll never let myself forget/ They had me out on a witch-hunt/ When I found myself,” she intones on the opening track. aya’s production lets sounds – drawing from her childhood fascination with nu-metal and emo – ferment, spiral, and soften, only for her vocals to slice right through. It’s as wry as it is impossibly visceral and dazzling, like a manic dream you wouldn’t wake up from even if you could.
Hushed, gorgeous, and warmly elusive, Alex G‘s major label debut is a high watermark in a career full of them. There’s still a treasure trove of childhood memories for the singer-songwriter to dig up, to try and bridge the disparate pieces and fill the missing ones. “I’ve searched far and wide/ For a place like this/ Now I can close my eyes,” he sings at one point on Headlights. And what happens then, in the blackness? Maybe his voice thrives, writing out every word, rescuing his younger self. Maybe it gets all distorted, firing up his imagination. Maybe he’ll get dizzy with the big bright light; maybe he’ll miss the one glaring right at him. Read the full review.
11. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, New Threats From the Soul
After more than a dozen years of honing his songwriting with the band State Champion and a few experimenting with drum machines and weird synths, Ryan Davis sounds grounded yet unconstrained on his sophomore record with the Roadhouse Band, far removed from the romantic ideals of music yet deeply existential and strangely spiritual about it. The songs are not simple but wordy, knotty, and outstretched while hinging on some elemental truth. It may not bring back the feeling, but it might make you feel, as Davis later sings, “with the feelings that I don’t express.” That’s more than most music, now or ever, would joyfully bestow. Read the full review.
There’s no shame in describing the deepest of pleasures in simple language: “It feels nice,” FKA twigs declares on ‘Room of Fools’, a highlight off her third album EUSEXUA, while another track is called ‘Girl Feels Good’. But the pop iconoclast is as gifted at putting things succinctly as she is at nuanced expression of both body and soul, which is why she’s spent so much of the album’s rollout trying to describe the word she coined for it. The record may not be as loose as her 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS, but certainly retains some of its clubby exuberance, as well as the spell-binding eroticism of LP1, in mapping that slippery state of being. That it’s a place worth exploring goes without saying. Read the full review.
On ‘Saturation Driver’, a highlight from La Dispute’s new album No One Was Driving the Car, disaster flicks play on a muted TV while nobody’s watching – except, that is, Jordan Dreyer’s camera-wielding narrator. Disaster – whether exploited for entertainment, untangling through time, or lost to history – is a fact of life; earlier on the record, Dreyer goes as far as to sing, “Every moment we’re alive a disaster/ A tragedy to be and breathe.” It is also a miracle, he later exalts; the follow-up to 2019’s Panorama is revelatory and windingly rapturous in that way, knotting the vicious truths and transcendent joys its characters are driven towards around the veil of memory, progress, and Christian fundamentalism. Read our inspirations interview with La Dispute.
That Bad Bunny would make an album that finds him reconnecting with the musical traditions of Puerto Rico, one that triumphantly doubles as a love letter to his motherland, is no surprise. But you barely have to scratch beneath the surface to acknowledge just how piercing, comprehensive, and ambitious of an effort Debí Tirar Más Fotos is – not only does it survey genres like salsa, plena, and música típica, but for those listening on YouTube, each of its accompanying 17 visualizers serves as a history lesson about Puerto Rican history. As musically rich as it is daring, the record also scans as one of Bad Bunny’s most personal, reeling from different kinds of loss, from cultural displacement to heartbreak. It’s way less of a detour than the global superstar reaching a new peak in predictably admirable fashion.
“Everything buffering, reality lag and jump/ Sometimes barely recognize the people I love,” billy woods raps on ‘Golgotha’, a line that cuts to the core of his hallucinogenic writing. The Brooklyn rapper articulates bad dreams, ghostly memories, and gloomy, cross-generational visions with strange lucidity, and while GOLLIWOG marks his first full-length effort without a primary collaborator in six years, he’s hardly alone in it. Sometimes it’s hard to trace who’s relaying whose story, how the past blurs into the present, though woods points to a tale about an evil golliwog – the racist caricature the record is named after – that he wrote as a child, remembering how his mother said it needed some work. So we get a challenging, unsparing 18-track record that stands among the all-timer’s very best.
