Category: Album

Freddie Mercury once said that music shouldn’t be divided into rock and non-rock, but into “pop” and “non-pop” – and that the second begins where the artist cannot live otherwise, where music becomes air rather than decoration. This thought seems like a random quote from an old interview, until you come across an album that…

For centuries, the inner world of a woman remained on the periphery of grand history, yet it continued to live – in embroidery patterns, in lullabies, in folk songs passed from mouth to mouth as the only available form of memory. Joy, desire, anger, longing for freedom – all of this rarely received the right…

I admit without shame: I have a weakness for debuts. There is always a unique, barely perceptible aroma of adventurism and slight jitters in them, when an artist first steps up to the footlights without the protective armor of past achievements and platinum statuses. It is an exciting moment of absolute sincerity, when the stakes…

“Every debut holds within itself the grace of incompleteness: it is the moment when the artist first opens the door to his workshop but has not yet turned on the overhead light,” Walter Benjamin once remarked. Anthony Do, performing under the pseudonym Dotom, is a graduate of the prestigious Roc Nation school of music, majoring…

“Space is not that far away. It’s only an hour’s drive if your car can go straight up,” British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle once joked. But if we set aside earthly mechanics, music, in my view, has handled this route faster than any shuttle. It is capable of traversing light-years in a fraction of a second,…

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, there will be peace,” Jimi Hendrix once said, reminding us that music knows how to negotiate where diplomats simply throw up their hands. In a world that has grown quite tired of the roar of news and endless stress, silence has turned into a luxury,…

“You don’t need to look far into our band’s history to know that we’ve always made an effort to use music to bring people together to support causes we believe in and make our small corner of the world a little nicer than we found it.” In these words from Loversteeth vocalist Brandon McCabe, there’s…

A tree is known by its fruit. Hidden within this ancient Biblical metaphor is an existential trap: we are accustomed to judging ourselves by our intentions, while the world judges us by our results. It is easy to hide behind the illusion of one’s own impeccability, but what are we to do if the fruit…

Miles Davis once said: “Play not what you can play, but what you hear.” The phrase is short, but it contains an entire philosophy that separates craft from art. In this gap between technique and inner impulse, true fusion is born. A state in which acid jazz meets psychedelia, and lo-fi fog settles on a…

“You cannot step into the same river twice,” said Heraclitus. But you can step into another-and find that it carries the same waters. Jean-Guy Roy, founder of Federal Lights, did something similar. In 2016, he didn’t just disband the group-he gave it a digital burial: deleted accounts, erased traces, shut the door. Ten years of…