pitchfork

pitchfork reviewed Day and Night by Carly Rae Jepsen 4h

7.5

Carly Rae Jepsen’s sprawling new double album celebrates full-time love and commitment with sweet, sunny tracks for Day and sleeker, dancier songs for Night. — It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single Carly Rae Jepsen record must be in want of its other half. A year after the Canadian pop star released her breakthrough record, 2015’s E•MO•TION, she returned with E•MO•TION Side B. 2019’s Dedicated received similar treatment. By the time Jepsen released the companion album to 2022’s The Loneliest Time, the “surprise” drop hardly registered. This brand of excess is key to Jepsen’s charm. Here is a singer who’ll repeat the word “really” six times in a row in a song’s chorus, just to make sure you really get the message; who claimed she wrote 200 songs for one 12-track record, then another hundred for her next one. Her latest album, Day and Night, tweaks her formula of abundance slightly, offering—in a CRJ first—a full double album upfront. As its title suggests, the record comprises two distinct themes: sweet, sunny tracks for Day; sleeker, dancier songs for Night. Working with a familiar stable of producers and co-writers, she turns out a sprawling album filled with loose, breezy tracks offset by the occasional pop gem and charming left-field details. Day hews mostly to the windswept ballads and disco-inflected pop that Jepsen moved toward on her previous set of records: “After All” and “Something Tragic” are lightly psychedelic, her voice all breathy and urgent; there’s a little chillwave on “Habits of Creatures,” a little folk on “Wild Child.” Night is more strictly synth-pop: “Don’t Leave Me on the Dancefloor” is the cleanest ABBA homage she’s ever managed, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the ultra-yearning “That’s Just Me” as a deep-cut E•MO•TION castoff. Day and Night’s sprawl is a double-edged sword. Though the production is usually layered and finely detailed, most songs don’t contain the razor-sharp hooks that usually make Jepsen’s work so indelible. In their absence, each side becomes a little unwieldy, and both Day and Night sag in their second halves. Only a fool would doubt that the prolific Jepsen could write 24 full tracks for a vaguely conceptual double album—but one wonders if a more focused, refined concept would better sustain its momentum. But perhaps a pared-back version of this record wouldn’t allow for the strange, quasi-experimental detours that populate it. She sneaks in a few bars of understated bossa nova on Day’s closing track and a sitar-like solo toward the end of “Soft.” The clubby production in the middle stretch of Night is entrancing, and it’s exhilarating when she introduces delightfully discordant synth stabs on “Near or Far” and a quick, frenetic breakdown at the end of “Hold Me to the Light.” A decade ago, Jepsen’s main concern was hammering perfect ’80s synth-pop from a dozen different angles; Day and Night makes it clear she’s now reaching for new ambitions, with a broader, bolder palette. For all this range, her lyrics are focused on core CRJ concerns: pining, lovesickness, crushes. Opener “After All” is an ode to domestic bliss, envisioning a life where all she needs is a “baby, one bedroom apartment/Daddy and me.” Then we’re off in a whirlwind of new love and memories thereof. Heartache is contained to a few tracks halfway through Day—“Wild Child” is about the inevitable pains of romance, while “Good Fine Alright” and “Something Tragic” wade through post-breakup blues—and after that, we scarcely hear of it again. Here, art reflects life: By the time she was making Day and Night in earnest, Jepsen was falling in love with her now-husband, musician Cole M.G.N., who’s also a producer on the album; by the time the record was being mixed, she was pregnant with her first child. As a result, the tracklist teems with songs about the ecstasy of fresh romance and the dream of turning infatuation into stability. A couple times on the album, Jepsen directly confronts the question of what we inherit from our lineages. On “Motivation,” she ponders her identity inside and outside her family of origin. It’s a topic worthy of careful excavation, though she hits the chorus with all the depth of a throw pillow: “We go hard in this family/Tear it up in this family,” she sings assuredly over an aggressively cheery beat, “I’m in love with my family/We’ve got room for insanity.” On the meditative closing track “Super Sage,” she’s no less overt but a little more probing; when she sings, “I’m controlling like my mother/But I barely even touch her,” it’s an unexpectedly vulnerable admission in a song about the leap of faith required by commitment. For all the record’s highs and lows, it’s touching that Jepsen's most wide-ranging, exploratory album comes at this transformative moment of married life and new motherhood. After all, what’s a greater experiment than making a promise of forever? What’s more psychedelic, more of a total immersion into the unexpected, than bringing new life into the world? In the video for “After All,” a very pregnant Jepsen dances around an apartment, eventually falling into the arms of a lover. It’s a little surreal, a little trippy, totally joyous—as if her contentment, rather than a source of stasis, is a portal into somewhere much wilder.

