Music is often an artist’s canvas, reflecting their innermost thoughts, feelings, and inspirations. For fast-rising Pop artist Ayri, it’s more than just a form of expression; it’s a medium to convey her innate sensuality and […]
Baroness: Stone
The only essential moment on Stone, the sixth album by beloved metal transmogrifiers Baroness, arrives just four minutes after the record begins and lasts only 30 seconds. As the band reaches the end of the […]
Octo Octa: Dreams of a Dancefloor EP
Maya Bouldry-Morrison sees music as a curative force, for both her audience and herself. “I deal with depression and anxiety,” she said in a recent interview, “but when I get out on the decks, I […]
DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ: Destiny
Somewhere between a brain massage and a 1990s basement rave, a memory and a dream, lies the curious and sparkling realm of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. Since her 2017 debut Makin’ Magick, the prolific, […]
Eli Escobar: The Beach Album
When was the last time New York dance music was “hot”? Some would probably argue the answer lies in the culture’s initial Brooklynification in the early 2000s, as chronicled on the margins of Lizzie Goodman’s […]
Tomb Mold: The Enduring Spirit
The first 10 minutes of Tomb Mold’s triumphant The Enduring Spirit make it obvious why they’re one of the most beloved death metal bands of the past decade. The Toronto trio emerged in 2015 amid […]
Ralphie Choo: Supernova
On his debut album, Ralphie Choo, a former chemical engineering student, toys with genres with radical abandon, manipulating sounds like reagents and catalysts in a lab. Across 14 tracks, fluttering flutes, dembow riddims, and flamenco […]
Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light
Irreversible Entanglements is a band built on improvisation, five jazz virtuosos—poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes—coalescing around an idea and discovering where […]
Sarah Mary Chadwick: Messages to God
Here’s the annoying thing about creating anything: You have to reckon with a time lag. Pure feeling can never survive the time required to decide to register it, and then jot it down. So you […]
The National: Laugh Track
R.E.M. had been a band for 24 years when they released their worst album, 2004’s Around the Sun, a record that magnified that aging act’s growing weaknesses and succumbed to sheer tedium. The National, perhaps […]
Buju Banton: Born for Greatness
Though released to relatively muted fanfare, Born for Greatness, the new studio album from veteran reggae star Buju Banton, still arrives with great expectations attached. Banton was already the first artist to break Bob Marley’s […]
Piotr Kurek: Smartwoods
Piotr Kurek’s Smartwoods comes on gradually, then all at once. An electric guitar plucks out a tentative phrase; a harp responds with unhurried plucks; metallic taps, like steel pans, add shading. Finally, an acoustic bass […]