Rosalía‘s fourth studio album is a towering epic, a four-movement work that draws inspiration from female saints and poets with “the intention of verticality.” But the most disarming, by pop standards, aspect of LUX isn’t the Spanish superstar’s spiritual and musical ambitions, or the way she folds them into a compelling structure, but its heart-rending sentimentality, apparent in both the dramatic ways she wields these stories and every small waver of her voice. That’s the quality of its operatic scope that cuts through on each listen, taking stock of her lived experience as much as it seeks to undress it and ascend to a new world. It’s a singular document of an artist at the top of her game, shamelessly looking to the past while confronting the oblivion of the future. Read the full review.
oklou‘s debut LP, choke enough, is eerily enchanting yet damn near impossible to pin down. The French-born, London-based vocalist and producer, born Marylou Mayniel, may have been honing in her leftfield stylings for a decade now, but the way she flavours every trace of genre on choke enough – which finds her working with A.G. Cook, Danny L Harle, and co-producer Casey MQ – gives it the feel of an instant avant-pop classic. As giddily lush and Y2K-infused as it is dreamily ambient – but above all vaporous – the record zones in on the experience of decentering from one’s self, the way it stretches over a period of years and the glimmers of life peaking through the cracks. It’s an album you can’t help but get lost in, yet it never totally loses itself, anchoring in a world of in-betweens.
If it sounds like the road is its own fateful character on Bleeds, it might have something to do with when and where it took shape. Entering the studio just a month after vocalist Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman broke up, the North Carolina band were recording off the back of an exhaustive touring schedule in support of 2023’s masterful Rat Saw God. With a couple of stylistic diversions, Wednesday‘s new album no doubt feeds off the gnarly, blazing energy of its predecessor, collaging another tangle of funny, tragic, beautiful stories. But reaching what sounds like a breaking point on the ferocious highlight ‘Wasp’ leads vocalist Karly Hartzman to be just as unsparing on the album’s more intimate moments. The band is about to embark on another tour, but Bleeds sounds like the equivalent of pulling over to let out a good scream. Read the full review.
“Not everything needs to even out.” The line stands out amidst the elusive tapestry of ‘Beautiful ending’, though the closer to caroline’s second album doubtlessly lives up to its titular promise. Not everything needs to resolve lyrically to make some sort of sense; not everything needs to line up musically to leave a mark on you. caroline 2 is a delightfully uneven yet meticulously crafted record, one that’s enamoured not so much with the disparateness of its parts as it is in the delicate act of stitching them together. In it you can hear empty spaces and vast stretches of time, people existing in the same room yet setting themselves adrift, bridging distances big and small. I can’t imagine not submitting yourself to its spell.
In the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, which follows the singer-songwriter around the age of 30, a TV interviewer asks what Cohen means when he says he tries to wake up in a state of grace. He describes it as “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you,” adding, “It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos, because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order.” I kept thinking about his use of the word warlike as I spun Geese’s revelatory new album, Getting Killed, which wastes no time pointing to the carnage all around while spending most of it in a fervid, ludicrous freefall that fills the gaps between the bizarre chaos of 2023’s 3D Country and Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal. Read the full review.
feeo frames her fragile, eerily intimate songs against the backdrop of infinity. Cosmic possibilities and absurd injustices shimmer at the edges of Goodness, making its vision feel as wide as it is singular; yet the more microscopic details and emotional nuances the London artist homes in on, the more her sonic poems scan as small epics, oozing through the connective tissue of a deeper world. At 39 minutes, Theodora Laird’s full-length debut is astonishingly rich; it swirls, brews, and burrows, rewarding you the further you stay along with it. Her voice is invariably beautiful yet at times almost vaporized by its surroundings, as if everything is always hanging by an incredibly fine thread. But her discerning eye and sense of presence remain infrangible. “I’m only a witness,” she sings, bearing like few artists dare to.