pitchfork reviewed Pylon by beabadoobee 4h

7.2

Members of Turnstile, Deftones, Paramore, and Pinegrove push Bea Kristi toward slightly grungier, angstier territory on her fourth album. — Last year, the fashion writer Biz Sherbert went to a Deftones concert in Atlanta and interviewed attendees before the show. The 2020s revitalization of the alt-metal pioneers is pretty well established at this point, but Sherbert’s documentation showed off the band’s popularity with young women specifically; she photographed teenagers and college students in miniskirts and tank tops, many of whom had discovered Deftones algorithmically, through Spotify or TikTok. The scene looked a lot different than the one I remember from seeing the band in 2003 in a sea of black-clad nu-metal bros. One group of young women even called Deftones a “girl band,” exclaiming, “This is girly pop music!” So when Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno shows up to do backing vocals for the last track of Beabadoobee’s latest album, it makes all the sense in the world, Beatrice Laus, currently 26 years old, has made her share of music that could be called “girly pop,” but with her fourth studio album, Pylon, she threads the needle between her usual brand of sweet-but-melancholic pop rock, and a newer, rougher sound. The ingredients that gave 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves its darling tweeness—peppy horns, tender piano—have been replaced with elements that will please anyone who spent their adolescence learning how to professionally glower: tapped harmonics, twirly twin guitar loops, sludgy riffs, screeching feedback. It’s a reverse Sour Patch Kid situation—first Beabadoobee was sweet, now she’s getting sour. To solidify the vibe shift, Laus has tapped an impressive breadth of alt-rock stars from the past couple of decades. Besides Moreno, we get vocals from Hayley Williams, guitar and songwriting contributions from Title Fight’s Shane Moran, one song co-written with Evan Stevens Hall from Pinegrove (one of Laus’s favorite bands, to the point of her getting a Pinegrove neck tattoo last year), and an appearance from Turnstile’s Brendan Yates so dour that, at first listen, I thought he was Bladee. The guestlist is stacked, but nothing on the album sounds particularly like Pinegrove or Deftones or Title Fight (Paramore is maybe the closest comp). Rather, the guests seem like they’re here to gently cheer on the grunge-ification of typical Beabadoobee mode: easily digestible lyrics about the turbulent emotions of young adulthood with sticky, straightforward melodies. Laus’ 2020 album Fake It Flowers had its share of dissonance, but Pylon is much more committed to getting heavy. The title track opens the album and sets the tone, building a churning, Goo Goo Dolls-y string arrangement to complement Laus’ somewhat oblique simile about long-distance relationships and electricity pylons, then pulling the pin on a grenade of distortion, its static crackling loud enough to scratch your eardrums raw. “Radio” juices an I bet you think this song is about you theme with a big, sarcastic guitar riff that zigzags over a thick bed of fuzz. Laus’ voice, always a source of lightness in her songs, has developed a pleasant, fluttery vibrato over the past couple of years, but the moments when she tries to match the intensity of the music by pushing her vocals to the edge—snarling on the pop punk-ish “Sun Has Set,” or shouting “Honesty is hard to come by!” amid snarky gang vocals on “In Motion”—draw attention to how hard she has to work to sound pissed off. It actually feels more interesting when she lets the radiance of her vocals shine over the more abrasive sounds. This contrast is best demonstrated on “Write Me a Letter,” an indie pop track that turns into a mall-punk anthem midway through. “Need you to stay/You make me better,” Laus sings with maximum earnestness, her voice soaring over crunching, syncopated guitars that would have gone crazy auto-playing on a MySpace profile in 2006. Sunnier energy arrives on tracks like “Memories,” a morsel of dream pop about being so over the moon for someone that you don’t even care if you’re not their type, and “Estranged,” where Laus sounds pretty upbeat despite existing in a state of uncomfortable ambivalence: “Feeling estranged, yeah/I gotta mean it/Beat it/But I don’t want to feel it.” A lot of soft-focus “it”s appears throughout Pylon: “Weigh it down,” “Gotta get away from it,” “I make it/You waste it/I own it/You know it,” “I know it’s just a matter of time/To get it off my mind.” The simplicity in Laus’ songwriting lays the groundwork for jumbo-sized hooks, but sometimes it leaves me wishing for a little more substance to hold onto. Still, for all the conventional rhymes and default “la la la” and “na na na”s, there are at least a few instances of minimalist brilliance. Her statement “I’m sick of the obnoxious dark” on “Spark,” for one, works largely because it made me realize the word “obnoxious” has a great mouthfeel and should be used more in pop songwriting. And on the title track, her desire for a long-distance partner to “hold me like a screen” brings a surprising romance to the action of FaceTiming. After all, what do we cuddle most passionately and consistently in life if not our phones? The standout track is “Switchblade,” whose off-kilter guitars and indolent drumming draws up a very specific mid-’90s alt-rock vibe, triangulated somewhere between Beck, Incubus, and Butthole Surfers. Laus is sick of riding the emotional sine wave of one’s twenties, a cycle of highs and lows with no end, or happy medium, in sight. “Growing old just seems to break everything that we mend,” she sings over grinding guitars, then cedes the floor to a shouty outro that evokes pissed-off schoolchildren. It’s a neat move: channeling post-anger exhaustion rather than anger but leaving the instrumentation to simmer menacingly underneath her muted affect. The more Laus plays with contrast and texture, the more she breaks from her conventions; the more she breaks from those conventions, the more compelling she gets.

