Vinyl Speaks

Find it. Spotify | Amazon If you want to know what guitar music can still do, this is your answer. Ellie Rowsell is one of the best rock vocalists working and the band is right there with her.The Last Man on Earth builds slowly until it completely isn’t. No Hard Feelings closes the album on terms only they could set. A record that rewards volume.Mercury Prize well earned. Their best by some…

The first thing Edinburgh does when you arrive for the Fringe is make it clear that everyone here is doing a show. This includes the person in the supermarket, the taxi driver, the man flyering outside the venue next to yours who has a show about his divorce and has committed to performing it every day for a month regardless of audience size. The Fringe is the densest concentration of human…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Parks arrived fully formed and this debut confirms it. Her voice does that thing where it makes whatever’s around it feel warmer. The songs are compact, the production minimal, but the emotional density won’t let you go.Black Dog and Hurt are the ones that hit hardest. A beautiful thing, made by someone who clearly needed to make it.Twenty years old when she wrote most…

Big. I’ve been sitting with the scale of this for a while now and I still can’t fully metabolise it. Grand Theft Auto VI is coming. And when I say coming, I don’t mean “a game is being released.” I mean: an entertainment event larger than most human experiences is arriving, and somehow we’re all just getting on with things. Doing dishes. Replying to emails. As though the horizon isn’t lit…

Steven Pressfield wrote a whole book about resistance and I am not going to plagiarise it, but I will say: he was right, and the thing he was right about has not diminished with time. Resistance is the force that makes you check your email when you should be working on the thing. The force that makes you clean the kitchen before sitting down to write. The force that makes every other task seem…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon The sisters HAIM make something genuinely bittersweet — not just the love-and-loss stuff, but the whole industry critique sewn through it. The Steps remains irresistible.The production (with Ariel Rechtshaid and Rostam) splits the difference between polished and loose. The album earns its fifty-five minutes by the end.A career record. Better than it was given credit for…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Where Crack-Up was challenge, Shore is release. Robin Pecknold made this album as an act of gratitude, and you can hear it — lush arrangements, wide-open harmonies, a record that sounds like September air.Not his most complex work but his most generous. Can I Believe You is the best song he’s written in a decade.Sometimes that’s exactly what the moment calls for.…

Silence makes most people uncomfortable. Not because silence is unpleasant — silence is often actively pleasant — but because silence creates a vacuum that the mind immediately rushes to fill with every thought it has been postponing. Those thoughts are important. That’s why you’ve been postponing them. The Useful Discomfort of Quiet We fill our days with noise — podcasts on commutes, music…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Auckland’s finest make the kind of guitar-pop that sounds bright and simple until you realise every syllable was placed exactly where it needed to be. Elizabeth Stokes writes about endings with a precision that hits harder than drama ever could.Expert in a Dying Field and Knees Deep are peak power-pop. The Beths are the real deal.Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. One…

The car rental desk at Edmonton International Airport had a choice for me. The practical option was queuing with sensible people making sensible decisions about sensible vehicles. The impractical option was standing slightly apart at the Premium counter, where a man in a different uniform was holding keys to something with a distinctly smaller turning circle and a significantly less useful…

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…