Adam Kyriakou’s Department is a one-man band in the style of Neil Hannon’s Divine Comedy and Matt Johnson’s The The; others may pass in and out, but Kyriakou steers the ship.
Audacity Files proves to be the maiden voyage for what should be an interesting and impressive career in sonic development. “Shadow Play” embodies the freneticism of the Lennon-McCartney opus “A Day in the Life”: brass, loops, and percussion lunging at the unsuspecting listener. Incidentally, “Shadow Play” is the longest tune on the record: despite pushing the boundaries of pop, Department wisely keeps the runtime to a palatable two-minute average.
Purportedly inspired by a voyage to his ancestral Macedonia, Department incorporates…
Category: R&B
Michael: Songs from the Motion Picture is the official companion album to the brand-new biopic, Michael. This album highlights 13 songs showcased in the film, spanning from The Jackson 5 to The Jacksons to Michael’s chart-topping solo success with “Off the Wall” and “Thriller.”
…Filling the superstar’s shoes is his nephew (and son of brother Jermaine) Jaafar Jackson, who reportedly will do some of his own singing in the film. Despite that, the soundtrack features only Michael’s original vocals. The movie’s screenplay has been penned by Academy Award nominee and Tony winner John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator on film; Red, Moulin Rouge! on stage) and also stars Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson, Nia Long as Katherine Jackson, Kendrick Sampson…
Contains all the single recordings of the group from 1966–1969 plus a non-LP B-side released posthumously in 1972.
In the 1960s, the American music landscape was powered by a vibrant network of independent record labels. Many—like Motown, Stax/Volt, and Elektra—began as small regional ventures before their success propelled them into national prominence and, ultimately, partnerships with major labels.
Baltimore, Maryland was one of the era’s creative hotbeds. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the city nurtured a distinctive musical identity, and local imprints such as Ru-Jac, Soultrain, and Pulse delivered radio favorites that defined the “Sound of Baltimore”—a gritty…
As listeners began to connect with her 2025 album Do It Afraid, Yaya Bey fell into a state of distress. She contemplated the commodification of Black grief, hers included, as well as the shorter lifespans of Black artists and the way their work receives overdue recognition after death. Her mind also remained freighted with anger and frustration over losses to Black communality, whether caused by gentrification or exacerbated by online infighting, aka diaspora wars (with white-owned social media platforms as the battlefields). While Bey might have been spiraling, her creative upswing continues with this close companion to Do It Afraid. Every bit as sure-footed and stimulating, the purposefully titled Fidelity is another invigorating modern synthesis of Black musical innovations.
Six years to the date of his last LP, Thundercat release his fifth studio album, Distracted, coming out via Brainfeeder. The new album features contributions from A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Tame Impala, Channel Tres, Lil Yachty and a previously unreleased collaboration with the dearly departed Mac Miller.
Distracted was primarily created in close collaboration with a new creative partner for Thundercat – the superproducer Greg Kurstin, known for his work with some of the biggest names in pop like Adele, Paul McCartney, Sia, Beyoncé, Beck and more – with additional production turns on the record from Flying Lotus, Kenny Beats (Kenneth Blume), and The Lemon Twigs. Distracted vividly captures…
Arlo Parks has long made a home in vulnerability and poetic lyricism, and on Ambiguous Desire, she doubles down on that instinct with confidence. The album is full of psychedelic textures, punchy basslines, and dreamy vocals that blur together into something hypnotic but anthemic.
While the coherence of the record sometimes lends itself to monotony, the darker sonic undercurrent, coupled with a newly found more intricate and explorative sonority, has a sensation of quiet and dreamlike absorption.
Across the whole record, Parks’ vocals are soothing and ambivalent. ‘Get Go’, one of the album’s singles, is definitely the record’s most euphoric moment. Punchy but shimmery, its broadness conjures the feeling of dancing and…
Hopes and Dreams is the title of the brand new compilation series from Tramp Records. This new series draws on the music selection of ‘Praise Poems’, not only in terms of obscurity, but also in terms of genius. Similar, but anything but a poor copy, the focus is on rare grooves from the 1970s. The album contains genuine rarities that definitely deserve more attention. Take, for example, the opener by Guamanian Frankie & the Karter’s Peanut Organization. The protagonist comes from Guam, a tiny island in the western Pacific, a good 5000km north of Australia. The previously unreleased ‘Back In Time’ comes from an acetate pressing. As far as we know, it is the only existing copy. Easy and Carrie Chaplin & Mark Perron delight us with light folk soul, and fans of Terry Callier will…
Loose collaborations can go in two directions – some sort of loose jams that just might go nowhere, or innovative chipping of ideas that result in some interesting musical results. In the latter case, there is usually a core set of musicians that bring in a sort of semblance to a possible chaos, leading the way to something that is tangible and ultimately listenable.
