In contrast to the widespread tragedy, outrage, and dread of 2020, Guided by Voices’s Mirrored Aztec offers a musical experience where dark emotions become sublimated through bright, rousing, old-school power pop. It’s an ethos reflected in the album’s cover art, which—in the vein of Savage Resurrection or the 13th Floor Elevators—features a woman sprouting a nymph-populated garden of psychedelic, DayGlo plants and flowers.

Mirrored Aztec is also something of a back-to-basics turn for the band’s current lineup. After two consecutive outings heavy on prog-rock structures and odd time signatures, the album follows a simpler template. Indeed, it initially seems to raise the possibility that lead singer and songwriter Robert Pollard may have drawn from the same well once too often. Opening track “I Think I Had It. I Think I Have It” features the kind of stabbing downstroke guitar work that’s defined this lineup’s most anthemic creations, including “Just to Show You,” “Space Gun,” “You Own the Night,” and “Cohesive Scoops.” And yet the track is too distinctive—and too damn good—to dismiss as self-derivative or parodic, coasting on a simple pattern of chords that escalates in intensity from verse to chorus and over which Pollard fashions a catchy vocal melody imparting an oblique battle cry that’s equal parts regret and no-looking-back affirmation: “Vision corrected/Oh, what I neglected back then.” Pollard’s slightly strained vocals on the high notes add a touch of endearing fallibility.

On Guided by Voices’s last few albums, Pollard brought to hi-fi life songs that until now have only existed as demos on the four Suitcase box sets, and Mirrored Aztec happily follows recent tradition. Overshadowed on the first Suitcase by the likes of “Pink Drink,” “Supermarket the Moon,” and “I’m Cold,” “Bunco”—a song that’s been sitting in Pollard’s workshop for at least two decades—employs unconventional chord changes to move from minor-key verses to major-key choruses. “Bunco” initially sounds awkward, but the strange tonal shifts underline eerie, poetic lyrics that constantly alternate between confinement and freedom: “Limited dimensions are following you/Ours is a room with a view under the stars.”

Pollard has used the new Guided by Voices—comprising himself, lead guitarist Doug Gillard, rhythm guitarist Bobby Bare Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March—to execute more experimental ideas, a tendency that peaked with last year’s Sweating the Plague. Here the two out-of-leftfield numbers are “Please Don’t Be Honest” and “Math Rock.” The former number, boasting a title antithetical to the band’s 2016 album Please Be Honest, is propelled by a giddy riff and palm-muted guitar work. Fun enough, but then a non-sequitur bridge composed of lush acoustic guitar and synths launches the song into the unforeseen sublime.

“Math Rock,” meanwhile, is not in the style of math rock. Though Gillard’s lead is jerky (or “angular,” as critics often like to point out) and March’s drumming is virtuosically busy, Pollard keeps the song light and playful rather than cold and technical. And the main riff is buoyed by what sounds like a toy piano, while later a delicious, concluding crescendo features a children’s choir shouting “Math Rock!” in answer to Pollard’s repeated exclamation, “Children of the nation/Join in the celebration!”

Pollard seems especially inspired by women whose names begin with “J”—as evidenced by GbV songs titles like “June Salutes You!,” “Jane of the Waking Universe,” and “The Best of Jill Hives”—and “Thank You Jane” stands out here for an exceedingly bouncy guitar line and sunny vocal melody, redolent of the Hollies and the Zombies. It also evokes nostalgia of another sort: Along with “The Birthday Democrats” from 2017’s How Do You Spell Heaven and “I Love Kangaroos” from 2018’s Space Gun, “Thank You Jane” might be one of the few latter-day GbV tracks to recall Pollard’s attempt in the late ‘90s and early aughts to recharge British Invasion-era pop with indie-rock energy. The song is so ebullient in appreciating the sheer miracle of existence (“Thank You Jane for stepping up to the plate to take your swing”) as to rival “Chasing Heather Crazy” and “Girls of Wild Strawberries” in pure pop perfection.

Not all of Mirrored Aztec is as great as “Thank You Jane” or any of the previously mentioned highlights. “Transfusion” and its chorus of “Too much confusion/Need a transfusion” is perhaps the album’s least interesting entry, rivaled only by the midtempo “Screaming the Night Away,” a track that feels especially sleepy after following the stomping “Haircut Sphinx.” Luckily, “Party Rages On” ends the album with gusto, though also by realistically promising that the continuance of all-out fun can only be earned by overcoming various pratfalls and tragedies (“Bill was face down,” “The speaker was blown out,” “The general was so dead”). It’s a fitting note of perseverance on which to end another triumphant album for Pollard and company, the only band that may very well outlive us all.

