The first Who album in 13 years opens with a perfectly cynical Pete Townshend lyric: “I don’t care/I know you’re gonna hate this song.” But it’s kind of hard to hate something that feels so familiar. Roger Daltrey sings the lyric and the ones that follow, claiming the song isn’t …
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There are two basic brands of sad when your relationship craters: One’s when your lover turns out to be a lying asshole. Worse, arguably, is when you realize the asshole’s you. This latter sad is woven throughout Charli, the first LP in five years by the punky English avant-pop queen …
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Madonna albums from this century fall into two categories: the playing-it-safe ones, and the “WTF is she thinking?” ones. You might be tempted to assume the mega-weird ones are better, but nothing is ever that straightforward in the Madonna universe. Confessions on a Dance Floor was her totally safe execution …
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Rapper Juice WRLD’s 2018 breakout single “Lucid Dreams” was a hip-hop hit that felt spiritually indebted to a very un-hip-hop influence: Dashboard Confessional’s 2002 “Screaming Infidelities,” which packaged the lamentations of a man deep in the throes of heartbreak in clean acoustic guitar and singer Chris Carrabba’s injured whine. With …
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Ariana Grande is a woman of her word, dropping her new album just six months after her last one—and Thank U, Next turns out to be her best album yet. Sweetener was full of potential hits; the old-school model would have been to milk it for a couple of years, …
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The Beach Boys Wake the World: The Friends Sessions Capitol 4 stars I Can Hear Music: The 20/20 Sessions Capitol 3.5 stars Brian Wilson once conceded that whilePet Soundsmay be his best album,Friendswas his favorite. Released in 1968, shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, …
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The very first line on Hoodie SZN, the new album from 23-year-old Bronx rapper A Boogie wit da Hoodie, is “All she ever wanted was my heart to hurt.” Few rappers mine their torrid affairs for lyrical inspiration with the fervor of A Boogie, who presents romance as a highly …
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As Geddy Lee put it in a recent Rolling Stone interview, Rush‘s Hemispheres signified “the end of a thing.” That thing was the band’s high-prog period, marked by grandiose, album-side–filling tracks. This phase lasted just three short years but produced some of the greatest-ever examples of the style. If 1976’s …
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Metallica became a force to be reckoned with on… And Justice for All, their fourth album and first after the death of bassist Cliff Burton. On their three previous LPs, they’d laid the groundwork for thrash metal, introduced melody and catchiness to the genre and built a following through relentless …
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More than a decade ago, Tyshawn Sorey, then best known as a rising-star jazz drummer, informed listeners that he had no intention of playing it by the book. “The usual expectation of a recording of compositions by a drummer is that the drums will be featured throughout,” Sorey wrote in …
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