Katie Presley
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The rapper turned pop singer's accessible, soaring voice is propelled by genuine charisma and heart, as she constructs her savvy, sweet pop out of sonically irresistible ingredients.
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The Canadian singer and producer makes user-friendly, irresistible pop music from an expressly feminist perspective. On her first full-length album, she wields many tools to do it.
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Shara Worden's music sounds both micro-orchestrated and entirely, ecstatically spontaneous. Every song here is a mission statement and a directive; each is propulsive and demanding of full attention.
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The singer's lo-fi solo debut has the earnest immediacy of Kimya Dawson and the ukulele-driven poignancy of Magnetic Fields. But it's powered by a subversive, fearlessly revealed rock 'n' roll heart.
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More than half the songs on Blue Dream feature the word "love" somewhere, and every moment of Fink's performance sounds as if it's being sung into someone's ear, not a microphone.
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As implied in her second album's title, the Finnish songwriter makes haunting, revelatory music for hidden places. Wagner sings for the dead; she digs past the heart of any matter and into bone.
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Millennial social anxiety pairs with breezy, effortlessly cool surf-rock on Alvvays, and the combination is irresistible. The Toronto band's beach-pop seems to come straight from the California shore.
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Hello Memory is synth-driven, youthful electro-pop, but there's substance to it, too. Little Daylight sounds breezy and grounded, heady and cerebral, with its feet on the ground even as it soars.
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Cold Beat, the new project of Grass Widow bassist Hannah Lew, represents the best of new wave — in title, metaphor and roster of influences alike. It's an exercise in controlled chaos.
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The Swedish singer's third album forms the final installment in a conceptual trilogy — and it's extraordinary as both a collection of songs and a tactical re-wiring of her genre's circuit board.