Label: Guided by Voices Inc. Release Date: August 21, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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For those with a certain affinity for emo music, Bright Eyes might as well be a classic rock band. Over the course of their first nine albums, Conor Oberst and his longtime collaborators, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, defined and refined a kind of sprawling, intensely honest brand of indie rock that would become an essential touchstone for a genre and an indelible document for an era. So when the band took a hiatus in 2011, following the somewhat divisive The People’s Key, it unofficially marked the end of an era.

As such, Oberst’s return to Bright Eyes after nearly a decade is no small gesture. But Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was feels less like a monumental happening and more like a seamless continuation, the sound of a band shrugging off a long hiatus and simply getting back to work. They’re still making deeply emotional indie rock songs, still flirting with the same grandiosity that helped cement the legacies of albums like Lifted and Fevers and Mirrors, and the songs still revolve around Oberst’s warbling search for the reasons we insist on continuing to exist when the world quite frankly seems to be crumbling all around us.

There’s something intoxicating about Bright Eyes tripping back onto a (purely metaphorical) stage on the album’s first proper song, “Dance and Sing,” which opens with a throat-clearing sound check before kicking into gear: “Got to keep on going like it ain’t the end,” Oberst sings. Adorned with a gorgeous string section, the track represents a kind of effortless widescreen ideal of a Bright Eyes song while setting the scene for one of the album’s key themes. “All I can do is just dance on through and sing,” goes the chorus, bringing to the fore the idea that, even as catastrophe seems to wait around every corner, the only way to carry on is to, well, carry on.

The songs on Down in the Weeds reprises the sheen and clarity of Bright Eyes’s later records, like Cassadaga and The People’s Key, and mostly eschews the rawer qualities of their early recordings. But the band also continues to pick up influences and incorporate new sounds into their foundation. “Mariana Trench” takes on a light ‘80s-pop aesthetic with its high-pitched foundational synthesizers and big, bouncy chorus, while “Pan and Broom”—a small little tune that rests on a back and forth between a popping beat and an imitation sweeping sound—recasts Oberst’s bedroom-pop days with a more modern sound. With contributions from heavyweights like Jon Theodore and Flea, the album continues to expand Bright Eyes’s sonic palette while staying true to their core: “Persona Non Grata,” for instance, takes one of the band’s typical funeral dirges and exacerbates the drama with a bagpipe solo.

Perhaps the most integral component of Bright Eyes’s music is Oberst’s ability to probe deep into the heart of despair, ennui, and regret. There’s plenty of that here, but his aptitude for going right for the heart of the matter is most powerful on “To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)” and “Comet Song.” The former recalls Oberst’s more unwieldy early days, for how it’s stuffed with ideas and little details that pack a real emotional punch: “I’ll ask my love/What will she say?/What’s it like to live with me here/Every fucking day.” It’s a testament to the band’s sharpened songwriting that the most affecting part of the track is the bright, ruminative guitar solo that appears where a chorus might go. Though they let their maximalist instincts shine, Oberst still resists the opportunity to sum things up neatly in favor of remaining ambiguous.

On the other hand, Down in the Weeds’s swooning closing track, “Comet Song,” does a good job of articulating some of the band’s main concerns. Oberst considers the existential weight of nostalgia and memory in some of the most affecting lyrics of his career, a crescendo of horns punctuating some of his most honest and gutting moments. “Spent decades in search of/What meant so much to you/Then sold the whole collection/Because the rent was due,” he sings in an aching reflection on the realities of growing up and moving on. But as “Comet Song” continues to swell, Oberst considers the sublime beauty in that fleetingness: “She doesn’t know yet what a comet does/You’re approaching even as you disappear.” No matter how much time has passed, Bright Eyes continues to be unmatched at tackling the biggest questions with a profound, heart-wrenching intimacy.

