I'm not a huge fan of the modern trend of rolling out an album in EP installments or expanding an EP into a full-length record, it tends to kind of just make the whole thing feel more like a steady churn of content. However, I think it worked out well for Carly Pearce: last year she got divorced, and followed that news quickly with the single "Next Girl" and the February release of the 29 EP that seemed to really capture her feelings about it while they were still really raw and immediate. And now this album adds 8 songs to the 7 from the EP and shuffles the sequence around into something that feels like a really complete, cohesive, and often devastating record. Pearce has had a great capacity to convey hurt in her voice since her first hit "Every Little Thing," and she wields that voice so well across the album, there's this emotive edge to her delivery even in more playful songs like "Your Drinkin', My Problem" and "Dear Miss Loretta" that really makes those songs pop. And "Show Me Around," dedicated to Michael Busbee, who produced and co-wrote her first two albums and died in 2019, is really moving, and the producers who stepped in here (Shane McAnally, Josh Osborne, and others) helped retain the sound of Pearce's previous stuff. This definitely isn't the most popular country album released by a recently divorced woman in September, but I think it's the superior record. Here's the 2021 albums Spotify playlist I put all the new records I'm listening to in.

I remember hearing bits of Low's first couple albums when they started out in the mid-'90s, and found the way they were going against the grain kind of intriguing, but assumed it was not really my thing and just never looked into them. But they've managed to gather more and more acclaim over the past 11 albums and it felt silly that I never really gave them a serious listen, and this album is pretty great, was very pleasantly surprised by the big loud glitchy flourishes on the first couple tracks, didn't know they'd strayed that far from their early signature sound. 

I don't follow British rap a lot but the buzz around this album was pretty big and "Woman" has been sounding good in rotation on one of my local rap stations. Some of the production feels a little overblown and over-the-top but I like the more conversational off-the-cuff stuff like "Two Worlds Apart," Little Simz is a really witty writer, "Fear No Man" is great too. 

This Year's Model is one of my favorite records of all time, a real desert island album, and I didn't necessarily know what to think when Elvis Costello announced a new version of the album with various Latin music stars delivering the lyrics in Spanish. But he got the idea after being asked to add female vocals to make "This Year's Girl" into a duet for the theme music to HBO's "The Deuce," and so Spanish Model follow that format of having the guest vocalists sing over the band's original performances. And while I often dislike the 'uncanny valley' quality of remixes of classic albums, the addition of new vocals in a different language, and a different running order that includes non-album songs from 1978 (, helps make it feel like a new thing that just happens to feature those killer Attractions performances. Pete Thomas's drums sound even fuller than before, and the new versions often keep going beyond where the original tracks faded out, so you hear cool stuff like the drum outro of "No Action" fall right into the intro of  "(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea." And hearing a Latin pop superstar like Luis Fonsi sing a favorite Elvis Costello deep cut like "You Belong To Me" works better than I expected, Steve Nieve's organ lines kind of start to feel a little Latin in this context. 

Back when Lil Nas X only released an EP, albeit a pretty solid one, when he had all the "Old Town Road" momentum, it kind of puzzled me that he thought there would ever be a better time to drop an album and wondered if he just didn't have enough material. So I will give him a lot of credit for laying low and taking his time on an album, and coming back with this triumphant rollout that really deepened his public persona and musical palette. There's a great balance of bravado and vulnerability on here, I like the uptempo bangers like "Dolla Sign Slime" and "Industry Baby" the most but he really lays out a lot in songs like "Dead Right Now" and "One Of Me" that I wouldn't necessarily expected from him being the most ruthlessly funny celebrity on Twitter. I'm definitely cool with him being pop radio's rapper of choice and taking the mantle previously occupied by Flo Rida or Macklemore. 

My wife listens to a lot of X Ambassadors around the house and I took her to see them in 2019 when they toured their last album, and Sam Harris is a really impressive vocalist, their stuff has grown on me a lot. It kinda felt like Interscope just abruptly threw this album out there without any promo or prior announcement because none of the many singles they've released in the past couple years have become radio hits. But it's a good album, kind of has this dramatic radio play superhero narrative thing running through it but it doesn't feel like the songs rely on you following or understanding the story aspect to enjoy them, I think "Somebody Who Knows You" is one of their best songs to date. 

Now that Walter Becker is gone, it's interesting how the line between Steely Dan and Donald Fagen has blurred a little -- in September two live albums were released that were recorded on the same tour with the same band, this one credited to Steely Dan, and the other credited to Fagen from the nights when they played his 1982 solo album The Nightfly. But both records are really beautifully performed collections of classic songs, I've seen the Dan a couple times in the last decade or so, once before Becker passed and once after, and they were both fantastic shows, this band is playing the hell out of "Peg" and "Aja." 

Nessa Barrett is one of the many TikTok celebrities that has a major label record deal now, I first heard her on her collaboration with another TikTok person, Jxdn, "La Di Die." But the big hit from her debut EP, "I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead," might be even worse, it's like she decided to be a more Hot Topic edgelord version of Billie Eilish. 

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