Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”
“It’s about broken lives becoming something better,” Counting Crows founder Adam Duritz has said of “Spaceman in Tulsa,” the seesaw between despair and aspiration that arrives early on his band’s first album in a decade, *Butter Miracle, the Complete Sweets!*. Duritz has undergone a personal transformation of his own during the interim. Not only did he lop off his trademark dreadlocks, but several years into his fifties, he also started the longest romantic relationship of his life. He’s managing lifelong mental illness perhaps better than he ever has too. And so, *Butter Miracle* radiates urgency and vibrancy, as if Duritz has returned to his mid-’90s prime with the wisdom of a renewed perspective. Duritz composed *Butter Miracle* during separate stints on a friend’s remote farm in the English countryside. After flirting with long-form composition on 2014’s “Palisades Park,” he submitted to that ambition by building four interconnected pieces that feel like a summary of the band’s enduring strengths. Where the heroic climax of “The Tall Grass” summons the power and yearning of 1996’s *Recovering the Satellites*, “Bobby and the Rat-Kings” has the summertime essence of 2002’s *Hard Candy*. These are, like the best Crows songs, statements of possibility and belief, of peering out of darkness. The band originally released that material in 2021 as an EP but remixed it to match Duritz’s next batch, which includes his most direct and winning songs in decades. Opener “With Love, from A-Z” is an intellectually sprawling celebration of his new romance, while the moody piano epic “Virginia Through the Rain” documents the soft sting of lingering regret, even as broken lives indeed become something better. “We are evolving/In night to morning,” Duritz opines during “Under the Aurora,” the sort of emotional epic that’s forever been this band’s calling card. “And I want to believe in something/Spun out of darkness/Somewhere under the aurora.”
Throughout his career, LA-via-Toronto singer-songwriter JP Saxe has struck a delicate balance between soul-baring sensitivity and self-lacerating humor. But he doesn’t so much juxtapose gravity and levity as fuse them to reflect the perpetually unsettled sensation of being alive and extremely online in the 2020s, where the churn of relentless doomscrolling leaves you unsure of whether to laugh or weep. *Articulate Excuses* is the first of two mini albums Saxe is unveiling over the course of 2025, after deciding to divide his large stockpile of songs into separate works organized by theme. And judging by this first installment, he’s been spending a lot of time reflecting on his worst behaviors and the cultural influences that encourage them. The opening piano hymn “SMARTPHONE MAKE ME DUMB” is a Sunday-morning plea for salvation from the myriad vices—social-media addiction, drinking, meaningless sex—that force him to admit, “My subconscious is a fucking monster.” But *Articulate Excuses* isn’t all sad-sack introspection: Saxe may inhabit the role of a manipulative ex-boyfriend on “LET A GINGER MAKE YOU CRY,” but the song’s playful, ping-ponging R&B beat lends his villainous portrayal a cartoonish quality. And with “SOFT ASS BITCH,” Saxe interrogates the inability of men to express their true feelings before scaling a Coldplay-sized emotional peak that could make any grown man cry.
