Album Reviews

After several years of cutting their teeth in Melbourne’s underground scene, Camp Cope gained widespread attention outside their native Australia with the release of 2018’s How to Socialise & Make Friends. Simultaneously brash and sincere, the album tackled heavy topics — misogyny in the music industry, sexual assault, the death …

First things first: Let’s skip to the ending. The long-lost 10-minute original version of “All Too Well” turns out to be even better than we were all hoping. Taylor Swift takes her own masterpiece, tears it all up, breaks it like a promise, shreds her tapestry, and rebuilds it into …

It’s been six years since Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats electrified The Tonight Show with their brawny rave-up “S.O.B.,” delivering a scorching performance that launched one of the more unlikely breakout stars of the viral-sensation era. Rateliff was a burly middle-aged guy from Colorado whom Jimmy Fallon had stumbled …

There are moving May-December relationships and then there is the pairing of paisans that is 95(!)-year old croon-king Tony Bennett with 35-year old pop powerhouse Lady Gaga, a superhero team-up that has produced another album of rock-solid takes on the American songbook. Their 2014 standards collection Cheek to Cheek was …

Alessia Cara has returned with a mighty pop opera. In The Meantime, her third album is about a bad romance that has the Canadian pop-R&B singer feeling like a phantom beneath a candelabra of patchouli candles. Over the course of 18 songs, she walks us through the five stages of …

In 2015, Mickey Guyton debuted with the ballad “Better Than You Left Me,” a moving slice of post-breakup affirmation that became a minor hit. Over the next half-dozen years, her career became stalled by a series of false starts, disappointments, and industry misjudgments in country music, a genre historically walled-off …

Last year, on the heels of her debut I Was Born Swimming, Ella Williams spoke about one of the four elements. “I’d say my relationship with water is one of being in awe and being terrified by the power of it,” she said. “The power of there being too much …

Even if you don’t know Julia Michaels’ name, you know her work. The 27 year old has carved out an enviable career as a songwriter for the stars that began when she was just 14, culminating in two No. 1 hits: Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” and Selena Gomez’s “Lose You to …

When John Carpenter was making his movies Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween, he wrote and recorded the scores himself almost as an afterthought because he had to: there was no budget for a composer. Here he had these hair-raising, suspenseful stories with murderers wending through darkness, but it all …

In his 1996 documentary The Last Angel of History, filmmaker John Akomfrah creates a fictional character to explore the enduring and connected threads of Afrofuturism in Black music, from Parliament Funkadelic to Detroit Techno. A time-traveling figure called “The Data Thief” digs through the past for clues about the future, …