Label: Dead Oceans Release Date: August 21, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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One of the few, if only, remaining alt-country bands from the 1990s with their original lineup intact—not to mention the most consistently active—the Old 97’s are a living relic. They don’t seem one bit ashamed of it, armed with the standard two guitars, bass, and drums, and still playing the same sort of semi-twangy barroom rock songs about drinking, women, the road, and drinking with women on the road. And the fact that they’ve remained, in non-pandemic times, a popular touring act for nearly 30 years without making any major or lasting changes to its approach speaks to the appeal of their original formula.

Just as remarkable is the fact that after all this time, Miller and his cohorts don’t sound jaded in the least: The band’s 12th album, predictably titled Twelfth, is largely defined by the singer’s surprising positivity in the face of, not only the troubled times of the present, but decades of life on the road. Miller delves into the past often throughout the album, from the young-love nostalgia of “Our Year” to the self-referential tribute to the band’s early years of “The Dropouts,” which isn’t the first such song Miller has written in recent years. There’s even a cheeky nod to one of the group’s few other still-active contemporaries, the Bottle Rockets, in the form of a honky-tonk shit-kicker titled “Bottle Rocket Baby.”

This backwards-facing view may seem a little on the nose for a band that’s not doing much of anything new musically, once again pairing the plainspoken barroom wit of Miller’s lyrics with Ken Bethea’s revved-up guitar work. As usual, the latter dominates so much of the mix that it may take a couple of listens to realize there’s barely a single distinguishable riff to be found across the album’s 12 tracks. But when Bethea pulls the ripcord on that heavy bottomless-pit tremolo effect for the dramatic moments, it nearly makes up for it.

Still, that also means that there’s not much to latch onto beyond Miller’s melodies and lyrics, both of which are entirely shopworn but at times winsome nonetheless. On “Turn off the TV,” which recalls the band’s past forays into power pop, Miller portrays the same sort of dorky pick-up artist who sang one of the best-loved Old 97’s songs, “Barrier Reef”: “Turn off the TV, let’s go back to my room/I’ve got a window with a hell of a view.” On the slow, hazy “I Like You Better,” he compares a paramour favorably with the exact things you’d expect a dude in a cowboy band to love the most: sleeping in, playing guitar, and drinking beer. “We got nothing/But nothing’s good enough for the dropouts,” Miller sings on “The Dropouts,” which might well serve as a decent rallying cry for casualties of the Covid economy.

Miller isn’t always so glib though. He got sober five years ago, which he does address on Twelfth, albeit with little depth. When he sings, “And the wine turns into whiskey/And the whiskey turns to tears/It’s been this way for years,” on “Absence (What We’ve Got),” it’s both sharp and revealing. Conversely, “Confessional Boxing” offers mostly surface-level hints at the dark times of the past, as the song growls but doesn’t ever bite. Miller fares better when he’s in pure storytelling mode on the after-hours waltz “Belmont Hotel,” on which the titular hotel becomes a metaphor for romantic renewal: “The ceilings were charred and the air thick with fumes/Now there’s a garden where bluebonnets bloom/And it’s better than brand new now.” You could say, then, that for the Old 97’s, all that’s old is new again.

Label: ATO Release Date: August 21, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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Rumors began swirling of a possible collaboration between U.K. pop singer Dua Lipa and Madonna earlier this year when the former’s manager floated the idea in an interview. Lipa has cited the queen of pop as an inspiration for her sophomore effort, Future Nostalgia, a collection of dizzying dance-floor fillers that draws on disco, house, and funk, so going straight to the source for the lead single from Club Future Nostalgia, her forthcoming remix album, feels like a natural through line.

Remixed by DJ/producer the Blessed Madonna (formerly the Black Madonna), who also helped curate and mix the entire album, “Levitating” finds Lipa trading verses with Madame X and fellow genre-bender Missy Elliott, whose early-aughts brand of hip-hop famously blurred the lines between rap, R&B, and dance. The track has been completely transformed from a midtempo pop-funk earworm into a sleek electro-disco gem worthy of Moroder or Cerrone.

Aside from some of her usual vocal tics, including a very Jody Watley-esque “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Madonna’s voice is nearly as unrecognizable as the song itself, vibing effortlessly atop a crisp backdrop of handclaps and skittering bass, while Missy flaunts her versatility by half-singing and half-rapping an expectedly #NSFW verse.

Watch the music video below:

Club Future Nostalgia is due August 28th on Warner Records.

