Latest Posts- Page 90 of 1755

Frankie Cosmos, Different Talking

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 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.

Listen on

HAIM, I quit

At their recent live shows, HAIM have been broadcasting statements that not only promote the titular message of their new album – I quit – but recontextualize older songs from their discography. “I quit giving up,” read the sister trio’s sign as they launched into their Women In Music Pt. III highlight ‘Don’t Wanna’ at Primavera. With longtime collaborator and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij co-producing, HAIM’s latest album presents a version of the band that is pointed, assured, and melodically brilliant – especially on the singles – but also anxious, scattered, and teetering on (or taking refuge in) stylistic obscurity. They say it’s the sound of the band they always wanted to become, which is another way of saying, as Danielle sings on the opening track, “You never saw me for what I was.” Which is not to discredit their first three good-to-great albums – just an opportunity to see it all through a new lens. Read the full review.

Listen on

Greet Death, Die in Love

Greet Death recorded their first LP since 2019’s New Hell in Davisburg, Michigan – specifically in Harper Boyhtari’s parents’ basement, where she and co-vocalist Logan Gaval spent much of their formative years. Going into it, Gaval had been listening to the Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work “because I was trying to figure out how to write a song that wasn’t just depressing,” according to the album’s bio. There’s a song called ‘Emptiness Is Everywhere’, for instance, but the line goes, “Emptiness is everywhere, so hold each other close.” “I wanted to try to write something less fatalistic, because I feel some kind of responsibility to help,” Gaval explained. The results are beautiful in both their tenderness and occasional grandeur.

Listen on

Hotline TNT, Raspberry Moon

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.

Listen on

Lifeguard, Ripped and Torn

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.

Listen on

Lorde, Virgin

“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.

Listen on

Pulp, More

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.

Listen on

S.G. Goodman, Planting By the Signs

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.

Listen on

Sharpie Smile, The Staircase

The Staircase, thee debut album by Sharpie Smile – the duo of Dylan Hadley and Cole Berliner, who used to make psychedelic art-rock as Kamikaze Palm Tree – is energized by contemporary pop music that’s punchy, shimmery, and ethereal in a combination that sheds light on their own idiosyncrasies. The music is kinetic and universe-swallowing, its contrasting yet comforting qualities manifesting within the space of a single song, as in ‘So Far’, or in the way the clubby ‘New Flavor’ is sandwiched between two serpentine ballads. Sharpie Smile is a step away from Kamikaze Palm Tree, but it’s also an extension and revitalization of the weird playfulness they harnessed as teenagers, transitioning into the vulnerability and instability of adulthood. “Wrap around the hand of excitement,” Hadley sings on ‘Brick or Stone’, “Long enough to breathe in.” Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Sharpie Smile.

Listen on

Smut, Tomorrow Comes Crashing

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.

Listen on

Turnstile, Never Enough

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.

Listen on