Jeff Tweedy changed my life. Ever since 2002, when I fell hard for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot after reading all those rave reviews, Wilco have been one of the mainstays of my music fandom. I’ve probably seen them live more than any other band, always hoping to hear “Misunderstood.” I return to their canonical classics frequently, sometimes for comfort and sometimes to be thrilled by “Via Chicago” or “The Late Greats” all over again. I never miss a new Wilco or Tweedy release, nor do I miss a chance to argue about them online. (My “Ode To Joy is better than Sky Blue Sky” take will never die.) Wilco is always one of the names in rotation when people ask me about my favorite band. I’ve been in the tank for them for so long that, in a parasocial way, they feel like family.

“Get in asshole, let’s drive.” Cameron Winter issues the invitation/command about two minutes into Geese’s new album, after he and guest vocalist JPEGMAFIA have already shouted, repeatedly, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” It’s a refrain they’ll return to often on “Trinidad.” The music is as volatile as the subject matter demands, wah-wah guitar and minimal creeping bass giving way to explosive drum fills and bursts of jazz trumpet. By the end, Winter’s uncanny mewling on the verses has given way to something like a street-preacher rant; Geese meet the moment by evoking a funk band that’s gone all-in on noise rock, matching Winter’s screams blow for blow. As the tension ratchets tighter and the manic claustrophobia sets in, you get the sense that the fuse has been lit and it’s only a matter of time.

It’s been more than seven years since Bronx rap phenom Cardi B released her blockbuster debut album Invasion Of Privacy, a truly great record. We’ve had two presidential elections, one global pandemic, and countless waves of rap and pop discourse in the time since Invasion Of Privacy came out. In that time, Cardi B has had three children, and it’s about to be four. She’s gone through one divorce. She’s released a great many absolute bangers — “Money,” “Press,” “Tomorrow 2” with GloRilla, “Put It On Da Floor Again” with Latto — that will seemingly never appear on a Cardi B album. Now, Cardi B has finally released Am I The Drama?, the sophomore LP that some of us thought would never arrive. It’s real. It exists. And people have their knives out for this one.

Sometimes it seems like the art form that captures reality in the most accurate way possible is collage. Other forms are too neat; the chaos of life can’t be communicated through organized paragraphs or a stylish painting. Every day is a mishmash, too messy to be a mosaic. Asheville indie rockers Wednesday have mastered the art of collage-like songs, of music that’s like a junkyard full of precious relics. You get the sense that leader Karly Hartzman is a true artist’s artist, subconsciously collecting fodder for her creations and allowing a project to form on its own volition. Bleeds, out Friday, is another triumph from an undeniable band.

Big Thief has always been an intimate affair. A lot of the time, it seems like the band’s members — vocalist/guitarist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia, and, until his recent departure, bassist Max Oleartchik — can’t get close enough to one another. On stage, no matter how much space they’ve got, they’ll set up and play crammed close together in the center. In photos, they’re usually touching each other, and sometimes they’re on the floor draped over each other in a cuddle puddle. In one interview, Oleartchik said that he felt like the four of them had “melted into each other.” Incidentally, a Twitter search for Big Thief polycule is not short on results.

Blood Orange should be the last artist to get the TikTok bump — not because Dev Hynes doesn’t deserve it but because the music that he makes under his Blood Orange alter-ego is so heady and immersive that it’s hard to imagine it making sense in 20-second chunks. Blood Orange has hooks, but they’re the kind of hooks that feel like crawling into a warm bath. You want to luxuriate inside those hooks, not to encounter them in barrages of distracting media blips. But the TikTok effect has come for Dev Hynes. A couple of weeks ago, Blood Orange’s 2011 song “Champagne Coast” went platinum, while 2018’s “Charcoal Baby” went gold. Those late-breaking successes feel utterly random, but they make their own kind of sense. If you’re a kid in search of a hazy, indolent late-summer vibe, you won’t find a better supplier of that feeling than Dev Hynes. Just wait until all those kids hear Essex Honey.

