Photo Credit: Vincent Haycock Since Kesha sued Dr. Luke in 2014, her reputation has shifted from that of the party girl of pop to the genre’s survivor. In the near-decade that’s ensued, she’s alternately embraced and run away from that title; on 2017’s “Praying,” she offered a direct rebuke to her former producer in the… Read more
Photo Credit: Kurt Iswarienko When Taylor Swift decided to re-record some of her earlier albums (most recently, Red), she was a woman on a mission. “I do want my music to live on,” she told Billboard in 2019. “I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials. But… Read more
Photo Credit: Anton Corbijn In music journalism, there’s a concept known as the five-album-test: any band that has released five consecutively great albums passes. The test is imperfect and controversial – rewarding consistency over irregular bursts of excellence – but the bands who pass it, undeniably, belong to the very highest echelons of music. Most would… Read more
Photo Credit: Freddie Stisted Surrey’s You Me At Six enjoyed modest commercial success in their home country during the late 2000s and early 2010s, with five Top 40 singles and two chart-topping albums to their name. If any mid-sized band should be set for a revival of fortunes, it should be this English quartet –… Read more
Photo Credit: Pamela Littky Fall Out Boy’s newest album, So Much (For) Stardust, begins with a dramatic, repeating piano line and a luscious arrangement of strings – it sounds like the sort of thing that should kick off some epic, wildly expensive action movie. Then, the song abruptly switches gears into the sort of frenetic… Read more
Photo credit Ashley Osborn If Paramore’s latest album – this year’s This Is Why – demonstrated what it sounds like when a beloved 2000s pop-punk matures tastefully nearly two decades after their debut, All Time Low’s newest offering Tell Me I’m Alive shows what happens when a band from the same time is still clinging… Read more
Photo Credit: Stephen Ringer In 2020, Aly & AJ’s 2007 single “Potential Breakup Song” went unexpectedly viral on TikTok. It’s a testament to the duo’s artistic integrity that on 2021’s A Touch of The Beat… – their first album in 14 years – and now, on With Love From, they don’t shamelessly try to recreate… Read more
Photo Credit: Lewis Evans Following up their 2021 debut It Won’t Always Be Like This, which saw the band peaking on both the Irish and the U.K. album charts, as well as joining Kings of Leon as an opening act on their When You See Yourself tour, Dublin’s Inhaler returns with their second album, Cuts… 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: 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