The album sounds beamed in from an earlier decade, but it runs deeper than nostalgia.
The album proves that McMurtry’s nearly peerless ability to tear our hearts out with a good yarn hasn’t waned a bit.
The boldest expressive choices on Martha Wainwright’s Love Will Be Reborn are vocal rather than thematic.
Orla Gartland’s Woman on the Internet attempts to challenge social norms but gets mired in lyrical abstractions.
The songs on the Killers’s Pressure Machine take their sweet time unfurling, luxuriating in subtle details.
Still Woozy’s If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is conveys even its confessions of distress with triumphant confidence.
Lingua Ignota’s Sinner Get Ready presents the so-called forces of good and evil as intertwined.
Billie Eilish pours her heart out in the self-directed music video for ‘Happier Than Ever.’
The songs on Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever seamlessly trace the singer’s path to happiness, or something close to it.
Torres’s fifth album, Thirstier, straddles the line between art pop and art rock.
While Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington assemble an array of mesmerizing sounds on Darkside’s Spiral, a larger vision eludes them.
Sling is less commercial than Clairo’s debut, but it’s also more thematically and musically myopic.
Thom Yorke reimagines Radiohead’s “Creep” as nine-minute acoustic dirge.
Vince Staples’s eponymous album keenly draws contrasts between the rapper’s upbringing and the life he now enjoys.
In a musical landscape that increasingly disfavors happiness, the band’s sixth album is an anomaly.
Our list of the best albums of 2021 so far is a testament to these artists’ independent spirit.
Halsey teaming up with Reznor and Ross is the collaboration we didn’t know we needed.
For all its significations and referents, the album never feels overburdened or contrived.
Throughout, the songs unravel into convoluted tangles of disembodied voices, discordant jazz piano, and droning synths.
The songs comprise a nebulous mass not unlike the swirling galaxy of the album’s cover art.
It takes profound empathy to write an album about your past and have it turn out to be about your love for others instead.