Music

Since releasing her first album, Gordi has experienced three years of emotional upheaval, which she has channelled into a new record, Our Two Skins. She speaks to Nick Buckley about losing her grandmother, falling in love over the phone and creating music in self-enforced isolation. “That’s when I feel most creative, when I don’t have everything at my disposal. You know, how I might make one sound if I don’t have that thing. It’s like creating unique moments out of nothing.”

Conceived and executed in isolation, Charli XCX’s latest album, how i’m feeling now, fearlessly charts new terrain while capturing the complex emotions of a stable relationship and the sadness of life away from friends.

During his early career, the music industry was intent on fitting Moses Sumney into boxes. But as his latest album, græ, attests, he is an artist determined to seek his own truths beyond the confines of expectation and identity. “I’m really interested in the collapse of identity politics, increasingly. I want us to get to a place where we can seek equality for ourselves without having to define as anything that’s simple. It feels really petrifying, the idea that you explain yourself to someone in order to gain their respect [and that] in doing that, you’re kind of solidifying your identity in a way that feels quite limiting.”

Forgoing depth and complexity for cheap nostalgia, Beastie Boys Story has little of the vitality that characterised the band’s music.

With the Covid-19 lockdown forcing Sydney arts precinct Carriageworks into voluntary administration, the embattled cultural sector is bracing for worse to come.

Singer-songwriter Fiona Apple’s impressive fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, is the culmination of her decades-long quest to ‘feel everything’.

I Feel Alive, the fourth album from Montreal band TOPS, captures their trademark lush soft rock sound while, in a stroke of timeliness, delving into tender explorations of love and loneliness.

While Australian musicians are losing significant income with the cancellation of tours and festivals, they are still making remarkable records to inspire and revitalise us.

With its stark lyrics, hypnotic melodies and unsettling production, Soccer Mommy’s Color Theory captures the anxiety of a generation facing an uncertain future.

Despite its hypnotic melodies, complex dynamics and cohesive sound, Grimes’ album Miss Anthropocene falls short of its aim to revitalise our engagement with the climate crisis.