For At Your Pace, their second album offering, Modha, a core Berlin-based duo of Dhanya Langer and Max Scholl operate as a sort of collective bringing in outside talents of the likes of Shanice Ruby Bennett (bass), Käthe Johanning (Rhodes), Fabiano Lima (percussion), Konstantin Döben (horns), and Tim Sensbach (guitar), as well as a set of guest vocalists/rappers like…
As AI becomes an increasing threat to humans trying to make a living from creative activities, Nubiyan Twist’s latest album is a defiant riposte. It is a celebration of the joyful energy and chaos that comes from musicians getting together in a room to play. While that could imply a scrappy sound, it would be a wildly inaccurate description of the ensemble. Chasing Shadows represents a skilful interception of jazz, afrobeat, R&B and electronics, fused with a mastery that reflects the nine-piece band’s background having formed in 2011 while studying at the Leeds College of Music.
Their fifth album resists the temptation of indulging in extended jams, all eleven tracks timing around the four-minute mark. New vocalist, Eniola Idowu, brings an extra soulful touch…
James Blake sometimes feels like pop music’s arch, ultra-serious older brother, floating above the scene with warbly torch songs that never quite come down to earth. He’s left his ghostly prints on artists ranging from Beyoncé to Rosalía to Lil Yachty, and it’s a testament to his influence how widespread his once novel, weightless style of production has become.
There was a time when it wasn’t common for mainstream artists to sing over instrumentals that sound like they would crumble against a gentle caress, or pitch vocals up and down to inhuman extremes. All of that experimentation, coupled with his heart-on-sleeve, midtempo songwriting, has lent Blake a somewhat dowdy image, like a Tory councillor who liked dubstep before…
Throughout his career, Chicago-based trumpeter Marquis Hill has traced and celebrated Black life, while reflecting a hard-spun hope in everyday life. Further, the Black Church has remained influential on his art and spirituality. (Beautifulism) Sweet Surrender is a ten track EP, that focuses its sound and creative gaze on spirituality and transcendence with an audacious cast. The core players include guitarist Emmanuel Michel, bassist Junius Paul, saxophonist Josh Johnson, drummer Marcus Gilmore, percussionist Juan Pastor, and a slew of guests including Makaya McCraven, vocalists Amyna Love, Zacchae’us Paul, and Manessah, and rappers Cisco Swank and Kumbayaaa. The music on this 34-minute set dances a loose line between contemporary jazz, neo-soul…
When Stockholm-based musician Kendra Egerbladh started sharing her music under the handle waterbaby in the early to mid-2020s, she was noted for a sophisticated alt-pop that combined light touches of jazz, hip-hop, downtempo, and atmospheric bedroom pop on songs with highly personal lyrics.
Her full-length and Sub Pop label debut, Memory Be a Blade, reveals a surprising evolution in sound that retains the influence of jazz and broader alternative inspirations while relying less on gloss and aura and more heavily on acoustic instruments like strings. The result is something physically closer, more delicate, and more diaristic while at the same time more intricate. The album was produced by Marcus White, her main…
In 1971 several dozen African American soul, jazz, and gospel artists embarked on a journey that would change the lives of everyone involved. They traveled from New York City to Ghana, West Africa to take part in a 13-hour concert entitled Soul to Soul. The concert was a celebration of 14 years of Ghana’s independence from British rule. For most of these artists it was their first trip to Africa. For the African American musicians, this was a journey about personal roots, the ancestral homeland, history, discovery, loss, pain and joy.
