Vinyl Speaks

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…

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…