Album Reviews

Before Steven Tyler and Joe Perry became the “Toxic Twins,” they were merely intoxicated. On a newly unearthed demo tape, which is coming out with the regrettably punny title The Road Starts Hear, that Aerosmith cut in 1971 — two years before releasing their self-titled debut — the band sounds …

Pop Smoke’s posthumous debut, Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon, may be impossible to duplicate. It was arguably the hip-hop event of a pandemic-blighted year, generating hit singles even as fans of his mixtape work rebelled against everything from the initial Virgil Abloh-created artwork to an excess of …

Sleater-Kinney are back to their old tricks, which means trying out some new tricks. The Pacific Northwest punks grabbed the world’s imagination with the 1996 riot-grrrl bombshell Call the Doctor, but ever since, they’ve refused to repeat themselves. Everything about their new album is outside their zone, starting with the …

Singer-songwriter Stevie Knipe has been making music for close to a decade, since they were a college student in upstate New York recording in a dorm room. But Knipe (who uses they/their pronouns) has really taken a leap forward in terms of both sonics and songcraft with the excellent Driver. …

Foo Fighters have been a reliable alt-rock institution for more than 25 years. A band with that kind of august track record could get bored or complacent with their job. But Dave Grohl and Co. just keep happily chugging along, putting out solid-to-great records, satisfying their enormous fan base with …

When the only music you can stand is the drumbeat of rage coursing through your aching head, the Sleaford Mods are always good for a spin. They’re Nottingham, England’s answer to the Fall, with singer Jason Williamson rant-rapping about everything from austerity-era Britain to consumerism to the foibles of the …

For decades, AC/DC have defended their devil-horned crown as rock’s most stubborn band. They’ve survived deaths (singer Bon Scott in 1980, guitarist Malcolm Young in 2017) and dirty deeds (drummer Phil Rudd was placed on house arrest after threatening to kill a man). Yet, they remain eternally committed to their …

The burst of creativity from John Darnielle, the word-swilling frontman and piercing singer-songwriter behind the North Carolina-based Mountain Goats, has not receded one bit in recent years. Quite the opposite: After successive full band triumphs with the noir-roots of 2017’s Goths and the wizardly wistfulness of 2018’s In League With …

Will This Make Me Good, the second album from Brooklyn musician Nick Hakim, begins with the Earth on fire. Cities crumble, tides rise, and yet “All These Changes” is a climate catastrophe dirge that swaddles and rocks you with its bobbing guitar strum, sighing strings and Hakim’s own tender croon, …

The power of Hemingway’s famous 6-word fiction miniature “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” lies in the unspoken parts, the gaps that the reader is left to fill in. Detroit rapper Danny Brown one-ups Hemingway at his own game on his fifth studio album uknowhatimsayin¿, a 33-minute slideshow of tiny …