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Despite its peculiar, even revolutionary approach to the acoustic singer-songwriter format, This Machine Kills Artists, the solo debut from the Melvins’s Buzz Osborne—a.k.a. King Buzzo—generated buzz (pun intended) almost exclusively among the band’s faithful. Now, as if to encourage a second look at his pursuit of heretofore unrealized sounds, Osborne has delivered Gift of Sacrifice, another album that veers off the beaten path.

On This Machine Kills Artists, Osborne plowed through 17 propulsive numbers that rarely broke the three-minute mark in the process of reimagining the acoustic guitar as a primarily rhythmic, at times almost percussive, instrument. In contrast, Gift of Sacrifice offers mostly lengthy atmospheric tracks that achieve a dark, pensive beauty, in large part due to the added presence of Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn, who’s featured throughout the album. “Delayed Clarity” begins with a series of brooding, heavily strummed acoustic chords to which Osborne eventually adds a gorgeously melancholic guitar lick. Two minutes into the song, Osborne begins to sing, and Dunn uses his standup bass to create—with the help of substantial delay effects—an eerie, swirling soundscape that submerges the track’s vocals in a psychedelic fog.

In the course of inventing their own brand of overpowering sludge metal, the Melvins have been often overlooked for their experimentation, but Gift of Sacrifice—with “Delayed Clarity” as its centerpiece—often spotlights Osborne’s masterful ability to explore strange worlds of sound by slowing down the pace and emphasizing texture over melody. “Housing, Luxury, Energy” reverses the structure of “Delayed Clarity,” with another set of brooding, heavily strummed chords accompanied by simultaneous tracks of Dunn’s arco patterns, including a scraping, atonal noise. Over more than six minutes, the song intensifies to the point where Osborne’s baying vocals and thunderous strumming produce an overwhelming maelstrom. The common thread of Osborne’s two solo albums is the transference of metal’s sonic density to the acoustic realm, and with this track and most of Gift of Sacrifice he’s especially succeeded, with Dunn providing thick foundational tones for extra heaviness.

Motifs of our oppressive, delusional, and arrogant ways seem to pervade Gift of Sacrifice. The surprisingly catchy “I’m Glad I Could Help Out” possesses a creepy, lurching rhythm aided by Dunn’s plucked bass notes as well as Osborne’s lyrical portrait of endurance through persecution: “They came to terrorize/The wisest of the wise/You have to survive/Before you can do anything.” While possessing only a rough intelligibility, the lyrical fragments on “Science in Modern America” appear to paint an all-too-relevant portrait of intellectual and moral decrepitude: “Forget everything and face nothing” is one such fragment, and it speaks volumes as to how Osborne views a world ruled by ignorance and cowardice.

The biggest surprise on Gift of Sacrifice is “Mock She,” perhaps the first “Hey, foxy mama” song that Osborne has ever written. It’s certainly the album’s breeziest offering, even as various elements undermine any straightforward sentiment it might express. After all, Osborne’s idea of a come-on is “Hey, baby, if you do what you’ve been told/My insulation’s gone, girl/You make me overload.” And as if to further suggest the breakdown of the authoritarian, mechanical narrator, his voice eventually disintegrates in a metallic gurgle while Dunn’s frantic bassline becomes increasingly atonal and arrhythmic.

Gift of Sacrifice flirts with such chaos, though sometimes in a compartmentalized manner: Three tracks, including the opener and closer, are short instrumentals that might have been elongated for further immersive and exploratory effect. Otherwise, the album is an off-kilter musical gift born of Osborne’s sacrifice of conventionality for weirder, wider possibilities.

Label: Ipecac Release Date: August 14, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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On the intro to his 2018 mixtape, Onepointfive, Aminé demonstrated his talent for verbose, declaratory scene-setting. The opening track of the Portland-based rapper’s second studio album, Limbo, likewise sets the stage with a chopped soul sample-driven beat and telling references to hip-hop’s past (Jay-Z) and future (Rico Nasty), while unfurling some of the moral concerns plaguing his thoughts. The album also contains new spins on the dormant practice of skits, and one such interlude pays tribute to the late Kobe Bryant, while others serve as outros for the tracks “Riri” and “Fetus.” These skits find Aminé conversationally musing to himself and his friends about growing older and his place in the world, and they’re a welcome, thoughtful nod to the rap opuses of yesteryear.

