In a post-monoculture era, why has a traditional-tinged country song topped the New Zealand charts for 19 weeks? Chart domination It’s been a weird 12 months on the NZ singles charts. Between 19 September 2025 and 1 October 2026, five…
He’s vanilla, baby. He’s like the second coming of Vanilla Ice, maybe. Jack Harlow Jackman Thomas Harlow grew up on a Kentucky horse farm. It’s a surprising background for a top-selling rap artist. And Jack Harlow sounds like a white…
Female solo artists Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers had never all been in the same room together when they decided to form a band. The three had collaborated on tours – Dacus and Bridgers had both opened for Baker. But they all have…
Vampire Weekend were formed by students at Columbia University. Frontman Ezra Koenig named the project after a vampire movie he started making in college. The group were interested in African music and punk rock, influences that are clear on their…
British pop maverick has enjoyed her most successful album release cycle yet with her eighth album Brat. It’s sold well in the UK and US and enjoyed critical acclaim. It’s even become part of the US political landscape – democratic…
Dijon’s music sounds like Prince, if the Purple One were forced out of Paisley Park and into his bedroom. His music is succinct and emotive, like a carefully curated stream of consciousness. But Dijon is skilled and in demand as…
Guatemalan cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti grew up only listening to Christian and classical music. Discovering Limewire, her musical horizons were instantly broadened. Fratti now makes eclectic music, centred around her experimental cello and pretty voice. Like many of my…
My 11-year-old daughter is obsessed with Olivia Rodrigo. She’s been her favourite pop artist for three years. She’s helped me write this article – we voted for ten songs each, and she helped write the blurbs. Her 2023 single ‘Bad…
San Francisco’s Avalon Emerson made her reputation as a DJ. But she used the advice of Jeff Tweedy’s book How To Write One Song to start a career as a vocalist and songwriter, her ethereal voice floating over dream-pop melodies. 2023’s & the…
Jessie Ware is the UK’s most likeable pop star. She’s charming where other mainstream acts leave me cold. Ware has a gorgeous voice, but she’s closer to Sade’s sophisticated poise than Celine Dion’s vocal histrionics. Ware’s dance-pop and blue-eyed soul…
Dina Ögon are a smooth Swedish supergroup. Lead vocalist Anna Ahnlund, drummer Christopher Cantillo, guitarist/keyboardist Daniel Ogren, and bassist Love Orsan had played in various projects before joining forces. The band’s name translates to “your eyes”. Dina Ögon describe their…
An Australian busker hit the big time with ‘Dance Monkey’. Tones and I Toni Watson grew up in Melbourne. She busked after learning to play keyboards and drum pads. When she was made redundant from her retail job, she concentrated…
Impossibly long legs and a three-octave range made fictional K-pop band Huntrix the biggest pop-culture phenomenon of 2025. KPop Demon Hunters The three pop stars/demon slayers of fictional K-pop band Huntrix were the biggest pop-culture phenomenon of 2025. Their face-off…
The Last Dinner Party were the breakout UK stars of 2023, with the release of the single ‘Nothing Matters’. They’d already enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame, opening for Nick Cave and The Rolling Stone. Their sound leans heavily on…
British soul collective Sault have broken almost every rule of album-making during their brief career. Debuting in 2019, they’ve already released 12 studio albums. Yet they’ve only played live once and have never given an interview. Their already sizeable catalogue…
Hayley Williams is best known as the lead vocalist of Paramore. However, she has also released three solo albums, two of which stand proudly along Paramore’s best work. Hayley Williams Album Reviews Petals for Armor 2020, 8.5/10Paramore’s After Laughter is my favourite…
In which we learn that Ariana Grande’s mom is an engineer, like the most fierce badass in the world. Ariana Grande Ariana Grande-Butera was born in Boca Raton, Florida, to an Italian-American heritage. She started her career in musicals and…
The members of The 1975 met at Wilmslow High School in their teens, playing at gigs organised by a local council worker. They started as a punk band, with Matt Healy, the son of two prominent actors, on drums. With…
I think it’s cheating to publish a best albums list during the year in question – like, what if the best album ever is released on the 15th of December? That wasn’t the case this year, but a lot of…
On this site, I have a list of my favourite album for every year from 1963 to the present. The only artist to appear more than once is Big Thief. The band formed in Brooklyn in 2015, although leader Adrianne…
