Photo Credit: Tim Saccenti Most people already know the story up until this point: Metallica originally formed in Los Angeles at the beginning of the ’80s. In a decade with no shortage of heavy metal entities for headbanging fans to choose from, Metallica eschewed then-common practices of the genre, such as featuring scantily-clad women on… Read more
Photo Credit: Press Brighton, England band Black Honey returns with their new album A Fistful of Peaches, released two years (almost to the day) since their last full-length offering, Written & Directed. The name of that album of course was a phrase that is commonly associated with movie credits, and this new title even paraphrases… 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: 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: Bryan Kirks Quantity doesn’t equal quality is undoubtedly an adage born out by the ongoing pop/rock-punk revival – we’re getting more releases from the genre than at any time since its mid-2000s peak, yet whereas the genre’s standard bearers were once My Chemical Romance and Avril Lavigne, it’s now Machine Gun Kelly and… Read more
Photo Credit: Eleanor Petry Taking its title from a popular alcoholic beverage of her youth, Molly Rankin and her band members reach new heights on their delayed third album. “’cause we’re always…,” Molly Rankin assures halfway through a sentence on the second track of Alvvays’ new record, almost as if she felt a reminder could… Read more
2022 was another interesting and relatively lucrative year for music. Not much of particular note happening in the way of rock’s oldest active veterans (i.e. those who began in the ’60s or ’70s), but a few major ’90s and 2000s came back to show that they’re still determined to move forward artistically. One 2010s starter… Read more
With the world largely returning to normal this year, 2022 saw no shortage of musical releases – with big hitters like Beyoncé, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar returning (to varying levels of success) and a new generation of talent (like Ethel Cain and London’s Black Country, New Road) making themselves heard. Below I sift through the… Read more
Constantly changing throughout the year, my Album of the Year list – which I always enjoy making – this year constitutes Irish Weird Al Yankovic-inspired country pop, moist body parts, teenage Sonic Youth apprentices, weaponized troglodytes, crashing metaphoric airplanes, strong, colorful, Canadian beverages, and for the first time since 2018 – no hip-hop albums. Below… Read more
2022 saw no shortage of fantastic music, which is perhaps why there’s so much disagreement as to what the year’s big, standout releases were. With this list, I attempt to break through the noise and put aside any personal biases to objectively assess the most important releases from this year. #10. Alvvays – ‘Blue Rev’… Read more