First Listen: Mothers, ‘When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired’
These songs feel like a snapshot of a time getting left behind rather than lived in, performed by a riveting, honest band.
Tag: NPR
Review: Santigold, ’99¢’
After a hiatus, the versatile, genre-smashing Santi White returns with a collection of playful, fun songs that reveal more of her personal voice than ever.
Chelsea Wolfe: Tiny Desk Concert
Last year’s Abyss saw Chelsea Wolfe make her metallic tendencies explicit. At the Tiny Desk with just an electric guitar, she takes three songs back to their primal form.
First Listen: Wolfmother, ‘Victorious’
Just as an arena is built to hold anyone and everyone, Wolfmother’s arena-rock is designed to contain everything that inspires it.
First Listen: Carrie Rodriguez, ‘Lola’
The veteran singer and fiddler combines seemingly disparate influences into a single, gloriously cohesive Spanglish statement.
Review: Birds Of Chicago, ‘Real Midnight’
J.T. Nero and Allison Russell like to describe the music they make as “secular gospel.” Their new album together is full of nostalgia, farewells and looming finales.
Review: BJ The Chicago Kid, ‘In My Mind’
The Windy City soul man has established himself as a supreme collaborator; his Motown debut features guest spots from Kendrick Lamar and Chance The Rapper.
Review: Africaine 808, ‘Basar’
The Berlin duo’s club music transcends dance-floor stereotypes through extreme juxtapositions, while drawing its power from a TR 808 drum machine and a world of sound.
Review: Prins Thomas, ‘Principe Del Norte’
These nine pieces expand to nearly 100 minutes of “cosmic disco” music, soundtracking a voyage into the deepest spaces of the mind.
Car Seat Headrest: Tiny Desk Concert
Will Toledo is a wordsmith with a vision, wrapping his faults and frailties in a DIY sound that’s still finely crafted. Watch him perform three songs in the NPR Music offices.
First Listen: The Suffers, ‘The Suffers’
The Houston band’s sound is steeped in what it calls “Gulf Coast Soul,” but it also channels ska, Southern hip-hop, classic soul, rock ‘n’ roll and especially reggae.
First Listen: Rokia Traoré, ‘Né So’
The Malian singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist returns with a gorgeous album focused on the idea of home.
Review: KING, ‘We Are KING’
The R&B trio, whose 2011 debut EP broke the Internet, finally follows it with an album of dreamy, idiosyncratic, self-produced soul music.
Review: Junior Boys, ‘Big Black Coat’
The long-running duo returns with another set of inventive, era-spanning, synth-driven techno-pop that sets Jeremy Greenspan’s alternately husky and delicate voice against synthetic backgrounds.
Review: Sidestepper, ‘Supernatural Love’
Richard Blair reassembles his innovative Afro-Colombian pop band, and the result never looks back. Instead, it shimmers and percolates while ignoring boundaries altogether.
Review: Lucinda Williams, ‘The Ghosts Of Highway 20’
The singer-songwriter’s new double-length set is a road album of a sort, as well as a remarkable distillation of Williams’ writerly gifts.
Review: Dr. Dog, ‘The Psychedelic Swamp’
The Philly psych-rock band revisits some of its earliest material, now fully fleshed out. Loopy, charming idiosyncrasy abounds.
Review: Elliott Smith, ‘Heaven Adores You’
The soundtrack to a new documentary inventories the periphery of the late singer’s catalog: unheard early recordings, instrumentals, collaborations, live appearances and other illuminating footnotes.
Wolf Alice: Tiny Desk Concert
Wolf Alice’s music can be noisy and primal, but at the Tiny Desk it showed a different side, as it performed three songs from 2015’s My Love Is Cool.
First Listen: Aubrie Sellers, ‘New City Blues’
On Sellers’ debut album, the “garage country” artist’s songwriting makes her accounts of losing control feel like deliberate, calibrated catharsis.