I thoroughly enjoyed watching A Hard Day’s Night. I first heard The Beatles before I could speak. Many people do. They’re not just an institution, they are the institution. Every piece of music currently made is in some way in conversation with The Beatles.
So, it’s astonishing to see them as just a bunch of very, very likable lads getting up to hijinks. It’s fun to see Ringo run a visual joke or John rebel against their manager. It’s magical to see the boys they were.
Of course, the magic is the music. The movie finds space for a lot of music and the album finds even more. “And I Love Her” is the first great McCartney ballad and the centerpiece of the movie. John’s edge in “I’ll Cry Instead” and “You Can’t Do That” is emphasized both by his performance in the movie and by the songs being cut from it.
For all four of the Beatles, watching the movie and then revisiting the album has shown me things I never understood about them. The majority of the movie is four lads from Manchester running away from teenage girls and enjoying every moment of it. I wish they had been able to do that forever.
Overnight fame early in one’s career can be a difficult cross to bear. The Strokes stuck the landing on their very first try with Is This It twenty-five years ago, and nearly every release since has followed a similar trajectory in public perception. First, people hate it (“Not as good as Is This It!”); then it grows on them; and finally, in hindsight, the album is heartily accepted as a beloved addition to the discography. It happened to First Impressions of Earth (2006). It happened to Angles (2011). Hell, it even happened to Room on Fire (2003) which is basically an extended cut of Is This It.
It’s no surprise, then, that Reality Awaits has received a lukewarm response at best. Yes, it’s not as approachable as its predecessor, the Grammy-winning The New Abnormal(2020). Yes, it’s more “Voidz-forward” than most of the Strokes’ output so far. But nowhere on this seventh album do the Strokes compromise on the quality of their sound. Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. on interlocked guitars, Fab Moretti’s metronomic drums, Julian Casablancas’ melodic vocals, Nikolai Fraiture’s tight bass – it’s all there, as perfectly in-step as it was twenty-five years ago. In fact, their sound is arguably more multi-faceted and confident now than it’s ever been.
And sure, let’s get this out of the way first: the Autotune. For the most part (and this may sound like a hot take if you gave up on the album after the jump-scare opener “Psycho Shit”), the Autotune is rather tastefully applied. When Casablancas uses it sparingly as a conscious vocal effect – as on “Going Shopping” or on “Lonely in the Future” – it offers a lackadaisical nonchalance that’s not that different from his classic distortion sound on Is This It or Room on Fire.
It’s also fair to say that there are parts of the album where the Autotune overshadows everything else. “Falling out of Love” features devastating lyrics about drifting away from a person who was probably the love of your life; unfortunately, the egregious Autotune over the song’s entire runtime shrouds everything in an impenetrable cloak of detachment. Album closer “Tyrants of the Mellow Moon” feels hastily stitched together between Autotune-heavy laments and more natural vocals, giving the uncomfortable feel of a human-robot duet.
That being said, it’s important to note that Casablancas’ vocal modulation is always an active artistic choice, rather than a cover-up for a lack of vocal ability. This is unlike, for example, Charli xcx, who freely admits that she uses Autotune out of laziness.
Now that that’s out of the way – Reality Awaits is jam-packed with some of the best songs that the band has ever created. Thematically, the album centers on a Casablancas favorite: the perils and effects of late-stage capitalism. “Dine N’Dash” features moody guitars and Moretti’s machine-like drums around the concept of consuming your way through life without the intention to pay – like the pop-culture trope of millennials endlessly window-shopping on Zillow. “Going Shopping” is an irresistible, summery track with a sharp commentary on the so-called “little treat economy”; it’s no coincidence that they got Walmart ambassador Walton Goggins to star in the music video.
“Lonely in the Future” is a sparkly, fun diss track about unoriginality and lack of artistic appreciation in the music industry. On the bare-bones (no drums!) “Liar’s Remorse”, Casablancas traverses a bewitching array of melodies while commenting on people increasingly absolving themselves of emotional agency (“Listen to the AI tell you what to do today” is not even a farfetched concept anymore).
“Going to Babble On” is probably the most “old-school Strokes” song on the album, full of tight instrumentals and beautiful melodies that keep you hooked from start to finish; never mind that Casablancas is critiquing the lack of critical thinking in society today (“Doesn’t anybody wanna know what’s going on?”). The funky, alluring “Fruits of Conquest” presents a handful of interesting ideas – bongos, an almost bossa-nova groove, and the seeds of defiance (“They don’t obey so we won’t obey”).
