There are microfibers in your clothing that will break down over time and contaminate the environment around you. When you look in your closet, you may just see your clothes sitting there innocently, but there is something sinister happening at a microlevel that you are not aware of. It happens with cheap fabrics most often, but even high fashion clothes are sometimes going to cause pollution.
Many of us know about the kind of negative environmental effects of fast fashion and modern fashion trends that create disposable outfits that are not meant to be worn very often. We may know about how they hurt the earth, but are we aware of the damage they could be doing to us?
What to Know about Sustainable Fashion
Sustainable fashion is a hot topic these days, and that is for good reason. If we are not careful about how we support different fashion designers and businesses, we will contribute to environmental damage. Some fashion companies are not concerned about their effect on the environment, but they are all concerned about their public image. If you know that a company is being irresponsible, then you should do your duty to protect the environment and expose them.
What’s in Your Closet?
Kids talk about monsters in their closest, but the real monster may be the clothes that are placed on hangers in there and sitting in shoeboxes on the floor. These items could be shedding microfibers into the environment, causing damage to you, your pets, and the surrounding environment. What’s so bad about microfibers?
The biggest issue is that they do not degrade naturally. They won’t ever become a part of the environment, and that’s because they are made of plastic. These little fibers can get into your airways and your digestive system. You can ingest them and breathe them in without ever noticing them. Your body may expel them in time, or they can build up inside you and your pets and cause damage. That sounds pretty scary, right? We should be scared about the effect these small fibers are having on our health and on the environment.
Emma with Imagine experts says that microfibers are tough to clean up, but a thorough and deep cleaning of the home can often remove most of them. If you have switched over to sustainable fashion recently, then there could still be microfibers in your home that you really don’t want there. Professional cleaning could be a great way to get rid of them and make your home a safer place.
Cleaning with the Earth in Mind
Do you try to conserve water when you are taking showers and doing laundry, making every effort to waste as little water as you can and combine loads of laundry? Yet even with that environmentally conscious mindset, you can still hurt the earth with the way you wash your clothes. Some clothing products are made with toxic dyes that look vibrant and colorful but are dangerous to the environment. When you wash them, especially if you wash them in a way they are not designed to be washed, you can cause the colors to bleed off. Those dyes can then get into the drains and eventually into the water supply, affecting humans, animals, and the surrounding environment.
You have to be careful first of all with what kind of clothing you buy and what kind of dyes are used. Secondly, you have to be careful about how you wash the clothes and how sensitive the dyes may be to certain kinds of washing cycles. Often, cold water cycles are safer for preserving colors and keeping dyes from running off compared to hot water washing cycles.
Time to Say Goodbye
Do you toss out unsustainable clothes that would harm the environment or do something else with them? Remember that many of these will not break down naturally in the environment, so it may be safer to put them in storage and hold onto them than make them end up in a landfill somewhere. If you don’t want them in your home anymore, you can gift them to friends or take them to a secondhand shop.
Once non-sustainable fashion is purchased, there is little that can be done with it other than for someone to keep wearing it. If you regret your decision to buy clothing that isn’t good for the environment, then keep that in mind the next time you go clothes shopping. Do your research to ensure that you are supporting sustainable fashion and environmentally conscious fashion companies. You can do your part little by little to reverse the trends and protect the environment.
It may seem like your small buying decisions cannot make much of a difference, but you can have a bigger impact than just on the clothes you buy. You can also tell your friends about your decision and what you have learned about shopping sustainably and how the fashion industry hurts the environment. Word of mouth is a powerful tool that will have a widespread impact. You can be affecting more than your immediate area by getting the word out and being an ambassador for eco-friendly clothing shopping.
If you convince just one friend to change their buying habits and they convince one friend to do the same, the effort can spread. At that rate, if one new person is reached each month by each person, the result can be phenomenal. You will have a dozen people reaching a dozen more people the following year, and that multiplies exponentially from there. In a few years, the result can be awe-inspiring, just by taking the time to spread the word about clothing pollution and taking a stand to change how you shop for clothes.
Not all modern fashion is harmful for the environment, and not all clothing manufacturers are creating products with toxic dyes and microfibers, and it will take people who care to make the difference and get more companies to change their habits.
