MUSIC

On February 18, 2022, Beach House, the modern masters of dream-pop, completed the full release of their eighth album, Once Twice Melody, after separating it over four chapters and four months. With the spread-out crawl to the final date, this unique marketing strategy left no clear sign of how Once Twice Melody would fare with album sales. After a few weeks, intriguing developments in the Billboard chart placements for the new Beach House album have illuminated a trend for 2022 as to whose fans are still buying albums. Reaching #1 this week on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart, Beach House and the other chart-toppers of the year confirm that a variety of music fans are stepping up their game in purchasing albums from their favorite artists.

In February, Foals released an album announcement and second single for Life Is Yours, the British band’s seventh studio album. The band is co-producing their upcoming album with three new producers who have shown recent promise. This time around, only three band members receive credit on this Foals album, as they lost their fourth member in 2018 and fifth member in 2021.

After seven albums, Metronomy’s indie electronica has developed from the more challenging experiments of The English Riviera into more streamlined pop music. The level of focus on good-time songs throughout Small World makes for a cohesive if unsurprising listen, but it’s hard to blame the pop songsmiths for staring at the darkness of the world and trying to inject some pure happiness into it. With dynamic energy, Metronomy say with complete earnestness that 'things will be fine' and fervently announce that 'it's good to be back.'

Though only confirmed so far by Conway the Machine himself, it appears that Griselda as a hip-hop collective is now disbanded, at least in its original form. Conway the Machine, whose real name is Demond Price, said in a February 2022 interview that he is no longer a part of Griselda, referring to the record company he started with his brother Westside Gunn. In terms of the rap group of the same name, which released its debut full-length album WWCD in 2019, the future of Griselda remains undetermined.

It’s understandably difficult for a nearly-70-year-old British man to keep things fresh in his music. That’s probably why Elvis Costello’s 21-century musical output has alternated between a classic approach and sounding completely different than before. 2020’s Hey Clockface was the latter, chaotic and unable to decide which direction the mercurial songwriter wants to go. Thankfully, The Boy Named If rights the ship just a bit despite being a similarly messy record, and while it's not as cohesive as Look Now (2018), Costello's newfound energy and passion on the album is undeniably praiseworthy.

It’s hard to believe these classics are now entering their 25th year! Each has cemented its status as required listening for lovers of classic albums, with generation-defining songs and legendary 90s angst distilled to its most potent form. Here are a few albums from 1997 that have earned their reputation.

The genre of art-pop continues to impress into the 2020s, developing into one of the most surprising, colorful, and all-encompassing songwriting approaches of the modern era. When a master songwriter values both individuality and the art of writing a good melody, the results have limitless potential, as evident in the output of Moses Sumney and St. Vincent. Welsh singer Cate Le Bon has slowly grown into the adventurous pop songsmith she has aspired to be since her first album, with her marvelous new album Pompeii marking her most distinctive recording to date.

While underground rap has thrived recently with the rise of Griselda and Armand Hammer, the albums in the mainstream for this decade have reached outside of the tight-knit rap circles and affected many lives. Here are those meaningful, fun, exciting, and devastating albums that have shaped the 2020s so far.

An influx of collaborative tracks is flooding Spotify Release Radars as artists release new music in preparation for the rollout of their 2022 albums. Whether seeing some familiar names or discovering new ones, hip-hop listeners will find each artist below playing to each other's strengths in thrilling ways in their roles as close collaborators or guests.

Since joining J. Cole’s imprint Dreamville Records leading up to their major-label debut Mirrorland released in September 2019, the duo known as EarthGang have had a creatively fruitful time by themselves as well as collaborating with others. Since the signing, they have a trilogy of EPs released with J. Cole as executive producer, their 2019 full-length, a collaborative record with EarthGang affiliates Spillage Village and rapper JID, and inclusion on the Revenge of the Dreamers III compilation. On February 25, 2022, an older, wiser EarthGang released the album Ghetto Gods, fully establishing their sudden fame with contributions from J. Cole, JID, and Future.

Beginning in March 2021, the unstoppable rollout of Silk Sonic dominated the rest of the year, leading up to the release of the group’s debut full-length studio album, An Evening with Silk Sonic. The album received glowing praise from critics and audiences, and the lead single “Leave the Door Open” now has almost 750 million plays on Spotify alone. Even though the album came out in November 2021, the duo already has another single available: a cover of Con Funk Shun's 'Love's Train.' With this release, we can only hope that the promise of more music is soon to follow.

Remember 2018? Though it was still years before the global pandemic of the 2020s, the world was not exactly holding itself together in perfect harmony. In times of heightened emotions, artists from around the globe tend to produce a wealth of inspired, sharply-written music highlighting the fears and insecurities about ourselves and the world.

For any mainstream pop record in 2022, following The Weeknd’s conceptual masterwork Dawn FM will be a nearly impossible feat. Considering that context, the third album from British singer Olly Alexander, also known as Years & Years, falls immensely below the standards set for this year’s pop music. That doesn’t mean it is a failure as an album; Night Call charted as a UK #1 record and succeeded in its mission to be a good-time-celebrating collection of songs. But frankly, listeners looking for the exciting, reliable rewards of a great pop album will probably find only surface thrills on Night Call.

If you need any more convincing, Beach House's eighth album, Once Twice Melody, truly is as good as everyone says. In place of an actual review, here is a celebration of the new music of Beach House, complete with a gallery of stills from the animated artwork for each song!

Navigating the maligned genres labeled “hardcore” is an extensive amount of inspiring bands with intricate music and histories. Whether on the side of punk or metal, these bands revolutionized the meanings of their labels, most either reinventing their approach on every album or sadly breaking up to avoid creative stagnancy.