By the album’s halfway point, though, it’s clear that this isn’t just another throwback, as Aminé’s full-bodied beats, vintage soul samples, and clever rhymes set him up as a deserving carrier of Kanye West’s torch. “Roots” features R&B/funk icon Charlie Wilson, a favored collaborator of Kanye, while “Pressure in My Palms” includes a reference to the origin of the divisive rapper’s beef with Taylor Swift, as well as a brief but unmistakable interpolation of Kanye’s 2005 track “We Major.” On “Mama,” Aminé lovingly sings the praises of his mother and her herculean efforts to raise him, as if in homage to Kanye’s “Hey Mama”—though the song also links to 2Pac’s “Dear Mama.”

One of the album’s more complex lyrical moments, “Becky” is an examination of racial inequality in America that centers on Aminé’s suburban upbringing, repeatedly returning to the line “Mama said/don’t ever bring a white girl home to me.” The song fascinatingly looks at the contradictions between the behaviors of individuals and the trends of the masses, a kind of liminality hinted at in the album’s title. Aminé is also frequently caught between his swagger and his conscience, resulting in a moral ambiguity that’s further explored on “Fetus,” which, in another stroke of highly uncharacteristic attitudes in rap, ponders the potential harms of bringing a child into the world. The production of these songs, like much of the rest of the album, is unhurried, allowing Aminé to enunciate words fully, the percussion patiently churning and the guitar lines slowly strummed.

Aminé isn’t quite as good a singer as he is a rapper, and certain songs, like “Compensating” and “Riri,” feel encumbered by their repetitive hooks. But when he’s spitting verses, Aminé’s bars feel as painstakingly worked out as those of J. Cole, though his looser, more blasé demeanor saves him from the strident handwringing of the North Carolina MC. (Cole would not, for example, say “Get off my dick and my balls” with the gusto that Aminé manages here.)

In melding traditional hip-hop form with just the right amount of modern trap verve, Limbo makes the case for Aminé, if not as the next great rapper, then as a pop-rap workhorse. The album proves that he can keep pace with his contemporaries while drawing on the history of the genre in ways many of today’s innovators are unconcerned with engaging.

Label: Republic Release Date: August 7, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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Glass Animals’s Dreamland blurs the line between dreams and reality, winding its way through a diaristic tour of frontman Dave Bayley’s life. The album catalogues the singer-songwriter’s relationships, observations, and growing pains with a typically felt and colorful attention toward the senses. As such, it’s more personal than either of the band’s previous two efforts, but that also means that it sacrifices the kaleidoscopic alignment of feeling and imagination that helped make those albums so distinct. It’s a bit of a trade-off, then, as the change in subject matter allows Glass Animals to find new direction, but their previous mode of world-building was, in some ways, more satisfying.

The band’s 2014 debut, Zaba, was seemingly dispatched from another planet, with lyrics filled with oddball imagery that was accompanied by vaguely exotic, waterlogged instrumentals and distant birdcalls, while 2016’s How to Be a Human Being was a playfully literary collection of songs about a cast of fictional characters. Dreamland still makes room for evocative, sensory lyrics and sonics that verge on the cinematic, highlighting the sense of physical touch (the latter word is used several times throughout), but it also spends a lot of time on the mundane artifacts in Bayley’s personal memory bank—Grand Theft Auto, hotels with “pool paintings on the wall,” Scooby-Doo, The Price Is Right—to middling effect. And his expressions of lust for various lovers alternate between the pedestrian (“Sometimes all I think about is you/Late nights in the middle of June” is repeated ad nauseam on “Heat Wave”) and the nonsensical (“You taste like surfing videos,” from “Waterfalls Coming Out Your Mouth”).

Throughout Dreamland, Bayley remains fixated on the carnal escapes that make reality bearable, like sex and drugs, and the fleetingness of those pleasures, which Glass Animals explores with a knowing wisdom. The band’s songs toe the line between dissecting such coping mechanisms and offering an escape of their own: Their bouncy keys, irrepressible melodies, and Bayley’s malleable vocals are intoxicating in their own right, belying the fact that these songs are keenly aware of how temporary their pleasures are.

The standout “Your Love (Déjà Vu)” perfectly encapsulates this threading of the needle, pairing twirling flute and celebratory, horn-like synths with lyrics such as, “I know you want one more night/And I’m backsliding/Into this just one more time.” The relationship described on the song is a momentary fix whose dwindling potency is conveyed by Glass Animals in such a way that suggests time is running out and that they’re making the absolute most of it.