Whichever way you cut it, Destiny is a lot. Even by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ’s standards – the pseudonymous London producer’s 2020 effort Charmed was three hours long – her latest is a daunting listen, clocking in at nearly four hours and jumping between styles, from lo-fi house to EDM to indietronica. I’ve listened to it in full maybe twice, and it’s weird to even consider it for a list like this, given how it treats the album as a uniquely malleable (and cinematic) form you can dip in and out of – but it is technically an album, and it’s one of the best of the year, so it belongs here. However you choose to take it in, Destiny is a sweeping experience where the reward is immediate but deeper investment is always welcome; its overwhelming rush of joy is driven by bountiful possibility but grounded in flashes of emotional vulnerability that keep you hooked. Like the voices that peek through it, Destiny stretches the limits of euphoria but invites you to really get lost in it.
Atlas is an album of vaporous, otherwordly beauty that, following a kind of dream logic, keeps pulling you in and slipping out of consciousness at the same time. It combines Laurel Halo’s childhood love for the piano, an instrument she reconnected with during a residency at the Ina-GRM Studios in Paris, with her unique sensibilities as a sound collagist, fusing and filtering minimalist piano sketches through various synthetic textures. Though it features appearances from Coby Sey, cellist Lucy Railton, violinist James Underwood, and experimental saxophonist Bendik Giske, the music swirls and pulses and swells like a one-person orchestra, each layer as blurry as the feeling it evokes, disarming and diaphanous yet tenderly affecting. You can never quite place it – maybe it spreads like the dissociating ambiance of a dark room, or the dissonance of staring at an old photo then yourself in the mirror, or blending into your surroundings on a late-night walk – but it finds you, one way or another, aching not to melt out of focus. 
Part of what makes Snõõper’s approach as a punk band so unique is the way they combine some of the members’ hardcore background with a wild playfulness that not only extends to, but is largely centered around, their live show, which incorporates mediums such as 8-bit animation and puppetry for a meticulously structured yet constantly evolving set. It’s that experience they set out to mirror on their debut full-length, Super Snõõper, released via Jack White’s Third Man Records. It’s impressive just how many ideas they pack in under 23 minutes, boasting an assemblage of styles that comes across as gleeful yet frantic, mangled yet precise, intense and extremely danceable at the same time. The whole time, it’s clear the thing Snõõper capitalize on isn’t chaos or aggression, but pure fun – even if it only funnels out as such at the very last second.
Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You might seem like an ominous title for an album of such simple, homespun beauty. The quiet domesticity that permeated Will Oldham’s last solo album as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, 2019’s I Made a Place, can be heard at the root of the new songs, but they wear their lessons with proud and penetrating ease, less prone to guard and puzzle. They’re bare-bones, soft, and raw even when embellished by strings, horns, and backing vocals, taking their time to unwind slowly, as if to exist this way is our only salvation against destructive forces both beyond and very much in our control. The songs on Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You have no choice but to live in an apocalypse, but in the you there also lives an us: if I share these and you pass them around, we might make something of our doomed time.
Corinne Bailey Rae’s fourth album, Black Rainbows, sounds like the sort of artistic rebirth you might call a revelation. Had André 3000 not released a flute album, it might have been the year’s most surprising left-turn, sharply eschewing the artist’s success in the easy listening realm as it glides through everything from blistering punk to forward-thinking R&B to avant-garde jazz. Far from a shallow experiment, though, it’s an audacious and astonishing album that feels liberating in meaningful and personal ways, inspired by the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, an exhibition on Black history curated by artist Theaster Gates. Its bold, sprawling nature seems to be a direct result of, and in conversation with, the art she witnessed there, pushing her to explore the possibilities of her music – whether by innovating within the styles she’s long operated in, experimenting with electronics, or calling back to her musical beginnings in a riot grrl group. She may have initially envisioned Black Rainbows as a side project, but the freedom and confidence it generated has led to a major step forward.
Even when it expands into something grandiose, Oneohtrix Point Never’s music can feel endlessly interior. It’s also part of what Daniel Lopatin 
Liv.e cooks up so many ideas on Girl in the Half Pearl that it’s hard to wrap your mind around. But sink into it and the Los Angeles-based artist’s shapeshifting, mercurial sound reveals itself as the product of both careful construction and introspection, an honest portrayal of rebirth and inner turmoil that can never quite extricate the two. Melding alternative R&B, lo-fi hip-hop, and jazz into its soupy chaos, the record allows itself to get tangled up in complexity but never strays from its core ethos, using its experimentation to unbottle the difficult corners of heartbreak, grief, and insecurity. It’s rare for a record so sonically adventurous to sound like an internal monologue rather than a soundscape of indistinct personality. “When I looked inside myself/ I found there was no one to help/ Guess I’ll find my super power/ Light by fire in the darkest hour,” Liv.e sings on opener ‘Gardetto.’, daring you to do the same.
