Set My Heart on Fire Immediately finds Perfume Genius making both his body and heart vulnerable, creating a profound intimacy from his preoccupations with fragility. Michael Hadreas can seem obsessed with thoughts of his own death, whether those manifest as the immediate release resulting from…
Waxahatchee’s latest succeeds according to her familiar attention to emotional precision and in pivoting to a more Americana-leaning sound. After 2017’s dark and brooding Out in the Storm it feels good to have a warm sounding record from Katie Crutchfield’s Waxahatchee project. Saint Cloud…
Tame Impala’s latest does nothing to change the narrative that Parker’s emulation of other bands borders on unintentional parody. Kevin Parker is often praised for his ability to take a sound that audiences are familiar with and contort it into something that’s somehow different,…
NO DREAM represents a thinning of Rosenstock’s post-2016 ethos. Jeff Rosenstock has spent the past decade or so getting flustered and yelling at a lot of different people in power — well, more specifically, he’s filtered his usual manic-ridden angst through a more righteous political…
After recent collaborative albums, Punisher shows Phoebe Bridgers to be a complex and preternaturally formed artist in her own right. At this point, Phoebe Bridgers seems unstoppable. While Punisher is only her second solo studio album, she’s been busy since her 2017 debut Stranger…
Yves Tumor’s latest realizes an androgynous vision of rock ‘n roll and continues their morphology as an artist. It’s hard to imagine an artist reinventing themselves while so successfully achieving a unified goal and message, but this is what Yves Tumor accomplishes on each…
Heavy Light sets the bleak landscape of contemporary society to the sounds of bubblegum pop. Meg Remy understands human struggle. On Heavy Light, the newest U.S. Girls record, she sings a catalog of challenges she’s faced. Tracks like “Born to Lose” (“And I don’t understand…
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 songwriter continuing to explore her femininity, as she did on 2017’s Semper Femina — but here, Marling approaches the…
KiCk i is lame and tame — a pop-forward album of limited imagination and experimentation. It’s been a busy last few years for Alejandra Ghersi. In-between investing around three months worth of time into a popular MMORPG, contributing to the soundtrack for Red Dead Redemption…
Johnny Jewel’s music is imbued with an eldritch air of nostalgia, the coupling of retro synth-pop and filmic ambiance bringing to mind images of a late night drive along a caliginous road; his production gleams like a rain-slick street, and the recalcitrant synth lines…