As Dreamland pivots from polished indie rock to electro-pop to hip-hop, it largely sidelines Drew MacFarlane’s guitar, which is only front and center on the self-professed B-side “Melon and the Coconut.” Thumping 808s and skittering hi-hats dominate songs like “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” and “Heat Wave,” replacing the shuffling drums, marimbas, and raw-material-inspired percussion of the band’s prior work, and it’s surprisingly refreshing. “Tangerine” incorporates a staccato beat that sounds almost identical to the one on Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” while Dr. Dre is name-checked on “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” a West Coast reference that Glass Animals doubles down on by having Top Dawg fixture Derek Ali mix the track.

Like How to Be a Human Being, Dreamland moves into more vulnerable terrain in the end, but the earlier album’s concluding run of emotive anthems, including “Poplar St” and “Agnes,” completed a well-rounded emotional arc. Here, songs like “It’s All So Incredibly Loud” and “Domestic Bliss”—which focus on a relationship’s breaking point and a woman experiencing domestic abuse, respectively—make dreary use of swelling string sections, undermining what should be the album’s tragic fulcrum. Instead, Dreamland’s best moments are propelled by slick drum machines and Bayley’s confidence as a frontman. His turn inward isn’t without humor and insight, but writing about other people on past albums provided a more enveloping experience, fleshing out imagined places and people with an intrigue that’s missing here.

Release Date: August 7, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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The world could use a pick-me-up right about now, but those hoping that pop singer Billie Eilish would follow up her multi-Grammy-winning debut with a “Bad Guy”-style banger will likely be disappointed by her new single, “My Future.” The track, produced by brother Finneas, is the 18-year-old’s first new release since February’s “No Time to Die,” the theme from the James Bond film of the same name, which was pushed to the end of the year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Like that song, “My Future” starts off as a dreary but gorgeous dirge, with Eilish’s soulful, layered vocals stacked on top of atmospheric keyboards. Halfway through, though, the track pivots to a spry midtempo shuffle, transforming into a deceptively hopeful tribute to personal independence: “I’m in love with my future/Can’t wait to meet her.” During a period in history when time itself seems to have come to a halt, and the future is uncertain, the song’s lyrics smack of irony: “I know supposedly I’m lonely now/Know I’m supposed to be unhappy without someone/But aren’t I someone?”

Eilish gets even more animated in the music video for “My Future.” The clip, directed by Australian artist Andrew Onorato, is bathed in cool blue tones before a rainstorm gives way to a more colorful palette, matching the song’s shift in mood and tempo. In her isolation, Eilish appears to find solace, communing with and eventually becoming one with nature.

Watch below:

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Country and roots music are too often used as shorthand for “serious” artistry, a notion steeped in matters of race and rockist authenticity fetishes. The implication that pop music is an inherently lesser art form has been the focus of the discourse around albums by Justin Timberlake, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus in recent years. Taylor Swift’s Folklore has already been subject to similar—and perhaps similarly misguided—scrutiny. That Swift has enlisted Aaron Dessner of the highly regarded indie-rock band the National as both a songwriting and producing partner—in addition to her frequent pop collaborator Jack Antonoff—and has embraced a grayscale, rustic visual aesthetic for the project has led many to declare the album a credibility maneuver or act of rebranding.

What makes Folklore such a compelling album, then, are the countless ways in which Swift, the savviest and most acutely self-conscious artist of her generation, anticipates questions surrounding her genre bona fides and leans into each apparent contradiction. She invites this degree of “What does it mean?” discursive handwringing because, on some level, it frees her to make the music she wants to make at any given moment. Folklore is neither a culmination of Swift’s career to date nor a pivot in a new direction. She’s doing exactly what she’s always done: offering a collection of incisive, often provocative songs that incorporate authentic, first-person details and leaving others to argue over specific genre signifiers.

Song for song, Folklore finds Swift at a new peak in her command of language. While tracks like “Cardigan” and “Invisible Strings” hinge on protracted metaphors, “Mad Woman” and “Peace” are blunt and plainspoken. In every instance, what’s noteworthy is Swift’s precision in communicating her exact intent. “I can change everything about me to fit in,” she sighs on “Mirrorball,” a sentiment that’s emblematic of her ability to bait autobiographical readings while also actively subverting them. If she’s offering a comment on her own desire to keep up with next-gen pop stars like Billie Eilish, then the obvious follow-up question is why nothing on Folklore sounds like a viable Top 40 single. Swift’s answer comes in the song’s final stanza, a marvel of vulnerability: “I’m still trying everything/To keep you looking at me.”