Aviator is one of those games that look simple. It’s just a small plane, a line that climbs, and that one second where you either win big, or crash like that same plane. But the game has a personality. Not the loud kind. The subtle kind, the type that shows up only when your finger is hovering over the button and you realise you’re arguing with yourself.
Some players try to hide it, but you can always tell who plays fast and who plays patient. It’s like watching people walk into a room. Some rush, some float, some take their time because they’re pretending not to care even though they do. Aviator forces all of that out without saying a word. The multiplier goes up and suddenly everyone’s “style” becomes visible, even if they didn’t know they had one.
I’ve sat in rooms where the whole table watches the climb together. Nobody talks at first. They’re just reading the number like it’s giving them a message only they understand. Someone cashes early and pretends it was intentional. Someone else waits too long and then leans back like they always knew it would crash. These reactions are the style. Not the game. The people.
What makes Aviator interesting is that it doesn’t distract you with ten different things at once. No shiny animations begging for attention. No overly dramatic soundtracks trying too hard. It’s almost too bare. But that’s the trick. The simplicity gives the game its shape. You fill the empty space with your own behaviour. That’s where the tension comes from.
Most casino-style games are about outcomes. Aviator online feels more like watching your own decision-making in real time. The game is simple. You’re not. You start telling yourself stories. “This one feels like it will go further.” “Last round wasn’t fair.” “Just one more second.” And then you realise you’re negotiating with a cartoon plane on your screen like it’s personal.
The social part adds another layer. When the multiplier climbs past the comfort zone, people become strangely united. You hear someone breathe differently. Someone else laughs too loudly. A stranger types a comment that sounds confident but you can tell they’re shaking just like everyone else. It’s oddly human. Everyone is trying to look composed while their instinct is pulling the other way.
Aviator also exposes pacing. Some people play like sprinters. They jump in, jump out, quick moves, no attachment. Others play like marathon runners. They wait, watch, wait again, then suddenly make a decision that doesn’t match the last ten rounds. And some people, the ones who swear they’re “not emotional players,” are the first to chase a crash with a reckless stake just to test their luck. You see it happen in the small changes in posture or the longer hesitation before they tap the screen.
There is no right way to play it, which is probably why style becomes such a big part of the experience. The game doesn’t push you into a corner. It simply asks the same question over and over: “How long are you willing to trust yourself?” The climb is the same every time, but your answer rarely is.
And that’s really what gives Aviator its charm. Not the visuals. Not the rules. Not even the wins. It’s the way the game quietly reveals the parts of you that other games never reach. You walk in thinking you’re playing something simple. Turns out you’re learning your own rhythm, your own timing, your own weird habits under pressure.
Aviator isn’t stylish on the surface. But it brings out style in the people playing it. And that’s the part that keeps pulling them back.
On their sophomore LP, Gaman, 
Featuring nearly the same backing band as last year’s Kabutomushi EP, 
Different Talking is the first album 
There might be a self-reflective throughline across 
While 
For their mesmerizing second album, Magic of the Sale, 
When it comes to love, 
Parader is torn between 
From their first rehearsal together, it took less than a year for 
“I got caught in the teeth of the thoughts that keep me awake,” Stefan Babcock sings on ‘Paranoid’, a blistering highlight off 
Jenn Wasner’s radiant new album under the 
After releasing their sun-kissed, soulful debut Evil Joy in 2021, 
“I’m undressed, paperless, filter gone,” 
Written after she relocated from Los Angeles to New York, 
Sometimes, even beautiful words aren’t right for a piece of music that can transport you on its own, a skill Meg Duffy cultivates by going long periods of time making only 
After finishing his tour in support of 2023’s 
Produced by No Age’s Randy Randall, the debut album from the Chicago trio is buoyant, destabilizing, and incandescent, splicing together bursts of power-pop, dance-punk, dub, and concentrated noise with the playful, organic immediacy of a group constantly tuning into each other as much as their influences. 
