Album Reviews

The last week of July produced an inadvertent first-week sales clash between Chance the Rapper and NF, a Michigan rapper with a significant cult following. NF is orders of magnitude less famous than Chance, but that didn’t stop his album The Search from outselling Chance’s wife-a-palooza The Big Day by …

Spoon have long been one of the most reliably great rock bands to emerge from the early Aughts indie boom. Their secret weapon has always been their restraint — riffs that simmer but don’t boil, lyrics about cautious hope, air-tight production that plays up their musical economy. It’s what makes …

With nods to King Crimson, Talking Heads, Death Grips, and many others, London’s Black Midi creates a unique brand of cathartic punishment on their excellent debut. The band’s barely college age (they met at the same prestigious performing arts school that produced Adele and Amy Winehouse), but they’ve attained striking …

Big Thief‘s third album UFOF creeps up on you. Unlike their previous LPs — 2016’s Masterpiece and 2017’s Capacity — on which sweet-n-sad folk-rock wrapped you in a warm embrace, UFOF sends a shiver down your spine in its simplicity. The album is 43 minutes of gentle, crackling coos from …

On their third LP, this trio of brothers build on the commercial success of 2017’s The Click, with bubbly tracks steeped in light orchestration, crisp hooks and even a little social commentary. Earlier this year, their single “Burn the House Down” became a semi-official anthem against gun violence by the …

The Vallejo, California hip-hop quartet SOB X RBE are basically a 21st century version of d’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers. They rap ceaselessly about defeating men in gun duels and seducing their girlfriends. Their signature icon (other than a ski mask) is the crossed swords emoji. And the title of …

Washington D.C.’s Priests clearly stated their refreshingly bedrock punk-rock concerns with the title of their 2014 EP, Bodies and Control and Money and Power. Their sound was refreshing too, at times recalling the Nineties riot grrrl idealism of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile on songs that took sharp shots at ye …

Cochemea Gastelum is a horn player rooted in groove music: part of a network of players associated with Brooklyn’s Daptone label, he’s worked with Amy Winehouse, Antibalas, and Sharon Jones, an anchor of her band, the Dap-Kings. His first solo album, The Electric Sounds of Johnny Arrow, showed off those …

Over the past decade, Sharon Van Etten has emerged as one of the most viscerally potent songwriters around, able to create gigantic-feeling songs that can have Taylor Swift levels of steely-eyed romantic recrimination: “The moral of the story is, don’t lie to me again,” she warned with scathing clarity on …