Pop

Don’t you just miss it when songs don’t try to be overly complex? Like when it allows you to just hit play, catch a feeling, and let yourself get carried away with whatever impulsive decision it’s suggesting? For some reason, Drea Dominique’s Roll gets it so well. Her path to indie R&B has taken a

There’s something beautifully compelling about making a song out of every reason people gave you to quit. You just answer them with a quiet, stubborn, “no looking back.” The studio must have been full of the kind of energy that makes you believe anything is possible with QUINTESSE feat. KARL JOSEF’s latest release, On my

You just gotta love it when an artist doesn’t pretend the mess around them isn’t real. They throw it onto the table and say, “Yeah, let’s talk about it.” Trey Bruce’s All Americans sounds exactly like that, no sugarcoating needed. Three decades of writing songs probably explains why Bruce knows exactly what he wants to

Some nights call for fogged-up windows, warm skin, a little reassurance, and a song as catchy and intoxicating as GlowDriver’s latest release, Tell Me. A repeated “tell me baby” could easily go wrong, but somehow, GlowDriver makes it work. What could feel excessive instead becomes a hook, a pulse, and a little spell through contemporary

Sandy Martin’s “Ice Candy” is a song about a goddess who has existed since before time, possesses enough power to treat the universe as her personal playground and still cannot find someone to love. This is, objectively, a lot to ask a pop song to explain before the second verse. Fortunately, Martin approaches the premise

Franxie’s “Stone” could have gone in the way of a particular kind of singer-songwriter who treats emotional distress as an opportunity to place one sad piano chord beneath another until the listener understands that sadness has occurred. Instead, it finds something more interesting in the familiar territory of anxiety, exhaustion, and the difficult business of