The music MIKE makes instantly feels like an intimate dialogue, and Showbiz! is no exception. Between his richly lackadaisical delivery and hypnagogic use of samples, the looseness and fluidity of the New York rapper-producer’s approach keep the listener engaged but never more than arm’s length away. Yet what remains beyond grasp for MIKE, always at an odd distance, is the perfect sense of home, something he keeps searching for across the LP – though “home” is where he recorded all of it, in phases after stretches of touring. Similarly, he muses on the idea of breakout success more than simply lounging on it. “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant,” he raps on ‘Artist of the Century’, an apt summation of the whole project.
Emily Sprague has no trouble baring her soul out in her lyrics. Intimacy, like tenderness, has and never will be a difficult thing for the 
On their first album in 23 years, Pulp are still caught up with the inexplicable nature of beauty and love. But for perhaps the first time in the group’s history, Jarvis Cocker seems less fazed by those things, homing in on the feeling and spelling out the ineffable, sometimes literally, as on the early single ‘Got to Have Love’. More is the product of waiting, not taking, a long time to make something – of your fears, of missed opportunities, of time itself. “The universe shrugged, then moved on.” And then it hits you. In the wake of longtime Pulp member Steve Mackey’s death in 2023, as well as the passing of Cocker’s mother early last year, the follow-up to 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life feels effortful yet elegant in its insistence on expressing love, not just the kind that endures, but the ones that disintegrate or never even really existed. 
It’s one thing to write music from the stomach versus the heart, as was Will Wiesenfeld’s intention for Gut, his first 
45 Pounds is as trashy as it is taut, as harsh as it is relentlessly hooky. It’s a combination that brings to mind contemporary purveyors of controlled chaos such as Gilla Band and Model/Actriz, though what’s remarkable about the New York-based experimental outfit’s corrosive, improvisational blend of punk, hardcore, and electronic music is how fully realized – and funky – it sounds on their debut full-length. Zack Borzone’s vocal chops manage to stand out amidst the discombobulating interplay between Jack Tobias’ radiant synths and Sam Pickard’s frenzied percussion, which peaks on the penultimate track ‘Blackout’. It sprints forward while keeping you on your toes.
Don’t let the title – itself a nod to a John Cheever short story – fool you: the deeper you listen to For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), the harder it is to pigeonhole it. It’s less for any kind of female archetype than it is about a certain brand of foolish masculinity it frames as both timeless and contemporary. It’s about Michelle Zauner, too, a singer-songwriter and author who, following the pop-inflected glee and success of 
While he continues to build an impressive resume as an engineer, Asheville musician 
There was one thing 
DÍA is no less self-reflective than 
Trash Mountain is named after a pink house sitting on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington, Vermont’s Old North End, which 
Plenty of popular music has taught us that fame can be isolating, but Brendan Yates has been singing about loneliness way before the breakout success of 2021’s Glow On. What’s changed with their new album Never Enough, which has received a more muted but still loving response, is the vantage point. “This is where I wanna be/ But I can’t feel a fuckin’ thing,” Yates declares on its track ‘Sunshower’. While seeing them live in the wake of Glow On provided a rare example of how jubilant and light-hearted moshing can be, the remarkable thing about seeing them at the 
Linear progression is generally a myth, yet one often projected onto artists, who must continually level up their sound without straying from their original vision. 
