After giving us one of the decade’s most forward-thinking and singular pop releases in her 2017 mixtape, Pop 2, expectations were high for Charli XCX’s much-anticipated third album. Unfortunately, its early singles - the catchy but uninspired Troye Sivan collaboration “1999” and an unnecessarily watered-down and Lizzo-fied “Blame It on Your Love” (a song which had already achieved its most transcendent form in glitchy Pop 2 closer “Track 10”) - indicated that this album would likely be a compromise between Charli’s more experimental desires and her label’s more palatable demands. Then, third single “Gone,” co-written and performed with Christine and the Queens, arrived like a breath of fresh air, a propulsive synth power ballad that sounds both like a celebration of pop’s past and a glimpse into its future.

In a way, this description fits the entirety of Charli, as it flits between more conventional moments, like the inoffensively sing-along-able “White Mercedes,” and moments that are so far out they’re nearly impossible to describe, like the clanging and ringing fire-alarm chaos of “Click” and “Shake It.” Amidst these extremes, Charli gets personal with emotional cuts like “Thoughts” and “Silver Cross,” in which her soul-baring lyrics and raw vocals are expertly drenched in layers of autotune and synth by PC Music producer A. G. Cook, a technique that enhances their potency rather than burying it. Where Pop 2 was a concise thesis statement on the future of the genre, Charli is more sprawling, taking its listener on a whiplash-inducing journey through its namesake’s various sides. It may not be the smoothest ride, but the bumps along the way are what make it such fun.



It’s difficult for a band to keep impressing when they’re entering year twenty of their existence. I was a latecomer to the National, falling hard for 2013’s Trouble Will Find Me and working backwards from there. Even so, I almost wrote the band off with Sleep Well Beast, an album that seemed to coast uninspired on the formula of its predecessor and fall flat in its few attempts to implement unexpected electronic elements. On I Am Easy to Find, the National both do and don’t shake things up. Many of the songs here sound like songs the band has already made or could have made in the past, treading familiar lyrical and melodic ground. Yet somehow it all sounds fresh again. This is in large part due to the fact that the album was made in collaboration with filmmaker Mike Mills, who directed a short film to accompany it but also contributed greatly to its overall sound. It also contains the voices of half a dozen female singers who put their own unique spin on the words crafted by frontman Matt Berninger and his wife, Carin Besser.

To some, the decreased presence of Berninger’s distinct baritone raises the question of whether this can be called a National album at all. But, to me, it’s an ingenious way to work around the fact that Berninger had been starting to sound a bit bored with it all. The interplay between him and his duet partners imbues the lyrics with a renewed resonance, framing them as intimate conversations (“If I said I was sorry for always being underwater, would you stay?”), parallel narratives (“We're always arguing about the same things/Days of brutalism and hairpin turns”), and entire Greek choruses (“There’s a little bit of hell in everyone”). Although a few songs don’t entirely work, it’s refreshing to see that the band isn’t just resting on their laurels.



Kelsey Lu has a voice that could make just about anything sound good. It’s not particularly flashy, but like Solange, she has beautiful control and wields nuance like a pro. Blood’s songs are more conventional than the expansive, free-form stylings of Lu’s breakout 2016 EP, Church. I listened to the album’s singles only once, feeling underwhelmed by their easiness and simplicity, which I perceived as empty. For some reason, though, I still felt compelled to hear the whole thing, assuming I would give it a cursory listen and never return. I was surprised to find myself completely captivated, immediately reaching for the replay button after it was over. The majority of Blood is low-key and mid-tempo, yes, and I can see why one might be tempted to call it safe or monotonous, but Lu nails an atmosphere that transports her listener to the clandestine palace of her mind, overrun with secret passages and hidden rooms.

As the album’s title implies, these songs are dark, lush, romantic, and intimate, meant to be soaked up slowly and luxuriously, like deep burgundy stains spreading across an ornate carpet. As much as she’s praised as a cellist and vocalist, Lu also knows how to turn a lyrical phrase. The imagery on “Atlantic” is bone-chilling, her voice velvet-clad and deadly as she sings, “Someone’s walking over her grave/Sudden shiver/Moving the pieces of her within her,” then commands theatrically, “Jump into the Atlantic!” An equally dramatic moment occurs when the gliding melodies of “Poor Fake” are interrupted for a quirky spoken word interlude, replete with an extended Kate Bush-esque shriek. The pulsing “Foreign Car” is the album’s clearest bid for pop success, but it’s also dangerous and odd in its own right. In a sense, Lu is a classicist masquerading as a popstar, and this cultural clash packs Blood full of subtle but fascinating contradictions.