Photo Credit: Reuben Bastienne-Lewis Long-running, off-and-on multi-platinum (in the U.K.) London Britpop band Blur returns with their first album of all-new material in eight years. Despite the title, The Ballad of Darren is not a concept album (longtime frontman Damon Albarn more than takes care of that approach with his other major project, the Gorillaz)…. Read more
Photo Credit: Kameron Pollock California, Metalcore quintet Avenged Sevenfold has never been one to shy away from the dramatic. It’s evident even in their many morbid album covers and song titles (“Shepherd of Fire,” “Burn It Down”, “Beast and the Harlot”). On the band’s eighth studio album, Life Is But a Dream…, they really do turn the… Read more
Photo Credit: Lindsey Byrnes The fifth full-length album by electronic music producer and DJ Nicholas Daniel Miller – known professionally as Illenium – opens with “Starfall,” an all-synth electronic instrumental. This is hardly the curtain-raiser a listener might expect if they choose to look ahead to the sixteen-song track listing, to see that upcoming cuts… Read more
Photo Credit: Dennis Leupold Bebe Rexha has always been an artist who straddles different genres and even subverts them, making her a force to be reckoned with in the music industry. And after a year filled with personal and emotional upheavals, it’s no wonder she has finally shed the past almost entirely for her eponymous… 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: Kristín Braga Wright Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from listening to country radio, women have spent the last few years carrying the genre on their backs. While Sam Hunt has been delivering toxically masculine lyrics over awkward genre fusions and Walker Hayes has been making bro-country Applebees jingles, Margo Price has been… Read more
Photo Credit: Joji via Instagram To be a YouTuber-turned-musician is to have any and all of your musical output treated with suspicion. It’s understandable why; when most people hear the phrase ‘YouTuber-Turned-Musician’, they probably think of someone like Dream – the viral gaming star who received widespread mockery last year following the release of his… Read more
Photo Credit: Clara Balzary Their last album was entitled Unlimited Love, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers seemed determined to show their fans exactly that (the feeling with the public appears to be mutual, as that album went Top 5 in twenty-five countries). Less than seven months after the release of that album we now… Read more
Photo Credit: Tom Oxley I rarely had so little to say about an album as Oxford band Foals’ seventh album Life Is Yours, so let’s hear what the band has to say about it. “We wanted to write music that would be a forcefield against the darkness, rather than try to proselytize people,” singer Yannis… Read more
Photo Credit: Greg Williams Liam Gallagher’s solo work, – c’mon, you know the guy who was once voted “The Greatest Frontman of All Time” in a reader poll by Q Magazine only weeks before host Peter Kay called him a “knobhead” during the 2010 Brit Awards after throwing away his award for “best album of the past 30 years”… Read more