I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is hardly a solitary affair. Along with William Tyler collaborator Scott Hirsch, Pedigo brought together a group of musicians that includes violinist Nathan Bieber, pianist Jens Kuross, pedal steel player Nicole Lawrence, and “phaser suggester” Forest Juziuk. But while the arrangements are richly spacious and uniformly warm, Pedigo ensures nothing overshadows the simple majesty of his fingerpicking, which hums to its own rhythm. Written on a 20,000-acre in Wyoming, Pedigo shades in the vacuum of memory like there’s just as much beauty in forgetting as remembering, in observing landscapes through a window and noticing them blur together in your mind. Without saying a single word, no album in 2025 could make you more at ease with the passage of time.
Over the past decade or so, 
Following 2021’s kaleidoscopic 
The follow-up to 2022’s 
In the first hours of 2023, 
Catchy and aggressive from the get-go, 
“I never lie in my songs,” 
The title of 
After more than a couple of influential records in the increasingly saturated shoegaze genre – 2021’s self-titled LP, 2022’s a blip, and 2023’s in/out – Total Wife did the opposite of fading into obscurity, signing to Philadelphia label Julia’s War and cementing their status with their latest, come back down. It’s a breathlessly inventive and unconventionally dreamy record whose tides are difficult to predict or even identify – mind-melting guitars that get blown out and repurposed as synths, vocals whispered right beside your ear then chopped to oblivion, and a fluid rhythmic backbone evoking, to quote their song ‘rest’, “the beat in between my restlessness.” Pitched between jittery alertness and the edge of sleep, come back down is also a riveting expression of the duo’s dynamic compositional and lyrical instincts, a force that grounds the record in its malleable, blurry transcendence. 
keiyaA was feeling numb as the hype around her last album, 2020’s Forever, Ya Girl, began to die down, when she came across a post by writer Mandy Harris Williams: “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.” He was citing the concept in physics that became the title of, and poetic fuel for, the Chicago-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s latest album, hooke’s law. Building on the avant-R&B vision of her debut, it’s a dazzling portrait of jadedness unlike any in the genre while remaining absolute playful, both in its lush experimentation and silly one-liners. It’s not claustrophobic, exactly, so much as club music from the bottom of an emotional well. “I toast to lighten up the pain,” she offers on the closing track, “Until we meet again/ Start again.”
Subtlety is a virtue in the singer-songwriter world. In the face of a dying earth, however, and energized by collaborating for the first time in a writing capacity with her live band, the Attachment Theory – Devra Hoff on bass and vocals, Jorge Balbi on drums and machines, and TEEN’s Teeny Lieberson on synth, piano, guitar and vocals – 
Building on 2023’s Live at Bush Hall, Forever Howlong leverages 
More than continuously toeing the line between styles, between coherence and abstraction, 
Diving into Weatherday’s latest outing, Hornet Disaster – which stretches over an hour and 16 minutes – is a daunting task, but the Swedish experimentalist sounds more exacting, determined, and addictive than ever. Six years after Sputnik’s debut LP under the moniker, Come In, and just a few after an 
You don’t always know what 
Sparks fly all over Sounds like…, Florry’s second album with Dear Life Records. It’s impossible to deny on the record’s euphorically charged, lyrically intriguing opener, ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’, but there’s plenty of magic to be found as the Vermont-based septet loosens up on the rest of the record. Like pretty much every album coming out of Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios, this one, co-produced with Colin Miller, sounds lived-in and magnetic. There is a rawness, at times even an explicit emptiness, in bandleader Francie Medosch’s lyrics, but it’s hardly something to stop the band dead in its tracks. “I was hoping to use this song to talk about/ Something that had been going on but I could not get it out,” she sings on ‘Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone’. Something like it, still, spills out.
The Antlers
The third and titular rule of Don’t Tap the Glass is the most ambiguous, which is somewhat reflective of the overall balance the record strikes: it’s a straightforward rap-party project whose kineticism is undeniable, but, arriving less than a year after the densely packed 
With a title like Bugland, it feels lazy to call No Joy’s new album playful. It’s really the way Jasamine White-Gluz’s work registers as a playground that’s so thrilling: a place that triggers fuzzy memories, a fantastical portal, a wild abstraction with no equivalent in the real world. Beyond their shared musical interests and boundless genre-hopping – having the most fun in the islands of nu metal, shoegaze, and pop music – it’s where her approach intersects with Fire-Toolz’s Angel Marcloid, who co-produced the Motherhood follow-up not just with wide-eyed maximalism but true enthusiasm. It’s a wonder to hear them play and burst into a swirl of emotions mostly antithetical to the project’s name, to linger and rush out of them – maybe cutting the word in half does it more justice – fully.
