Little Simz explores familial and cultural themes, moving from stream-of-consciousness confessions to epigrammatic observations, volatile rants to equanimous self-examinations.
Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power contains enough magic to be infectious. It’s an ambitious work by an artist exploring aesthetic possibilities.
Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever mostly navigates a mix of downtempo and glitchy ambience, framing her as Gen Z’s resident chanteuse.
While Darkside’s Spiral includes moments of virtuosic integration there are other moments where the album seems to lack a unifying aesthetic.
With his latest album, Vince Staples mines an artistic, existential, and notably fertile limbo. It’s his most reflective and sober perspective to date.
Black Midi’s Cavalcade displays superlative skills, fierce chemistry, and avant-garde vision, offering spellbinding performances while also falling prey to sonic tautologies and circuitousness.
Chemtrails uses a more minimal and nuanced palette than earlier albums, Lana Del Rey distancing herself throughout from her familiar persona and stylistics.
The characters in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, distinct as they are, besiege the viewer's mind as metaphors, mythic exemplars of a disturbing legacy America seems unable or unwilling to address.
Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green's The River Speaks of Thirst is at once a political statement, cultural commentary, and an aesthetic milestone, a skillful commingling of galvanic activism and evocative poetry.
