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 first glance, the collaboration between Future and Lil Uzi Vert that birthed the Pluto x Baby Pluto mixtape makes…
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 the world to 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’, Savage Mode II is the blockbuster sequel, one that affords the…
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 doesn’t bother explaining anywhere in the record about how she got there, it’s apparent on the title track (featuring…
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 to hold a newcomer’s hands throughout the whole album-length tour — he titled the album Yo Hago Lo Que…
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 Liam and Noel Gallagher? Their public personas make it rather difficult to conceive of Oasis as not just nobodies,…
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…
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 anxieties behind the primary colors of Paramore’s After Laughter, it yielded the opposite (but nevertheless incredible pop) results. The…
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 began to seep into R&B by the end of the ’80s — a period that soon saw Bell Biv…
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 lead single off her 2009 album Two Suns. Interim Bat for Lashes releases have found Khan growing more wary…
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 to a specific crush who inspired a habit the narrator can’t quite shake: “It’s too late, I’m addicted to…
