guardian

guardian reviewed Reality Awaits by The Strokes 1d

8.0

a perfect marriage of mayhem and melody on their best album in years — Here’s a sentence no old-head Strokes fan wants to hear: to understand Reality Awaits, the stalwart NYC group’s seventh album and first in six years, you first have to understand the Voidz. Julian Casablancas’s other band has been taking up more and more of his time in recent years, much to the chagrin of fans who may have dipped into the group’s painfully, awkwardly proggy 2014 debut Tyranny and decided to just let the old legend have his fun (away from their own speakers, of course). Anyone who decided to listen further will have found that the Voidz have turned into a great, crowd-pleasing, safely experimental zone for Casablancas to pull out some of the most energised, goofy work of his career. If you’re thinking I come to this guy for cool, not goof, I don’t know what to tell you: this is a man who spends interviews discussing his theories about ancient Sumerian culture. The 2018 Voidz record Virtue is a high point of Casablancas’s entire catalogue: a gentle stylistic mixed bag that covers winsome pop-rock, yacht rock, bedroom pop and much more. That album seemed to clear the decks for the Strokes’ last record, 2020’s The New Abnormal, on which they sounded the most like their 2001 selves since Is This It. That album is now the definitive Strokes album for gen Z – go to any Strokes show and watch the younger contingent light up during The Adults Are Talking – but it didn’t presage a long-term back-to-basics route for Casablancas and co. On Reality Awaits, by sheer force of will, he fuses the crackpot strangeness and, ahem, fondness for AutoTune of the Voidz with the Strokes’ minimalism and pop melodicism. It’s this combination that gets you some of Casablancas’s funniest, most interesting performances in years: warbling unintelligibly about John Legend and Josh Groban; borderline screaming the phrase “and in a hundred thousand years from now!” in order to fit it neatly to an old-timey Strokes melody; singing sweetly about “starting again” on Going to Babble On, one of the most winsome, heartfelt Strokes songs since their debut. It’s worth emphasising, once again, that Casablancas is no longer the louche chronicler of downtown cool that he once was. But he’s still a totally compelling frontman and, even with a tighter-than-ever rhythm section, the hot-burning core of this band. If Casablancas sometimes sounded like he was going through the motions on The New Abnormal, Reality Awaits retrofits the madcap experimentalist side of the Voidz to cleaner, more tuneful production; the result is playful and frequently joyful. Going Shopping rides a simple, insistent yacht rock groove that allows Nick Valensi to noodle with increasing intensity as Casablancas sings about being a “seven-foot zombie”, while the dubby The Fruits of Conquest revives the sinister 80s sleaze of 2011’s Angles with a little more conviction. Inevitably, Reality Awaits suffers from the same sense of clumsiness that’s touched most recent Casablancas projects. Here, it arrives in the form of Tyrants of the Mellow Moon, the album’s formless, ambling closer. Unlike the rest of the record, which is content to gambol in pop structure, Tyrants feels unwieldy and leaden, threatening to drag down what is otherwise one of the band’s most nimble outings in years. Here, Casablancas’s AutoTuned warblings feel oppositional to the band’s moody soundscape; it feels like the first time, amazingly, on the whole record that his Voidziness is threatening to eclipse his Strokesiness. But that the two sides can align so thoroughly, and so pleasurably, is itself a victory – for years, it’s felt like the Strokes have been his cash-grab project. Now, it feels like there’s a whole lot more road left for the group to explore.

guardian reviewed A*POP by Tyla 1d

8.0

old-school pop superstar transports us back to more carefree times — From her penchant for paparazzi-baiting stunts – arriving at a recent London listening party in Y2K cosplay with this second album’s title temporarily tattooed across her lower back – to her music’s outsized mix of sun, sex and sultriness, 24-year-old South African Tyla seems keen to transport us back to more carefree times. On the head-knocking, Christina Milian-esque Mr Nonchalant, for example, she references her belly ring and tells a man she likes his eyes “cuz they match the thong”. However, as with Rihanna, her constant point of comparison since emerging in 2024 with transatlantic smash Water, Tyla is able to nimbly traverse genres and reference points thanks to a characterful voice that suits every mood. On frustrated opener Is It Love she gives it the full-belt treatment, while on Chanel – an intoxicating fusion of R&B, amapiano and pop – she sits back, riding Nigerian-British producer P2J’s beats as if on a lilo with a cocktail in hand. Even when the rug is pulled out from under her on the shape-shifting banger Kiss, which careens between lithe Afrobeats shuffle and full-on dance-pop breakdown, Tyla manages to pull focus back to her at its centre. At 14 songs, the bolshie A*Pop gets a little overconfident – closer Hot Tubs isn’t as interesting as its title suggests; the mid-tempo Fairytale is a bit wet – and its focus on love’s highs and lows a tad limiting, but as a bold statement of intent for an old-school superstar, it’s close to top marks.