Thirty-seven years since their first jam sesh, Deftones are as popular as ever. In 2023, they were rocking Jersey’s 4,500-cap Stone Pony Summer Stage; this April, they sold out Madison Square Garden. There was no new album announced, not even new music. What happened?

Hayden Anhedönia is an artist through and through. The 27-year-old visionary has written at length about the frustration of having everything she does turned into a joke on the internet for the sake of a meme. She’s taken accountability for a problematic past while recognizing that the majority of the people attacking her are not doing it in good faith. She stood her ground when Republicans tried to take her down after she called for the assassination of more CEOs. She dropped a 90-minute ambient EP and a 55-minute meditation within weeks of each other. Now she’s back with her second official album as Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.

We’re in the middle of the dog days. As brutal heatwaves and endless thunderstorms alternate their grip on our throats, we keep pressing play on track after track, hoping what comes from the speakers justifies the sweat pouring off our bodies. Debate rages on social media about the “Song Of The Summer”: Who’s made it? Who needs to make it? Does it even exist? When the country had a more unified pop culture that revolved around radio countdowns and 5 o’clock traffic jams, the answers to those questions came more easily. Decisions were made for us. Now, in the fractured attention span landscape, too many bangers appear for us to process adequately. Perhaps we’ve moved on from needing an anthem for the season. It stays warmer later in the year, after all.

Alex Giannascoli has had a career so prodigious it could serve as the basis of a mockumentary in the vein of Christopher Guest or the Lonely Island. Over a decade after he began staking his claim in Bandcamp real estate as a teenager under the moniker Alex G, the Pennsylvania native and DIY enthusiast announced in early 2024 that he’d signed to RCA. The major-label jump was surprising, but there were indicators pointing in that direction: We already knew he’d be opening for stadium mainstays and RCA recording artists Foo Fighters later that summer. The year prior, he’d notched a co-writing credit on the UMG-signed Lil Yachty’s rock crossover Let’s Start Here. He was booking late night shows while still looking like the kind of guy who records at home. He was TikTok-beloved, he was working on his second feature film score, and he was hitting up the studio with at least one pop star. You know that was him playing on Blonde, right?

Justin Bieber is a dad. He’s a husband. You’re not getting it. It’s not clocking to you. It’s not clocking to you that he’s standing on business, is it? He doesn’t give a fuck if you’re on the sidewalk! He’s a human fucking being! You’re standing around his car! At the beach! You know what Justin Bieber is saying? You don’t think he’s a real fucking guy, do you? You’re going to take this video out of context. You’re going to say he’s mad. Justin Bieber doesn’t know who the fuck is paying you to provoke him, but he’s not the fucking one, OK? Stop provoking him. He’s a real dad, a real husband, a real man, so don’t fucking do this shit to him, OK? He’s not to be fucked with. He doesn’t know who’s paying you to provoke him, but he’s not the one. He doesn’t care that you’re on the sidewalk. He doesn’t care what kind of dirty work, what kind of nasty shit — you’re getting paid in the background to provoke him, bro, but he’s really not the fucking one. He’s not the one. He doesn’t care that you’re on the sidewalk, bro.

It’s a tale as old as indie rock itself: Wet Leg didn’t think anyone would hear “Chaise Longue.” Barely two years after college friends Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers decided to write music together on a whim, their deadpan, Mean Girls-quoting debut single made them international stars. In the short time that followed, they opened for Harry Styles, rock veterans like Dave Grohl and Iggy Pop became fans, and their self-titled LP won them multiple Grammys. Beyond their relatively simple, hook-based post-punk, there was also something endearing about Teasdale and Chambers, two conventionally attractive, deliberately softspoken, undoubtedly cool young women from the sleepy Isle Of Wight who dressed like they had eBay alerts set up for Gunne Sax skirts and wielded kitschy props like lobster claws in their music videos. To the uninitiated, it was sometimes hard to discern if Wet Leg were taking themselves overly seriously or not seriously enough. Time spent with the music suggested the circumstances were more aligned with the latter.

