Photo Credit: Brianna Capozzi Miley Cyrus has long been one of the 21st century’s most powerful and evocative vocalists, but it wasn’t until recently that she found an appropriate sonic palette for her powerhouse voice – abandoning the Top 40 pop stylings of her early work, the bizarre experiments of Miley Cyrus & Her Dead… Read more
Photo Credit: Nasty Little Man Gorillaz began more than two decades ago, originally a form of collaboration that was unique, to say the least, between a musician (in this case, Blur vocalist Damon Albarn) and an illustrator (Jaime Hewlett, creator of the British comic book series Tank Girl) with the purpose of creating a soundtrack… Read more
Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz P!nk begins her ninth studio album in the same mode that she has spent most of the last decade in – a straightforward, polished piano ballad. “I think of you // When I think about forever // I hear a joke and I know // You would’ve told it better,” she sings,… Read more
Photo Credit: Aidan Zamiri Although some synth-pop nerds might remember Chairlift, most people probably heard the name Caroline Polachek for the first time when she started her solo career in 2019 with Pang and her shimmering indie-pop hit “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” Now, on her second solo effort, Desire, I Want to Turn… Read more
Photo Credit: Zachary Gray The best, most beloved Paramore songs managed to meet listeners where they were and capture their collective feelings like lightning in a bottle. The snarling “Misery Business” captured desire in its most intense, brattiest, most unreasonable, most teenage form, while the lilting “The Only Exception” captured the ecstasy and anxiety of… Read more
Photo Credit: Nathan James Musicians have been writing love songs dedicated to the object of their romantic affection for millennia, but we honestly can’t remember the last time we heard anyone as out-of-their-mind in love as expressed in a song on a particular track from God Save the Teen, the latest album from rock drummer… Read more
Photo Credit: Louie Banks In 2017, Shania Twain ended a fifteen-year gap between albums with Now – re-introducing herself to the public with a newly mature sound that attempted to show she’d evolved without losing her signature charm. That album’s best songs did just that (“Home Now” and “Life’s About to Get Good”), but the… Read more
Photo Credit: Gunner Stahl Not since Tyler, the Creator reinvented himself with soul-inspired records like Flower Boy and IGOR has a rapper reinvented himself as 25-year-old Lil Yachty does on Let’s Start Here. So, what in the world happened? The viral hit “Poland,” released earlier this winter, hinted that Lil Yachty was about to climb… Read more
Photo Credit: Lauretta Suter A decade or so ago, you couldn’t flick between radio stations without catching half-a-dozen inescapable hits from DJs – be it Calvin Harris’s “We Found Love”, Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” or Naughty Boy’s “La La La.” With those hit-makers now all years removed from their last chart-toppers, Reading’s Sam “SG” Lewis… Read more
Photo Credit: Marilyn Hue 28-year-old Albanian-American Ava Max has always felt like an oddity in the 2020s mainstream pop landscape. The maximalist pure-pop of her 4x Platinum-certified hit “Sweet But Psycho” stood in stark contrast to her chart-topping peers, who were either throwing it back to the ’80s (The Weeknd, Dua Lipa), penning stripped-back singer-songwriter… Read more