In many ways, Slowdive’s self-titled reunion album was their most successful statement yet, a reclamation of their legacy that managed to retain and invigorate the timeless magic of their music.
After recording their 2019 debut Moveys remotely during the pandemic, Slow Pulp opted to do the same on Yard, their gauzy, confident, and endlessly comforting sophomore full-length. The album showcases a band capable of switching between loud, intoxicating indie rock songs and soft, quietly affecting ones – what’s remarkable is that they so clearly share the same heart. Grappling with anxious isolation as much as it benefits from collaboration, it finds Emily Massey pushing her vocal limits while continuing to express self-doubt around different facets of her life. “Am I wrong?/ Or is it okay to stay inside and out of love?/ Tell me I’m wrong/ I’m just gonna give it a try and hope that it’s enough,” she sings on ‘Broadview’. All over Yard, you can feel the sun burning, and you can feel the love slipping through. Those questions don’t go away, but the feeling is infectious.
On her fourth record and first for Double Double Whammy, I Keep My Feet On the Fragile Plane, Allegra Krieger hones in her sharp-eyed songwriting to observe the rushing, paradoxical nature of day-to-day life with a mix of groundedness and mysticism. The New York singer-songwriter’s music has always been attuned to the constant cycle of beginnings and endings, but here, working again with producer Luke Temple, she finds comfort and levity in the idea of a “fragile plane,” which she describes as “a middle ground in the universe,” gracefully elevating small moments with subtle, evocative orchestration. “Everything’s leaving just as it’s coming in/ Nothing in this world ever stays still,” she sings, inviting us not to linger, but take stock of what does as we move along with the tides.
HELLMODE might be the first Jeff Rosenstock album to get a proper promotional cycle, but you don’t need a press quote to figure out it’s all about battling existential dread. First off: HELLMODE. Secondly, it’s a Jeff Rosenstock record, which means it serves as an attempt to take honest stock of his life and channel the kind of anxiety that never sticks to a single form; “the constant chaos keeps a brain a-rattlin’,” as he puts it on ‘GRAVEYARD SONG’. Reuniting with producer Jack Shirley to record the album at Hollywood’s EastWest Studios, where System of a Down laid down Toxicity, HELLMODE is as raw, furious, and anthemic as you might expect, but it’s also one of the loveliest and most affecting efforts Rosenstock has put out under his name. He’s still intent on releasing pent-up frustration in ways that urge you to sing along, but leaves more space for tender intimacy before each burst of catharsis.
Having met each other through the local punk and hardcore scenes, the members of MSPAINT decided to form a band based on a simple premise: making music with no guitars. The irony was that most of them had previously occupied the role of the guitar player; the challenge was not having it sound like any rock band ditching guitars on their post-apocalyptic eighth album. Their debut LP, Post-American, co-produced by Militarie Gun’s Ian Shelton, does away with preconceptions around hardcore by blending elements of synth-punk, hip-hop, metal, and straight-up pop. Though brimming with grim, dystopian imagery that’s meant to hold a mirror up to society, it’s an infectious, invigorating album that maintains hope for a future that feels just as possible – not looming on the horizon so much as hovering at the edges of the reality we already live in.
Nothing could have truly prepared us for an 87-minute flute album from André 3000, and he’s self-aware about it. When I saw the song titles on the LP, which opens with ‘I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time’, I was worried André might be too self-aware and literal to really go where the music leads him – that it would take its clear reverence for new age, jazz, and ambient a little too lightly and too abstractly to be used as an expressive tool. That’s not the case. New Blue Sun is playful, but it’s also intuitive, deeply devotional, and delicately sincere in its emotionality; the framing is just a necessary excuse for the musicians to probe and teeter on. It’s not exactly a breeze to get through, but it’s a wondrous album that floats by pretty gently. For a record with so many expectations piled onto it, it’s unprovocative in a way that feels freeing, but never quite unassuming.
