Music
Albums, artists, scenes, and the sounds defining our moment.
Ameen Harron Is Cape Town's Most Restless Sound Right Now
A Korean choreographer in Seoul builds an eight-count to a Cape Town producer's track and posts it on YouTube. The track is called "RSA no...
Five Years Later, Pa Salieu Knows Exactly What Coventry Made Him
The title is not clever. Pa Salieu called his second album Second, and that is exactly what it is. The second record. The next one. The...
Signal Fire Is Tkay Maidza's First Proper Album and It Was Worth the Wait
The Last Year Was Weird, her trilogy of EPs released between 2020 and 2022, was always a provisional title. It described exactly what it...
Time Will Tell Is the Album Devon Gilfillian Has Been Preparing His Whole Life
The album Devon Gilfillian has spent his entire career building toward did not announce itself in advance. He came up in Philadelphia,...
No Sleep In Paradise Finds Naomi Sharon Settling Into Her Own Gravitational Pull
There is a particular kind of vulnerability that comes from reducing the noise. Not the dramatic, confessional kind that comes from a song...
Burna Boy and the Album That Made Africa Non-Negotiable
On July 8, 2023, Burna Boy walked out onto the field at Citi Field in Queens, New York, and played a headline show to a crowd of over...
Chloe and Timbaland Remind R&B What It Once Risked
In 1997, Timbaland produced a song called "Are You That Somebody" for Aaliyah. The production was startling enough that it became the...
Hard-Fi Return Unburdened, and It Shows
In El Salvador there is a saying: do not sweat someone else's fever. Do not make yourself sick over a war that was never yours to fight....
EDNA Changed What UK Drill Was Allowed to Be
EDNA sold 15,494 copies in its first week, entering the UK Albums Chart at number one on 9 October 2020. That number matters less as a...
Myles Smith Arrives Where the Story Gets Hard
One billion streams is a number that changes what a debut album can be. Myles Smith hit that figure with Stargazing, a song he wrote in...
Ama Dropped the Alias and Kept Everything That Mattered
Ama Louisa John grew up in London and started making music under the name Ama Lou. The Lou was something she chose as a preteen, a...
