Pluto x Baby Pluto is an uneven affair, less a successful collaboration than a platform for one ascending rapper to overshadow one feeling the fade. At…
Savage Mode II’s half-hearted experimentation makes for diminishing returns this time out for 21 and Metro. If Savage Mode is the cult classic that introduced…
Hook begins Crashed My Car, her first of two mixtapes from 2020, in hysterics, detailing how she, yes, crashed her car. While the Riverside rapper…
Bad Bunny’s YHLQMDLG provides both an entry point to modern urbano and a crash course in the traditions that built it. The rapper hardly cares…
How lucky would one be to have the opportunity to listen to Definitely Maybe while remaining blissfully ignorant of the very inflated egos of both…
Songs for Our Daughter is another in a run of lyrically-precise, sonically-varied Laura Marling efforts. Songs for Our Daughter, Laura Marling’s seventh LP, finds the folk…
Petals for Amor finds Hayley Williams at her most vulnerable as a lyricist and most experimental as a musician. If Hayley Williams intended to hide her…
After writing the early blueprint for ’90s R&B, Mary J. Blige laid out her own musical foundations on 1994’s My Life. The influence of hip-hop…
On Lost Girls, Natasha Khan sounds more free than she has since she completely lay her trust in the arms of another on “Daniel,” the…
Love songs come second nature to Kiki Vivi Lily on her debut full-length, Vivid. Thinking about black coffee leads to the sweet dedication “Caffeine Holic,” addressed…
Tricot pack a lot of musical ideas into a single song — and they unwind or abruptly pause their guitar playing, all based on a…
An interest in outer space has informed both the visual aesthetic and music of Dempagumi.inc over the past year. While the group first appeared as…
As a title, Hell Like Heaven serves to explain the clashing contradictions that bring about the joys in The Peggies’ music. The Japanese trio’s buzzing,…
One baffling segment in BNK48: Girls Don’t Cry sees the Thai version of Japanese girl group AKB48’s “Koisuru Fortune Cookie” — one of the most popular J-pop singles…
The first taste of the ever-cocky DaBoii’s latest solo project — outside his group, SOB x RBE — came back in May, with “Onna Gang,” a…
Maison Book Girl don’t craft full-fledged songs so much as attempt to make sense out of cacophonous noise. Toy flutes, jagged guitars, and pensive pianos sound-off at once, but don’t fully communicate with…
Kayoko Yoshizawa has approached songwriting as a process somewhat akin to writing a storybook since her 2013 mini-album, Majo Zukan, building her elaborate pop songs around the…
“Do you have an album you recently liked?” Tofubeats cried out on 2017’s “Shoppingmall,” the lead-off track of their last album, Fantasy Club. There, drowned-out by noises…
For an idea of where Andre 3000 and Big Boi’s heads were at after their first album, look no further than the infamous 1995 Source…
Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith nicked expensive names to big up their first effort as EPMD on debut Strictly Business. That was just how it was done back in…