Here is the latest Music News from Rolling Stone Magazine.
Post Pop Depression
There’s a famous early-Seventies Mick Rock photo of Iggy Pop – wild-eyed in a T. Rex -T-shirt, a pack of Lucky Strikes clamped between his teeth – with his arms around David Bowie and Lou Reed: together, the troika who smacked rock & roll out of its hippie daze and…
This Is What the Truth Feels Like
If there’s a moment that sums up why Gwen Stefani is so eternally beloved, it’s the surreal scene from The Voice last fall when she led her team through New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” in a swirl of confetti. Only Stefani could sound so perky while threatening to…
George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison
In the fall of 2014, an expansive group of artists – from Brian Wilson to Butch Walker – got together for two concerts in Los Angeles honoring George Harrison. George Fest is a concert album put on by Best Fest, the traveling tribute-show series that has convened all-star tributes to Bob…
Vroom Vroom
Charli XCX is the rare pop diva who can make an EDM robot character sound more punk than pop. Her four-song Vroom Vroom EP is the perfect snack between 2014’s Sucker and her as-yet-untitled third LP. With Sophie of naifish UK pop collective PC Music producing every track, this quick-hit release unleashes something more…
ColleGrove
In an age where the most acclaimed Southern rap is the emo Codeine mumblecore of Future and Young Thug, an album that combines two of the brashest wiseasses south of the Mason-Dixon is either an unfashionable oddity or fresh breath of salty Borsht Belt air. There’s not a pun too…
Painkillers
After spending a decade singing openhearted confessionals as the frontman of New Jersey punks Gaslight Anthem, gravel-voiced Brian Fallon is turning down his amp for a solo debut full of acoustic ballads and midtempo alt-country songs. Fallon references heroes like James Brown and Van Morrison as he transforms rough old…
Emily’s D+Evolution
Talented jazz musician Esperanza Spalding is best known for snatching the Best New Artist Grammy from the clutches of a young Justin Bieber back in 2012. That year’s experiment, Radio Music Society, transmuted the textures of neo-soul through tricky changes and unlikely arrangements – avant-garde, yes, but ultimately as welcoming…
untitled unmastered.
We’re up to our molars in data-seas of dissonance, and most of us are flipping out, at least a bit. Why wouldn’t our best artists mirror that? In the wake of Kanye’s work-in-progress psychodrama comes this left-field Kendrick Lamar surprise drop – a similarly unfinished-feeling, just as all-over-the-place, yet somehow more…
Star Wars Headspace
Zen master music producer Rick Rubin has played Yoda to countless musicians over the last decades. So he’s the perfect guy to executive produce an album of Star Wars-themed EDM. The possibilities for such a project are pretty limitless, and the best tracks here approach the beloved source material with…
Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin
Willie Nelson may be the king of outlaw country, but the LP that made him a household name was Stardust, his quintuple-platinum 1978 set of old-school pop standards like “Georgia On My Mind,” “All Of Me,” and “Blue Skies.” Blue-jeaned badasses might’ve sneered that their Whiskey River-running hero had gone…
This Unruly Mess I’ve Made
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ 2012 breakout, The Heist, was a heartwarming underdog success story. A true son of Seattle, Macklemore does a fair amount of hand-wringing over his fame on this long-awaited follow-up: The album opens with “Light Tunnels,” which makes winning at the Grammys sound like a winter shoveling…
99¢
“All I want to do is bottle it to sell,” Santigold tells us on the smiling, reggae-inflected tune that opens her third record. It’s a fitting boast from an artist whose stylish mix of dubby hip-hop and neon-tinged New Wave has been used to hawk cars, insurance and Bud Light…
I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It
Hey, what gives, fellas? INXS and Duran Duran weren’t around in 1975. This ascendant U.K. quartet ground their second album in sleek dance rock that often feels like it was sculpted on a gaudy Eighties budget as the bandmates tried hard not to get too sweaty in their aqua-neon sport…
Full Circle
For Loretta Lynn’s first album since 2004’s Van Lear Rose, her startlingly great 2004 collaboration with Jack White and his crew, the iconic queen of no-bullshit country music, now 83, looks more backwards than forwards. Culled from a decade’s worth of sessions and co-produced by John Carter Cash – Johnny’s son, whose…
Dig In Deep
Bonnie Raitt has long been a singer-songwriter’s best friend, a deep-blues interpreter with sublime taste in composers, from Jackson Browne and Randy Newman to the Jazz Age siren Sippie Wallace. Raitt is as bold and sharp on Dig In Deep, made with her longtime road band. She takes sensual charge…
Yes, I’m A Witch Too
Some artists are primarily about the work, others about the ideas. John Cage tilted famously towards latter, ditto his pal and co-conspirator Yoko Ono, whose recent career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was an impressive reminder. Among those ideas, the 2007 LP Yes I’m A Witch was a…
Livin’ on a High Note
Pairing a veteran singer with next-generation material is a crapshoot conceit, and odds drop when the songs are commissioned instead of curated. But after two Jeff Tweedy-produced LPs did for her what Rick Rubin’s benchmark American Recordings did for Johnny Cash, Mavis Staples takes her comeback higher still with this…