Kathleen Edwards was born in Ottawa, but a diplomat’s daughter, she grew up in Korea and Switzerland. She learned the violin and listened to Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan. After high school, she started a career as a…
Even in 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic still looms large over popular music. Many of these albums were affected by events – forcing delays or changes in personnel. As always, there was a wealth of excellent music recorded in 2022 –…
Isle of Wight’s Wet Leg were breakout stars in 2021, when their innuendo-laden hit ‘Chaise Longue’ went viral. Their name comes from an Isle of Wight expression denoting visitors to the island, recognisable because they’d have wet legs from getting…
‘Easy On Me’ is the lead single from Adele’s fourth album, 30. A gentle piano ballad, it addresses her relationship with her young son in the wake of her recent divorce. Adele Adele Laurie Blue Adkins is one of the…
Sabrina Teitelbaum flirted with musical success in a different guise. Between 2017 and 2019, she released singles as the pop artist BAUM. Her grandfather, Randall D Smith, is known as the pioneer of vulture capitalism. Dissatisfied with the results, she…
Michael Gordon grew up in New Jersey, where he played in bands but gravitated to making solo music in his bedroom. He grew up in the age of music piracy and was inspired by the eclectic range of music that…
Justin Bieber has released some top-notch singles. ‘Yummy’ isn’t one of them. Justin Bieber Canadian pop singer Justin Bieber was discovered via YouTube. His mother uploaded videos of Bieber singing onto the video platform. Eventually, entrepreneur Scooter Braun saw one.…
Christian Benson (Luude) is one half of the Australian electronic dance music duo Choomba. The other member is his cousin, Timothy Benson. Luude topped the New Zealand charts for nine weeks in 2022, remixing Men At Work’s 1981 hit ‘Down…
Gabriela Jimeno Caldas was born in 1990 in Bogotá, Colombia. She spent her teens as the drummer for Colombian hardcore band Ratón Pérez. They played at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. She moved to the US, where she studied…
Mark Jacob Lenderman was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He’s a busy fellow—in addition to his solo career, he’s a member of the band Wednesday. He’s also carved out a career as a solo performer, releasing four solo albums in…
2024 was the international year of camelids. The war in Gaza continued and Donald Trump won the US election. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad was deposed in Syria. But fortunately, there was interesting music to distract us from the world’s chaos. It…
New York’s Cassandra Jenkins comes from a musical family. Her parents worked on cruise ships as musicians, and her brother is in the band Morningsiders. As a teen Jenkins played folk festivals with her family, touring in a giant silver…
There hasn’t been a new Radiohead album since 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. The Smile might be the next best thing. The two most distinctive members of Radiohead – vocalist Thom Yorke and guitarist Johnny Greenwood – formed The Smile in…
The siren beats of Pasifika communities in Auckland made it to the top of the American charts, with some help from Jason Derulo and BTS. New Zealand in the US charts Historically, the top of the US charts has been…
Pointing out bad lyrics in a tween fantasy Disney series feels like shooting fish in a barrel. But this quartet of movies features some of the most ridiculous wordsmithery I’ve ever heard. I’ve had this post sitting in my draft…
In the heady days of the 1990s, it felt like Beck was the apex of post-modern innovation, blurring the lines between genres on projects like Odelay. Los Angeles band Glass Beach take this approach about six light years further on their…
Smooth R&B artist Erika de Casier was born in Portugal to a Belgian mother and a Cape Verdean father. She’s now based in Copenhagen, Denmark, starting her career working in a kindergarten. She spent time as part of the duo…
The duo of Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis met on the Toronto scene, bonding over their shared love of vintage indie jangle-pop. They now split their time between Toronto and Geelong, Australia. It makes sense because their jangling recalls Antipodean…
Swift is such a megastar that even her outtakes top the NZ singles charts. Taylor Swift It’s a little perverse for the randomiser to suggest a Taylor Swift song for this column when she’s just released a new album. But…
Katie Pruitt grew up in Atlanta and was raised Catholic. She attended Catholic school and mass. She got into music in middle school, learning the guitar and enjoying musical theatre. But she quickly became interested in songwriting, using it to…
