Working in the vein of "laptop twee" acts like friends& and Worldpeace DMT, who fuse the genre-smashing maximalism promised by hyperpop with the whimsical optimism of '00s buzz bands, the material on their 2025 album Shy at first is as dense and dynamic as the songs you try to compose in your imagination.
The gift of skaiwater's best music is its unique shape, blown-out underground rap styles carefully folded into delicate origami. Forget every preconceived notion you might have about 'rage rap' and put on 'rain'-it's so pretty, a butterfly fluttering around a bomb site. On that album, skai harnessed beat drops like wrecking balls crashing into the walls of their heart.
From the first single "I Just Might," a pleading request that his lover be able to move on the dancefloor at his level, it's clear that Mars is inviting more comparisons to groovier hits of yesteryear than usual. It reminded me of both Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet" and Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing," hitting the same melodies or gang vocal inflections.
West builds most of the songs around a single repeated chord, strummed high up on the neck. Her band populates the arrangement with everything else she needs-bass licks, chord changes, dynamic surges-while West sends her voice into the song's darkened corners and curls her mind around whichever odd idea grips her.
In 'Bad Moons,' the unpredictability lies not in the lyrics like usual, where Mike Kinsella admits he's 'just two little boys in a trench coat' in that languorous voice he can't shed. Instead, the lasting impression comes from his bandmates' graceful turns through delicate post-rock. Aqueous harp and piano eventually give way to a fishing net of guitars, each minimalist line woven tighter than the next.
The Finnish conductor and violinist is talking about Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, a work of such innate Britishness that it regularly tops UK classical music popularity polls. Kuusisto's Lark isn't RVW-lite, however, but a penetrating, convincingly honest account that strips the music back to its essential roots in the English folk tradition.
Almost four decades into their career, Deftones might be as big as they've ever been. Sure, they were hitmakers of the CD era, but these days they're selling out Madison Square Garden, running their own highly successful (and surprisingly well-programmed) music festival, and - most importantly? - they're massive on TikTok. Despite all of the buzz, though, the band has taken its sweet time dropping new music.
To really die you have to die three ways. Townes Van Zandt discovered this after overdosing on model airplane glue. He was declared DOA at the hospital where, to hear him tell it, he sat for an hour and a half while doctors debated just how dead he was.