Girl with Fish is the sophomore LP from Pittsburgh’s feeble little horse, and it turns the intriguing qualities of 2022’s Hayday into something altogether mesmerizing. Unlike similarly-minded indie acts, the band doesn’t search for the sweet spot between hooky melodies and ambitious experimentation; stickiness is their whole deal, whether it comes in the form of something delicate, fuzzy, or idiosyncratic. Their synergy warps and mangles and compresses a swathe of influences until they’re barely identifiable, but the musical and emotional dynamics are laid out in such a way that it leaves you with something to latch onto. There’s a mix of humour and vulnerability in bassist/vocalist Lydia Slocum’s lyrics, which perfectly match the playful chaos of the music. Sometimes, it seems to suggest, it’s more fun to just get lost in the maze.
“All the beautiful things are opaque,” Alasdair MacLean sings on ‘Lady Grey’, a shimmering highlight from the Clientele’s astonishing new double LP I Am Not There Anymore. The stories on the album don’t cohere in any clear or narratively revelatory way, but the beauty that pervades it – haunting, surreal, inexplicable – reveals itself through recurring images, signs, and symbols that feel persistent and strangely resonant. “What happened with this record was that we bought a computer,” MacLean has said, and beyond electronic instrumentation, they also fold in spoken-word passages, minimalist piano instrumentals, and string and horn arrangements across its 63-minute runtime. For all its dazzling scope, the Clientele immerse us in the sonic, emotional, and geographic landscape of I Am Not There Anymore so fervently that it immediately feels both out of time and close to home, like an echo of a memory that only gets bigger and more elaborate the further away you get from it.
Westerman recorded his debut album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, in Portugal and London with his friend and producer Nathan Jenkins (aka Bullion), who helped move his intricate folk sound in a more textural direction. After spending much of the pandemic in Italy working on demos by himself, Westerman decided to go to Los Angeles to lay down his sophomore LP, An Inbuilt Fault. Co-produced alongside Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, the record sets his inquisitive and often ambiguous songwriting against vibrant and fluidly adventurous arrangements that place emphasis on both complex grooves and the primacy of the human voice. Even in the fragmented blur of a lot of these songs, a sense of hopeful sincerity and tenderness seeps through Westerman’s gorgeous, intimate music. 
In the past, Sofia Kourtesis has leaned away from dance music as a form of escape and towards evoking a sense of nostalgia for home, even as she stretched the definition of the word beyond the literal place where she grew up. The Peruvian-born, Berlin-based artist favours vulnerability over the perfect rigidity and intellectualism that marks the genre, and her work on Madres, richly textured and meticulously crafted as it is, is above all emotionally complex. Complex not just in its range of emotion – though there is certainly more of that than you would expect from a glistening and infectious set of dance tracks – but in the way it tends toward joy as something intimate, radical, curiously malleable, and teeming with history. In trying to contain it, Kourtesis’ songs remain autobiographical but venture further than she ever has before, sharpening her ear as a storyteller, curator, and sound collagist. 
Around the making of Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling, Jake Ewald was particularly fascinated by artists who have managed to whittle down a life’s worth of memory and experience into an emotionally resonant piece of work, one of whose simplicity often belies just how enormous of a task that is. Ewald’s own writing feels instinctual, generous, and nuanced, and though it’s delivered with growing awareness, he admits he didn’t immediately realize when his attempts with Slaughter Beach, Dog tended towards something similarly wide-encompassing, if still ambiguous, like on the 9-minute single ‘Engine’. The album floats beautifully from one song to the next, giving each character and story the space to exist and reasons to hold onto them. They’re never the same for everyone, but no matter where it hits you, it’s a kind of featherlight marvel. 
Hotline TNT’s debut album, 
“We’ve both dealt with loss and grief in separate ways/ On the same track running,” Sampha admits on ‘Jonathan L. Seagull (JLS)’, a track named after Richard Bach’s 1970 novella about a bird’s pursuit of perfect flight. It’s safe to say that for him, it was largely through the making of his Mercury Prize-winning debut album, 2017’s Process, which came out in the aftermath of his mother’s death, pairing gorgeously textured arrangements with soul-baring lyricism. Although Process was both deeply meditative and sonically kinetic, its follow-up homes in on those qualities while being more outwardly concerned with his connection with the ones around him, a connection he describes as art. Bach is also referenced on the single ‘Spirit 2.0’, which starts out luscious and fluttering until Sampha cracks it open, enraptured by a sense of total freedom and peace; he’s on a free-fall, drifting out of time, because he knows the wings of his people are there to catch him.
