Right out of the gate, the Tedeschi Trucks Band have always thought big. In 2010, the peak of an indelible pop era that brought us Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and so much more glorious pop, who else would launch a big-band ensemble, complete with a horn section, that blended soul, …
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Halfway through A Light for Attracting Attention, the Smile‘s debut album, Thom Yorke flashes a smirk: “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” he drawls slowly almost without melody over ambient synths and downtempo piano on “Open the Floodgates.” Then he doubles down, whinging, “We want the good bits, without …
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Any posthumous album is, by its nature, haunting — the sound of ghosts on wax forever floating in a state between unfinished project and final-ever recordings. But in the case of Phife Dawg, who died in 2016 at the age of 45 from diabetes complications, that purgatorial sense feels particularly …
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The last thing Lana Del Rey wanted us to know before retiring her Instagram account several weeks ago was that Blue Banisters, her seventh major-label studio album, tells her story “and does pretty much nothing more.”The note provides an unusual amount of clarity for Del Rey, whose typical album rollouts …
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Arkansas hard-rock yowler Amy Lee of Evanescence cut quite a unique figure when she first showed up in the mid-’00s. The nu-metal scene that the singer asserted herself into wasn’t just male-dominated, it was asshole-dominated. But Lee rose above that wan world of bellyaching and bad facial hair like a …
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It’s been 11 years since Kid Cudi released his debut album Man on the Moon: The End of Day, a five-part dream sequence that cast his battle with mental illness in heroic terms. Cudi played the everyman night owl, awash in a cocktail of blunts, beer, and mushrooms. Ironically, his …
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So here we are again…again. And honestly, we should have seen this one coming. Of course, Taylor Swift, stuck in quarantine like the rest of us, decided to release a whole new collection of 17 songs as a sequel to her outstanding Folklore, unleashing it unto the world with as …
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When it comes to lowered expectations in pop, there probably isn’t a better candidate than the Avalanches’ third record. The Australian EDM combo’s debut, Since I Left You, took the art of constructing music out of samples to a heightened level of craft; that patchwork quilt of music was one …
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Lil Peep was barely 21 years old and already an international star when he died from an overdose of Xanax and fentanyl on his tour bus in Tucson in 2017. Peep was divisive in his lifetime; a gangly outcast from Long Island with a “Crybaby” face tat and hair the …
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Two years ago, Willie Nelson delivered God’s Problem Child, a tragicomic heart-stopping meditation on the singer’s rapidly advancing age. A year later, he released an equally sturdy follow-up (2018’s Last Man Standing), and after detouring with his collection of Sinatra standards, the 86-year-old legend is back with Ride Me Back …
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