We weren’t sure if Madonna could surprise us anymore. Until she did.
Howlin Rain’s Mansion Songs is filled with momentary points of chaos, a sense that the songs could fall apart at any moment.
What’s remained true since “Declare Independence” is her disinterest in a zeitgeist that at one time her participation helped shape.
Manson sounds at home on the outlaw dirges, supporting his claim in a recent interview that the album explores the singer’s “redneck” side.
B4.DA.$$ never tries to be more than an apprentice work, working up an articulate introduction for a serious-minded new talent.
Belle and Sebastian wants to dance, but Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance is less of a 180 turn than one might expect.
The Decemberists’ new album, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, is built on a series of wild stylistic vacillations.
Sullivan chats about Reality Show, her earliest experiences as a gospel prodigy, and her long hiatus from the industry.
Uptown Special assembles a seemingly disparate group of collaborators to create a cohesive homage to vintage soul and funk.
That Meghan Trainor’s debut is called Title is emblematic of the album’s religious devotion to formula.
The album is all about trying—striving to best a catalogue without peer, and sounding, minute-to-minute, like its makers might’ve done it.
Some songs deserve a second chance. And sometimes they get it.
Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper finds Panda Bear staking out a middle ground between quirky abstraction and pop accessibility.
Part of what makes Jazmine Sullivan’s Reality Show so remarkable is how often it dares to foreground her pen over her pipes.
Trendspotting is a tricky enterprise.
This year’s great music videos often offered a behind-the-scenes, sometimes meta, look at image-making.
Among the new songs are “Bitch I’m Madonna,” a garish EDM track that’s perhaps the most divisive of the songs that have leaked.
Though 2014 produced some great albums, the last 12 months often seemed, at best, a transitional year for music.
The album is ever-worked, ever-tweaked, and perfected but soul-bearing and raw like little else.
The Pinkprint is a nakedly introspective work that reduces Minaj’s formerly freewheeling aesthetic to its bare components.
Sucker is a party album charged equally with punkish rebellion, hip-hop cool, and pop universality.