Water From Your Eyes’ fifth record, 2021’s Structure, brought their knack for hooks, mangled experiments, abstract lyricism, and playful sincerity together and closer to the fore. It’s a balance they continue to toy with and perfect on Everyone’s Crushed, their first LP since signing to Matador. “I’m ready to throw you up,” Brown sings on ’14’, which you might hear as off, because that’s exactly what the album keeps doing – the songs twist and tease and tie themselves into a knot until you almost can’t stomach it, but it’s the same chaos that feeds you, so you can’t help but come back. Throw you off as they might, there’s real tenderness and beauty there, and it’s all as thrilling as it is violently, inescapably funny.
The title of Indigo De Souza’s latest album is a pure statement of fact: All of This Will End. Depending on your frame of mind, it scans as either totally defeatist or life-affirming, and the Asheville, NC singer-songwriter doesn’t point in any one direction – simply gestures at the preciousness of everything and, in her music, traces how it moves through her body. De Souza wrote the follow-up to 2021’s Any Shape You Take during a transitional period while detaching herself from a toxic community, and by the time she went back into the studio, she was surrounded by safer, kinder, and more loving people who became a source of inspiration all their own. Like her previous albums, it’s driven by raw intensity and emotional dynamics that can get pretty messy, but it’s also filled with unwavering conviction for the things that matter, and for the importance of growing with them.
Treading the line between the playful and violent, Mandy Indiana’s 2021 … EP balanced militaristic grooves with formless, visceral experimentation, paving the way for the band’s debut full-length, i’ve seen a way. They recorded parts of the album in bizarre, unconventional locales – screaming vocals in a shopping centre, live drums in a cave in the West Country. One session even took place in a Gothic crypt while a yoga class was underway just above them, a sort of literal manifestation of their disruptive, even combative approach to creating dissonance. But the real battle is happening within the music, as Caulfield, singing in her native French, infuses the amorphous chaos that buzzes through the record with fiery intent. Mandy, Indiana fashion a world of discomfort that pulls you further in the more you try to turn away, all while ensuring the view they project is no more grim than galvanizing.
“Somebody stop me,” Samia begs as she walks into the middle of the party, overcome by the sudden urge to write a poem. Her striking 2020 debut 
When Trevor Powers first started working on his next Youth Lagoon album, it felt like nothing was snapping into place. Then, in October 2021, he suffered a severe reaction to an over-the-counter medication he took for a minor stomach ache that nearly cost him his voice. It was a chaotic and terrifying time in his life that, in addition to fostering a deeper appreciation for home, the people around him, and God, carried such spiritual weight that it pushed him to confront the fear that was choking up his creativity. On Heaven Is a Junkyard, he applies this renewed perspective to peer into the haunted beauty of his small-town surroundings, blurring and melding with his own internal landscape in ways that feel not muddled or weightless, but revelatory and – once again, or rather still – comforting. 
When he started working on his new album, Andy Shauf thought the songs might not even be connected this time. It would be a more conventional collection – normal, even – thus, Norm. The record ended up having a lot more in common with his previous albums, sketching out scenes for his characters to figure out how they relate to one another. Partly because of how the songs were conceived, however, and partly due to the influences he was exposed to, Shauf also found himself exploring new and interesting ideas, both musically and conceptually. Some things are immediately obvious, others take time to sink in. On the surface, the songs are pleasant and hazy, but there’s something much darker lurking underneath. Follow along and you’ll be rewarded with an intimate journey where each storyline ultimately comes together while still leaving things eerily open, like a dream.
“I want it to be, like, messy,” Olivia Rodrigo declared a few seconds into her debut album 
The title of Joanna Sternberg’s sophomore album, which follows 2019’s Then I Try Some More, sounds like another knotty yet defiant self-affirmation: 
Four decades into their career, Yo La Tengo have such a sprawling and versatile discography that it’s no surprise their most beloved records, from 1997’s I Can Feel The Heart Beating As One to 2013’s Fade, are ones that make an effort to streamline their sound while eloquently fusing different styles. Aside from it being their first album of wholly new material since 2018’s There’s a Riot Going On, that’s another reason why This Stupid World feels like another pivotal moment in a career full of them. On paper, a lot of This Stupid World sounds doomful, or at least weathered by the passage of time. But more often than not, it’s a record that’s thrilling in its aliveness: “This stupid world, it’s killing me,” goes its enveloping mantra. “This stupid world is all we have.”