Side Pony
With the title track to Lake Street Dive’s latest LP – surely the greatest coiffure anthem since Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair” – frontwoman Rachael Price coins a fresh double-entendre for a down-low lover, rhyming “You’ve been in my stable” with “I see you whenever I’m able” while boldly venturing, “Who doesn’t…
Painting With
Avant-pop institution Animal Collective have specialized in ecstatic noise explorations for more than a decade. But their 10th album skips the signature escape-pod reverb washes, speeding up the tempos and shortening the song lengths to come up with the zippiest music they’ve ever made. Animal Collective’s core trio recorded Painting With…
The Life of Pablo
The world has distracted from Kanye West’s creative process – except, as he shows on The Life of Pablo, distraction is his creative process. This is a messy album that feels like it was made that way on purpose, after the laser-sharp intensity of Yeezus. It’s a labored-over opus that wishes it…
Night Thoughts
It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since Suede introduced Brit-pop to the world on a 1992 Melody Maker cover that dubbed them “the best new band in Britain.” The London outfit went on to release a series of U.K. chart-toppers, only to fall victim to changing tastes toward the…
New View
Among midlife indie kids working a sidelong vision of classic-rock ecstasy, there aren’t many doing it with more grace or smarts than Eleanor Friedberger. She’s been at it since the early 2000s – first with her brother Matthew in the Fiery Furnaces, and now as a solo artist – and…
The Catastrophist
Tortoise were matter-of-fact poobahs of a modestly potent Nineties movement dubbed “post-rock,” which was pretty much what their elders called “prog-rock,” but with beats refreshingly prioritized over wanky virtuosity and way fewer proto-Game of Thrones fantasy-fiction lyrics. (In Tortoise’s case, lyrics were largely ditched altogether.) It was an excellent notion…
Adore Life
With its raised-fist cover photo and violent, primal post-punk grind, you’d expect the second album from arty London band Savages to be an anti-everything screed. But their music is driven by emotions that are almost unprecedented in the genre that gave us Joy Division and Public Image Limited: “Love is the answer,” they…
Moth
Brooklyn duo Chairlift have attained the synth-pop holy grail: They’re the Yaz of our time, filling their albums with perfectly sculpted, searchingly lovely tunes wrought from tense, tugging intimacy just as Vince Clark and Alison Moyet did on classic songs like “Bad Connection” and “Only You” 30 years ago. Yet…
Matter
It’s difficult to listen to St. Lucia’s second full-length without thinking of a list of Eighties touchstones: “Home” recalls the high-energy grooves of Prince at his purplest, the synths on “The Winds of Change” sound a little like Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” Ultimately, though, St. Lucia mastermind Jean-Philip Grobler – a…
Malibu
Like Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment or Raury, Anderson Paak is a dreamer and a romantic who blends hip-hop, R&B, rock and soul into a funky world all his own. The Oxnard, California, musician updates the muted grooves of Soulquarians-era landmarks like D’Angelo’s Voodoo with the sweeping, wide-screen ambitions…
Nevermen
Ever since introducing himself to the world with Faith No More’s The Real Thing in 1989, Mike Patton has been defined by near-superhuman levels of vocal dexterity and a creative restlessness that borders on ADHD, trying everything from avant-garde composition to Italian opera to the surf rock-death metal hybrids of…
M:FANS / Music for a New Society
Like many musicians, John Cale tends to excel in collaboration – see the Dream Syndicate, the Velvet Underground, albums with Nico, duets with Terry Riley and Brian Eno, and production for the Stooges, the Modern Lovers and Patti Smith. Cale’s 1982 LP Music For A New Society, however, was a…
Wild Stab
When Nineties alt-rocker Juliana Hatfield started working with Paul Westerberg last year, she soon realized that much of the Replacements singer’s greatest work remained unreleased. “She brought a lot of this to life that otherwise would have just sat down in the basement and sort of rotted,” the notoriously reclusive…
The Astonishing
Subtlety and economy aren’t words that typically come to mind when pondering a new Dream Theater album, much less one that arrives in the form of a double-disc epic with 34 tracks spanning two-and-a-half hours. Yet counterintuitively, those qualities help the veteran prog-metal quintet’s 13th album, The Astonishing, live up to its…
Human Ceremony
Listening to the debut album from Brooklyn trio Sunflower Bean is a bit like flipping through some smart stoner’s impeccably refined record collection. All the correct drone-rock references are present: the Velvet Underground at their beachiest, the Autobahn liftoff of vintage Seventies Kraut-rock, the Eighties drug-punk of Spaceman 3, recent…
Anti
For much of 2015, repeated delays and a lack of solid information started to make Rihanna’s Anti feel like pop’s mythical creature. Now that we know it’s real, we can hear the singer’s eighth LP for what it is: a sprawling masterpiece of psychedelic soul that’s far more straightforward than its…
All I Need
“When I look at you, the drums all start beating,” Foxes sings on “Amazing,” just before she loses control of her wild heart and a swirl of strings, background voices and handclaps carry her skyward. There’s really no fire that Foxes thinks can’t be improved by the addition of gasoline….