It’s my fifth year of ranking albums annually on this site. It feels like the weakest year to date. The top of the list is weaker than usual. The top-rated album is more a subtle pleasure than a blockbuster. On…
Burna Boy’s seventh album, I Told Them…, recently topped the UK charts. It feels symbolic, with the Nigerian-born artist the first African to top the UK charts. It’s the culmination of a decade of hard work, where he’s released seven…
A crop of young, critically acclaimed post-punk bands emerged in the UK around 2020. It’s tough to keep up – I can barely differentiate Dry Cleaning from Black Country, New Road. My favourite of the crop is probably Squid, a…
Olivia Isabel Rodrigo first came to prominence as an actor. She appeared in Bizaardvark and High School Musical. In 2020, she signed a recording contract and quickly became a pop superstar. Her debut single, ‘Driver’s License,’ debuted at number one on…
Jenny Lewis’ musical career is the second act in her working life. She first achieved fame as a child star, appearing in commercials then movies like The Wizard and Troop Beverly Hills. She largely quit acting in the mid-1990s to…
Female solo artists Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers had never all been in the same room together when they decided to form a band. The three had collaborated on tours – Dacus and Bridgers had both opened for…
Arooj Aftab was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents. She taught herself guitar and became a viral sensation in Pakistan, an early adopter of the internet with hits ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Mera Pyaar’. Aftab moved to the US at 19…
Caroline Polachek grew up in Connecticut and was formerly the vocalist for the indie-pop duo Chairlift. Chairlift enjoyed a surprise hit in 2008 with ‘Bruises’, featured in an Apple commercial. Polachek previously flirted with a solo career, releasing albums under…
Hayley Williams moved to Franklin, Tennessee, in 2002, to escape from her abusive stepfather. She formed Paramore at the age of 15, joining forces with Josh and Zac Farro, whom she met at a music program for homeschooled students. She…
British collective Sault have eschewed all the usual rules of music-making in their brief and eventful career. They’ve veiled their identities, never played a live gig, never released a music video, and have produced material at a breakneck pace. Sault…
Margaret Debay Rogers grew up in Maryland, the daughter of a Ford salesman and a nurse. She began learning the harp at seven and writing songs by thirteen. In high school she indulged a wide range of musical interests, playing…
Indie artist Nilüfer Yanya was born in Chelsea, West London. She’s the daughter of two visual artistsmwith Turkish, Irish and Barbadian heritage. Yanya grew up listening to her father’s Turkish music and her mother’s classical music but gravitated to the…
The consequence of reviewing new releases each week is that I already have too many records for one page. Here’s part two, continuing from part one. Manchester Orchestra The Million Masks of God 2021, 8.5/1021st-century arena rock is often problematic…
Pop music has become a much more respected art form in the past decade. Records like Taylor Swift’s 1989, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, and Robyn’s Honey have attained the acclaim usually reserved for more critically favoured musical genres. Dua Lipa’s an obvious candidate to…
Born in London, Cleopatra Nikolic’s parents met in a jazz band – her Jamaican dad plays bass and piano, while her Serbian/Spanish mother sings and plays guitar and flute. Cleo Sol was inspired to take up music by Stevie Wonder’s…
Miami synth-pop duo Magdalena Bay consists of songwriter/vocalist Mica Tenenbaum and musician/producer Matthew Lewin. The pair met as high school students, first playing together at Live! Modern School of Music. They formed a progressive rock band, Tabula Rasa, before going…
Lindsey Jordan grew up in Baltimore, which is also home to Beach House and Wye Oak, and at one point her guitar teacher was Helium’s Mary Timony. Seeing Paramore at age 8 made Jordan question her previous assumption that only…
Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell was the first musician born in the 21st century to score a number-one single in the United States. Eilish had already been building a profile for a few years, debuting on SoundCloud and building a…
Natalie Hemby was born in Illinois, the daughter of a Nashville studio guitarist. She almost signed a record deal with Sony in her early 20s but it fell through. Instead, she worked in marketing but started collaborating with Miranda Lambert…
The members of Black Midi met at the BRIT School in London, a performing art college whose other alumni include Amy Winehouse, Adele, FKA Twigs, and Imogen Heap. With access to the studio during school, they were able to get…