pitchfork reviewed Secret To Spare by Jawdropped 4h

7.0

On its debut album, the refreshingly sincere L.A. power-pop quartet wears its heart—and its influences—on its sleeve. — As Jawdropped tell it, Los Angeles isn’t such a bad home for aspiring musicians. Practice spaces are generally easy to come by. Transporting gear to the gig is no problem—you’re already used to sitting in your car all the time. For every DIY venue that shutters, there’s a new one ready to pop in another neighborhood just a touch less gentrified. And most importantly, cutting your teeth in such a sprawling creative hotbed means there’s a good chance of crossing paths with likeminded people who each have their own complicated feelings about what it means to “make it.” That creative hotbed is where Jawdropped met, anyway, and its characters serve as the nexus for the quartet’s debut album, Secret to Spare. Vocalist Kyra Morling, vocalist/guitarist Roman Zangari, bassist Sean Edwards, and drummer Cook Lee-Chobanian are longtime Angelenos who, all in their 30s, have accumulated plenty of experience across a slew projects that never quite took off. They formed Jawdropped a little over two years ago, solidifying their early friendship by attending an Evan Dando show together and exploring crunchy power-pop of their own on their 2025 EP, Just Fantasy. But the Lemonheads’ influence becomes even clearer on Secret to Spare, as early as the first ten seconds of opener “The Line,” where Morling counts off a rush of sunny, major-key guitar chords that feel lifted straight from It’s a Shame About Ray. But where Dando’s narrators were often disaffected or passive, Jawdropped pride themselves on wearing their hearts as blatantly as their influences on their sleeves. They’re far from their generation’s first band to namecheck Paul Westerberg, Teenage Fanclub, and Dinosaur Jr. in one breath, but there’s a refreshing sincerity to their ’90s revivalism: “I’m just not interested in coming off mysterious or cool,” Zangari has said, distinguishing himself from the myriad zoomers who made cribbing Deftones fashionable. “Monday,” a pop-punkish early single about overcoming hesitance toward telling somebody how you really feel, forges some transparent urgency: ”If I wait one more day/I might go insane/Cause I’m just wasting time,” Morling and Zangari sing in unison, their overlapping vocals lending a bar-band warmth to their self-produced fidelity. Across Secret to Spare, Jawdropped couch these interpersonal, observational stories in the trepidations of the big-city grind. The muscly, melodic “Cup” reflects on feeling sidetracked after finding temporary fulfillment in ill-advised habits: “Late to arrive/To the first day/That you had to try.” The pummeling, frenetic riffs of “Smoglight” juxtapose its narrator’s exasperation due to overworked nights and dull mornings; over time, Morling’s repeated declarations of “God, it’s so romantic” feel like a last-ditch effort to remind herself it’ll all be worth it. But the highs, Jawdropped argue, can prove just as formidable as the lows. The jangly “Split Lip” reckons with the harsh truth that getting everything you thought you wanted can’t always eclipse your shortcomings, although lines like “Lay your cards on the table/Sign your soul to a major label” feel a bit on the nose. More effective is the midtempo anthem “Whiplash,” where gentle ups-and-downs become nauseatingly consequential without warning, or the balladic “Cellulite,” which measures passing time in clothes outgrown and tattoos acquired in lieu of traditional milestones. “Summer’s a forever feeling, I’m sure,” Morling sings. Add that to Jawdropped’s list of reasons to move to L.A.: At least it always feels like summer.