Twenty-three years ago Pusha T opened Lord Willin’, Clipse’s bone-classic 2002 debut, with this line: “Playas, we ain’t the same, I’m into caine and guns.” That was the thesis statement, and the past few decades have provided the supporting evidence. Ever since then, Pusha has discussed caine and guns in loving, exuberant, writerly detail. When it comes to being into caine and guns (but especially caine) at a consistently high level, Pusha is the greatest of all time. About 20 seconds into Lord Willin’, Pusha gets into his origin story: “Back in ’84, when I saw Crockett and Tubbs as the law, these eyes got big when they televised that raw/ My mama shoulda seen it comin’/ Me runnin’ up and down the down the stairs too quick/ Hummin’ Miami Vice theme music/ Calderone made me colder/ I see the villain’s impact now that I’m older.” It’s a fun little vignette — a little kid seeing a cool coke kingpin on an ’80s cop show and envisioning himself as a cool coke kingpin himself, then spending his life living up to that little-kid image. But there’s another character in that vignette: Pusha’s mother. A few years later, Pusha addressed her directly on “Momma I’m Sorry.” Now, Pusha opens Let God Sort Em Out, Clipse’s long-awaited fourth album, talking about his mother in a very different way.

A year after we entered global isolation due to COVID, Ella Yelich-O’Connor resurfaced to tell us she’d stopped taking calls. On 2021’s polarizing Solar Power, she threw her cellular device in the ocean, began healing under the sun’s UV rays, and started reckoning with herself as the one of the world’s most beloved pop stars after two critically acclaimed albums. “Teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash/ Now I’m alone on a windswept island,” she sang on “The Path,” over dreamy guitar plucks and flute flutters. Though she might’ve looked like “a prettier Jesus” with endless disciples, (the) Lorde was questioning the mythology built around her: “If you’re looking for a savior, well that’s not me.”

Any diehard Springsteen fan can tell you all about the counter-narratives.

Turnstile are breaking boundaries. They’re making hardcore purists angry. They’re going where no hardcore band has ever dared to go. They’re reinvigorating a genre that’s hampered by rote traditionalism. They’re making hardcore purists hopping mad. They’re opening up hardcore to whole new audiences. They’re making your parents send texts like, “Do you know that band Turnstile? I saw them on Jimmy Kimmel last night.” Hardcore purists are livid. Their music is aggressive but their album cover is pink 🤪. Did you see they played beer pong with Post Malone? Did you hear Charli XCX forecasted a “Turnstile summer”? Did I mention how irate they’re making hardcore purists?

It keeps happening. A beloved band reunites after a long absence and records another album. Or maybe a beloved band never breaks up, and they just release their first album in a very long time. You want to hear it, and you’re excited, but you hope it doesn’t tarnish their legacy. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you can’t let go of the idea that every band reunion is a cynical financial decision, or that every comeback album is an unabashed wallow in the shallow marshes of nostalgia. And then the band releases something that forces you to shut the fuck up and appreciate what they’ve done. Maybe their latest album isn’t the best thing they’ve ever made, but it can stand tall alongside their classics. They can hold their heads up high, and you get a new entry in a discography that you once considered to be a closed book. Everybody wins.

It’s unlikely that Yung Lean will ever put out an album as good as Starz, but that’s fine. The fourth studio LP by the Swedish rapper and Drain Gang associate arrived at the unfortunate time of May 2020, and it was far more atmospheric and artistic than what had come before it. The blurry title track even featured indie outcast Ariel Pink, whose dreamy influence can be heard all over the enveloping record. 2022’s Stardust was a skittish, glamorous follow-up, a bit all over the place but gripping and ambitious throughout. His newest, Jonatan, is another unpredictable, worthwhile adventure.

