Lav's Music Corner

Review by Lavender: Weatherday is the emo and noise pop project of Swedish singer-songwriter Sputnik. The project first received quite a bit of attention online in the months following their 2019 debut Come In , which in the years since has developed a pretty substantial cult following. While Sputnik has remained busy with various collaborations and side projects in that time, Hornet Disaster  is the long-awaited sophomore Weatherday album. With a 76-minute runtime spread across 19 tracks, the album gives long-time fans plenty to chew on for however long it takes until Weatherday eventually returns again.  If you've paid any attention to my TikTok or Twitter, or even came to the release party I hosted for Hornet Disaster  last week, then you already know I'm a big Weatherday fan. And in the lead up to this record I became more and more excited with the release of pretty much every song. In one way or another dating all the way back to 2022, 7 songs in total had been relea...

Review by Lavender: Clipping  is a rap trio that in certain circles needs absolutely no introduction. One of those circles being my long-time readers as I've always been a huge fan of the band. I dished out a lot of retrospective acclaim to their progressive rap masterpiece from 2014 and their highly conceptual follow-up a few years later. I was also a big fan of their multi-album indulgence into horror-core which resulted in the excellent 2020 album Visions Of Bodies Being Burned , their best record yet and one I called my album of the year for 2020. But it's been a long 5 years since then and what the group returned with is a shift in style to the equally conceptual world of cyberpunk. While they tackle the new sound and style with just as much commitment, it's far and away the dorkiest thing I've ever heard them do, which is an issue at points.  Dead Channel Sky  isn't precisely a tale of two halves but a majority of the highlights pop up on the first half, which...

Review by Lavender: Playboi Carti is a rapper who rose rapidly to popularity around 2016 on the back of a few viral hits on his self-titled debut mixtape. That was followed by two records that played with unique sounds in the highly-populated world of trap music and both garnered substantial critical acclaim. 2018's Die Lit remains a personal favorite of mine whose woozy psychedelic beats remain undeniable to this day. That was followed in late 2020 by Whole Lotta Red  which substantially switched up Carti's sound and became highly influential in the worlds of vamp and rage. After several release dates were announced and never followed up on and a series of singles were uploaded to YouTube last year, we've finally arrived at Carti's follow-up. Music , by comparison, is even more all over the place than its predecessor though it delivers a comparable energy. What it doesn't deliver is anywhere near as dramatic a progression in his style or ethos as I was hoping for. ...

Review by Lavender: Lady Gaga is a caliber of pop star that really needs no introduction. Throughout the early 2010s, she was elevating to and then occupying a platform of pure superstardom scoring hit after hit after hit in the process. Though her previous record Chromatica  performed decently in 2021, it was a significant step down from expectations for her studio output that left me and many others wondering if her time in the brightest lights was over. It isn't. On the back of some of her biggest hits in years, Gaga returned triumphantly with a record that stylistically throws it back to her earliest days and is surprisingly rewarding doing it.  To say that this record started off on unsure footing would be an understatement. Last year Gaga shared "Disease," a single that didn't perform extraordinarily well. I think that's a shame cause the song is an absolute fucking jam with an utterly infectious hook and thumping dance beat that I think is great. On the opp...

For the first rapid fire review segment of 2025 I wanted to take a look at some hyperpop records that have been garnering a lot of attention, or that we've been covering over on Ringtone Magazine. saoirse dream  - saoirse dream Let's start with the easy one. I like this Saoirse Dream record quite a bit and you should listen to it. She combines the digital sounds of contemporary hyperpop with flavors of 90s rock like grunge and shoegaze into a genre she calls Wizard Sleaze. I know all of that because I interviewed Catherine, the girl behind Saoirse Dream about the album for Ringtone Magazine and caught a ripping live show from her the week the album dropped. For that reason I'm not going into detail to try and pick the record apart track by track, instead I'll just give it a certified Lavender seal of approval and encourage you to try the record out yourself. 7.5/10 Club Shy Room 2 EP - Shygirl Despite never being a massive fan of Shygirl's first few albums, I went ...

Review by Lavender: Panda Bear is the nickname/project of psychedelic folk artist Noah Lennox. Lennox has spent more than two decades as a member of critical darling indie folk outfit Animal Collective, but has also been a magnet for acclaim as a solo artist. The peak of that came on his 2007 album Person Pitch , which I and many others consider to be a masterpiece. His last solo album dropped back in 2019 but he's stayed very busy since then with multiple Animal Collective records dropping and a collaborative album with Sonic Boom in 2022. Now he's returning to solo work with Sinister Grift , a surprisingly vulnerable record that sees Noah dealing with the aftermath of his divorce. And it's absolutely stunning.  Sinister Grift led off with the single "Defense" which was pretty notable for being a collaboration with the biggest critical darling of 2024, Cindy Lee. I did enjoy the track, but I didn't realize just how much I liked its catchy lucid psychedelia un...

Review by Lavender: Ichiko Aoba is a Japanese folk singer whose music dates all the way back to 2010. Her back catalog received a ton of retroactive acclaim in the wake of her critical breakthrough, her masterful 2020 album Windswept Adan . That record introduced many, myself included, to her gentle voice, beautiful arrangements, and naturalistic songwriting. All of that is VERY present on its follow-up 5 years later. Though Luminescent Creatures  won't be as awe-inspiringly fresh as its predecessor for most listeners, it achieves a similarly remarkable beauty.  That beauty was predicted by the singles, all three of which I loved. "Luciferine" came first last year and wow was it astonishing to hear it again in its full beauty after a few months when playing the album. The production in the song's densest moments is just perfect, giving every piece of lush instrumentation its own place to breathe and fly. It also features what I think may be the catchiest set of refrai...

 Review by Lavender: Darkside is the project of prolific singer and producer Nicolas Jaar alongside multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington. The project's inception actually dates back to the earliest days of Jaar's acclaimed career and the pair's debut album together was released in 2013. Following a long dormant period, the band returned in 2021 with a second album called Spiral , which I thought was every bit as good as their debut if not better. That's why I was excited to see the wait for a third release taking just half the time and went into Nothing  expecting the pair to keep all their momentum up.  Darkside has always been a strange and difficult to define project. They're probably best described as art rock but with a production and sometimes even compositional slant inspired by Jaar's more electronica-oriented projects. But even with that premise, Nothing is by FAR the pair's weirdest and most difficult to define album yet. The project jumps all ov...

Review by Lavender: Anxious are a Connecticut band that broke through a few years ago after generating tons of regional buzz with a strong debut album Little Green House . Thanks to publications like Brooklyn Vegan I was a pretty early adopter of the band and their debut lived up to a lot of my expectations and seamlessly blended together styles of hardcore, emo, punk, and pop punk. It's for that reason that I was both excited by and invested in the bands future and what I hoped would be development. Instead, a rough collection of singles gave way to a second effort that robbed the band of nearly everything I once found so interesting about them.  I hate writing negative reviews so let me at least start by sharing what I liked about the record, primarily that it gets off to a strong start. The opener "Never Said" is by far my favorite of the singles and my favorite song on the entire record. It's a raucous pop-punk breakup song with a catchy hook and snarling lyrics f...