Don’t You
Wet get one moment right — perfect, really — then stretch it out into an entire album on Don’t You. The Brooklyn trio’s debut draws power from a softly lurching weightlessness, the few seconds of suspended animation when the whole world falls away and you have few seconds of peace before gravity…
The Ghosts of Highway 20
With blowsy, parched vocals, languorous tempos, straggly melodies and flyaway guitar lines, Lucinda Williams’ 12th album feels a little like an alt-country picture of Dorian Gray. You could also call it a portrait of the artist as an older woman: time-scarred, unapologetic, but still potent. Yeah, it’s literary; yeah, it’s…
Wonderful Crazy Night
Elton John opens his 32nd studio album by looking back in delight. “Some things you don’t forget/Some things just take a hold,” he sings with relish in the title song, a jaunty recollection of lasting love at first sight. The music framing that glee – “Loose clothes and a cool,…
Islah
On his major-label debut, Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates is not afraid to be as flashy, daring and intense as he was on the five acclaimed mixtapes he’s released since 2013. He’s a rapper’s rapper, a lyrical Evel Knievel without any desire for a cloying pop crossover; it should be mentioned…
Heaven Adores You
For an artist who inspired as intense devotion, and was as prolific, as Elliott Smith, it comes as some surprise that the Portland singer-songwriter’s archive – chock-full of unreleased songs, fascinating demos and illuminating alternate takes – hasn’t been excavated more thoroughly over the years. Arriving nearly a decade after the posthumous compilation…
Majid Jordan
Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman are merchants of mood. Performing together as Majid Jordan – Al Maskati sings, Ullman produces – the Toronto duo helped write and produce Drake’s 2013 hit “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” a pop confection that was really a deep house track at its core. That song…
Let Me Get By
With the Allman Brothers retired, the jam scene’s southern division needs a new top dog, and the TTB sound like it here. They’re no Xerox: Guitar hero Derek Trucks has a bit more freedom than the Allmans provided – see the dreamy raga-style acoustic coda (“Swamp Raga for Holzapfel, Lefebvre,…
Is the Is Are
As soon as one shoegaze revival ends, another one starts up. While many in the latest generation are content to pile on tons of effects to make up for bland songwriting, Brooklyn pedal-board hoarders DIIV’s second album finds them eager to prove there’s more to them than ambience. Many of…
Down to My Last Bad Habit
Vince Gill is an encyclopedia of country tradition, whether he’s reviving western swing with the Time Jumpers, producing new standard-bearer Ashley Monroe, or wrapping his Oklahoma high tenor around “Sad One Comin’ On (Song for George Jones)” – a note-perfect honky-tonk weeper about the king of honky-tonk weepers. That’s the…
Pool
“How many more of these sad songs can one boy write?” Aaron Maine asked on an early release in 2011. It was almost like he was giving himself a dare. He’s written a boatload of sad songs over the last few years (as Porches and under other aliases) – good…
Khalifa
Will Khalifa be the Wiz Khalifa album listeners make it all the way through? Perhaps, but it won’t be an especially memorable task. Even as the Pittsburgh rapper builds on the darker, trap-influenced vibe of 2014’s Blacc Hollywood, his lyrics cling to the themes that have worked for him in the past: his success and…
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