With Life on Earth, Hurray for the Riff Raff has achieved something truly enviable: a fresh start.
Mitski’s adoption of the decade’s tropes on Laurel Hell comes across as muddled and at times mismatched to her songwriting.
At its best, Elvis Costello’s The Boy Named If rivals the fractious energy and melodic verve of the singer’s classic period.
Courtney Barnett’s Things Take Time, Take Time captures something true and profound about how we relate to the world and each other.
As the album turns 30, we take a look back at My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
Parquet Courts’s Sympathy for Life proves the band is still capable of writing songs that shine in the same no-frills style as their idols.
The album’s simple, one-word song titles and ramshackle arrangements suggest a blunted capacity for more elaborate creativity.
The time has come to at long last grant Trompe le Monde its rightful title as the Pixies’s best album.
If Musgraves is going to be a pop star, Star-Crossed proves she’s doing it on her own terms.
Big Red Machine’s How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? leans into traditional song structures and fully fleshed-out arrangements.
The album proves that McMurtry’s nearly peerless ability to tear our hearts out with a good yarn hasn’t waned a bit.
It takes profound empathy to write an album about your past and have it turn out to be about your love for others instead.
The album solidifies the Akron duo as one of the most vital and credible blues-rock bands active today.
The artist’s sixth solo album matches pitch-perfect ’70s-retro stylings with testy lyrical themes.
The album is a welcome, if predictable, reminder of the days when the guitar-driven verse-chorus song was king.
The album finds the band exploring new tones and textures without betraying their monolithic, thundering signature sound.
The album is an ambitious, dizzying jumble of genres and tones, held together on the power of the singer’s beguiling voice and charisma.
Though the band’s musicianship is in peak form, the album’s songwriting limits its impact.
The album is inexorably tied to lessons from the singer’s past—the reward of a long, strange trip.
It’s only the fleeting glimpses of the band’s more organic style that provide any lasting rewards.