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: Madison Phipps Ellie Goulding has made a point of describing her fifth album Higher Than Heaven as her “least personal album” to date. In an age of pop music geared towards the confessional and emotionally weighty, many fans have welcomed Goulding’s embrace of a pop ethos that prioritizes massive hooks, earworm melodies, and… 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: 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: 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: 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: Beth Garrabrant (All Photos) Taylor Swift’s re-recordings have, so far, been largely successful – beyond achieving their central aim of giving Swift back control of the masters of her first six albums, they’ve earned her another No.1 with “All Too Well,” as well as jumpstarting an overdue critical re-evaluation of her earliest works…. Read more
Photo Credit: Samuel Bradley In 2020, The 1975 attempted to take their music to new heights with an expansive, experimental double LP. Whereas many of their peers – from Taylor Swift to Fiona Apple – gained acclaim for branching off in new directions that year, The 1975’s Notes On A Conditional Form proved divisive; one… Read more
Photo Credit: Meredith Jenks Back in 2012, online dating and sharing cell phone numbers were still relatively new things, so there is no wonder that Carly Rae Jepsen’s ridiculously infectious guilty pleasure “Call Me Maybe” would go on to become the best-selling single of the 21st century by a female artist and one of the… Read more
Photo Credit: Claryn Chong Born in Lincolnshire, England thirteen days before the new millennium, Holly Ffion Humberstone grew up a small-town girl, playing the violin for the Lincolnshire Youth Symphony Orchestra. Some years later, she released two extended plays, performed at Glastonbury Festival and on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, as well as opened for Olivia… Read more