Producer and musician Kelly Lee Owens grew up in a small Welsh village. She sang in her school choir and played bass and drums in indie bands. She became an auxiliary nurse at a cancer treatment hospital in Manchester, but…
Kyoto math rock band Tricot’s 真っ黒 (Pure Black) was the first 2020 album I reviewed on this site. There have been other excellent records this year, from HAIM, Owen Pallett, and The 1975, but 真っ黒 is now facing its most…
This week I look at releases from three different continents, all wrestling with political and racial issues. Nigeria’s Burna Boy employs Afro-fusion, U.S. hip-hop duo Run The Jewels rattle off fast-paced hip-hop, while anonymous UK collective Sault sing about black-centric…
This week we cover some power-pop from New Zealand, some Americana from Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and a mini-album from R&B artist Victoria Monét. The Beths Jump Rope Gazers Power pop is a great genre for one hit wonders,…
Three more recent releases for your listening pleasure. Jessie Ware’s sophisticated dance-pop, Yves Tumor’s abrasive electronica, and Rina Sawayama’s brash pop. Enjoy! Jessie Ware What’s Your Pleasure? Jessie Ware is probably the UK’s most likeable mainstream pop star; I struggle…
This week I look at new releases by pop-superstar-turned-indie-folkster Taylor Swift, singer songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, and chamber-pop artist Perfume Genius. Coincidentally, veteran drummer Jim Keltner plays on two of these releases. All three of these records are currently placed among…
Three recent releases for you to peruse. Canadian Owen Pallett’s new album ventures into Nick Drake territory with its acoustic guitar picking and strings. Paramore’s Hayley Williams first solo album is poppy, yet adult and restrained. London’s King Krule continues…
HAIM’s first two records were fun. The trio of L.A. sisters had great harmonies, their eclectic approach recalled both Fleetwood Mac and 90s R&B, while Danielle Haim’s bluesy guitar added some edge. Their third record, however, is the biggest leap…
For this week’s new music reviews, I’m looking at two Americana releases from early 2020. Both are in the zone where folk and country intersect, as previously explored by Gillian Welch and Townes Van Zandt. Both are fifth albums, from…
Three reviews of May releases – the pop/rock of Manchester’s The 1975, the synth-pop of Canada’s Carly Rae Jepsen, and the Americana of Alabama’s Jason Isbell. I’ve already a fan of all three artists, hence the quicker than usual turnaround.…
This page collects album reviews for 2020s artists of whom I’ve only reviewed one or two albums. This page became too long to edit easily so there’s a second part covering M-Z. Florence Adooni A.O.E.I.U. 2025, 7/10Florence Adooni was born…
Less than two years into the new decade, it’s already been eventful. A global pandemic and BlackLivesMatter protests have already created ten years’ worth of chaos.
The lock-down album is something we’ll presumably see more of over the next few months. As far as I’m aware, the first 2020 lock-down record from a major artist is from English pop auteur Charli XCX. Charli, born Charlotte Aitchison,…
Pop music has become a much more respected art form in the past decade. Records like Taylor Swift’s 1989, Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, and Robyn’s Honey have attained the acclaim usually reserved for more critically favoured musical genres. Dua Lipa’s…
This week Aphoristical Album Reviews takes a look at recent releases from two female artists in the Americana/country zone. Both of these records have lovely production and strong songwriting, and are highly recommended. Katie Pruitt Expectations Katie Pruitt grew up…
Canadian artists Caribou and Grimes both make music that’s creative and laced with pop hooks. Both have released new albums this year; Caribou’s is more pop-oriented than usual, while Grimes takes a darker path. Try Caribou’s Suddenly for breezy enjoyment…
Destroyer have the most misleading name in popular music. What you expect is death metal or perhaps a KISS tribute band. What you get is a man sardonically purring and bleating his twisted insights over smooth yacht rock. Like many…
Indie singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers was born in Los Angeles and studied vocal jazz at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. Bridgers grew up with parents who were involved in the entertainment industry – her mother encouraged her…
Math-rock band Tricot formed in Kyoto in 2010, released their debut album in 2013. Their fourth studio album 真っ黒 (Japanese for Pure Black) marks their major label debut. Tricot spent time as an all-female trio, but drummer Yuusuke Yoshida was…
Sophie Allison was born in Switzerland and grew up in Nashville. She self-released guitar-pop as a teenager on Bandcamp, before releasing her official debut, Clean, in 2018. While she records with a band, Soccer Mommy is effectively an alias for…
