Once a perfect little baby/ Who’s now a jerk/ Standing close to the pyre manning fireworks. These are the last words on the sparse opener and title track of MJ Lenderman’s new album Manning Fireworks. It almost sounds like an elegy, grieving the loss of innocence, wondering how he ended up there. But as usual, it’s too irreverent and funny to be a requiem.

On the first song from Fontaines D.C.’s debut album Dogrel, Grian Chatten proclaimed: “My childhood was small/ But I’m gonna be big.” It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That 2019 record from the Dublin band — who’ve since relocated to London — instantly set them apart from the slew of other groups overpopulating the post-punk genre. That year, we named them a Band To Watch; the year after, they unveiled its follow-up, A Hero’s Death, which was honored as our Album Of The Week. Their third LP, Skinty Fia, was predictably extraordinary as well, but now, with Romance, Fontaines D.C. leveled up in ways that couldn’t have been expected.

“How do you feel when you’ve felt it all now? How do you see when you’ve seen it all?” Those are the last words Jack White sings on No Name, the rad new album he’s officially releasing today after slipping white label copies to unsuspecting Third Man Records customers two weeks ago. (The properly labeled album went on sale at Third Man shops today, and tomorrow it hits the internet and select indie record stores.)

There wasn’t supposed to be another album. According to the man himself, 2021’s The Ballad Of Dood And Juanita was to be the last Sturgill Simpson record. There would only be five. He’d said it time and time again, but how many musicians play this game of peekaboo? When cash stops flowing as heavily as it used to, a farewell tour can be the tempting financial diuretic for a band that needs to pay the bills. Fans will pony up, only to feel duped a handful of years later when the reunion tour is announced. Simpson always seemed too noble for that, so we took him at his word. With his vocal hemorrhage in 2021, it seemed like his retirement was a done deal.

In 2010, when she was “Charli XCX” only on flyers for underground London raves, Charlotte Aitchison sang Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” as a performance art piece while studying at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art. It’s hard not to view the school project as a prophecy. Britney’s impact is woven throughout Charli’s career, culminating in a scrapped songwriting collaboration and a classically Britney Instagram diss: “They keep saying I’m turning to random people to do a new album … I will never return to the music industry !!!”

What do we want from Billie Eilish? Debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? culminated a long string of EPs and singles that made Eilish a teenage star. It was the start of the alt-pop wunderkind’s career, but also kind of the end. An idiosyncratic inquiry into the dark side of modern girlhood, When We All Fall Asleep was a masterpiece that achieved a level of popularity that ruined Eilish’s life. Happier Than Ever was a navigation of the pain that came with that fame. Her music was still jittery, accented with eerie beats and unpredictable soundbites, but it was clear that the cost of her meteoric rise was the childlike wonder of her music. Something had been lost. This is true of Hit Me Hard And Soft, too.

Historically, Taylor Swift has not been big on proper nouns. She’ll throw the names of cities into her lyrics, and sometimes she’ll specify neighborhoods or parks or streets. Every once in a while, she’ll toss in a namecheck, like James Taylor on “Begin Again.” But most of her songs are about the relationships between an obvious “I” and an unspecified “you.” The identity of that “you” is rarely secret.

There were rules. Was there ever a manifesto? Not exactly, but Ezra Koenig at least gestured toward one. The idea was to establish some stylistic guardrails, to prevent Vampire Weekend from defaulting to easy rock-band tropes and to set them apart from their peers. As Koenig explained to the Denver alt-weekly Westword in 2008, the notion that band members were forbidden to wear T-shirts onstage to maintain the group’s preppy image is strictly apocryphal. But “no trip-hop” and “no post-punk” were real. So was “no distortion.”

It’s not a country album. Beyoncé already said it wasn’t a country album a few days ago, but artists say a lot of things when they’re promoting records. In this case, it happens to be true. Cowboy Carter, the much-vaunted Beyoncé country album that materialized in the collective imagination when she released the first two singles last month, does not exist. Instead, we get an album that uses country music as a framing mechanism and maybe also a springboard. The album that we got is probably more interesting and definitely more fun than the one I worried we were getting.

There are certain things aging rock stars say when they’re a few decades in and releasing their 12th album. They might say they are rocking harder than you’ve heard them in years, that “It’s a lot heavier than you’d expect.” They might say, no, really, “No hyperbole… this is our best work.” These are certain things members of Pearl Jam, a group of aging rock stars, said in advance of their own 12th album, Dark Matter, which arrives nearly 35 years into their career. As you might imagine, not all of these things ring true.

This album is a small miracle. Please don’t take the following as a backhanded dismissal of Big Thief — if I was picking the best album of the 2020s so far, I’d have to give serious consideration to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You — but I remain amazed at what Adrianne Lenker gets up to when she gets away from her main band and from the world at large.

