Artists worldwide have been exploring the visionary potential of electrical instruments in all manner of new and novel ways to create psychedelic music.
The genre rediscovery via TikTok during the first stages of the pandemic has been going on long enough that we might consider it a Shoegaze Revival Revival.
The best albums of 2024 challenged orthodoxies, blended and created new genres, and spanned a vast range of musical styles and traditions, while looking forward.
As always, rock was a guitar-led extravaganza in 2024 with artists drawing from an ever-widening musical well. These are the 25 best rock albums of the year.
The songs on Peach Pit’s Magpie have little idiosyncrasies. They are built around sophisticated chord progressions and unique vocal and guitar melodies.
Annarella and Django’s Jouer is lush with thought, skill, and, yes, play, intangible elements that make this genre-defying album superb and satisfying.
This was another year of riches in the best jazz and creative music, with barriers between the tradition and the avant-garde melting away.
Thematically, much of this year’s best punk and hardcore music addressed mental health and working through the past while striving for a more peaceful present.
The excellent Brassroots Democracy details the beautiful and bleak ways that jazz music created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day.
Americana has never been better with the quality of music, diversity of styles, and the artists’ demographics in terms of race, gender, and wealth.
The year’s best folk albums transcend genre boundaries, yet each entry remains firmly grounded in the folk ethos of connection and storytelling.
Hard rock band Shinedown are never quiet about their struggles and never will be as they assure fans that being “slightly awkward, kinda weird” is perfectly normal.
