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Gouge Away Deep Sage Review: Short of a Gut Punch
With its breakneck pace, 90-second songs, and rants against animal testing, Gouge Away’s 2016 debut, Dies, placed the band’s sound squarely within the hardcore template. But the band’s range of...
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Empress Of For Your Consideration Review: An Artist Finds Her Voice
Empress Of’s For Your Consideration is a celebration of Lorely Rodriguez’s voice as both an artist and vocalist. Where a similar artist might use synth pads as musical accompaniment, Rodriguez inserts...
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Couch Slut You Could Do It Tonight Review: Letting the Blood Flow
Couch Slut’s aesthetic was firmly established on their debut album, My Life as a Woman, the cover of which featured a black-and-white drawing of a man ejaculating onto a woman’s face. Leandro De...
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Fat White Family Forgiveness Is Yours Review: Shock Rock with a Side of...
Fat White Family are arguably best known for their on-stage nudity and confrontational use of Nazi imagery in their work. Their 2019 album Serfs Up!, however, found the South London provocateurs...
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Camera Obscura Look to the East, Look to the West Review: Making Small Steps
Camera Obscura’s sound has rarely ventured beyond small variations on twee, reverb-soaked indie pop, and Look to the East, Look to the West—the Scottish band’s first studio album since 2013’s Desire...
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Orville Peck Stampede: Vol. 1 Review: A Slip of the Mask
Following the postponement of his 2023 tour for health-related reasons and his departure from Columbia Records, Orville Peck attempts something of a reset with Stampede: Vol. 1. A seemingly...
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Vince Staples Dark Times Review: A Hip-Hop Memoir Haunted by the Past
“Fans say they want 2015 Vince,” Vince Staples says on “Etouffée,” a track from his sixth studio album, Dark Times. While the SoCal rapper’s career is an undeniable success story, far removed from his...
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$uicideboy$ ‘New World Depression’ Review: A Hard Pill to Swallow
Rappers $crim and Ruby da Cherry, the duo known as $uicideboy$, are both recovering opioid addicts, and they treat their battles with drugs, depression, and suicidal ideation as a flex. Not to put too...
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Loma ‘How Will I Live Without a Body?’ Review: Living in a Corporeal World
Austin trio Loma has never really sounded like a live band, often reliant on overdubbing multiple instruments to create their singular sound. Nor have they limited themselves to standard rock...
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Review: As Johnny Blue Skies, Sturgill Simpson Takes a ‘Passage du Desir’
Sturgill Simpson has always chafed at the boundaries of neotraditional country, from covering Nirvana on 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth to delving headlong into ZZ Top-style blues-rock on 2019’s...
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Review: With ‘King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2,’ Denzel Curry Lets Loose
Denzel Curry’s King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2 serves as a sequel to the Miami rapper’s 2012 mixtape, which he recorded as a teen when he was part of the proto-SoundCloud-rap collective Raider...
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X ‘Smoke & Fiction’ Review: A Too-Complacent Final Testament
Even in their earliest days in Los Angeles’s punk scene, X had one eye on rock music’s past. Guitarist Billy Zoom’s twisted riffs made nods to Chuck Berry, while Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek produced...
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Uniform ‘American Standard’ Review: An Oppressive, Intensely Personal Ritual
For Uniform, heavy music is a means to confront the most difficult experiences in life. A case in point is the 21-minute title track of the noise-rock band’s fifth studio album, American Standard, on...
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Alan Sparhawk ‘White Rose, My God’ Review: A Playful but Palpable Expression...
Alan Sparhawk’s White Roses, My God resists easy interpretation. That’s due, in no small part, to the fact that the former Low singer-guitarist filters every note that he sings through Auto-Tune,...
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Geordie Greep ‘The New Sound’ Review: Former Black Midi Frontman Takes on...
Former Black Midi singer-guitarist Geordie Greep takes stock of contemporary masculinity with his first solo album, The New Sound. Where Black Midi constructed elaborate worlds to tell stories about...
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Mount Eerie ‘Night Palace’ Review: Bucolic Indie Rock That’s as Fickle as...
Mount Eerie’s 2017 album A Crow Looked at Me and its follow-up, 2018’s Now Only, were largely acoustic efforts filled with intensely pained songs written in the aftermath of the death of songwriter and...
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Lauren Mayberry ‘Vicious Creature’ Review: An Album That Falls Short of Its...
Over the last decade, Chvrches singer Lauren Mayberry’s lyrics have grown increasingly concerned with the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated industry. The duo’s 2021 album Screen Violence...
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The Weather Station ‘Humanhood’ Review: The Calm Before the Storm
The Weather Station’s seventh studio album, Humanhood, is prickly and less accessible than the Canadian band’s previous work, reflecting their determination to innovate. The group’s folk leanings still...
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Review: Sharon Van Etten, ‘Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory’
Sharon Van Etten, who’s studying psychology with the hopes of one day becoming a therapist, lifted the name for her new band, Sharon Van Etton & the Attachment Theory, from a theory devised by...
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Destroyer ‘Dan’s Boogie’ Review: Loose, Improvisational, and Opaque Genre...
One reliable aspect of a Destroyer album is that it will mark a change in style from the Canadian band’s previous release. But regardless of the genre or genres—glam rock, country, synth-pop, and...
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