“Just remember: Pleasure is a right!” Jessie Ware shouts on the title track of her new album, which could just as well have served as the tagline for 2020’s revelatory What’s Your Pleasure? The “just remember” is as important as the declaration itself: That! Feels Good! is an emphatic reminder to hold onto the ethos she embraced on that album, part of a wave of pop records firmly rooted in the euphoric possibilities of dance music – a happy coincidence when people most needed it. Her decision to explore disco was, in her own words, 
It’s one thing to expose yourself, and another to be seen; one thing to be immortalized and another to be remembered. As much as yeule’s music tears into the vast space between the human and the artificial, it also magnifies those imperceptibly different shades of experience, the kinds that can make or break a body, making them feel infinite. “Feels like shit/ When you read me/ Like you all know,” yeule sang on ‘Eyes’, a track from their phenomenal 2022 album 
Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, the follow-up to Kara Jackson’s stripped-back EP A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart, grew out of a collection of demos the Chicago singer-songwriter recorded in her childhood bedroom in the early days of the pandemic. With help from a group of musicians including NNAMDÏ, Sen Morimoto, and KAINA, she refined them into a candid, tender, and audacious LP that confronts overwhelming emotions around grief and love without smoothing them over. Yet the loneliness in her music is a rare kind – one that nurtures her internal contradictions, finding ways to be humorous and playful and fierce as a means of sustaining, if not warding off, suffering. In its honest specificity, you’re reminded of the things we share, all worth the light of day.
Ratboys’ 2020 LP 
Kali Uchis’ music conjures a world of fantastical intimacy, and she knows how to tease us in. While the intro to her triumphant 2018 debut, Isolation, extended over two minutes, carrying an air of mystery and escapism, the track that opens her third album, Red Moon in Venus, is shorter but just as efficient: “I just wanted to tell you, in case you forgot/ I love you,” she intones, enveloped by twinkling synths, chirping crickets, and birdsong. Across the next fourteen tracks, Uchis remains firmly committed to that proclamation of love, even as it pushes her sound in different directions. Though more conceptually focused than Isolation and building on the promise of its Spanish-language follow-up Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, the way the album revels in different shades of devotion makes for a lavish, enchanting journey.
In the lead-up to her last album, 2018’s Heart Shaped Bed, Nicole Dollanganger visited the Poconos and was 
The subject matter of Anohni’s songwriting is most often heavy, tragic, and inescapable. Which is why one of the most striking things about My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross – which follows her 2016 masterpiece HOPELESSNESS and marks her first release bearing the Johnsons moniker in over a decade – is how she’s able to carry it with such remarkable lightness. Co-produced with Jimmy Hogarth, the album contains some of her loosest, most organic, and grounded material to date – terms not usually associated with the artist’s consistent and mountainous acclaim. Guitars chime softly against Anohni’s aching, desperate voice on ‘It Must Change’, which communicates the depths of her grief while flickering in spirit between personal and environmental catastrophe. “No one’s getting out of here/ That’s why this is so sad,” Anohni sings, and the band keeps working to articulate, without really trying to transform or define, that pure emotion tearing at its core.
Kelela’s music has always been flooded in layers. But while the artful, forward-thinking nature of her alternative R&B has been the center of discussion ever since she broke out with the 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me, what renders her approach so unique has just as much to do with the intricate ways in which she directs emotional attention. “I really want to be sexy in a nuanced way,” she 
“You didn’t think this would come out of me,” Taja Cheek sings on ‘5 to 8 Hours (WWwaG)’, a highlight from her dazzling new album as L’Rain. It’s a fitting moment of self-awareness on a record full of them, as the Brooklyn singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s music tends to swirl with surprise; even if you’re familiar with the dizzyingly intricate collages on her first two albums, particularly 2021’s 
2021’s To See the Next Part of the Dream turned out to be an unexpected breakthrough for Parannoul, who fused bedroom pop and shoegaze into an overwhelming, singular experience. The one-man project out of Seoul remains anonymous but has since opened up to collaboration, with last year’s Paraglow EP, a joint release with Asian Glow, topping our list of the 
Yves Tumor has evolved from experimental sound collagist to glam-rock star, but even as they have become more “hook-focused,” as the artist 
On her sophomore album, Amaarae floats over lavish, genreless production with effortless ease. Inspired by her diverse upbringing – she’s lived between the Bronx, Atlanta, and Accra – and using her delicate, sultry voice as a malleable and thrillingly melodic instrument, she’s able to make her fusion of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, and even punk feel as seamless as it is infectious, offering a refreshingly experimental take on global-minded pop. But neither the lifestyle nor the love she sings about is easy – sexual desire’s swaddled in frustration, inextricable from danger, and her vision of luxury dips into fantasy no matter how actualized it is. But the complexity of Fountain Baby, from its emotional dynamics to its musical alchemy, never comes at the cost of pop appeal. “I do what I want so I can get my way,” she proclaims on ‘Sex, Violence, Suicide’, which careens from dreamy ballad to a punk rager. No point pushing boundaries if you’re not having fun, and with all this space to indulge, she’s having it her way.