In short, Reality Awaits is perfectly named: an eyes-wide-open distillation of what’s happening out in the real world today. Musically, it’s a great continuation from The New Abnormal and, for fellow side-project enjoyers, from the Voidz’ Virtue (2018). Every listen rewards with another layer of the band’s ever-evolving sound: the secret to their continued relevance for twenty-five years and counting. And if you’re still not feeling up to it – well, to quote Julian: “You don’t get it, it’s a pity / Maybe you’ll catch up sooner rather than later.”
Music, Fashion, Film is an album lacking in both good music and good ideas. I do not believe that it achieves a single one of its goals. It’s not an interesting enough experiment, it’s not an honest enough confessional and it’s not good enough as a rock album, a pop album or as a mixture of the two.
She does not have the voice for the rock styles that she chooses. It is particularly bad in the obnoxious and boring opener “Rock Music” that would be appropriative were it not so slight. It gets no better with the following “SS26” that adds a shallow cynicism and a hollow mock-profundity to the already uninteresting music.
The rock in Music, Film, Fashion is superficial. Hyperpop has already taken a great deal from rock. 100 gecs and Rina Sawayama have both mined ’00s rock to make fascinating music but they were able to do that because they clearly grew up with those sounds. Charli was clearly listening to Britney and N*SYNC instead and so she has an incredible ear for modern pop but this album shows no such understanding of rock.
She pulls two great sounds from her rock foray though. The first half of “Card Declined” and the chorus of “I’m Afraid” are both excellent. She gets harsher and harder with her rock and that works much better than the rest of the album. It makes me wish that rather than the anodyne rock she takes from for the acceptable but forgettable “Persona” and “Yeah” she had found Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill. I would have loved a Charli riot grrrl album.
She has some other decent music in “wink wink” and “2007”. They are both good Charli pop but nothing novel. “Camera” is more interesting and has both a strong opening and chorus. It also has some of her better lyrics on a very weak album lyrically. I’ve been listening to Charli for a long time. I saw her when she opened for Marina and the Diamonds. I saw her when it was me and a dozen other people at a free concert in the Golden Gate Park. I don’t claim to know her as a result but I can say that she’s much more convincing when she talks about ambition or hedonism than she ever gets in the introspection of this album.
This is fittingly at its worst at the end of the album. “No One Lasts Forever” is boring music and boring thinking and then made much worse by a trite David Cronenberg outro. It, like the rest of the album, is nearly devoid of originality.
Little Simz takes this short, almost entirely collaborative EP to try a more popular sound. It works well. It’s not her most individual or her most interesting work but it’s a new and effective mode for her and a fun 13 minutes.
Like all of us, Vince Staples is working through America. He’s not new to this. Baldwin once said that to be conscious is to be in constant rage. Vince is more fatalistic. He holds resignation in the standout chorus “White flag / I don’t wanna fight no more” and yet he cannot help but speak.
He speaks well too. The rapping in Cry Baby is never as challenging as his best work but the album is consistently propulsive and the slight move into party rap for “Go! Go! Gorilla” works well for him as does the combination of funk and politics of the song. Cry Baby is not Vince at his most experimental but it’s nice to see him a bit relaxed and he does great work in any mode.
“STAMPEDE” has the energy a song needs when it channels TV on the Radio. When the album has energy, it is very strong. “LIFE KEEPS GOING” has a great beat, a great beat shift and a fun dash of Robyn. “THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE” raps well and has fun voiceovers. “DEATH CULT ZOMBIE” is a fun Clash-style song. Unfortunately, the energy flags too often and so an album with lots of styles and lots of ideas sags under its own weight.
In “the cure”, Olivia sings the tremendous couplet “Used to play a game in my head when I’d date a guy / Tally up the girls that he fucked ‘til I started to cry” and she sings it softly as she matches an indie rock backing and indie twee music video to it. This rock swells and grows as she does over until it crests in self-acceptance. This is why you seem pretty sad is exceptional. She matches music to emotion masterfully and so crafts a spectacular narrative across the entire album.
Her flexibility allows for this. “the cure” could be a Phoebe Bridgers cut, “stupid song” shows her in Taylor mode, “expectations” draws from Madonna. When she brings in Robert Smith for “what’s wrong with me,” their vocal harmony is a pleasure.
I do wish however that she was able to transcend her influences. She keeps each song within genre lines and none of her forays truly approach the best of each of their respective classes. She often comes close though. I love the riot grrl of “my way” and her caustic lines are expertly placed in her narrative of the shaping and reshaping of her own personality. “u+me = <3” is very well crafted pop and “I know everybody changes but I hope we don’t / Carve our names into the carseat leather” are great lines.
