Katie Presley
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The rock trio's first album since 2005 sounds as fresh and vital as a debut, but also as nuanced and skillful as the work of three players with a decade-long, inimitable rapport betwixt them.
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Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz spend their second album feeling and defining the contours of each other's voices, trading verses, lines and leads. They call it "blood harmony," which about sums it up.
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Shara Worden's music sounds both micro-orchestrated and entirely, ecstatically spontaneous. Every song here is a mission statement and a directive; each is propulsive and demanding of full attention.
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As implied in her second album's title, the Finnish songwriter makes haunting, revelatory music for hidden places. Wagner sings for the dead; she digs past the heart of any matter and into bone.
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Millennial social anxiety pairs with breezy, effortlessly cool surf-rock on Alvvays, and the combination is irresistible. The Toronto band's beach-pop seems to come straight from the California shore.
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The Swedish singer's third album forms the final installment in a conceptual trilogy — and it's extraordinary as both a collection of songs and a tactical re-wiring of her genre's circuit board.
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The first solo album from the former Distillers singer feels like a time capsule from the '90s — when powerful, not conventionally pretty vocals attained massive mainstream cultural capital.
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Every defiant growl, jaded vocal fry and distorted guitar lick on Annie Clark's fourth album flirts with the avant garde, yet uses an accessible, if inventive, musical vocabulary to do so.