Vinyl Speaks

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…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Two people from the Isle of Wight show up with a debut full of slack-wire guitar and deadpan one-liners. Chaise Longue introduced them and the album delivers on the promise.Dry wit meets genuine hooks. It’s all so effortless you start to resent it a little. Then you play it again and the resentment dissolves.Best rock debut in years and they made it sound easy. It…

Everyone loves a beginning. Beginnings have energy and possibility and the pleasant hum of things not yet gone wrong. Everyone loves an ending — a conclusion, a result, evidence that the effort meant something. Nobody writes songs about the middle. Nobody throws a party for the middle. The middle is just there, enormous and demanding, asking you to keep going without the motivational boost of…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Clairo decides to go lush and spare at the same time — string arrangements, afternoon-light production, songs about being exhausted by the performance of yourself.Not the obvious move after Pretty Girl going viral, but the right one. Quiet in a way that rewards patience. Reaper is beautiful in a way that makes you not entirely trust it.She grew up in public and this is…

There’s a very specific moment in international travel — it happens around the third or fourth country in as many weeks — where you stop being sure what time zone your body is in and start relying entirely on external cues. The light. Your phone. The face of whoever is explaining your call time. And, if you’re paying attention in the right way, a watch. I started wearing a proper GMT watch after…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Three singular artists combine and somehow become more than the sum of their parts. Tight, warm, and quietly devastating. The three-part harmonies do things that should only be theoretically possible.$20 hits on impact. Julien Baker sounds like she invented suffering. Phoebe and Lucy sound like they’re trying to coax her back from the edge. It works.The back half earns…

Everyone is talking about boundaries now. This is mostly good news. The problem is that some people have confused “I have a boundary” with “I have an excuse.” These are different documents. A boundary is a limit you’ve set because you understand what you need to function well. An excuse is a limit you’ve set because something makes you uncomfortable and you’d rather not examine why. The Honest…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Michelle Zauner writes about grief without making you feel trapped by it. Jubilee is the sound of a person deciding to be alive again — wide-open arrangements, brass, strings, a refusal to be small.Be Sweet is legitimately joyful and Paprika is one of those songs that earns its bombast completely.A debut of a new phase. Joy as an act of will, made audible. 8.5/10   If…