Way before it was meticulously sequenced, Sinister Grift – Panda Bear’s first record to feature all his AnCo bandmates, with notable appearances from Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede (Lennox’s partner), and his daughter Nadja – began with Lennox and his co-producer and lifelong friend Deakin (Josh Gibb) laying down material in his newly built studio in Lisbon. Like its ecstatic take on heartbreak, the record reconfigures country tropes, classic rock chords, and reggae rhythms without quite distorting or diluting them. It sounds at ease with its menace and disconcerted by its playfulness, and these are all words you can twist around every time you press play.
As far as 
It’s been five years since 
Deftones’ 10th album – and best in years – deftly balances their signature brutality and lushness. The follow-up to 2020’s relatively muted Ohms was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who previously worked on 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan, and reminds us that no band can make cataclysmic music sound quite as sumptuous. On standout ‘milk of the madonna’, Chino Moreno invokes bloody rain, thunder, quaking winds, and most of all fire, sounding utterly consumed yet invigorated by the pummeling force of the instrumentation. “The display ignites your mind,” he sings. How could it not?
Ethel Cain
The title of 
During the pandemic, facing complications from myalgic encephalomyelitis and long COVID, Jasmine Cruickshank underwent heart surgery and was bed-bound for almost half a year. It was then that she decided to come out as trans, end her abusive marriage, and escape to Manchester, where she found – and was able to write through – her queer community. Backed by an all-trans band, 
First, 
For nearly an entire hour, Through the Wall barely changes up its groove. Remaining sultry and poised, Rochelle Jordan’s incadescent, scintillating new album anchors in a tasteful fusion of R&B and deep house that many attempted but none executed as faithfully as, the Los Angeles-based, British-Canadian singer-songwriter this year. Hooking you in with some of the most tempered – and temptatious – pop choruses of the year, Jordan doesn’t try to prove you won’t hear a better club record this year. She just swings into action, eager to take up space.
More than a surefire hit that’s capable of carrying a whole album, ‘9 2 5’ serves as a thesis statement for The Passionates Ones, whose title should stave off those without that kind of fire in their hearts. Slotted right in the middle of the record, it paints a typical portrait of an artist struggling to overcome systemic challenges to “manifest a vision,” while everything around it explores more personal, nuanced shades of it: “I dreamed this life, now I’m scared to live it,” Marcus Brown admits on ‘It’s Time’. Flitting between R&B, jazz, funk, and hip-hop, Brown’s eclecticism ensures the songs are radiant enough to prevent the fear from taking over – so they all shine just as bright.
On the first song of their 
Luminescent Creatures takes its name from the closing track of 
Essex Honey is probably too eclectic to sound like the music you grew up with, but it certainly feels like it. “Regressing back to times you know/ Playing songs you forgot you owned,” Dev Hynes sings on ‘Westerberg’, a key line on an album that digs through memory by interpolating songs from acts including the Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Everything But the Girl’s Ben Watt. Just as evocative are the variably abstract passages of piano and cello, the first instruments Hynes ever played. Foggy, fatigued, yet clear-eyed, 
As the most pioneering band in modern shoegaze, TAGABOW could capitalize on a fantastical, watered-down version of a sound that’s only getting more popular, especially on their first LP for a bigger label in NYC’s ATO Records. They could shroud everything in glitchy layers of artifice and mutter poetic lyrics that mean nothing for the rest of their careers. Douglas Dulgarian’s way of avoiding that was making a record he’s deemed 
Sudan Archives’ lavish, ambitious world keeps expanding on THE BPM, but not at the expense of vulnerability – quite the opposite. Broadly speaking, the virtuoso’s third LP is as inventive as her 2022 breakout Natural Brown Prom Queen, but it also at times feels like a totally different album: wilder and more confounding its musical swings, more existential in its post-breakup candor. Sudan and her collaborators’ production is hypnotic and breathless with ideas without ever falling out of sync with the singer’s emotional overflow. “Sometimes I can get real low but I am high right now,” she sings on ‘Los Cinci’, prizing every point on the spectrum equally.
