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: 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
Photo Credit: Jimmy Fontaine / Atlantic Records While the cover artwork and a couple of the song titles (“Blood Runs Red,” “Lawless Dream,” “Twisted Tongue”) might suggest that it’s a heavy metal album, Matt Maeson’s second full-length album Never Had to Leave is instead a tight and compelling collection of well-produced alternative rock and folk… Read more
Photo Credit: Kenneth Cappello Of the over 13,000 albums on the database of Metacritic – the review aggregation site – Charlie Puth’s debut Nine Track Mind holds the unfortunate distinction of having the 7th lowest critic’s score; Spin labeled it an “inoffensive dross,” while Q Magazine said that it “whimpers like a sad kitten.” With… Read more
Photo Credit: Jimmy Fontaine / Courtesy of Atlantic Records Since their 1998 debut album Something About Airplanes Bellingham, Washington alternative rockers Death Cab for Cutie at least outwardly appear to have missed out on mainstream success, even though four of their albums went Top 10 in the U.S. between 2005 and 2015. The band’s tenth… Read more
Photo Credit: Sanjay Parikh At the relatively average album length of forty-eight minutes, there’s a heck of a lot crammed into Shinedown’s seventh full-length release. Planet Zero is a concept album with an outward science-fiction theme (a rock trend that seems to be coming back, as suggested by Bastille’s latest release Give Me the Future)…. Read more
Photo Credit: Empire/Atlantic Records With her 2018 debut Expectations, former Disney star Hayley Kiyoko was crowned Lesbian Jesus. Now, with Panorama, she offers up her second coming – in the form of 13 sleek, ready-for-radio pop numbers. Kiyoko’s LGBTQ+ identity has always been central to her music and to her core appeal. The embrace of her… Read more
Photo Credit: AB+DM Every generation needs an artist who is unafraid to write cheesy, feel-good, uplifting anthems; an artist who would rather risk being saccharine than sour. Natasha Bedingfield (“Unwritten”), Kelly Clarkson (“Stronger”), and Katy Perry (“Firework”) have all alternately held this title and fulfilled their role dutifully. It would be unfair to dismiss Lizzo’s music… Read more
Photo Credit: Urban Wyatt “Industry Baby” – the collaboration between Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow – felt like it might be a turning point in Harlow’s career, and not just because of its huge commercial success. While the majority of creative credit goes to Nas himself, it remains true that the song offered a… Read more
Photo Credit: Dan Martensen Ed Sheeran’s debut album + (Plus) – which boasted four Top 10 hits in the singer-songwriter’s home country of the UK – made him an easy target for critics; who saw him as a banal, guy-next-door writing forgettable by-the-numbers love songs. For the most part, however, Sheeran’s debut album has aged surprisingly well;… Read more