In other words, Swift’s at a point in her career where she knows chart success is incidental to broad cultural impact, and she has the cachet to sacrifice the former for the sake of the latter. “All Too Well,” from 2012’s Red, has rightfully become one of her signature songs despite not ever having been released as a single, and that same fate seems likely for many of the tracks here. Every song on Folklore boasts at least one couplet or stanza that’s simply extraordinary for its command of language, narrative voice, empathy, or some combination thereof.

The standout “Seven” first presents itself as a wistful remembrance of childhood before revealing the complexities of what we lose as we age: “Picture me in the weeds/Before I learned civility/I used to scream ferociously/Whenever I wanted.” The song also presents a queer text within Swift’s songwriting for the first time, which broadens the narrative voices she’s employed over the course of her career. “Illicit Affairs” builds to what seems like it will be one of the singer’s trademark middle-eight tone shifts, only to end abruptly without resolving into another chorus, enhancing the sense of finality in her dressing-down of a former lover. Rather than pulling her punches by repeating a catchy refrain or hook, she lets some of her bitterest lines linger, and it’s one of the album’s most impactful moments. Later, she sings from the POV of the rejected party on “This Is Me Trying” to devastating effect: “You told me all of my cages were mental/So I got wasted like all my potential.” The track finds Swift giving credence to the other person’s view of her, making for an even more believable narrator.

Swift’s early albums were hamstrung by her insistence that hers was the only story to be told—that, essentially, she was the protagonist in everyone else’s autobiography, and not just in her own. Folklore’s shifting perspectives—an homage to heiress Rebekah Harkness on “The Last Great American Dynasty,” the queer through line in the love triangle of “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty”—highlight how Swift’s widening worldview has deepened her skills as a songwriter. And even if none of these tracks sound like a “hit,” “Invisible String” and “This Is Me Trying” still demonstrate Swift’s masterful grasp of song structure. Her use of repetition throughout the album is particularly effective: “The 1” invokes both “the greatest films of all time” and “the greatest loves of all time” as sources of regret, while each stanza on “Invisible String” begins with a line that uses passive voice to create a narrative remove.

That Swift employs her long-established songwriting tropes in novel ways is truly the most significant development on Folklore, rather than her choices of collaborators or whether the album scans as pop or alternative or electro-folk. She’s mined this type of melancholy tone before, but never for the full length of an album and certainly never with such a range of perspectives. It isn’t the weight of the subject matter alone that makes the album feel so vital—it’s the exemplary caliber of her writing. She may sing of wasted potential, but Folklore finds Swift living up to all of the praise she earned for her songwriting earlier in career.

Label: Republic Release Date: July 24, 2020 Buy: Amazon

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Less than a year after the release of her seventh album, Lover, Taylor Swift has dropped the follow-up, Folklore, along with a music video for the track “Cardigan.” The singer announced the surprise release on social media early on Thursday, accompanied by a series of grayscale photos of the erstwhile country star in the woods that—though reminiscent of an A24 horror film or a metal album cover—reflects a return to a more stripped-down sound.

Reportedly shot according to CDC-recommended Covid-19 safety guidelines and overseen by a medical expert, the video for “Cardigan” was directed by Swift, who also reportedly did her own hair, makeup, and styling. The special effects-heavy clip finds the singer climbing inside a dusty upright piano and into a moss-covered fantasy world, tinkling the ivories of an overflowing grand piano at the edge of a CGI waterfall. Later, she clings to the instrument on a stormy sea before traveling back to reality.

Co-written and produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, “Cardigan” is an unassuming piano ballad notable for its pointillistic percussion and Swift’s understated vocal performance. As for the titular sweater, it apparently serves as a metaphor for an artist whose love life bears the marks of more than a little wear and tear: “When I felt like I was an old cardigan under someone’s bed/You put me on and said I was your favorite.”

Watch the video below:

Folklore was written and recorded remotely with Dessner and features collaborations with Bon Iver, Jack Antonoff, and a mysterious songwriter billed as William Bowery (after all, it wouldn’t be a Taylor Swift album without a little sleuth-baiting).

Folklore is out now on Republic Records.

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