On 
“The foolish hope of great eternal beauty,” Anna von Hausswolff sings on ‘Facing Atlas’, reaching her highest register, “This shit breaks my heart.” As epically ambitious as the Swedish musician’s latest effort is, it’s no more high-minded than any other depiction of heartbreak, except in framing it as the equivalent of the sky splitting in two. The atmosphere is so imposing and dense it justfies the unyielding desparation in von Hausswolf’s voice, which hardly ever relaxes. Why would when it seems like the only thing that can power through the cacophony? In starting over, the singer finds better places to store her pure, frantic hope.
“I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” Lorde sings on Virgin’s opening track, ‘Hammer’. That doesn’t mean she’s not searching, but on the pop star’s first album in four years, she embraces that feeling. When she sings of the “peace in the madness over our heads,” it’s not reflective of the kind of healing journey that polarized listeners on 2021’s 
Though 
The world of 
“I’m a material bitch,” 
As if titling a song ‘Fame Is a Gun’ isn’t enough provocation, Addison Rae opens it with the lines: “Tell me who I am/ Do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?/ Don’t ask too many questions/ That is my one suggestion.” It’s tempting to intellectualize Addison in the context of the TikTok-dancer-turned-pop-singer’s personal narrative, or the references she wears on her sleeves – Lana, Britney, Madonna – or even the stream of singles that sold more and more people on the prospect of Addison. But tune into Addison and it becomes clear that innocence is a synonym for sincerity, which is the main reason its every move and mood – euphoric and wistful, woozy and downcast – feels seamless; though working with the writer-producer duo of Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser across the record adds to the cohesion. Rae luxuriates in it all even as she maintains an air of detachment. She cares, of course – just don’t think too hard about it.
Up until now, Smerz records have tended to pique my interest, even amaze, then soon slipped from my mind. But Big city life, the Norwegian duo’s fuzzily glorious new album, clicked in immediately – and demanded repeated listens. Evocative of their experiences in New York and their hometown of Oslo, the record – playful and, to borrow one of the track titles, feisty – resonates on a wider scale. Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s eccentricity remains intact, layering one ambiguous feeling after another, but never without pulsing forward. “I’m realizing lately/ That I won’t feel like this again,” is the closing sentiment on ‘A thousand years’. Might be half-remembered, even imagined, but never anything less than real.
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
A selfie utilized as an album cover might be the first thing that strikes you about Blurr, making it no surprise the album carries the intimacy of a voice memo – and often sounds like it was recorded directly onto a cell phone. More than staring at yourself in the mirror or inside the screen of a tiny computer, however, Joanne Robertson’s latest release feels like shutting it off and catching your reflection in the blackness. Without any percussive accompaniment, it is full of rhythm, the coiling between her voice and guitar invoking the soul humming through the body: tender and tactile despite its fuzziness, temporal while stretching toward infinity. Oliver Coates’ string contributions, astonishing and meticulously placed, fill out the canvas as if in absolute certainty that endless place is not just reachable, but colours out the solitude.
