Music Reviews & News
Reviews, releases and updates. Every track dissected bar by bar, with zero mercy.
Splat!
They wrote a profound meditation on the end of humanity and named it after the noise a bug makes on your windshield.
Foreign Tongues
The guest list is longer than most bands' careers, and half of it seems there to help carry the amps.
Confessions II
Only Madonna would franchise her own 2005 and then have the absolute nerve to make the sequel good.
singasong
You hired Pharrell and Dylan Brady, then buried your own two stars so deep in the mix that the debut sounds like a producer demo with idols attached.
Return to the Return (of the Spectrum of Intergalactic Happiness)
You made a sequel to a sequel, dropped it on a full moon, and sampled Chopin next to a hypnosis tape. The most on-brand thing about it is that it somehow works.
Forever Now
A carpe diem concept album so safe it feels less like seizing the day and more like scheduling it.
The Wow! Signal
You spent twenty years promising Black Holes 2 and finally delivered it, which means your big comeback is a sequel to who you used to be.
The Ground Above
The album is gorgeous. The reviews are a hostage situation written entirely in Talk Talk comparisons.
I Built You a Tower
You didn't just make a return to form album, you wrote the rock critic's favorite story and then dared them not to use it.
Dear God
You called it a declaration of identity. It's a great album with the confidence to overstay its welcome.
Sweating Someone Else's Fever
You disappeared for fifteen years and recorded the comeback in an ex-taxi office, which means you literally took the long way home.
RE:CREATED
It is the best alt rock album of 2026, on one small condition: that we all agree to forget the first one ever existed.
EUSEXUA Afterglow
You buried the most powerful weapon in your arsenal, your voice, under your own fog machine.
The Story of Michael and Tanya
You bared your entire marriage and brought Whoopi Goldberg to introduce it, then sang every song like it was the last one before the building burns down.
Whack's Museum
You asked for your flowers while you are still alive, then handed us a bouquet that wilts in twenty-seven minutes.
Black Mozart
The standout moment on your Mozart album is the one where you stop playing Mozart. Read the room, or failing that, read the reviews.
Castle Park
Most artists hide their unreleased 2011 demos. Graham Coxon frames his, calls it a treasure, and the worst part is that he is completely right.
Iceman
You did not drop three albums, you dropped one album three times and dared the charts to say no.
can we do it all again?
Eighteen tracks, a small army of guests, and the most memorable voice on the album is still the question mark in the title.
Kicking My Feet & Screaming
You called it Kicking My Feet & Screaming, but the loudest thing on the whole record is the silence where a risk should be.
My Mess, My Heart, My Life
Calling it the most honest thing you have ever made only counts if the honesty sounds like you and not like every other earnest boy with an acoustic guitar this year.
Reality Awaits
You did not need to reinvent yourselves, you just needed to sound like you still wanted to be here, and on the best moments you finally do.
Dollar Bill / Frozen Charlotte
You announced your album by hiding it in your own store and waiting for fans to find it, which is either the most artistically pure move in rock and roll or proof that you fired your entire PR team and just never told anyone.
Khemmis (Self-Titled Fifth Album)
You named your fifth album after yourself, which is either a masterclass in confidence or proof that the ritual consumed the part of your brain responsible for titles.
girls like girls the album
You turned one 2015 bop into a novel, a movie, and a 14-track album, which is either visionary world-building or the most elaborate refusal to let a song retire gracefully.
Aurora
Your 24th album is so comfortable it has basically achieved sentience and asked for slippers.
You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
She named the album after the exact sentence a worried friend says to you at a party, then sold it on hot pink vinyl, a Target exclusive CD, and a sticky sweet variant, so the heartbreak is genuine and the merch table is open. The girl is sad, the cart is full, and somewhere a Geffen spreadsheet is the happiest it has ever been.
New Religion
She wrote billion-stream hits for other people while her own label kept telling her no, so she left, started her own religion, and made everyone shoot a music video for it. The grim reaper finally freed the hostage, and the first thing the hostage did was drop thirteen singles.
Tampa
Naming your big R&B reunion after Tampa is a bold way to promise candlelight and deliver a layover. The song is lovely, but somewhere a city of three hundred thousand people just became the most romantic thing nobody asked it to be.
Until The Sun Explodes
A boy who was eleven months old when his father overdosed now sings I owe you my life on a major label release with twenty-one other tracks and a merch store. The wound healed into a product. Bradley never got to leave; the catalogue made sure of that.
Iconic by Mistake
A label that owns all three groups wrote a song about how the haters made them iconic by mistake, then released it on the most precisely calculated day of the year. The only mistake in the building was assuming nobody would notice the boardroom fingerprints on the empowerment.
I Built You a Tower
It took Death Cab twenty-two years on a major label to remember they were good when nobody was paying them. Sadness, it turns out, performs better without a marketing department.
Inferno
Thirteen years of silence and the big reveal is that the apocalypse sounds like Boards of Canada with a Bible and a longer runtime. The mythos wrote checks the tracklist takes seventy minutes to almost cash.
