Even the songs with the most explicitly historical narratives can’t help but double as personal confessions.
Rather than treat the blues as a stuffy, academic genre exercise, Roll with the Punches plays like a party album.
Throughout his latest album, Josh Ritter is mindful of folk forms but never beholden to them.
Wonderful Wonderful’s best tracks happen to be the ones that feel the most tossed off by the Killers.
The songs on Grace span eras and musical genres but are all connected by their sense of place.
The album plays to its principals’ strengths without sounding like an exercise in nostalgia.
Not Dark Yet’s unadorned, low-key sound is key to some of the album’s more radical feats of imagination.
Dark Matter’s triumph is that it hits you in the gut just as much as it resonates in the brain.
Alice Cooper’s Paranormal is a reminder that loud, lumbering rock never goes out of style.
Moore has combined his affection for the late, great Toussaint with immersive knowledge in his songbook.
This is an album concerned with legacy—about what we leave behind, about how we’re remembered.
Atkins’s lyrics eschew metaphor for a more confessional mode, and her arrangements are punchy and direct.
TLC sticks to the group’s late-1990s aesthetic and acts as though nothing has shifted in the world of contemporary pop.
At its best, Together at Last almost makes one wish for a redo of previous albums.
So You Wanna Be an Outlaw engages Steve Earle’s past without ever sounding stuck in a rut.
A Kind Revolution isn’t explicitly topical, but its mood captures the spirit of the age.
Turn Up the Quiet allows listeners to lean into words and melodies they already know by heart.
From A Room: Volume 1’s focus is on individual moments, not on how its songs work together as a whole.
Trombone Shorty walks the line between pop and jazz throughout his Blue Note debut album.
The album’s pleasures make lasting impressions, but the larger takeaways are a mixed bag.