More saliently, does it make sense to quibble over whether the songs are genre-bending when the album moves so freely? Does it make sense to say that the songs are merely very good when the album is exceptional? It is no matter, for you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is truly an exceptional album.
Even if you haven’t yet heard their music, you might have seen clips of Angine de Poitrine around social media already; their polka-dotted, masked presence is hard to mistake for anything else. In the same vein as Daft Punk and Glass Beams, Angine de Poitrine materialized from the outset with their own lore – the stated story here being that they are a pair of space-faring, music-loving aliens called Khn and Klek de Poitrine.
So, behind the mystery, what are they really? At the heart of it, Angine de Poitrine is a math rock band that deals primarily in microtones – the notes outside of the traditional 12-note Western system. The duo combines the inherent jaggedness of microtonal music with a phenomenal sense of melody and rhythm to result in a free-flowing yet utterly groovy cacophony of sounds; think alien jazz-rock. Throw in the looping skills of the guitarist-slash-bassist plus their inimitable visual presentation, and you’ve got yourself a viral band indeed.
The duo released their first album, Vol.I, back in 2024, and are now back with Vol. II in April of this year. Over a thirty-six minute run-time on Vol.II, Angine de Poitrine take us on a kaleidoscopic, frenetic journey unlike anything else.
“Fabienk” opens with the sparse squawks of what could be an alien spaceship; gradually, layer by layer, the song unfolds into a hard-charging banger that could, say, soundtrack the boss level of an indie video game. “Mata Zyklek” is a firecracker of a rock song – one could easily imagine Cadillac using this for new commercials in place of Led Zep’s “Rock and Roll”.
With “Utzp”, the aliens go in a totally different direction: a simple melody set against staccato upbeats could remind the listener of a Greek wedding song, or perhaps Eastern European polka. “Sarniezz” opens with a thick bass riff that eventually takes center stage, shaping and molding the guitar and drums.
The psychedelic “Yor Zarad” masters the art of hypnotic repetition, interspersed with just enough melody to imbue the track with a sense of irrepressibility. “Angor”, the final track of the album (although we found that the order of listening doesn’t really matter), utilizes switches in rhythmic pattern and a mesmerizing microtonal melody that snakes into your brain and keeps you locked in.
Just as a side note (and this is purely a matter of opinion), Vol. II does get a little overwhelming in the second half of the album, especially if one is listening all the way through; there’s just too many ideas, snippets, concepts that the band brings up through the interminable layers, leading to a sort of mental fatigue trying to process everything. However, your mileage may vary; perhaps you’ll listen to Vol. II and wish for a Vol. III that’s twice as long.
Aside from the microtones and the masks, there’s another reason that Angine de Poitrine went viral this year. The band came into the limelight in early 2026 with an extremely well-received KXEP set, at the same time when AI had started looming, like a Death Star birthed by evil billionaires, over anything creative or human. Ironically, this duo of so-called aliens became a symbol of anti-AI – because no AI model could ever produce something as creative, random and unusual as Angine de Poitrine.
@anginedepoitrineofficiel have been breaking the internet for weeks now. Is surreal art and music like this going to proliferate in a world where anyone can create music and media with the push of a button? Is it a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as AI-produced music is going mainstream? Are there echoes of past art movements such as Impressionism, Abstract Art, Dadaism? #AI#anginedepoitrine#aimusic#genai#arthistory#arthistorytiktok#microtonal#artificialintelligence
As with all well-crafted instrumental music, this album stays with you. Angine de Poitrine are experts at weaving in intricate melodies, counter to and in between motifs that they’ve been building for some time. It’s those melodies that stay with you and keep you coming back for yet another listen.
I find myself surprisingly emotional listening to The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The best of the Beatles albums, Revolver, turns 60 this year and the best of the Beatles will turn 84 and somehow Sir Paul is still making music. He’s more bluesy than in his youth and his rock is harder and his voice is rougher. He’s often searching for the beauty of his truly great melodies and he never finds them and the rock never gets as complicated as one would like. It doesn’t matter. This is Paul McCartney, making music that he clearly enjoyed making and that I truly enjoyed hearing. This is a delight.
This is very competent indie rock. “What’s Right” is well done, well constructed music. Similarly, “Burn It Down” is crafted well. It’s good a good instrumental break and lots of nice sparkles in the sound. It’s unfortunate then that it has nothing to say. “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Wood” has some nice music but doesn’t match the wit of an incredible title. I come to indie rock like this for the epigrams and the razor blades and without that cleverness, an album like this sounds hollow.
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