Directed by Academy AwardⓇ winner Denis Sanders and produced by Tom Mosk & Richard Bock, the concert film/documentary had a limited theatrical run in 1971. It now returns restored with the original edit reconstructing each scene…
Justin Hicks‘ vast body of work as a vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and sound artist extends beyond recording studios to galleries, museums, theaters, and other spaces. A keen collaborator with connections to myriad artists across disciplines, Hicks earned a Drama Desk Award nomination with his music for the Lynn Nottage play Mlima’s Tale, and he is an integral part of Meshell Ndegeocello’s band. He’s all over The Omnichord Real Book and No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, winners of the first two Grammys for Best Alternative Jazz Album. One standout from the latter is “Love,” featuring co-writer Hicks in harmony with the voices of wife Kenita Miller-Hicks, drummer Abe Rounds, and bassist/leader Ndegeocello,…
Almost four years separate Waves from Starfruit, the Grammy-nominated fifth record that brought Moonchild’s first round of guest features and gave the trio wider footing without altering the music’s center of gravity. Starfruit was recorded remotely during lockdown, populated by collaborators like Lalah Hathaway, Rapsody, Alex Isley, and Tank and the Bangas who slotted into the band’s pocket without disrupting it. Amber Navran has said the new project grew from a difficult stretch of personal reckoning, and the love songs that filled every prior Moonchild release have mostly vanished. In their place are songs about cutting people off, surviving hurt without pretending it ends, and telling yourself the truth when you’d rather not. Waves continues the collaborative instinct, but the subject…
It’s all blurring together. Ambient is emo now. Rap sounds like harsh noise. Drum’n’bass is basically bedroom pop. And Ben Bondy, who until now has primarily dealt in disorientingly dubby ambient music, has emerged with something resembling a singer/songwriter album, but not quite. Bondy, a New York/Berlin-based producer who’s made a name as part of the latter’s cozy Kwia collective, has built a sprawling body of work across a number of labels representing the bleary haze of the left-field electronic underground. West Mineral Ltd., 3XL, Motion Ward, Quiet Time — if they deal in grainy, dissociative soundscapes, Bondy has probably released something for them. Across his scattered releases and DJ sets, Bondy’s demonstrated a voracious, shapeshifting…
Ari Lennox is one of contemporary R&B’s premier sophisticates, preferring a palette of lush jazz, soul and ’90s hip-hop over the more genre-fluid sound pushed by contemporaries SZA and Kehlani. But a few songs into her new album, Vacancy, she makes it eminently clear that tradition and wildness can coexist, with fabulously sparky results: on ‘Under the Moon’, she describes a lover as “vicious / Like a werewolf / When you’re in it” and proceeds to howl “moooooooooon” as if she is in an old creature feature.
Vacancy, Lennox’s third album, is far and away her most fun, and if it isn’t quite as ingratiating as her 2022 Age/Sex/Location, it makes up for it with canny lyrics and an airy, open sound. ‘Cool Down’ is a reggae/R&B hybrid that…
The title of DJ Harrison‘s fourth Stones Throw album might be misleading to some, as ElectroSoul is an evolution of the Butcher Brown player’s dusty fusion of jazz, funk, and hip-hop, and other sounds, neither a sharp stylistic pivot nor a genre exercise. There’s no discernible Kraftwerk or Bambaataa influence — nothing is sleek and booming like Planet Patrol’s “Play at Your Own Risk” or any modern track in that lineage that could be classified as such. Due to its predominant mood and the circumstances in which it was made, ElectroSoul could be considered Harrison’s Mellow Madness. Quincy Jones recorded that 1975 album after he recovered from multiple aneurysms. Harrison experienced a health scare that wasn’t as serious, but it led to a prolonged…
If you know anything about SAULT, they don’t do interviews. They don’t do photo shoots. For years, the British collective — anchored by producer Inflo, has released music with almost no promotion, no faces attached, no origin story to sell. It’s philosophy that the songs belong to whoever needs them, and the people who made them would rather stay out of the way. Since 2019, SAULT has dropped nearly a dozen albums spanning funk, gospel, orchestral ambience, and protest soul, often releasing multiple projects at once (in 2022) as free downloads. Their 2020 records, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise), arrived during the summer of George Floyd’s murder and spoke to that moment. The anonymity lets the collective voice stay collective — no star to distract…
DERBY’s debut album Slugger presents an interesting paradox: How can an album this derivative also feel authentic, even original?
Single “Gold” seems like a slick attempt to recreate Dijon’s fast and free songwriting magic, his big-feeling bravado, his Americana-twanged R&B; “Jenny” draws clear inspiration from Alex G; his frequent use of pitch-shifted vocals and flanged guitars are siphoned from the Bible of Blonde. Yet DERBY — a Houston native who now lives in New York and whose real name is Craig Caldwell — has talent that continues to reveal itself even after you clock the comparisons and a perspective that cuts through the references. Slugger captures a world of quotidian intensity and rural nostalgia: shooting a deer through the eyes with…