Vinyl Speaks

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…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Grief as precision instrument. Bridgers has a knack for sneaking devastation into a line that sounds almost throwaway — then you’re standing in a kitchen crying over a simile about a ghost.Savior Complex and Kyoto are different animals but both perfect. The closer still annihilates.Quiet, crushing, and somehow luminous. One of the better albums made this decade. A…

Discomfort has excellent PR. Every motivational speaker — myself included, and I should know — goes on about leaning into discomfort, embracing discomfort, making discomfort your business partner. It sounds exhausting because sometimes it is. Here’s the more useful version of this idea: discomfort is information. It’s your nervous system saying: this is unfamiliar. Not dangerous. Unfamiliar. The…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Dropped into a pandemic and saved the year. Disco-pop done right because nobody involved was too cool to make something that actually works as a dance record.Levitating, Physical, Don’t Start Now — the hit rate is absurd. Lipa plays it completely straight and that’s exactly why it lands.The album that made everyone remember why they liked pop music in the first place.…

The air in Dubai smells different when you arrive at 2am. Hot, certainly — a heat that doesn’t apologise — but there’s something else underneath it. Money, probably. Or the memory of money. Standing outside the terminal with a carry-on at my feet and the particular jet lag that doesn’t know whether to announce itself, I had one clear thought: somewhere in this city there were people who needed to…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon The biggest album in the world for a reason. Bad Bunny doesn’t ask you to keep up — he builds a whole summer and invites you in. Reggaeton, dembow, plena, bomba, all handled with the easy confidence of someone who doesn’t need to prove anything.Tití Me Preguntó and Moscow Mule are as good as pop music gets. Heat in album form.Twenty-three tracks and almost none of them…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Christchurch alternative funk rock band who briefly had all of New Zealand’s attention and deserved more of it for longer. Traction captured the moment — “Can’t Get Enough” and “Scorpio Girl” are New Zealand 90s time capsules played at volumes that justified the decade.A band who were better than their commercial peak suggested, and this is that peak. Worth hearing now…

Trespassing gets a bad reputation because we confuse it with theft. They’re different. Theft takes something away. Trespassing just goes somewhere you weren’t formally invited to go. Which, if you think about it, describes most of the best career moves ever made. I am not encouraging you to break laws. I am encouraging you to question whose interests those laws serve, especially the informal…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Bay of Plenty-born Walker’s debut, released when he was 19. Australian Idol win aside, the record itself holds up — warm, soulful pop with a voice that was always going to be too big for any competition format designed to contain it.The beginning of a career that still has chapters to write. Walker’s gift grows more interesting with material that meets it, and From the…

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Taylor Swift makes an insomnia record and the whole world goes sleepless trying to decode it. The production is lush and claustrophobic in the best way — Jack Antonoff’s fingerprints everywhere, like a signature.Anti-Hero is the kind of pop song you can’t outrun. Not her most daring work, but her most comfortable. Sometimes that’s what hits different at 3am.The 3am…

The rental car was a Dacia Logan. In Romania, this is a completely ordinary car — the Dacia is a Romanian brand, manufactured in Pitesti since 1966, and the Logan is its sensible, affordable, and thoroughly unassuming flagship. In the context of my usual approach to car rentals, which involves attempting to upgrade and occasionally succeeding, the Dacia Logan was an education. It cost…