As someone with such a deep reverence for Katie Crutchfield’s music, it has for some reason been difficult for me to find a way to actually write about Tigers Blood. It’s incredible, obviously, the sort of album that makes me tear up if I think about it too much. But it’s also something I’m reticent to poke at in fear of ruining the magic. In some ways, it feels like Crutchfield is making the music that she was always meant to make — the tangled punk poetry on Cerulean Salt, as much as I love it, seems slightly incongruous now. But it also sort of feels like the music that Waxahatchee has always made, honest and intimate and immediate. In this newer country-inflected sound, Crutchfield is at home: telling stories and setting scenes and letting some light into her often bleak, cynical worldview. The irregular edges of her early songs have fallen away; what was once muddy and indistinct is now clear.

Are you caught up on the grand narrative of Ariana Grande’s personal life? I wasn’t. When she was engaged to Pete Davidson, I knew all about that. You couldn’t be anywhere near a computer in 2018 and not know all about that. They were attention magnets, meme-bait — the picture with the lollipop, big dick energy, the inevitable breakup, all that stuff. When Ariana Grande turned all that stuff into her delirious hair-flipping confection “thank u, next,” it was both fun and smart. She harnessed the dangerous power of public attention and used it to fuel a light, shimmering jam. But if she was counting on her ability to do the same thing with complicated grown-up situations, then maybe she should’ve thought again.

Lots of popular narratives can emerge from a night of live television, but those narratives will not necessarily have anything to do with reality. For instance, let’s discuss the idea that Taylor Swift stole Kacey Musgraves’ thunder. During the Grammy Awards a few weeks ago, a prettily photographed commercial teased the existence of a new album from Musgraves. Not long after, Taylor Swift, making an acceptance speech for some award that’s not worth remembering, announced a new album of her own. You can see why people would spin stories about Swift’s announcement dunking on Musgraves’ rollout. But when you actually listen to Deeper Well, the new album that Musgraves teased that night, it becomes clear that Musgraves had no thunder to steal. When Deeper Well is playing, thunder is the furthest thing from my mind.

The title Underdressed At The Symphony encapsulates the appeal of Faye Webster. She’s cool and classy enough to attend such an event, but winds up sticking out like a sore thumb in the audience, not really belonging to the older, sophisticated demographic. Her songs are beautiful sprawls that masterfully meld together indie pop, country twang, and R&B, yet they’re full of endearing, playful asides that betray her age, like on 2019’s “Kingston” when she sings, “He said, ‘Baby’ — that’s what he called me — ‘I love you.’” On her last album, 2021’s I Know I’m Funny haha, she intones about her partner’s sister, “She said I’m funny and then I thanked her/ But I know I’m funny haha.”

They’re just messing around. That’s a good thing. The freedom to explore without the burden of expectations is healthy — enjoyable for the listener, too, if you have interest in hearing some of music’s most singular talents hard at play.

It’s not the first Peter Gabriel album of my lifetime, but it’s close. The English art-pop musician and prog-rock pioneer will release his first album of new material this Friday, 21 years removed from his last, and the long wait has paid off in the final output. i/o is a meticulously assembled arena rock album about nature and time, a major new statement from an aging rock legend.

Pop-punk is the new classic rock. I guess this is growing up.

They didn’t have to do this. They’re the Rolling Stones. They need no excuse to tour stadiums. Their discography was not missing one last piece. In 2023 — two years after the death of founding drummer Charlie Watts, seven years after their last album, 18 years after their last collection of original songs, and 61 years after they formed the band — there was no pressing need for a new LP. The only reason for Mick and Keef and Ronnie to make Hackney Diamonds is because they wanted to.

This motherfucker. I woke up this morning, and I was upset. The energy around Drake has been truly dark lately. The anhedonia. The self-indulgence. The persistent dwelling on petty grievances. The open, vulnerable reveling in his own worst confirmed-dickhead-bachelor romantic tendencies. The endless diminishing-returns dominance. The too-big-to-fail corporate omnipresence. The fake accents. The wounded-bully demands for empathy. The declining commercial fortunes of rap itself, which are enough to make Drizzy Drake look like the captain of a sinking ship. The sense that this guy simply will not go away. And here, on the morning of his fourth album in just over two years, this guy is making me contend with 23 songs over 85 minutes? Fuck this guy. And yet here I was, singing a different tune by minute 85. This motherfucker got me again.

You don’t have to be a middle-aged poet to unearth the world’s hidden absurdities, but it definitely helps. On Armand Hammer’s new song “The Flexible Unreliability Of Time & Memory,” Elucid accosts a dystopian collage of wooden flutes and electricity flares that sound like a dying android as he notes the casual irony of humans requiring robots to confirm their identity.

“I dont even know yall.” It might be the realest thing that any celebrity has said in 2023. A couple of months ago, during a brief flirtation with Facebook’s new faux-Twitter platform Threads, Doja Cat refused to tell her clamoring fans that she loves them. This interaction lost Doja hundreds of thousands of social-media followers, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that celebrities are trained not to do these days, as the parasocial stan-army interaction has become the default method for stars to face their public.

