Just as I was settling down for the winter ahead, preparing my mind’s fortress for the short gray days that blur into long silent nights, TSHA’s new EP Flowers grew out of my assignment pile like those Alpine plants that seem miraculously to grow out of solid rock. …

Billie Eilish’s ‘Therefore I Am’ is a caustic diss track if there ever was one. Her signature casual close-to-the-mic vocal croonings and chattings makes the unlucky object of this song’s message feel lower than an afterthought. That famous philosophical phrase from …

Some people think the only good music on this planet is music which follows their expectations and doesn’t ask them any questions. It hovers in familiar chord progressions, in recognizable compositional syntax, never stepping beyond genre lines. “Talent” becomes …

Artists spend a lot of energy trying to evoke a sense of place, a presence of “other space” that is larger than the art object itself and envelops the audience. I’ve only recently become awakened to the sense of painterly space on a canvas or board that allows …

There is a moment of arrival in every musician’s career where they release a self-titled album. Some, like The xx, do it as their first album. Others, like Bon Iver, hold back and wait until the sophomore of their careers. A self-titled release is a calculated move, a …

Jón Þór Birgisson is an artist who needs a lot of space. Having built a prolific and visible career out of an experimental praxis, he’s something of an enigma to me, an oxymoron here in the American audience, which favors digestibility, marketability, franchisability in …

‘Lifetime’ by Romy starts playing on my speakers, and I immediately think of ABBA, how delicious pop music can feel sometimes, how EDM waves of a banging four-on-the-floor beat and swishing, swashing, swelling, flowing instrumentation express the headrush of …

Now Here No Where is the fourth album by meticulous techno wizard Kölsch, and it’s a wide variety of emotions from start to finish, a cinematic soundtrack to the year 2020 that runs the gamut from tragic death march, to sentimental nostalgic dreams, to midnight in …

From its inception electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso, consisting of singer Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn, discovered in their sound a unique mode of experiential exploration, and they’ve been following that mode ever since. With a home base in Durham, NC, …

Indie duo Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner are back on the scene with a new tUnE-yArDs release for the first time in two years, arriving just in time with just what I need—an artsy punky worldbeat pop explosion. Their new single ‘nowhere, man’ is tense like …