Something felt off amidst the accolades lavished upon Little Simz following her 2021 Mercury Prize-winning record Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Be it by awarding her Best New Artist at the Brit Awards in 2022, despite having just released her fourth album in a decade-plus career, or through the postponement[Read More…]
Album Reviews
Arctic Monkeys return to earth with grandiose inconsistency
Arctic Monkeys are no strangers to reinvention, having pursued a range of musical directions since emerging as part of the mid-2000s garage-rock revival. On The Car, however, the band continues down the path set out on 2018’s left-field, lounge-infused Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, refining their approach with new baroque-pop influences[Read More…]
‘The Loneliest Time’ offers up a mixed bag of delights and let-downs
As a long-time Carly Rae Jepsen lover, I have been eagerly awaiting new music since her last project, 2019’s Dedicated and the accompanying Dedicated Side B (2020). While Jepsen’s sixth studio album, The Loneliest Time, certainly doesn’t disappoint, it doesn’t quite knock your socks off either. Released on Oct. 21,[Read More…]
Miss Americana is back, and so is her pop persona
It’s 11:59 on a Thursday night. My friend and I wait with bated breath in Milton B, hurriedly refreshing Spotify. We’re not waiting for the café’s mediocre WiFi to load—we are waiting to listen to Midnights, Taylor Swift’s latest album. I knew all too well that the impending release would[Read More…]
The 1975’s new album is a triumph of genre-mixing tracks
The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language is an eclectic new album that encapsulates the band’s shift into genre-mixing assortments. Filled with lively synth sounds—courtesy of star producer Jack Antonoff’s production—unlike The 1975’s previous work, the album abandons their alt-rock origins in favour of jazzier, pop notes. “The 1975”[Read More…]
Alvvays embrace expansive shoegaze in a bold development of their sound
Though it took Alvvays five years to produce the follow-up to 2017’s Antisocialites, their third record Blue Rev proves to be worth the wait. The band grappled with several setbacks in the album’s production, including the theft of their early demo tapes, the destruction of their equipment in a basement[Read More…]
‘Hold The Girl’ explodes with originality, but is lost among the debris
Back in 2020, Rina Sawayama released her debut album, SAWAYAMA, and entered pop consciousness like how one would kick down a door: Fierce and unapologetic. Her sophomore endeavour, Hold The Girl, has Sawayama looking back through the very same doorway, retracing her footsteps down the path of her childhood. Released[Read More…]
Charli XCX’s ‘CRASH’ yields gems among the generic
If you’ve come to appreciate Charli XCX’s hyper-pop charm, you’ll love CRASH, released on March 18, a collection of dance tracks perfect to bob your head to. However, the fast-paced set lacks the expressionism that has defined Charli’s career so far. Especially following her latest, self-reflexive pandemic album, how i’m[Read More…]
‘Mother Rock!’ shakes the anthropocentric boat
Montreal art gallery Art Mûr has been home to Québécois artist Patrick Bérubé’s solo immersive installation, Mother Rock!, since March 5. As the clock ticks on our ability to prevent climate change’s most catastrophic consequences, Bérubé invites visitors on a tour of the relationship between humans and the natural world[Read More…]
‘The Batman’ is DC’s very own horror blockbuster
Scattered whispers and occasional chuckles echo hollowly through the cinema’s depths, jittery in their disposition and nervous in their delivery. Excited eyes dart back and forth between the screen and the faces surrounding them. A nearly three-year anticipatory build-up is culminating into a gentle frenzy—a feverish apogee. This is the[Read More…]
