Album Reviews

In an utterly accidental way, a box set devoted to the Archies, the infamous TV cartoon band of the Sixties, couldn’t have arrived at a timelier moment. Earlier this month, we lost the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith. The band’s musical gatekeeper, the one most preoccupied with the TV-generated combo being allowed …

Michelle Zauner is no stranger to facing grief head-on with elation. The circumstances of her life surrounding the release of her first two albums as Japanese Breakfast are well-documented: her debut Psychopomp was recorded in the wake of her mother’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2014, and her explorations of …

With his quadruple-platinum 2015 album,Traveller, troubadour Chris Stapleton established himself as a Nashville superstar who could interpret country songs with the touch of a great R&B singer. Stapleton’s gravelly voice, outlaw look, and earnest storytelling made him a bearded paragon of roots tradition. But that role didn’t really fit an …

Bully‘s Alicia Bognanno credits the creation of her new record, Sugeregg, in part to finding proper treatment for her bipolar II disorder. “Being able to finally navigate that opened the door for me to write about it,” she said in a release about the album, which deftly moves from moshpit …

The soft glamor of Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? radiates with the persistence of a sparkling disco ball in a foggy club. It’s melancholic luxury, like heavy drops of mascara-stained tears. It is also, undeniably, the British pop star’s best album yet: a sumptuous tribute to both peak- and post-disco …

A pop savant whose vision keeps getting more all-encompassing as he keeps making records, Mike Hadreas (a.k.a. Perfume Genius) has delivered his most ambitious music yet on his fifth LP. Back at the dawn of the 2010s, he drew notice with music that had the muted, willful intensity of bedroom …

Listening to Louis Tomlinson’s solo debut, Walls, is a bit like hanging out with the high school quarterback who stayed in his hometown after the rest of his class moved away. It wistfully brings to mind One Direction’s glory days, grown faded around the edges by time. The quarterback is …

Over the course of her six full-length albums, Kentucky singer-songwriter Joan Shelley has trafficked in the strain of intimate, earthy folk and country that calls to mind everyone from Nick Drake to Iron & Wine to Gillian Welch. Her latest, Like the River Loves the Sea, feels simultaneously grounded and …

“People: repent ” intones Lee “Scratch” Perry to begin what might be his gazillionth LP, Rainford— and his signature spacey West Indian storefront-preacher steez feels perfectly-suited to a cultural moment defined both by widespread institutional criminality and high-grade legal weed. As a founding father of dub reggae and arguably its …

In April 2017, Cate Le Bon moved to the Lake District of Cumbria, England, alone. She spent a year there, learning how to build furniture from scratch while constructing introspective songs on an old piano. Her fifth studio album, Reward, is the result of this isolation—ten sonically diverse tracks that …