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Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers — Kendrick Lamar

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Heavy and intentional. Kendrick turns the critic’s gaze back on himself and it makes for an uncomfortable, essential listen. The double album structure has its longueurs but the peaks are extraordinary.N95 and Rich Spirit hit immediately. Mother I Sober is the album’s emotional core. He doesn’t offer easy resolution.Neither should he. 9/10 If the reviews are doing it…

Dawn FM — The Weeknd

Find it. Spotify | Amazon The Weeknd leans all the way into the concept — a purgatory radio station, Jim Carrey as the DJ — and it shouldn’t work but it does. The production is ’80s-inflected and immaculate.Gasoline and Take My Breath are hits in the old-fashioned sense. His most cohesive album and his most interesting.The concept earns itself, which concepts rarely do. 8.5/10 If the reviews…

Ants from Up There — Black Country, New Road

Find it. Spotify | Amazon One of those albums with a backstory that threatens to overshadow the music — singer Isaac Wood left the band days before release. The music holds its own weight anyway. Dense post-rock arrangements, string quartets, moments of real beauty and real wreckage.Concorde is the emotional centrepiece and it earns every second. They made it through and so will…

Your Blind Spots Are Exactly Where You’re Most Confident

Your blind spots are, by definition, the things you can’t see. This makes them difficult to address using the technique of looking harder, which is the technique most people try first. The only way to see your blind spots is to use other people as mirrors — people who will tell you what they observe without softening it into uselessness. This is why feedback is valuable and also why most…

#comedy #confidence #motivation #satire #self help #vinyl burns

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow — Weyes Blood

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Middle chapter of a trilogy and it feels like it — this is where the questions get asked before the answers arrive. Natalie Mering’s orchestrations are lush, the songs stately and strange.It’s Only Heaven is devastating if you’re in the right mood, which is to say: all moods. Baroque pop for people who’ve stopped explaining what that means.Essential. More essential than…

The Waiting Room Agreement

We understand. Nobody said it out loud, but everyone in a waiting room has silently agreed to a set of very specific rules. Don’t make eye contact for more than a quarter of a second. Keep your phone unlocked as a prop. Do not eat something that smells of anything. Do not have a conversation on speaker. And crucially, do not acknowledge — not even slightly — that you are all in this…

The Automatic Watch Ritual That Changed How I Start Every Morning

Somewhere between the hotels in Turkey and the hotels in New Zealand, I developed a specific morning ritual. It involves coffee at whatever temperature room service has decided is appropriate, the particular quality of light that comes through a hotel curtain at 7am in an unfamiliar city, and the sound of an automatic watch winding itself in the corner of the room. The watch winder is, from a…

#lifestyle

The Mask You Wear Long Enough Becomes the Face

We all wear masks. This is not an accusation — it’s an observation. Different contexts call for different presentations. The version of you at a job interview is not the version of you at 3am when you can’t sleep and you’re reading about something obscure because it interests you. Both are real. Both are you. They just have different costumes. The problem isn’t wearing masks. The problem is…

#comedy #confidence #motivation #satire #self help #vinyl burns

Sometimes I Might Be Introvert — Little Simz

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Simz puts in the work and shows it. This is an ambitious record — orchestral, conceptual, political — that succeeds on every level it attempts. Introvert opens like a declaration of war.Woman featuring Cleo Sol is the kind of collaboration that elevates both parties. The momentum doesn’t let up across nineteen tracks.One of the strongest British rap records in years. She…

A Light for Attracting Attention — The Smile

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with Tom Skinner on drums — looser and more alive than Radiohead has felt in years. The Smile doesn’t need the Radiohead name; this album earns its own reputation.Skinner’s playing is the secret weapon. The Opposite and Thin Thing are the kind of songs that make everything else feel slightly beige.Essential. Not a side project — a proper…

The Antidote to Loneliness Isn’t More People

The loneliest I have ever felt was in a room full of people who all knew each other and where I knew no one and nobody seemed to notice and the hors d’oeuvres were taking a very long time to come around. The least lonely I have ever felt was alone at a desk at 2am working on something I cared about deeply. The work was company enough. What Loneliness Actually Is Loneliness isn’t the absence of…

#comedy #motivation #satire #self help #vinyl burns

What's Your Pleasure? — Jessie Ware

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Pure disco. Ware decided to make the late-night club record she wanted to dance to, and she made it. Not a retro exercise — contemporary pop that knows exactly what it’s doing and does it without irony.Every track is a candidate for the high point. Ooh La La and Soul Control are exactly what they sound like and more.Turn it up. This is what confidence sounds like in pop…

Blue Weekend — Wolf Alice

Find it. Spotify | Amazon If you want to know what guitar music can still do, this is your answer. Ellie Rowsell is one of the best rock vocalists working and the band is right there with her.The Last Man on Earth builds slowly until it completely isn’t. No Hard Feelings closes the album on terms only they could set. A record that rewards volume.Mercury Prize well earned. Their best by some…

Edinburgh Fringe: Where Everyone Is a Performer and the Weather Is Always Wrong

The first thing Edinburgh does when you arrive for the Fringe is make it clear that everyone here is doing a show. This includes the person in the supermarket, the taxi driver, the man flyering outside the venue next to yours who has a show about his divorce and has committed to performing it every day for a month regardless of audience size. The Fringe is the densest concentration of human…

#lifestyle #luxury travel

Collapsed in Sunbeams — Arlo Parks

Find it. Spotify | Amazon Parks arrived fully formed and this debut confirms it. Her voice does that thing where it makes whatever’s around it feel warmer. The songs are compact, the production minimal, but the emotional density won’t let you go.Black Dog and Hurt are the ones that hit hardest. A beautiful thing, made by someone who clearly needed to make it.Twenty years old when she wrote most…

The Biggest Thing That Has Ever Happened

Big. I’ve been sitting with the scale of this for a while now and I still can’t fully metabolise it. Grand Theft Auto VI is coming. And when I say coming, I don’t mean “a game is being released.” I mean: an entertainment event larger than most human experiences is arriving, and somehow we’re all just getting on with things. Doing dishes. Replying to emails. As though the horizon isn’t lit…

Maximum Resistance Means You’ve Found the Work

Steven Pressfield wrote a whole book about resistance and I am not going to plagiarise it, but I will say: he was right, and the thing he was right about has not diminished with time. Resistance is the force that makes you check your email when you should be working on the thing. The force that makes you clean the kitchen before sitting down to write. The force that makes every other task seem…

#comedy #motivation #resilience #satire #self help #vinyl burns

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