Category: Reviews

After overcoming a two-year creative paralysis, Kendrick’s new album is like peering into an unsettling and refracted kaleidoscope lens on our own time.

The Toronto jazz group’s latest full-length flourishes from the strength of its guest appearances, and rewards as a result of re-listening.

On her new album, Little Simz has found a way to explore her more conceptual ambitions without sacrificing authenticity or honesty; without losing sight of the artistic voice that she has so clearly found and made her own.

Returning for its second edition proper and tripling in size, Gilles Peterson’s festival is testament to the scene and community which birthed it. A growing ‘family’ created out of a love for the music which makes it.

Chiko Chinyadza puts it himself in his Spotify bio: “each track getting one step closer to finding my sound”. And as part of that journey, ‘Hello World’ definitely feels like a step in the right direction.

Collaborating with his dad after a near death experience, Mockasin returns to his hectic, mischievous musical laboratory with his father in tow, indicating that irreverence runs in the family.

As with all untimely deaths we’ll always be eager for a broader insight into what could’ve been with Pop Smoke’s potential. Does the second posthumous collection of his tracks satiate this eagerness or dilute the influential drill music that made his meteoric rise to fame?

Maidza gets fearless with her new EP, and with the chameleonic, genre-defiant artist at the fore, Australian hip-hop is poised for a renaissance.

Dacus’ new album is witty and frank, juvenile and mature, messy and refined all at once, staking a claim for one of 2021’s albums of the year.