pitchfork reviewed Angel by Lizzy McAlpine 4h

6.8

After going viral with swooning, rom-com-ready songs, the singer-songwriter takes a more homespun approach on her fourth album, a set of folk-influenced tracks buoyed by a wandering spirit. — After the pandemic hit, aspiring indie-pop phenoms seemed to gravitate towards a few common moves: record a couple of covers of Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher to build an audience; bare your soul to the TikTok algorithm through confessional lyrics; whisper into the microphone like you’re afraid someone might catch you recording alone in your room. Often, just two out of three of these requirements did the trick. It worked for Gracie Abrams, Olivia Rodrigo, and even briefly for Katie Gregson-MacLeod, of “complex” fame. That formula also helped Lizzy McAlpine—a singer-songwriter from Pennsylvania who first garnered attention on social media while a student at Berklee College of Music, uploading videos from home when the pandemic shut down school. Then, her 2022 ballad “Ceilings” sparked a TikTok trend in which people ran away from the camera and passionately belted out its confessional lyrics. The viral success of “Ceilings” epitomized how McAlpine’s early music felt built for a romantic comedy: first swooning, then devastation in the third act. But for her fourth album, Angel, she takes a more homespun approach. McAlpine sounds less like a heroine of a coming-of-age film than a songwriter at an open mic, testing out material for an audience primed to turn songs into snippets. Before her third studio album, Older, McAlpine parted ways with producers Philip Etherington and Ehren Ebbage, who were responsible for some of her early hits and had a more cinematic pop flair. Instead, she began working with a live band, making secular songs reminiscent of contemporary worship music. It’s not necessarily the subject matter of songs like “Spring Into Summer” or “Pushing It Down and Praying”; it’s their swelling arrangements, and the fact that McAlpine has a velvety voice fit for a youth worship leader. She continues that trend on Angel. When she sings of “holy ground” and “sacred spaces” on the album’s lead single “The Light in the Painting,” an organ-laden track that evokes a dew-soaked dawn, you can picture her staring out into the crowd, one hand reaching for the heavens and the other clutching her chest like a Disney heroine. Angel is much more traditionally folk and has little of the glossy production that defined her earlier work. The album is built mostly around tender pianos and twangy guitars with the occasional harmonica and bout of whistling. At times, it sounds like she was inspired to create a soundtrack for her Broadway debut, Floyd Collins, a musical about a man who gets trapped in a cave in Kentucky. “A car wash and a new pair of pants” offers a fun, folksy spin on the traditional pop diss track. Its cadre of guitar, bass, percussion, bongos, and pianos tempts McAlpine with the sound of a full, bustling life, waiting on the other side of a breakup. Since her debut, McAlpine has had a knack for capturing the domestic details of intimacy. On Angel, she describes the tapping of a lover’s fingers (“Angel”), cutting fruit to nourish oneself (“Peach”), and longingly watching someone talk on the phone (“I Have a Friend”). “I Have a Friend” is peak yearning, with some lyrics that are a little too literal: “I have a friend/I have a lover.” But she makes up for it with lines that invite you want to stare out of the window and invent a life with someone—pure daydream fodder: “There is no room/Without your voice to fill it,” she sings, “My mouth is just a straight line/Without your lips to kiss it.” Across Angel, McAlpine wanders, singing of empty houses, winding paths, forks in the road, and uncharted waters. She wanders sonically, too. The rock-influenced, propulsive sound of “The Moon” and “Ugly Things” recalls McAlpine’s debut, then we get “A Car Wash and a New Pair of Pants,” where she lilts like Joni Mitchell on a ’70s Laurel Canyon production. “Soldier of the Road,” featuring Fleet Foxes, doubles down on the indie folk of Older; it’s also the first time we hear McAlpine blend the personal with the sociopolitical, singing about the alienating effects of war and capitalism. These detours make sense: She wrote Angel while listening to Joni Mitchell’s landmark records Hejira and Blue. Their influence seems to have pushed her in a more exploratory direction on these tracks—with any luck, they’ll encourage her to wander more expansively, and truly head somewhere unique.