Music
The Maximalist Dance Music of Valgur, Ibibio Sound Machine, Hama, and Steve Lacy
These new releases burn with creepy surprises, rubbery jitters, musical knots, and basslines that run into your arms.
Music
Film
Martin Scorsese Tells a Tall Tale of Bob Dylan's 1975 Tour
The director's new documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, is practically a mockumentary — playing fast and loose with facts to highlight the musician's penchant for fascinating contradictions.
Music
Ragnar Kjartansson’s Panorama of Love and Death
The artist’s Death Is Elsewhere conveys an understanding that humans — relatively recent additions to a 4.5-billion-year-old planet — will come and go. The planet will remain.
Music
Rock Without the Posturing
New albums from Mdou Moctar, Control Top, L7, and Gary Clark Jr., guitar heroes all.
Music
Vampire Weekend Self-Consciously Grows Up
Growing up and finding love are conflated as a general spiritual awakening on the band's new album.
Music
The Gospel According to Kanye and Aretha
The live stream of Kanye West's Coachella "Sunday Service" and the restored Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace offer contrasting portraits of celebrity faith.
Music
The Singer-Songwriter Complex
New word-heavy releases from Jenny Lewis, Sir Babygirl, Nilufer Yanya, and Sharon Van Etten.
Music
Billie Eilish's Creepy, Crawly Pop
Eilish’s debut album is an exercise in comic horror.
Music
Solange, Captured Mid-Dream
Conceived as a musical map of Houston, Solange's hometown, When I Get Home wanders from mood to mood, arrangement to arrangement, a soundscape as cityscape, where songs correspond to locations and melodies merge with memory.
Music
John and Yoko’s Wedding Album, Once an Oddity, Now an Icon
An unlikely element of Lennon and Ono’s late-1960s peace campaign was an aural selfie, ahead of its time.
Music
James Blake Grows Up
Assume Form is Blake’s first album to acknowledge his status as a pop presence, but it also feels like an attempt to broaden his range, to correct the way he became associated with generic melancholy.
Music
The Odd Comforts of Alternative Rock
Traditionalism often enables quiet triumphs. Or loud triumphs, if you turn the volume up.