With 232 pages and an expanded 12″ by 12″ format, our biggest print issue yet celebrates the people, places, music, and art of our hometown, including cover features on David Lynch, Nipsey Hussle, Syd, and Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, plus Brian Wilson, Cuco, Ty Segall, Lord Huron, Remi Wolf, The Doors, the art of RISK, Taz, Estevan Oriol, Kii Arens, and Edward Colver, and so much more.
Soccer Mommy, Evergreen
Sophie Allison’s fourth album digs deeper both poetically and personally as her dozy, conversational vocals and pop-grunge arrangements reach their clearest form.
Better Lovers, Highly Irresponsible
The breathless riffs, ferocious pace, and veteran sense of security that define this debut album from the metalcore supergroup feel like the work of a band desperate to escape their history.
Kevin Ayers, All This Crazy Gift of Time: The Recordings 1969-1973
Composed of the avant-garde songwriter’s first four solo records along with live recordings and other oddities, this collection is a wealth of weird ranging from pastoral freak-folk to circus noise.
Josh Hurst
“DAMN.” bears our struggle and triumph, swagger and fear, success and uncertainty, love and original sin.
Nothing here wants for hooks or for energy, but the songs on The New Pornographers’ seventh album all seem flat somehow.
Colter creates music that drones, builds, drifts, and crests, never following familiar emotional beats but instead allowing them to follow their own wild intuitions.
“Salutations” maintains the tattered humanity of its unaccompanied counterpart, but somehow makes it all go down a little smoother.
There was always bound to be a straight-ahead dance-rock album from Spoon. How could there not be?
“Being You” is gnarly and cerebral, the sound of a jittery headspace that’s got room enough for every flight of fancy.
Sampha’s debut is a record with broad appeal and precise vision; a record where listeners can find themselves but also where they’ll spot the auteur’s hand if they really care to look for it.
The erstwhile minimalists have never made a record that sounds so glossy and full, but there’s not enough production polish in the world to mask the the hurt and the vulnerability at its core.
There is immense catharsis in Killer Mike and El-P’s appetite for destruction.
It’s tough to shake the idea that we’re getting the real John Legend for the very first time.
The author’s reflections on his relationship with his deeply racist brother make an appeal to our common humanity.
If a sudden shift toward EDM trappings sounds like an awkward fit for an alt-country band, on “FLOTUS,” it plays out as neither sudden nor awkward.
The My Morning Jacket frontman’s second solo record is not a hymn to destruction, but an anthem of resolve.
Nothing is held back.
If you found yourself lost in the cosmos of Kamasi Washington’s triple-LP “The Epic” last year wondering which star to reach for next, 2016 has a few answers for you.
With the essay collection “Upstream,” the lauded poet offers a portrait of herself and the world that is no less shrouded in mystery than her best work.
Rumors of Leonard Cohen’s desire for death have been greatly exaggerated.
“Ruminations” is what it claims to be: a series of ponderous reflections that abide and even cultivate solitude, finding the melancholy romance in moments of quiet introspection.
These are songs that tangle with love as a force both personal and political, and with the love of self, the love of God, the love a people must have for one another if any of them are going to last.
Though it turns out this isn’t a Harry Nilsson tribute album, the title is still a good omen.