Katie Presley

For the songwriter's sixth album, she leans into a retro country sound for a big-hearted set of songs about grief and burgeoning love.

From a musician at home in revolution, here is an album about the quiet insurgence of maturity.

Tagaq, an Inuk throat singer, marries modern pop with deeply-vested tradition to gobsmacking effect. The songs on her new album, Retribution, encompass terror, rage, ecstasy and bone-leeching sadness.

On her sixth album, the Norwegian singer Jenny Hval aims for impact, surrounding her vulnerable voice with spiky, disarming instrumentation that bolsters the intensity and intimacy of her songs.

Bat For Lashes' new concept album, The Bride, plays with the same traditions and symbols that make weddings romantic, to dark and devastating effect.

The folk and bluegrass artist takes a big, bold step, writing darker, more mature material. With stylized images of her bare skin, the video reads like an exploration beyond previous comfort zones.

The L.A. trio's second album is a stalwartly positive collection of punky garage-pop songs, born of dire circumstances.

Their titles may be diametrically opposed, but Chris Pureka's new single, "Back in the Ring," and Rufus Wainwright's 2012 sensation, "Out of the Game," are spiritual cousins. Each composition acts as a compassionate but fraught memorial to how things were, and a clear-eyed acceptance of how things are. ...

Performing as Emmy the Great, Emma-Lee Moss makes music not unlike the hushed, intense conversations that can spring up between strangers at a party. From her intimate lyrical intricacies to the careful way she plays guitar, Moss' gaze is unbroken, her vulnerability utter and her attention to detail unwavering. ...

The dinner party depicted in the new video for Ane Brun's "You Lit My Fire" is, perhaps, not how most of us imagine the feminist revolution looks. The clip, directed by Lisa James Larsson, is a mostly light-hearted affair filled with glamorous women and crystal chandeliers. But a revolutionary ...

Sometimes the change you don't think you're ready for is exactly the one you need. At the end of 2014, the Spanish quartet Deers had to abandon its name for legal reasons. It wasn't a revision the band wanted to make, but the moniker it chose instead, Hinds (hind being ...

Calliope Musicals frontwoman Carrie Fussell says she envisioned "Party Master & the Space Brigade" as a light-hearted dance number about how aliens are just like us. And it was — until the Austin band brought their freewheeling live show to Bisbee, Arizona, where a performance of the song ...

The not-so-secret weapon wielded on Seattle punk group Chastity Belt's second album is performative lassitude. Time To Go Home is full of slow, hazy songs whose tempos and degrees of exerted energy are an exact inversion of their weighty subject matter. Feminist political statements are couched in eye ...

The cover art of Newcastle indie-rock quartet Lanterns on the Lake's new album, Beings, is at once soothing and unnerving. Warm, filtered light bathes an arid mountain-scape, and whimsical will-o-the-wisps bubble around the edges of the image. Yet, in the middle of the photograph, there sits an unadorned ...

All of Marisa Anderson's music has travelled thousands of miles. This is literally true — the Portland, Ore. guitarist spent her late teens and twenties walking across the United States — and it's one of her gifts as a musician. She revels in the journey, in the process that ...

Otis Redding wrote "Respect" in 1965, but the song belongs to Aretha Franklin. The changes that the Queen of Soul made for her definitive version — spelling out "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," adding lyrics about receiving her "propers" and "TCB" (taking care of business), discarding Redding's pleading delivery for ...

Every moment of The Coathangers' "Watch Your Back" seems designed to knock you off your feet. Five seconds in, the opening, bouyant guitar line jolts, giving way to a breathless punk beat that's three parts steamroller and one part percussion. Brash schoolyard vocals tear in and then drop out, ...

Some paths to the past are well-traveled. Textbooks and school lectures draw straight lines between cause and effect, between history and history repeating. Other paths are visible but lesser-known, uncovered by alternate narratives and specific research. And others still are completely invisible, so overgrown with time and lack of attention ...

A song titled "Nothing Without You" has a steep hill to climb toward independence. Before hearing a word, the artist has admitted to being hamstrung by addiction, and an inability to form a sense of self separate from the desideratum. It's a risky impression to make—especially if you're an up-and-coming, ...

The New York Police Department unveiled a new set of rules regarding its use of force, The New York Times, Newsday and the New York Post are reporting.

The new policy will establish new, explicit guidelines on when to use force and how to track those incidents.

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