The Listener

FKA Twigs is the most interesting pop musician we have right now

8 February 2025 9:00 am

Grade: A Hell, there’s a lot not to like, or even to be a little suspicious of, with this young…

The real best album of last year

4 January 2025 9:00 am

Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North…

Dazzling: Marc-André Hamelin’s Hammerklavier

23 November 2024 9:00 am

Grade: A When Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata was published in 1818, pianists were confronted with a mixture of ‘demonic energy and…

Goodbye to MC5, the holiest of rock’s holy cows

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and…

Less Riot Grrl than Riot Lladies Who Lunch: Sleater-Kinney’s Little Rope reviewed

19 October 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B- Given that Carrie and Corin are now in their fifties and one of them has settled down with…

A box set for those on the spectrum: Markus Poschner’s Bruckner Symphonies reviewed

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B+ Anton Bruckner wrote 11 symphonies – Numbers One to Nine plus a student exercise and the formidable rejected…

Ten times better than Taylor Swift: Romance, by Fontaines D.C., reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B+ Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it…

The Stockhausen work that is worth braving

31 August 2024 9:00 am

Grade: A- One of the best one-liners attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham refers to the stridently avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen: ‘I’ve…

Too bombastic to be country music: Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion reviewed

24 August 2024 9:00 am

Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are…

‘Left me stunningly bored’: Brat, by Charli XCX, reviewed

29 June 2024 9:00 am

Grade: C I don’t doubt the ingenuity. The mastery of a technology which now exists as a substitute for melody,…