Following last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd, 
If the words 
In an 
When Dijon sings that he’s on fire, you believe him. But it’s different from any other artist trying to sell the idea that lasting love has the power to obliterate all your insecurities. It’s chaotic, Dijon Duenas affirms, making swooning, infectious, dazzling R&B music that can sound on the verge of a breakdown even – or especially – at its most ecstatic. With help from Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Michael Gordon, the Los Angeles-based musician and producer has no issue fragmenting his most immediate hooks or rendering his voice unrecognizable when he’s most breathlessly trying to express himself. Whatever inspiration it owes to the past, Baby suggests you can no longer make beautiful, revelatory pop music without sounding at least a bit precarious or unwieldy.
Don’t let that cover artwork throw you off – take it as a warning sign. Though informed by sobriety, that newfound perspective edges the London-based electronic producer into an even more abrasive direction than her ketamine-fuelled 2021 debut, im hole. Because the reality of sobriety – its very soberness – can be even more horrifying, like a blinding light on the rear-view mirror where total fuckery is just a gasping breath or nightmare away. “I’ll never let myself forget/ They had me out on a witch-hunt/ When I found myself,” she intones on the opening track. aya’s production lets sounds – drawing from her childhood fascination with nu-metal and emo – ferment, spiral, and soften, only for her vocals to slice right through. It’s as wry as it is impossibly visceral and dazzling, like a manic dream you wouldn’t wake up from even if you could.
Hushed, gorgeous, and warmly elusive, 
After more than a dozen years of honing his songwriting with the band State Champion and a few experimenting with drum machines and weird synths, 
There’s no shame in describing the deepest of pleasures in simple language: “It feels nice,” 
On ‘Saturation Driver’, a highlight from 
That Bad Bunny would make an album that finds him reconnecting with the musical traditions of Puerto Rico, one that triumphantly doubles as a love letter to his motherland, is no surprise. But you barely have to scratch beneath the surface to acknowledge just how piercing, comprehensive, and ambitious of an effort Debí Tirar Más Fotos is – not only does it survey genres like salsa, plena, and música típica, but for those listening on YouTube, each of its accompanying 17 visualizers serves as a history lesson about Puerto Rican history. As musically rich as it is daring, the record also scans as one of Bad Bunny’s most personal, reeling from different kinds of loss, from cultural displacement to heartbreak. It’s way less of a detour than the global superstar reaching a new peak in predictably admirable fashion.
“Everything buffering, reality lag and jump/ Sometimes barely recognize the people I love,” 
Rosalía
If it sounds like the road is its own fateful character on Bleeds, it might have something to do with when and where it took shape. Entering the studio just a month after vocalist Karly Hartzman and guitarist 
“Not everything needs to even out.” The line stands out amidst the elusive tapestry of ‘Beautiful ending’, though the closer to caroline’s second album doubtlessly lives up to its titular promise. Not everything needs to resolve lyrically to make some sort of sense; not everything needs to line up musically to leave a mark on you. caroline 2 is a delightfully uneven yet meticulously crafted record, one that’s enamoured not so much with the disparateness of its parts as it is in the delicate act of stitching them together. In it you can hear empty spaces and vast stretches of time, people existing in the same room yet setting themselves adrift, bridging distances big and small. I can’t imagine not submitting yourself to its spell.
In the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, which follows the singer-songwriter around the age of 30, a TV interviewer asks what Cohen means when he says he tries to wake up in a state of grace. He describes it as “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you,” adding, “It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos, because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order.” I kept thinking about his use of the word warlike as I spun 
feeo frames her fragile, eerily intimate songs against the backdrop of infinity. Cosmic possibilities and absurd injustices shimmer at the edges of Goodness, making its vision feel as wide as it is singular; yet the more microscopic details and emotional nuances the London artist homes in on, the more her sonic poems scan as small epics, oozing through the connective tissue of a deeper world. At 39 minutes, Theodora Laird’s full-length debut is astonishingly rich; it swirls, brews, and burrows, rewarding you the further you stay along with it. Her voice is invariably beautiful yet at times almost vaporized by its surroundings, as if everything is always hanging by an incredibly fine thread. But her discerning eye and sense of presence remain infrangible. “I’m only a witness,” she sings, bearing like few artists dare to.