It was already a momentous occasion. Five years after their inaugural Homecoming festival, the National were returning to Cincinnati for a long-awaited second installment amidst their big comeback year. This time around, they had a lineup that illustrated the band’s stature and reach: an icon like Patti Smith, revered forebears in Pavement, peers on their own comeback streak with a reunited Walkmen, beloved younger artists like Bartees Strange and Snail Mail. The National headlined both nights, marking anniversaries for both High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me by playing them in full. It was an event in a lineage of events for 2023 — selling out Madison Square Garden, releasing their first album in four years. Then, from the stage, they announced there would be another new National LP dropped into the world on Monday.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of books about women on the verge — Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater, Raymond Kennedy’s Ride A Cockhorse, D. G. Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (all courtesy of my New York Review Of Books obsession) — and I’ve been seeing a lot of Mitski in these stories.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling LP2.

Everyone was coming back from the dead. In the first half of the ’10s, Slowdive joined a crowd of long-departed bands deciding to give it another go. Many of these were satisfied to tour the festival circuit, indulge fans’ nostalgia for a little victory lap and a solid paycheck, then return to the ether. Some dared to make new music, and some succeeded, though far more of them returned with albums that were inevitably pale echoes of past glories. In 2017, Slowdive did the unthinkable. They released a self-titled comeback, their first album in over 20 years, that doubled as reclamation and reboot. And against all odds, it was arguably the best collection of music they had ever released.

Jackson Maine showed up too early. When A Star Is Born came out in 2018, a sticking point, at least among music-nerd types, was who Bradley Cooper’s character was supposed to be. Was he Eddie Vedder? Caleb Followill? Here, we had this guy singing haggard, world-weary country-rock, but he was headlining festivals, popping up in gossip columns, causing an immediate stir when he drunkenly wanders into a drag bar. In the pop climate of the moment, that guy simply didn’t exist. A few years later, we’ve got a ton of those guys, and Zach Bryan is sitting right at the top of the heap. Bryan isn’t quite up to the point where he could discover Lady Gaga and turn her into a star by singing her song onstage. At this rate, though, it won’t take long.

Listen: Travis Scott has come unstuck in time. Travis has gone to sleep a washed-up pariah and awakened on the day that his McDonald’s meal came out. He has walked through a door in 2023 and come out another one in 2019. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1971.

An artist’s initial work often sets the tone for how they’re perceived for the rest of their career. So it went with PJ Harvey: Her electric early ’90s albums Dry and Rid Of Me established her as a ferocious guitarist and vocalist who chronicled womanhood with unapologetic candor — a reputation that has stuck with her, to some extent, ever since. But during a career that now spans more than three decades, Harvey has intentionally detonated any attempts at being boxed in; she’s explored avenues like bewitching alternative rock (1995’s To Bring You My Love), crunchy glam (2000’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea), and antique piano compositions (2007’s White Chalk). If anything, the fervent rawness of her first records now seems like a mere starting point, not a defined pathway.

Did you take it for granted? I took it for granted. In May 2012, Sigur Rós released Valtari, a magnificently pretty album described by bassist Georg Holm as a slow-motion avalanche. In June 2013, they returned with Kveikur, a darker, sleeker, more electronic-leaning iteration of the band’s singular post-rock sound. This was two albums just 13 months apart from one of the greatest bands in the world — real, canonical LPs, not the kinds of side projects and short-form works that have filled up the intervening decade. They were good, too. Returning to them now, both records hold up as, if not life-upending Ágætis byrjun-tier masterpieces, the sort of otherworldly post-rock spectacle Sigur Rós made their name on. We were spoiled. And then, suddenly, we were starved.

In hindsight, calling the album Reunions was funny, in a bleak sort of way.

How can you tell you’re washed when so much of your greatest music is about being washed? It’s a question that has lingered around the National as long as they’ve been famous. Ever since taking “another un-innocent, elegant fall into the un-magnificent lives of adults” on 2007 breakthrough Boxer, the Brooklyn-founded band of Cincinnati natives has been giving off sad-dad vibes, turning middle-aged neuroses into tastefully morose bangers, ballads, and anthems. You know the drill: Over contemplative, sometimes cathartic big-budget indie rock, lanky baritone Matt Berninger grumbles and croons his way through borderline-surreal vape-pen poetry about depression, dysfunction, alienation — all the midlife-crisis feelings — lending quirky personality to an otherwise deadly serious sound. The approach yielded magnificent results for years, though exactly how many years is up for debate.

Have you heard the news? Metallica are back, baby! The thrash legends are both shrewd and corny enough to choose the week of Easter to release an album they’re selling as a resurrection. 72 Seasons consciously and frequently reaches back into the band’s hallowed past for musical and lyrical references, doing everything it can to conjure up the fuzzy memories the core fanbase has with their earliest work. The album plays like an extended apology for Load, Reload, and St. Anger — and to a lesser extent, the Black Album. (Lulu doesn’t really figure into it.) Does that sound familiar at all?