#madison cunningham

[calliopeprelude]

lucy and julien (in the same outfit) with madison cunningham and aoife o’donovan recently! – via aoifemaria on IG

[twopoppies]

This is the link of the article but it's behind a paywall: https://www.thetimes.com/culture/music/article/arenas-and-the-avant-garde-harry-styles-is-changing-the-rules-of-pop-p6tmzxfg2

I've read it through archive.is. The most interesting parts are these ones and the new lyric from the album: https://www.instagram.com/p/DVSD81eCNgU/

The writer also says this about the album: "There’s no sign of a need to expunge the pain in his heart, unlike tormented songwriters ranging from Nick Drake to Lana Del Rey. His new album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, which will be released on Friday, is a winning mix of upbeat rock, electro pop and funk with the odd dash of experimental weirdness, but the lyrics are for the most part as much of a word soup as the album title. Clearly you don’t get to play 30 nights at Madison Square Garden without a lot of grit and drive, but there’s something about Styles that suggests he could take it or leave it."

But I personally find the article a little bit passive aggressive. The writer kind of underestimates him for being a former boy bander through the whole article, he also mentions the pr "girlfriends" (all of them) as a brief comment, compares him to the boys, etc.

Okay. I had to set my VPN to the UK in order to open it; that was the problem. And ew... the article starts off super obnoxious. This author went into this having zero respect for Harry, what he's accomplished, or his artistry.

Curating the Meltdown festival is the ultimate badge of honour for any self-respecting cult artist. In 2002 David Bowie lured the New York punk pioneers Television out of retirement for the annual festival on London’s South Bank. In 2007 Jarvis Cocker introduced the sedate confines of the Queen Elizabeth Hall to the punishing drone of the avant-garde metallers Sunn O))). Meltdown’s guest directors have run the gamut from classical composers (George Benjamin, 1993) to soul divas (Chaka Khan, 2024). Now a 32-year-old former member of a boy band created on The X Factor has joined this elite group. “Harry Styles is a globally influential figure, people are interested in what inspires him and Meltdown is the perfect place to show that,” the Southbank Centre’s artistic director Mark Ball says on why he asked the cute one from One Direction to curate Meltdown 2026. “It’s a sign of how much he’s respected that when we reached out to managers and agents the response was unanimously positive. His kindness and generosity is known throughout the industry.”

(emphasis mine)

But some of it is less snotty (although they can't help themselves in places):

There’s no sign of a need to expunge the pain in his heart, unlike tormented songwriters ranging from Nick Drake to Lana Del Rey. His new album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, which will be released on Friday, is a winning mix of upbeat rock, electro pop and funk with the odd dash of experimental weirdness, but the lyrics are for the most part as much of a word soup as the album title. Clearly you don’t get to play 30 nights at Madison Square Garden without a lot of grit and drive, but there’s something about Styles that suggests he could take it or leave it. “I’d always thought, or hoped, that I was the kind of person who didn’t need the dopamine hits that doing this job often gives you,” Styles says. “But I hadn’t actually removed myself from it and it’s hard to eliminate the doubt that maybe if it all went away, I’d really miss it.” Is it simply that he saw an opportunity and decided to run with it? “It’s more that no part of him is manic or egotistic,” says Madison Cunningham, a 29-year-old singer-songwriter from California who opened for Styles at his Madison Square Garden shows in October 2021. “He’s very focused, a hard worker, yet you feel calmed down by his presence. The first thing he did when we met in the green room was make us all a cup of tea. That’s not typical of a big star.” Nor is it typical for a big star to contact a relatively unknown acoustic songwriter of Joni Mitchellesque introspection directly, as Styles did Cunningham in 2020. “I saw a message from him on Instagram and thought, surely some scam,” she remembers. “It really was the man in the flesh, saying, ‘I’ve already contacted your agent and I hope you can open for me.’ I never thought our worlds would connect, but it showed he had his eyes on some kind of pulse and the ripple effects were life-changing. He’s so badass for doing that, and not just because it impressed my little sister.” What marks Styles out from his fellow guests at pop’s top table is a curiosity about the world beyond himself, aligned with an ability to take good advice from the people around him. “Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed,” goes a line from a song on the new album. “But it’s nothing to do with me.”

This is an odd thing to attribute to Harry Lambert, but I suppose he means the "gender" of fashion.

It was Lambert who encouraged Styles to play around with style and gender — something that wasn’t possible in One Direction and certainly not as a teenager growing up in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire

[...]

But Styles’s willingness to go beyond convention as a modern pop star is what has made him stand out. “Harry loves an album,” Tom Hull, aka the Kent-born, LA-based producer and songwriter Kid Harpoon, told Sound on Sound magazine in 2024. Hull started working with Styles in 2017. “If you want an album you have to care about that all along the way because otherwise you’re going to end up with three singles and seven failed singles.” In pop everything is about the hit single. As such it’s a field where caring about an album as much as the next single is unusual, but Styles has a musical curiosity that allows for a broader vision. That first became clear to Hull during the making of Harry’s House in 2020 when Covid meant Styles couldn’t go on tour. The pair, joined by the songwriter Tyler Johnson and the sound engineer Jeremy Hatcher, spent a month holed up at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu trying out all kinds of musical themes until coming up with something they liked. “It really is just exploration,” Hull says. “There is no judgment. Everything is up for grabs, no one’s ever, like, ‘That’s a bad idea.’ Harry is one of the best curators of people you’ll meet. His taste is impeccable.”

