Album Reviews

For the last five years, Brothers Osborne have been one of the more compelling acts operating squarely within the confines of commercial country music. The Maryland brother duo has built a strong live following (and earned a pair of Top Twenty hits) based on their no-nonsense balance of crisp country-rock …

Will the real Maluma Baby please stand up? Breaking out five years ago with the dyadic major label debut Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy, the Colombian star has cosplayed both inamorato and lothario, picking and choosing which side to whip out on any given track. In practice, though, he’s rarely as …

Mention Teyana Taylor’s name, and it evokes kinetic experiences: aerobicized thrusts in Kanye West’s “FADE” clip, melting alongside Kehlani in a “Morning” homage to the 1998 camp-classic Wild Things, casually flexing in Jay-Z’s video for “Blue Magic.” As a dancer and model – she launched her career in her teens …

The biting emo-folk of Phoebe Bridgers’ 2017 Stranger in the Alps established the singer-songwriter as a woeful wisecracker. Bridgers was a millennial Warren Zevon who, even if she sang about sexting instead of heroin withdrawal, shared the shrewd Seventies songwriter’s penchant for fictionalizing their own death and chronicling perpetual L.A. …

Every era has its Norman Fucking Rockwell, and in the middle of the Seventies, that record was Gene Clark’s No Other. With its country-rockified version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, the lush, self-consciously poetic album from the former singer and songwriter in the Byrds occupied its own patch of …

Despite years of admirable effort, Nashville’s attempts to rock out can still tend to come off pretty hammy. Then you get something like “Mess With My Head,”a searing standout from Miranda Lambert’s seventh LP, Wildcard. Over sleek drums and noir guitars, the country queen unspools steamy psychodrama, singing about her …

When Missy Elliott walks back into the room, nearly 15 years after her last album, every knee must bow. She’s the kind of genius who can work on her own eccentric terms, and the whole world agrees to play along because, well, what other Missys have we got? There’s never …

By the time “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” arrives on Lover, her seventh and most epic album, Taylor Swift has entered uncharted territory. For one thing, it’s the 17th song here, and none of her previous albums have run more than 16 tracks. (Lover actually contains 18.) More importantly, …

Sleater-Kinney deliver the goods almost immediately on their new LP, on a title track that begins with industrial clangs, then explodes into rock fury rivaling anything in their catalog, a barrage ofNevermind-grade guitar blasts pacing Corin Tucker’s cathartic, paint-peeling howls. She paraphrases the famous “Things fall apart, the center cannot …

Once More We Saw Stars is a quietly heartbreaking memoir from Jayson Greene, a music editor at Pitchfork. It’s his first book—but the last he ever would have wanted to write. He and his wife Stacy lost their two-year-old daughter Greta in a horrifying accident—the girl was sitting with her …