There’s music about intimacy, and then there’s music about intimacy between the people making it. boygenius songs have a way of being gut-punchingly honest no matter who they’re addressing, but the ones celebrating the bond between the trio – Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus – are bound to be a different kind of special. Their friendship felt so precious that when Dacus first came up with ‘We’re in Love’, a song whose first-person plural is entirely unambiguous, Baker was slightly mortified by the idea of making such earnestness public. “Damn, that makes me sad,” Dacus sings, characteristically reacting to her own imaginary scene. “If you rewrite your life, may I still play a part?” Of course, sadness alone doesn’t cut it. When it twists a knot in your stomach, a whole swirl of emotion’s caught up in there. the record, friendly soldier in waiting, will help you breathe it out.
Julie Byrne began working on the follow-up to 2017’s Not Even Happiness in the fall of 2020, collaborating with her longtime creative partner Eric Littmann on sessions that extended through the spring of 2021. In June of 2021, Littmann died suddenly at age 31. In the wake of his loss, what would become The Greater Wings was shelved for six months, before it was completed in early 2022 with producer Alex Somers. She treats both the inanimate and human subjects of her songwriting with a divine sensitivity, seeking a connectedness that can turn a personal plea into a communal meditation. When it manifests, as in ‘Flare’, it serves as proof that music doesn’t need to carry us very far, so long as it simply does. By the end of the record, Byrne can only arrive at the greatest revelations with an “I guess,” but her truth, for once and still, seems to contain a whole universe: alive, timeless, and new.
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We reads as a dramatic title, but stress the second to last word and you hear the beginning of a question. The songs on Mitski’s seventh album sound like that, too: bold yet tentative, elegant yet knotty, drawing you in with their organic beauty until you realize you’re stranded in the dark alongside her, wondering what awaits us. The follow-up to 2022’s 
Even a cursory, breeze-through listen makes it clear billy woods has a lot to say on Maps. Line by line, there’s a strange pleasure in trying to untangle his knotted, artful rhymes and trace his shifts in perspective. But the album is especially fascinating considering the scope of his discography; conceptually, as a kind of travelogue, it veers away from last year’s Aethiopes and Church, two vastly different albums in their own right, but at the same time seems to follow the same fragmented, dream-like logic, which woods doesn’t so much rest in as attempt to rip into. For many like-minded artists, dense lyricism against dreary, diffuse instrumentals is a comfortable vibe; for woods, it’s a challenge to find comfort amidst the unsteadiness. His second full-length collaboration with producer Kenny Segal, Maps both warps and perfects his approach while pushing him to explore new territory.
Javelin is billed as Stevens’ first album in “full singer-songwriter mode” since his 2015 masterpiece Carrie & Lowell, though it doesn’t exactly find him in the same mode. It’s his first proper solo album since 2020’s 
Rat Saw God, the follow-up to Twin Plagues and Wednesday’s Dead Oceans debut, is a triumph of razor-sharp focus, churning intensity, and natural ambition. By this point, the group is so in sync that it sounds like they’re carrying stimuli through the same nervous system while eliciting different responses. For all the darkness that the album digs into, what it drags along with it is never a lack of clarity. On the contrary, these mostly coming-of-age tales, lived or otherwise absorbed, seem to have sharpened so many human senses: Karly Hartzman is acutely aware of irony, especially as it pertains to religion, and, on songs like ‘Bull Believer’, fuses allegory and truth to striking effect. Her descriptions never feel overbearing or exaggerated, but heightened in their reality, zoning in on the blurry space between pain as an experience and tragedy as a story. The blood stays fresh on the page but the pain takes on different dimensions; comedy is an unintended consequence, not an antidote. It all blends together in ways that are immediate, glorious, and totally arresting.