Being a good curator of people led to Styles asking Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice, an indie band whose 2025 album The Clearing has more in common with the 1970s soft rock of Fleetwood Mac and the skittering jazz-folk of Pentangle than modern pop, to provide backing vocals on Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. “When I arrived he had already done a lot of the backing vocals and I remember thinking, why don’t you just keep them?” Rowsell says on being asked to do a job usually done by professional backing singers. “His vocal range is very wide so he doesn’t really need other people and he has a way of sounding like other singers anyway, but it was good for me because with guitar bands you don’t do collaborations. Pop is all about collaborations and Harry made it a nice experience.”

[...]

Styles’s solo career has eclipsed that of his old pals, leading to an estimated wealth of £225 million, properties in New York and London — with four adjacent houses on the same street in Hampstead — and being named in 2023 as Britain’s most successful musical export. But the concert residency announcement has not come without controversy, chiefly because of the high prices (rear pitch standing tickets at Wembley start at £144.65) and expectation that fans must travel — he’s only playing Manchester, London and Amsterdam in Europe — not the other way round. “It’s a big ask,” says the music business writer Eamonn Forde. “But there is the environmental advantage of not moving a huge production around the world, the mental health benefits of not being on the road for months on end and the financial advantage of doing a deal with a single venue.” There remains the danger of charging too much for tickets because if you price-gouge your most loyal fans, they may not come again. “The concerts will have the best production possible and that costs money,” Forde says. “You can’t have eight lights and an oil wheel for a Harry Styles show. Factor in astonishingly high insurance, venue hire, tax, VAT and a pound from each ticket going to the Music Venue Trust, and the costs mount up. Ultimately, though, you price for the market and for Harry Styles there is limited supply with phenomenal demand.”

Full article here with a UK VPN if you're outside of the UK, or here behind a paywall.

[iomoonofjuputer]

i liked hoziers latest album unreal unearth a lot when it came out, but to be honest the more i listened to it the less impressed i was with it. it has a lot of great songs i like but i kinda felt like it ended up being weaker as a whole than wasteland baby

it kind of clicked when ace by madison cunningham came out. these two albums have these things in common

more grandiose instrumentation than their previous music

dramatic/cinematic presentation

the album has a throughline

but i think what ace showed me is that the dramatic grandiose presentation of the entire album as a whole has to be in service of, like, the songs sounding good. cause ended up feeling like unreal unearth being a "9 circles" thing that moves from front to end with a flow between songs was actually a detriment to its actual sound being interesting to me. the cinematic movie score sound is kind of more boring to me than his usual sound but madison cunningham goes in that "chamber" direction thats extremely compelling... & thus the concept of the album, in lyrical and instrumentation and sound as a whole, is strengthened

maybe another ingredient is hoziers shit is kind of just getting poppier which is just not my taste

[driftwoodsix]

Six's favourite albums of 2025

12. Madison Cunningham - Ace standouts: skeletree, golden gate (on and on), beyond that moon, best of us

11. PinkPantheress - Fancy That standouts: tonight, stars, stateside

10. Rachel Bobbitt - Swimming Towards the Sand standouts: hush, hands hands hands, deer on the freeway

9. Kevin Atwater - Achilles standouts: the cage, ferry beer, huntley, achilles

8. Billie Marten - Dog Eared standouts: feeling, crown, the glass, planets

7. Lucy Dacus - Forever Is a Feeling standouts: big deal, talk, bullseye, lost time

6. Laura Stevenson - Late Great standouts: #1, not us, instant comfort, late great

5. Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party standouts: kill me, true believer, parachute

4. Blondshell - If You Asked for a Picture standouts: t&a, arms, toy, model rockets

3. Jensen McRae - I Don't Know How but They Found Me! standouts: novelty, mother wound, praying for your downfall, massachusetts

2. Bon Iver - Sable, Fable standouts: awards season, short story, from, if only i could wait, there's a rhythmn

1. Samia - Bloodless standouts: bovine excision, lizard, sacred, carousel, north poles

[fairweathermyth]

MADISON CUNNINGHAM Invisible Chalk (Garden Session)

[betweentimeand42]

Aoife O’Donovan, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Madison Cunningham. Photo taken during I’m With Her’s 2025 fall tour and shared on Aoife O’Donovan’s Instagram.

[lat-north]

another photo study in the same vein as the last, just a different person

[krispyweiss]

Song Review: Madison Cunningham - “My Full Name” (Garden Session)

Madison Cunningham made some serious changes to “My Full Name,” creating an altogether new song of it in performing the Ace track for a “Garden Session.”

Seated and playing solo on a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, Cunningham takes liberties with the melody and adds flamenco flourishes even as the words remain the same.

I’m finding out that I’m allergic to/every living thing that isn’t you, Cunningham sings to the person whose use of her nom de birth sends the musician’s heart aflutter.

The gutsy rearrangement of the neo-classicism of “My Full Name” is impressive enough. But it’s Cunningham’s masterful guitar playing that really sells this reworked piece.

Grade card: Madison Cunningham - “My Full Name” (Garden Session) - A

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