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…
You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In.
…’Growing Pains (Deluxe)’ features six added tracks, including “Heavy Heart,” and “Tumbleweed,” and four acoustic tracks that were recorded at Second Nature Vintage in Nashville.
What is a watch bird? In 
Since the dissolution of Yura Yura Teikoku, Shintaro Sakamoto has refined a solo language built on understatement. Where his former band favoured volatility, his solo records proceed at lower pressure, privileging texture, spacing and grooves that remain deliberately underdeveloped. On his fifth solo album, Yoo-hoo, that approach resolves into a two-part movement, the record gradually shifting from suspension into motion without ever announcing the change. ‘Is There a Place For You There?’ establishes the album’s opening register, its unhurried and blown-out vocal and flattened delivery setting a mood of controlled inertia, melting against, even slowing the beckoning rhythm of Yuta Suganuma’s drums. The early stretch is governed by tactile…
For Mona Fastvold’s film about the Shaker founder, Daniel Blumberg reworked hymns, composed songs, and led a sizable chorus to mimic speaking in tongues. It’s ambitious but ultimately overbearing.
Guitars on Life is a duo offering by acoustic guitarists 
Essential Curvature is a double-length compilation drawn from five albums by Bay Area folk-jazz-world fusion outfit Curvature, guitarist 
…The expanded digital album includes 11 bonus tracks in total: the three songs from the 2007 ‘End Like This’ EP, four previously unreleased outtakes, and four demos.
The Live at City Gardens EP features a blistering six-song soundboard recording captured live on February 11, 1984, at the legendary punk club City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey.
Somewhere in an old mill in Yorkshire, a man – maybe – has been buried under patch cables, feeding electricity through modular synths long enough for the hum to be part of the drizzly landscape. That no one really knows who they are feels appropriate. Their anonymity has become part of the machinery, like an unlabeled switch. 
‘The Power Station DLX’ includes the remastered album alongside three discs of bonus material, including unreleased “raw instrumental” versions, single mixes and live material, including the band’s performances from the charity concert Live Aid and an unissued full set from nearly a month later at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.
Although Whitney K is widely characterised as being the artistic expedient of itinerant Canadian musician Konner Whitney (see what he did there?), his latest recording venture 
Searows’ second album, 
When Chilli Jesson first appeared on the cover of NME way back in 2012, it was as one half of the most charismatic, chaotic indie frontman double act since Pete ‘n Carl. Palma Violets, the headline declared, were “the best new band in Britain”. Jesson, their bassist and sometime vocalist, was the effortlessly cool mouthpiece of the operation. But behind the youthful bangers and artfully dishevelled hair, Jesson’s adolescence had been tumultuous. At 14, he lost his father to drug addiction, and it’s this grief that – almost 20 years on – the musician addresses with his new venture, Dead Dads Club.
The Lowest Pair is an American folk duo made up of Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee, known for their intertwined vocal harmonies and banjo-forward songwriting. Formed in 2013, the pair has built a dedicated following through records that balance traditional folk roots with plainspoken, emotionally direct lyrics. Having a particularly prolific run in their early years, releasing six albums in their first seven years, the pair haven’t released a new album since 2020’s 
The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of 
The title of