Sanctuary
The best Evanescence album in years, which is also a polite way of saying the bar spent a decade lying on the floor. Amy Lee invented this sound in 2003, and the most damning thing about her imitators is that she still does it better half asleep.
Dinner Party
Niall made an album so inoffensive that even my contempt keeps sliding off it. Twelve songs, zero pulse spikes, the audio equivalent of room temperature.
An Eraser and a Maze
Twenty-seven years of fighting the label for creative freedom, and the first thing Brock does with it is prove why someone gave him a leash. An eraser was right there in the title, Isaac. Use it.
Cry Baby
Vince made a punk record so dry it makes actual punks sound like theater kids. The only thing crying on Cry Baby is every rapper who attempted this pivot and ended up fronting a Limp Bizkit tribute act.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane
It is a lovely victory lap, but let's not pretend the stadium wasn't already on its feet before he sang a note. Paul McCartney could release 47 minutes of kettle noises and still hit number one, and somewhere deep down, he knows it.
Lemonade
This album was not written, it was manufactured to ISO standard, and somewhere in Seoul a spreadsheet is very proud of itself. Lemonade indeed: squeezed, filtered, pasteurized, and guaranteed to contain no actual lemon.
I Knew It, I Knew You
A billionaire wrote a tearjerker about an abandoned toy for a corporation that has been reselling your childhood since 1995, and somewhere a marketing executive wept real tears over the quarterly projections. The doll gets left behind; the invoice never is.
8 Months
Eight months is also the length of every relationship Thomas's target demographic has had since 2019. He is not so much describing a personal experience as he is providing a piece of customizable software. That is either smart writing or accidental marketing. Both, probably.
25 Was Us
Naming a track 25 Was Us in 2026 means committing to a piece of writing that will only fully land for people currently between 22 and 30. The song is going to age like a Polaroid. Beautifully and slightly out of focus.
MDMA
Naming a song MDMA is a marketing decision before it is an artistic one. Every algorithmic playlist that touches party themes will pick it up. Every parent will not. Whether you find that funny or cynical depends on your relationship to streaming economics.
Wild
Naming a track Wild in 2026 is choosing to be findable by no one and discoverable by nobody. The algorithm will throw it onto playlists. The listener will not remember the name when it ends. That is a tradeoff Thomas has made consciously or accidentally.
Never Over
Never Over is also a song that will be played on every "still not over them" Spotify mood playlist for the next eight years. That is a great revenue model. It is a less great way to be remembered as an artist.
Waste Your Pain
The line 'don't waste your pain on me' is delivered with the emotional weight of someone who has never had to wait for a bus. Cruz Beckham singing about pain is like Elon Musk tweeting about loneliness. The feeling may technically be there but the context will never let it land.
Iceman
Iceman is what happens when a generational talent decides that the safest version of his work is the version worth releasing. Drake at his peak made music that felt like a person was inside it. Iceman feels like a quarterly report.
Silhouette
A song called Silhouette in 2026 is a song that is trying to be evocative on the cheap. Imagery this generic should be earned with writing this precise, and the lyric does not quite get there. Production saves the track. Production cannot save the title.
Mr Know It All
The lyric is 'Mr Know It All, you didn't know me at all' repeated with slight rephrasing for three minutes. Teddy Swims has been given the gift of a generational voice and is using it to sing the same breakup metaphor every seven months. Someone at his label has to hand him a real song to sing.
Sandbox
A lesser band would have made an album about how their fans rediscovered them. The All-American Rejects had the discipline to make an album about the people they have become instead. That distinction is rarer than it should be.
Too Soon
A song called Too Soon will be on every Spotify "wish things ended differently" playlist for the next decade. That is steady revenue and an unmistakable signal that the algorithm has decided what kind of artist Thomas is allowed to be in 2026.
Dandelion
Two of the tracks are obvious Morgan Wallen pitch outtakes that did not quite fit the Wallen voice so they got handed to Ella and repurposed. You can hear them coming from the first eight bars. She sings the hell out of them, but they still feel like leftovers.
Echolalia
Echolalia is not made for streaming algorithms, casual listeners, or background play. That is its strength and the source of every complaint anyone will make about it. The album sets terms. You can take them or you can leave them alone.
Your Eyes
A song called Your Eyes in 2026 is a song that was not going to be searchable, memorable, or culturally distinguishable from the 4,000 other songs called Your Eyes. Production saves it. Production should not have to.
Cruel World
There is still one Sam Fender feature and two songs about a specific boy who specifically wronged her, which is starting to be a genre unto itself. At some point the breakup songs have to start feeling like choices instead of obligations.
In Times of Dragons
The mythological lyrical framework will alienate listeners who cannot follow her there. That has been true since 1992 and Tori has never adjusted for it. That is the entire point of being Tori Amos.
Kissed Her More
Kissed Her More is also a title that confirms Sally's long-standing thesis that all of Thomas's 2026 song names are tweet-length confessions trying very hard to look like art. They are tweet-length confessions that happen to be wrapped in art. The distinction is doing a lot of work.