guardian reviewed John McCabe: Symphonies 2 & 3 and Cello Concerto by Kenneth Woods, Raphael Wallfisch & BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1d

8.0

writing of enormous scope and colour — John McCabe, who died in 2015, made some important recordings of other people’s music – he championed Carl Nielsen, and his survey of the complete Haydn piano sonatas has held its place in the Decca catalogue for half a century – but when it comes to his own works there are still gaps to be filled. Alongside the Symphony No 2, completed in 1971, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Kenneth Woods here supply the overdue premiere recordings of McCabe’s 2007 cello concerto Songline and his 1978 Symphony No 3. The Symphony No 2 is tense and edgy, musing on the cyclical nature of violence; the cello concerto, its title inspired by ancient Aboriginal pathways, is restless in a different, searching way, which the soloist Raphael Wallfisch captures eloquently. What is striking and gratifying about both is the lucidity of McCabe’s music, its textures remaining clearly defined through writing of enormous colour and scope. The Symphony No 3, Hommages, inhabits a lusher soundworld, densely weaving in nods to Haydn and Nielsen while also looking in other directions – one passage with muted strings and celeste could almost be Shostakovich reimagined by the Strauss of Der Rosenkavalier. Vividly energised and expressive throughout, the performances do all three works justice. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify

guardian reviewed Little Miss Twain by Shania Twain 5d

6.0

rootsy revival strays from the dirt track to the middle of the road — ‘When I was a kid, I started on stages just like this,” Shania Twain told the 200 fans sardined into a London pub back in June, trailing her seventh album Little Miss Twain. A reintroduction to the Canadian country legend, the record mines memories from her Ontario childhood for hints of the arena-filling star she would soon become. Over wistful Mellotron and pedal steel, the title track marvels at little Eilleen, as she was called back then, escaping the rural north and making it big in Nashville. Yet, somehow, it all feels inevitable – as if Twain’s career was conjured into being by the conviction of her mother, who drove her to those tiny bars in a beaten-up Chevy. And yes, from the vantage point of 2026, it’s difficult to imagine it going any other way. Twain’s icon status is certified by five Grammys and the way her free-spirited hits have become karaoke classics – not to mention the fact that her 1997 album Come on Over remains the highest-selling studio album by any female artist in history. But it was far from inevitable. The first decades of Twain’s life were shaped by poverty, violence and the shocking death of her parents, which left her responsible for raising three younger siblings. Northern Town, a noirish track with upright bass and flourishes of classical guitar, gives a veiled insight into those early years, its lyrics thick with cigarette smoke and the irony of being hard-up in gold rush territory. On a double-time bridge, she fantasises about cutting loose and driving south to sing: “Just so you know, I’m ready to go,” she murmurs. Unfortunately, the rest of Little Miss Twain is vague on the details. Songs such as Quit My Life (an upbeat number about taking the day off) could be imagined from the perspective of young Twain weighed down by responsibility – but truthfully, there’s little to suggest it. Instead, memory lane is left in the rear-view, and Twain pivots from tender autobiography to her tried-and-tested comfort zone: zany humour and unadventurous but catchy melodies, all within the pop-rock-country Venn diagram she made her own in the 90s. Much of it feels far too safe, from the soul-lite Take It to the River, featuring Ronnie Wood and The War and Treaty, to the clutch of fluffy, overproduced tracks about young love. The best of them, New Love, has a cantering beat, blushing strings and a lovely lightness of touch, so it’s a shame its themes are rehashed on the hokey saloon song Down the Middle and the forgettable Scary Little Thing. Thankfully, recent single Dirty Rosie is hoedown pop with real personality. Doing doughnuts around truck-obsessed country bro stereotypes, it puts Twain’s increasingly textured voice to great use. By contrast, I’d Be Loving Me sounds vocally strained, but in a way that brings much-needed gravity and ache to the record. Ditching the denim and dirt roads of country cliche, this deceptively simple ballad wonders how Twain would apologise if she were in the shoes of her cheating partner, and whether, roles reversed, her partner would accept that apology – all with the sinking feeling that little will change. On the title track, Twain sings of two dreams: she wanted to ride horses, while her mother wanted her to become “the next Tanya Tucker”. The two dreams intertwined: Tucker duets on those very lines, and Twain sighs over a lovely horse on the insouciant That’s the Money. Little Miss Twain may not be a return to peak powers, but amid country’s fresh crest in popularity it’s a sharply timed reminder of Shania’s rich legacy and influence. The genre would be far blander without her.