Album Reviews

During his 18 months in the national spotlight, Juice WRLD was consumed by the concept of death, which offered a neat, compact metaphor for his infinite emotional suffering. As he emerged in 2018 as one of pop’s most vital young voices, he described himself in his music as someone circling …

Hayley Williams has been the face of Paramore for over half her life, so you better believe she knows how to put on a show. When examining pop-rock’s quirky bombast during the 2000s, there’s hardly a more apt representation than Williams wielding a carrot microphone onstage at Warped Tour, with …

On April 23, 1985, a billion-dollar beverage company felt the heel of a boot descending on its windpipe. Coca-Cola’s rival, Pepsi, was everything the late 19th-century drink was not — smooth, new, and sweet enough to quench the carbonated corn syrup-addled taste buds of the Reagan era. Instead of riding …

Nathaniel Rateliff was one of the more surprising success stories of the 2010s, a decade that full of strange ones. A big bearded white guy from Colorado, he broke out singing brawny soul music with his band the Night Sweats. Paying proud homage to Memphis soul, Rateliff’s 2015 hit “S.O.B.,” …

As the most commercially popular punk band in the history of the United States, Green Day have often admirably taken it on as their obligation to make Rock For Our Times, to heal — or, if the case requires, salt — our national wounds. It’s a tough gig. The Clash …

Frank Zappa may be the only rock star as prolific in death as he was in life. And that’s saying a lot, considering he released 62 albums in his 52 years on this planet. Since his death in 1993, his estate has put out nearly 60 releases, making it even …

If you’re listening for evidence of the many psychedelic mushrooms Harry Styles says he ate during the recording of his outstanding second album, you will have to wait until Fine Line‘s second to last song for a dose. But when “Treat People With Kindness” arrives, it trips balls. Musing about …

The first thing you see in Earl Sweatshirt’s “EAST” music video is Earl standing on a city beach, enjoying the sunset and holding a joint and a Corona. A giant superimposed moon darts haphazardly across his body. Earl’s friends grin and point at the camera and throw up middle fingers …

Despite becoming a genre-busting mainstay over the past seven years in his native U.K., psychedelic-soul singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka has heretofore remained a relatively anonymous television soundtrack staple in the States, with nary an indie hit to his name. Most fans here know him, if they know him at all, as …

The not-so-secret wish of every man-child is to grow up: Do the sex, get a girlfriend, make a mark. Two of Blink-182‘s contemporaries embraced quite different versions of adulting some time ago: Weezer traded irony for radical sincerity with future-classic Pinkerton in 1996, while Green Day went political — and …