Justin Vernon was sick of being sad — maybe even physically ill from it, depending on how his opaque interview comments are to be understood. In the run-up to SABLE, fABLE, the first Bon Iver album in almost six years, Vernon has spoken about feeling trapped inside the performance of emotional distress that has defined his band since debut album For Emma, Forever Ago, with its readymade narrative of a broken man pouring his heart out in a remote cabin. Multiple times he has recalled an instance when he began weeping onstage after catching a glimpse of a struggling friend and the audience responded rapturously, as if he was giving them exactly what they came to see.

We’ve been here before, but let’s go back. Could we just go back? To “Mombasa,” I mean. The last minutes of “Mombasa,” the last song on Deafheaven’s last album, 2021’s Infinite Granite.

The new Lucy Dacus album cycle certainly hasn’t been the indie darling’s best. Forever Is A Feeling is the boygenius member’s debut on major label Geffen; a cliché title offers an unpleasant introduction, as does the cover artwork that many fans deemed AI-like despite an actual artist’s efforts. Dacus put out a call for “hot mascs” for the “Best Guess” video; when the video came out, fans were disappointed by the lack of diversity of the chosen “hot mascs.” So, now the question is: How’s the music, though?

Melancholia has followed Michelle Zauner since she was very young. “I was haunted by nightmares and an intense paranoia of my parents dying,” she recalled of her childhood in her 2021 memoir Crying In H Mart. “I imagined robbers breaking into our house and envisioned their murders in horrible detail. If they returned home late from a night out, I was convinced they’d gotten into a car accident. I was plagued by recurring dreams of my father, impatient with traffic, attempting to navigate a faulty shortcut that led their car off the edge of the Ferry Street Bridge, plummeting them into the Willamette River, where they would drown, unable to escape through the doors due to the water pressure.”

Playboi Carti has been playing hard-to-get for years. He’s been teasing a new album without releasing it. He’s been putting new tracks up on YouTube or Instagram but not the streaming services. He’s gone four years without a full-length statement. So when Carti announced that his long-awaited LP would finally arrive today, people got excited. Many of those people stayed up late. It was a long night for them.

You’ve heard this talk about reheated nachos, haven’t you? The internet slang term came about last year, with “nachos” referring to a person’s style, aesthetically or sonically — the point being that, even if the ingredients are the same, it’s a dish best served fresh. The phrase reached a broader audience after Lady Gaga premiered “Abracadabra,” a single from her new album Mayhem, during the Grammys. “Abracadabra” feels quintessentially Lady Gaga, from its chainsaw synths to the very “Bad Romance” way she flips her name into a devilish tongue: “Abracadabra, morta-oo-ga-ga.” Even the menacing choreography of its music video seemed to hark back to a time when reviews likened her dark eccentricity to a “David Cronenberg creation.” As one fan emphatically proclaimed on X following the video’s premiere: “She really reheated her own nachos!!”

That album cover is some real A24 shit. The image that Abel Tesfaye chose for Hurry Up Tomorrow, the new record where he supposedly bids goodbye to his time as the Weeknd, wasn’t out in the world until the album arrived on streaming services last night. It’s a striking picture — the top half of Tesfaye’s face, jaggedly tilted and captured mid-howl. He’s got sweat beading all over his forehead and scrunched-up eyes, and he looks a bit like James Brown or one of the other classic soul singers whose music only influences the Weeknd’s sound in the most distant of ways. The album’s title appears in big, blocky letters that seem to be sliding out of focus, while the album’s many, many track titles appear in a tiny font that creeps up the side. It could be a production still from The Brutalist, and Tesfaye clearly intends for the album to stand as that kind of grand, towering statement.

Rap music is miraculous. You could be staring down what promises to be a lazy Friday afternoon, the week before a holiday, and then you could glance at your computer and realize that the world has changed. The album that you’ve been waiting on, the one that you didn’t want to presume to expect, could suddenly fall out of the sky — the whole thing just arriving on your phone all at once. Shit could get crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious. It’s that rarest of beasts: the good kind of emergency.

