Album Reviews

Give it up for the Chemical Brothers. Genres and trends come and go, festival gods rise and fall. Yet Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons stay eternally true to their block rocking vision. The duo has now outlasted two stupidly-named marketing gimmicks designed to sell dance music to normals: electronica (which …

The firstNigeria 70compilationwas an ear-opener for fans of Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade, cultural ambassadors whose Nigerian exports blew the minds of funky post-punks and disco connoisseurs in the U.S. and U.K. in the 1980s.Nigeria 70version 1.0 laid out a banquet of tracks by those men and lesser-known peers: …

Two years after the smash success of “Despacito,” his Guinness World Record-breaking collaboration with Daddy Yankee, Puerto Rican superstar Luis Fonsi follows through with his ninth full-length (and first since 2014), Vida. Fonsi’s career is no overnight success story — he’s spent the last two decades as one of Latin …

When the story of a desultorily opportunist era in mainstream rap is finally written, 6ix9ine will undoubtedly land a starring role. But give the Brooklyn hip-hop troll credit: he’s critic-proof. Even as he languishes in a New York detention center on federal charges due to his alleged association with the …

For the last five years, Big Joanie have made waves around London’s indie-rock scene with a sparse sound that echoes PJ Harvey, Joy Division and the Slits, among others. Kathleen Hanna and Iggy Pop have sung their praises, and now their debut album, Sistahs, is coming out via Thurston Moore …

Elle King’s breakthrough 2015 hit “Ex’s and Oh’s” pulled off a neat trick: It was catchy mainstream rock that felt fresh without making concessions to hip-hop or EDM. King’s touchstones were NancySinatra, Dusty Springfield, Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti-western-soundtrack twang and T. Rex glam shuffle. Her debut LP,Love Stuff,filled out that sound …

Sumac, Love in Shadow|★★★ 1/2 Keiji Haino and Sumac, American Dollar Bill – Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous To Look at Face On |★★★★ Sumac is an extreme metal power trio with seemingly no boundaries, jazz-like interplay and a hankering for noises both brittle and extreme, sparse and overwhelming. …

Important things to know before pressing play on The Blaze’s new album: This French electronic music duo, composed of cousins Guillaume and Jonathan Alric, are not to be mistaken for Blaze, the veteran house producers from New Jersey known for dancefloor favorites like “Funky People.” And The Blaze’s new album, …

Deafheaven fancy themselves as a modern-day Bad Brains, but instead of blending hardcore punk and reggae, they combine vicious black metal with expansive space rock. They alternated between the two on their 2013 breakthrough record, Sunbather, and indulged Pink Floyd proclivities like secretly recording a drug deal, before abandoning a …

Florence Welch is the big sister you wish you had: wild enough to be a co-conspirator, together enough to be an inspiration, even a role model. On High As Hope, the fourth and most intimate Florence + the Machine LP, she recalls hijinks on MDMA, confesses to an eating disorder, …