Dark Hearts has a scattering of stellar moments–and one could even argue that its highpoints are some of Annie’s best to date.
An album that delivers on all fronts, from the ratatat of drill or the swinging hip-hop beats, EDNA explores as much as it uncovers more sides to its voice.
Haim’s statement on Women In Music Pt. III is a confident and emboldened departure from feeling like they have something to prove.
After stripping everything down on her ballad heavy Joanna, pop’s favourite kink, Lady Gaga, has returned to the electro-pop suite with Chromatica, a record no one could have expected even from someone who so full of surprises.
Mordechai offers a rich, meditative escape from the world, something more welcomed than ever in the current climate.
Whilst not as loud or as brash as their self-titled debut, So When You Gonna… is a record that shows Dream Wife bolder than ever, asking questions and opening doors that few are willing to look at. It asks you what you want and challenges you to go after it.
Made in the wake of 2017’s Glasshouse, an album where she felt encumbered by commercial expectations, Ware answers with twelve fiery cuts which are brighter, salacious and disco to the core.
Chockful of jazz that embraces you in a familiar feeling, Source is akin to an old friend you may not see for a while, but whenever you do, the world feels that little bit brighter and it’s as if no time has passed at all.
Though it is by no means a flawless album, it is exactly the kind of thing you should be using to set your mind at ease. Fleet Foxes have always been inherently hopeful and thankfully they’ve not lost sight of that, roll on 2021.
It’s hard not to lavish Owens with praise here, but atop Inner Song’s exceptional track list and an underlying message based around acceptance and healing, Owens uses those experiences to expand into a wider array of exploration and storytelling.
Visions of Bodies Being Burned, like its predecessor, is macabre and monstrous in all of the ways that your leering curiousity would have it. It’s a taut exploration of hatred and hostility, one which stands shoulder-to-shoulder with its demonic older brother.
We’re New Again is sonically updated for the 21st century, but still firmly rooted in jazz, soul, and blues — musics of protest and radical defiance rather than the disillusionment and solitude the original I’m New Here transmits.
Healing Is A Miracle is a magical album whose depths reveal themselves slowly even if the record itself (at only 34 minutes) disappears in the blink of an eye.
It holds the best batch of Waxahatchee songs yet, with Crutchfield at her most candid, raw and clear-eyed. This is the work of someone who’s begun to write a bold new chapter in her life, and it’s special stuff.
On Sumney’s arresting and remarkable new double-album græ, he now challenges the idea of us as standardised, binary beings.
Punisher is that rarest of beasts. A record that grows with each listen, that takes it’s time for its stories to unravel, and that wears its love of literature on its sleeve as comfortably as it does its love of music.
Wholly a spontaneous offering, entirely DIY in production, and made from the creative confines of whatever was available to the singer in self-isolation; Charli XCX has proved that music really can be made anywhere, with anything, during a period where the world is on pause, and still sounds like the future is hers to play with.
Ultimately, this deftly intelligent record takes personal and musical themes, and presents them in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s ever been done before.