Vinyl Speaks

Find it. Spotify | Amazon After years of maximalism and concept albums about Everything, The 1975 make their most approachable record and it’s secretly one of their best. Jack Antonoff production, Healy actually reigning himself in for once.Part of the Band earns its six minutes and I’m in Love with You is a straight-up perfect pop song. The brevity helps enormously.You can argue about everything…

Letting go has been so thoroughly sold to us as a spiritual achievement that we’ve forgotten it’s also just a practical skill. You let go of things that aren’t working because holding them costs you resources you could spend on things that are. This is not a complex philosophy. It’s inventory management. The Sunk Cost of Your Arms Being Full The thing we’re reluctant to let go of is usually…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Björk makes albums that exist outside comparison, and Fossora leans into that harder than usual — fungal imagery, bass clarinets, grief, family, the underworld as place and metaphor.Atopos is like nothing else she’s made, which is saying something. The quiet tracks at the centre carry a weight that builds on re-listens.Not a casual record. One of her essential ones.…

The password. You’ve forgotten it again. Of course you have. It was sixteen characters of apparent gibberish that Past You constructed in a moment of paranoid brilliance and then trusted Future You to remember. Future You has failed. Future You is standing here clicking “Forgot password?” like it’s a confession booth. There is a ritual involved. You will need your email. You will go to your…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Perhaps the album of the year its year — and not just critics saying so, but the feeling you get listening to it that something actually happened. Apple recorded this mostly in her home and it sounds like it: lived-in, eccentric, alive.The rhythms are unusual, the lyrics furious and funny and sharp as anything she’s written. It ends and you want to start over…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Indie pop with the confidence of something already classic. Magdalena Bay make synth-pop that feels like it was always there waiting to be discovered — the hooks are relentless, the concept wears lightly.Killing Time and Tunnel Vision are the tracks. There are more that come for your throat just as cleanly.Album of the year 2024. The discourse was right for once.…

It’s 10:45pm in Hamilton, New Zealand, and the kitchen in the venue has closed, the after-show conversation has wound down to the comfortable silence of people who’ve worked hard and know it, and I am faced with the classic post-show decision: find something open, order delivery to a hotel room I don’t entirely understand yet, or go to the hotel bar and let the hotel bar sort it. I have never…

Light is the most motivationally over-used metaphor in existence. Every speaker, every retreat, every greeting card that has ever tried to be uplifting has reached for light. Including me. I have used light as a metaphor at least four hundred times and I don’t regret most of them. Here is something they don’t put on the greeting card: too much light is blinding. The person who refuses to sit…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon A complete reinvention that most artists wouldn’t risk. Halsey spent a record imagining their death through eighteen different alter egos, each one a different genre and a different lifetime.The ambition is real and so is the execution. That it works as a whole album is remarkable. That it works as individual songs is miraculous.Uncompromising and genuinely strange. The…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Tyler does the thing where he acts like he’s just having a conversation and then halfway through you realise he’s built an entire argument you weren’t expecting. The production is as rich as anything he’s made.Noid is the opener that sets the stakes. It’s messier than Igor and that might be the point — this is the sound of someone figuring things out in real time.More…

There’s a peculiar pressure around healing, which is that it should look like something. It should have milestones and timelines and eventually a conclusion where you stand at the front of the room and tell people how you did it. Healing doesn’t do that. Healing is a slow geological process that happens mostly underground, mostly when you’re not watching, mostly in ways that won’t be apparent…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Made in the shadow of love and loss, and it sounds exactly like that. Stevens strips back to acoustic simplicity, his voice more exposed than it’s been in years. The sadness is architectural — carefully placed, load-bearing.Will Anybody Ever Love Me? is the kind of question only the people most deserving of love ask.Quietly devastating. His most personal album since…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Mitski has figured out how to be orchestral and minimal at the same time. Country arrangements, spare and stark, and then a full symphony breaks through when you least expect it.Her most cinematic record and also her quietest. Buffalo Replaced is doing something genuinely strange. The title track says everything that needs saying in under three minutes.This is what it…

Let me tell you something about performing outdoors in a wool jacket in Edinburgh in August: it is the correct decision and also potentially a medical one. The Fringe runs for a month. Edinburgh in August is beautiful, unpredictable, and genuinely cold at 6pm when the wind comes off the Firth of Forth and decides it has business with the back of your neck. The audience is wearing everything from…

Real listening is rare enough that when you experience it, you remember the person who did it for years. Think about the last time someone truly listened to you — not nodding while composing their response, not checking their phone, not steering the conversation toward their own experience. That person is probably still vivid in your mind. That’s how scarce it is. That’s how powerful it is. The…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Shoegaze and country have no business sounding this good together. Wednesday makes distortion feel sun-baked, and Karly Hartzman writes like someone who’s been paying close attention their whole life and is just now saying it out loud.Bull Believer is the centrepiece: fourteen minutes of barely-controlled wreckage that earns every second.Not for everyone. Very much for…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon This album doesn’t make sense and that’s why it works. Polachek is operating somewhere between art pop and pure pop instinct — Bulgarian folk, flamenco, PC Music, heartbreak — and somehow she lands every jump.Bunny Is a Rider and Welcome to My Island are different flavours of brilliant. Maximalist and alien and genuinely hard to shake.The best pop album of 2023 and it’s…