Album Review
Story Stream
Lady Gaga Throws Everything in the Pot March 13, 2025
Lady Gaga blew through Saturday Night Live over the weekend, weaponizing boisterous vocal runs and skinny fringe dresses that suggested the 38-year-old singer-songwriter, producer, and actor had put in the proverbial 10,000 hours studying zesty mid-2...
On Drake March 03, 2025
For perspective, it’s Nina Simone’s birthday and the anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X as I write this—one of those travesties of serendipity when birth dates and death dates align to create an eternal loop or union between two souls and ...
Bad Bunny Phoned Home January 14, 2025
Last month, Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny was navigating a holiday-season flutter of activity, including a giveaway for disadvantaged youth in his hometown, when most of his country was plunged into darkness for several hours. The blackout threate...
On Jelly Roll's 'Beautifully Broken' October 17, 2024
In his 1999 autobiography My House of Memories, Merle Haggard marveled at his stardom, knowing it’d be a pipe dream by the standards of the day. “Can you imagine what would happen today if I were 24, just out of prison, and trying to get a record dea...
Post Malone’s Country Album Has Too Much Baggage August 22, 2024
Post Malone’s ascent to hip-hop stardom was a fast and jittery ride. In short order, he progressed from making songs in his bedroom to whiffing conversations about cultural appropriation to churning out hits whose soaring hooks beat back accusations ...
On Post Malone's 'F-1 Trillion' August 21, 2024
Is country a lifestyle or an accessory? Depends on who you ask. Presently it’s fashionable to try and bridge that gap. Blue-state dwellers with email jobs are dressing up like duck hunters, donning Carhartt and Realtree camo to the warehouse rave or ...
Charli XCX Toys with Stardom on “BRAT” June 12, 2024
Halfway through Charli XCX’s new album, “BRAT,” the British pop star delivers a lyric that is “pop” in neither form nor content. She is rapping, more or less, her voice slightly warped by Auto-Tune. ...
On Charli XCX's 'BRAT' June 10, 2024
It’s the era of the relatable pop star, where the Machiavellian hustlers of the music industry A-list write songs about being as unlucky and confused as you and I. These days, the world’s biggest musicians are apparently also the salt of the earth, p...
Billie Eilish’s New Album Is a Landmark May 21, 2024
Plumbing the dregs of her own adolescent subconscious for both amusement-park horror and the real sort, Billie Eilish aptly titled her 2019 debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? In 2021, she sardonically named her follow-up Happier Tha...
‘Jackpot!’ Is The Most Compelling Album Of The Year May 17, 2024
When I was 12 years old, we lived in the middle of nowhere. We didn’t have cable, the rabbit ears brought in only two television stations, and the mountains around us meant the network station from the nearest sizable town only came in intermittently...
Taylor Swift Strikes Out Looking on 'The Tortured Poets Department' April 23, 2024
Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this! When Taylor Swift took the Grammy’s stage last month to claim her award for Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights, she saw that spotlight as an opportunity to announce her 11th studio album: The T...
Taylor Swift Makes One for Herself April 23, 2024
At a February concert in Melbourne, Taylor Swift spoke to the stadium crowd of nearly one hundred thousand strong about The Tortured Poets Department, the forthcoming album she had announced two weeks prior at the Grammy Awards. “It was really a life...
The Tortured Taylor Swift April 22, 2024
In the week that Courtney Love called Taylor Swift “not important” (“She might be a safe space for girls,” Love said, “but she’s not interesting as an artist”) comes The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th album, a self-defence against such criti...
On Beyoncé April 15, 2024
What happens when your delusions of grandeur are not delusions; when you accrue the talent, resources, and courage to execute any dream or vision you possess, and there will invariably be an audience from which detractors will be cast as lunatics or ...
On Bob Dylan's 'Desire' January 15, 2024
[Scene 1: West Village, New York City, 1975. A legendary songwriter, mid-30s, is surveying the neighborhood where he cut his teeth a decade before. A violinist, younger and without his star status, but striking, with long dark hair and mysterious poi...