Of All People
Dave Grohl has been writing 'Of All People' as a song title since 2011. It has been waiting on the shelf for the right moment and the moment turned out to be whatever moment was free this week. The song does not know why it exists, which is why it exists.
She Did It Again
She Did It Again is a perfectly engineered single that will earn its streams and disappear from cultural memory the moment the next Tyla song arrives. Both artists are operating at the floor of their talent, which is still well above most peers.
Going Shopping
The title is Going Shopping. The song is about Going Shopping. There are no layers here. Julian Casablancas has spent 25 years gesturing vaguely at modern life from behind sunglasses and we are supposed to be impressed that this time the gesture involves a retail experience.
Lose Your Self
The surprise release strategy works artistically and fails commercially. The album is going to get reviewed in five places and played by their existing fans and nobody else will know it exists until someone makes a YouTube video about it six months from now.
10 Til Midnight
The album is 17 tracks long because nobody at Death Row told him no. A good editor could have turned 10 Til Midnight into a tight 45 minute statement. What we got is 62 minutes of Snoop thinking out loud with the Pro Tools still running.
Holy Thread (from The Devil Wears Prada 2)
Four minutes is slightly too long for this song to sustain its own premise, and the final thirty seconds feel like they exist so the film's end credits have somewhere to land. You can hear the sync licensing in the song's DNA.
Pinky Up
The 'pinky up like royalty' hook is the kind of line that gets written, deleted, rewritten, approved by four A&R executives and a focus group, and then shipped as if it came from a human brain.
EXPERIMENTAL RAP
Calling it EXPERIMENTAL RAP is a flex only if the experiment is still ongoing, and at this point Peggy has run the same lab procedure enough times that he should publish his findings.
Blue Morpho
Ed has finally made a solo album that sounds like Ed, which is a triumph until you remember Ed's whole job in Radiohead was making everybody else sound better.
the color of rain
The tragedy is not that the color of rain will be underheard, it is that the people who most need to hear it have been trained by ten years of Spotify to skip anything that takes longer than a chorus to make its point.
Ugly Duckling Union
Ugly Duckling Union is the sound of a bedroom band realising the bedroom got knocked down, and trying to convince itself that the new open-plan studio with the post-punk pedalboard is what it wanted all along. Sometimes I believe them. Sometimes I miss the mattress on the floor.
Live From Mexico
A live album is supposed to be a document of why the songs needed to exist. This is a document of why the tour needed to exist, which is a completely different and much more expensive question.
Florescence
Calling your third album "Florescence" when the songs themselves are mostly mid-bloom is the kind of title only a literature graduate would commit to and only a publicist would defend.
Love Is The New Gangsta
Calling your album Love Is The New Gangsta in 2026 is not a thesis, it is a tattoo you will quietly cover up in 2028.
Everyone For Ten Minutes
You cannot produce half the pop charts and then act surprised when your own album sounds like a tribute compilation to artists you yourself invented.
Blog Era Boyz
"Blog Era Boyz" is what you call a project when the algorithm is your real producer and the audience you actually want is a 33-year-old marketing manager who still has a SoundCloud account he doesn't talk about.
Sexistential
The title track pairs confessional lyrics about IVF with references to the 2008 Adam Sandler comedy You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Robyn is the only artist alive who could make that work, and she barely does.
THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE
17 tracks. Seventeen. In an era where albums are getting shorter, RAYE looked at the streaming economy and said "absolutely not." There are at least three songs here that a braver editor would have cut, and the album would be stronger for it. But RAYE didn't fight her label for years just to let someone tell her to trim the tracklist.
Whatever's Clever!
The album title has an exclamation point. That's the kind of manufactured enthusiasm that defines Charlie Puth's entire career. He's the musical equivalent of a LinkedIn influencer who posts about 'hustle culture' while sitting in a home studio worth more than your house.
Younger You
Two minutes. The song is two minutes long. Cyrus co-wrote and co-produced a two-minute song for a Disney special celebrating a show that ended 15 years ago. This is either beautiful restraint or a contractual obligation with a character limit.
ALL ROADS LEAD HOME
Seven tracks. Released with guerrilla pop-ups in Shepherd's Bush and unannounced radio freestyles. Central Cee marketed this EP with more creativity than most artists put into their actual music. The rollout was the art. The EP is the receipt.
ARIRANG
Four million copies in a week. For an album that most Western critics are calling "their most Korean record yet." BTS has reached the point where they can sell Korean cultural identity to a global audience and the audience buys it without blinking. That is either cultural diplomacy or extremely good marketing. Probably both.
Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.
The album title is "Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally." That is not an album title. That is a Tumblr bio from 2014. Harry Styles has reached the point in his career where no one around him will say "maybe that title is a bit much" and it shows.
HADES
Eighteen tracks about dystopia and patriarchal evil. Eighteen. Martinez looked at RAYE's 17-track album and said "hold my concept art." The lead single is called "Possession" and the second single is called "Disney Princess." The self-awareness is either brilliant or completely absent and honestly it could be either.