Let’s not go overboard. It’s so tempting! You want to go overboard in a situation like this! A great legacy act returns with its first album in a long time, one that explicitly calls back to thing things that made the group so beloved in the first place? That’s what we want! Given our reunion-friendly touring climate, it’s something that happens more often than you might expect! When it happens, fans and critics have a tendency to get too excited, to praise the new record in ways that almost diminish the old ones. It’s a shortcut to living in the past, insisting that yesterday’s trailblazers are superior to today’s. It’s the line of thinking that leads Time Out Of Mind to defeat OK Computer, both at the Grammys and on the 1997 Pazz & Jop poll. So let’s not do that to the Cure. Let’s take a breath.

“Hey man, slow down!” Thom Yorke exclaimed in the waning moments of arguably his greatest album. The music for “The Tourist,” which closes out Radiohead’s OK Computer at an appropriately unhurried pace, was composed by Yorke’s bandmate Jonny Greenwood after seeing out-of-towners obliviously blazing through a town in France. If the song begins as a friendly reminder, it quickly evolves into a pointed rebuke: “Idiot, slow down!” It is a tune about stopping to smell the roses rather than racing from one checkpoint to the next — good advice for those seeking to get the most out of life. Maybe, if released today, it would have a lyric about putting your phone down.

Once a perfect little baby/ Who’s now a jerk/ Standing close to the pyre manning fireworks. These are the last words on the sparse opener and title track of MJ Lenderman’s new album Manning Fireworks. It almost sounds like an elegy, grieving the loss of innocence, wondering how he ended up there. But as usual, it’s too irreverent and funny to be a requiem.

On the first song from Fontaines D.C.’s debut album Dogrel, Grian Chatten proclaimed: “My childhood was small/ But I’m gonna be big.” It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That 2019 record from the Dublin band — who’ve since relocated to London — instantly set them apart from the slew of other groups overpopulating the post-punk genre. That year, we named them a Band To Watch; the year after, they unveiled its follow-up, A Hero’s Death, which was honored as our Album Of The Week. Their third LP, Skinty Fia, was predictably extraordinary as well, but now, with Romance, Fontaines D.C. leveled up in ways that couldn’t have been expected.

“How do you feel when you’ve felt it all now? How do you see when you’ve seen it all?” Those are the last words Jack White sings on No Name, the rad new album he’s officially releasing today after slipping white label copies to unsuspecting Third Man Records customers two weeks ago. (The properly labeled album went on sale at Third Man shops today, and tomorrow it hits the internet and select indie record stores.)

There wasn’t supposed to be another album. According to the man himself, 2021’s The Ballad Of Dood And Juanita was to be the last Sturgill Simpson record. There would only be five. He’d said it time and time again, but how many musicians play this game of peekaboo? When cash stops flowing as heavily as it used to, a farewell tour can be the tempting financial diuretic for a band that needs to pay the bills. Fans will pony up, only to feel duped a handful of years later when the reunion tour is announced. Simpson always seemed too noble for that, so we took him at his word. With his vocal hemorrhage in 2021, it seemed like his retirement was a done deal.

In 2010, when she was “Charli XCX” only on flyers for underground London raves, Charlotte Aitchison sang Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” as a performance art piece while studying at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art. It’s hard not to view the school project as a prophecy. Britney’s impact is woven throughout Charli’s career, culminating in a scrapped songwriting collaboration and a classically Britney Instagram diss: “They keep saying I’m turning to random people to do a new album … I will never return to the music industry !!!”

What do we want from Billie Eilish? Debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? culminated a long string of EPs and singles that made Eilish a teenage star. It was the start of the alt-pop wunderkind’s career, but also kind of the end. An idiosyncratic inquiry into the dark side of modern girlhood, When We All Fall Asleep was a masterpiece that achieved a level of popularity that ruined Eilish’s life. Happier Than Ever was a navigation of the pain that came with that fame. Her music was still jittery, accented with eerie beats and unpredictable soundbites, but it was clear that the cost of her meteoric rise was the childlike wonder of her music. Something had been lost. This is true of Hit Me Hard And Soft, too.