“John is on a walk somewhere in Chicago,” Timothy Showalter, who records as Strand of Oaks, sing on his upcoming album In Heaven. “Losing our leaders/Who you gonna follow?” The “John” he’s singing about is John Prine, the late country-folk songwriter who died last year from complications due to Covid-19. …
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Even if you don’t recognize her name, you may know Maia Sharp’s music. Over the last quarter-century, the songwriter and performer has released a bunch of solid albums that navigated the middle ground between country, pop, and Americana. But her songs have also been rendered by other artists: Back when …
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Happy release day to Lucy Dacus’ “Thumbs,” a song so highly anticipated it has its own fan-run Twitter account. Dacus began performing it in 2018, but politely asked her audiences not to record the unreleased track. Surprisingly, this worked, and the legend of the ballad so perfectly devastating it couldn’t …
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Here is a song you need to know, especially if the “you” in question just lost all their Parquet Courts and Sonic Youth records in a tragic mishap. San Francisco’s Pardoner have all the Nineties (and neo-Nineties) guitar moves down, pilling up easy noise and weird hooks in their frantically …
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The preternatural powerhouses known as BTS have given us spectacle and showmanship before, but on their latest album, BE, the seven-piece group from Korea are showing off their versatility. Nowhere is that more evident than on “Fly to My Room,” the second track off the new album. Co-written by RM, …
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If the lady’s feelin’ just like the moon she loves, then Miley Cyrus is lighting her path beneath the “Midnight Sky” with the brightest, fullest moon possible. The 27-year-old Disney darling-turned-pop provocateur has returned with yet another bold reinvention, looking to the raw arena rock vocals and the pristinely glossy …
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When it comes to introductions, a new artist could do a lot worse than launching the rhetorical question, “Why you hating like a jive sucka?” Those are the first words that tumble out of Teezo Touchdown‘s mouth in the video for “SUCKA!” Decked in a white tank top, dramatically sagged …
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Caylee Hammack has a knack for polishing what’s messy and making it beautiful, in a way that mirrors her signature bedhead. Hoop earrings made of plastic, heart-shaped sunglasses that could be found in a gas station, and small-town life in general — they’re all things that some might look down …
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Sarah Mary Chadwick‘s voice has always sounded devastating — her sparse “Confetti” was one of the most moving songs of the year — and that voice sounds like it’s on the verge of breaking apart throughout “Please Daddy,” an elegy for her late father. The New Zealand–born, Melbourne-based artist can …
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Gravel or velvet, jagged edges or curved slopes, coarse scales or soft fur: A voice generally contains one or the other. But Rod Wave plays between extremes. His singing voice is gentle and yearning, while his rapping is akin to DMX after taking ineffective cough medicine. The Florida rapper plays …
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