Anna Tivel has always blurred the line between songwriting and poetry. With each record she refines her ability to draw whole worlds in her lyrical stories, finding light and sorrow in equal measure.
Big Thief… their Double Infinity is a record of continuity and rupture, intimacy and expansion. It feels like their most communal work, stitched together with the voices and playing of friends from the experimental, ambient, and folk underground, while also weaving the precise and universal into the lyric detail.
Georgia Lines sings with a voice that feels both delicate and commanding, as quiet as a whisper caught between piano notes and as powerful as a line soaring above sweeping arrangements. With The Guest House, she reaffirms her ability to move between tenderness and strength while embracing new textures and greater rhythmic variety.
From the first fuzzed-up guitar riff to the final jubilant outro, The Beths’ fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie, reveals a band in full command of its material and entering a new creative phase.
Kathleen Edwards has always been a songwriter who tells stories through the details: a hockey team that cannot win, a car driven across Los Angeles, a door painted pink. Through vivid detail and a deep sense of place, she turns the specific into something relatable and universal.
With The Clearing, their fourth album, Wolf Alice channel every lesson from the past decade into a record that feels elemental in its confidence. This is a band deep in the groove of their own creative force.
New Radiations, the tenth studio album by Marissa Nadler, is a slow-burning, hypnotic immersion into shadowed soundscapes and aching introspection.
With We’re Only Human, his tenth album, Hayes Carll trades the wry observations of modern absurdity for something more introspective and tender, though no less sharp.
In her second album, Pocket Clocks, Hannah Virk stretches her sonic palette and lyrical ambition, as she swaps the domestic interiors of her debut, Upstairs / Downstairs, for a world governed by ticking clocks and algorithmic rhythms. It is a lo-fi, thoughtful, and distinctive meditation on time, technology, and identity, full of charm and intelligence.
On Bit Players, Don and the Divorcees invite us into quiet rooms where we might sit alone, delivering a debut album that leans into subtlety, silences, and songcraft.
