Don’t meddle with a masterpiece they say. But what happens when someone peddles your masterpiece? When someone you have zero respect for buys and sells your work and could continue to profit from it for many years to come? This is essentially what happened to Taylor Swift when the masters to her early albums released on Big Machine were sold without her having any say in the matter.

Belgian shoegaze outfit Slow Crush release long awaited second album.

Grateful Dead’s bond with St. Louis stretches back to their first show there in 1968, when they debuted “St. Stephen.” The 20-CD boxed set Listen to the River: St. Louis ’71, ’72, ’73 provides a unique structure that offers an evolutionary framework for listeners to follow and assess the band’s changes through its seven previously unreleased concerts.

Primitive Ignorant tackles the trauma of addiction and celebration of life on genre transcending Life or Death EP.

Opening with what recalls the haunting lullaby of Rosemary’s Baby morphing into a spectral Alice Coltrane-esque howl, Connan Mockasin’s Jassbusters Two sets off on an appropriately moving and funny trajectory immediately. Conceived of as a tell-tale band of schoolteachers uniting to ostensibly create some more traditional songs, the entire scaffolding for this loosely conceptual album is a punchline.

On their sophomore studio album, Southern Californian thrash metal godfathers Slayer eschewed the dingy production quality of 1983’s lo-fi Show No Mercy for a fuller, far more vicious sound, ultimately resulting in the genre classic Hell Awaits.

1996 was Oasis’ best year and perhaps their last truly good year. At that point, the band that defined a musical era had released two visceral albums in quick succession: 1994’s Definitely Maybe and 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? They had catapulted into the top tiers of music, making them into one of the most in-demand tickets.

After 2018’s monumental breakthrough album, Your Queen is a Reptile, Shabaka Hutchings’ East London modern jazz greats Sons of Kemet seemed poised to take over the world, or at least the world of jazz, much the same way Kamasi Washington did a few years earlier, propelling a genre of music whose popularity has waned over the decades back into public consciousness. After being used on HBO’s I May Destroy You and a reputation for insidious, barn-burning live shows, we get the highly-anticipated follow-up, Black to the Future.

Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak are a match made in heaven, and that fact has not been lost on them. The pair first linked up when Paak opened for Mars on his 2017 tour and they began to jam, later reconnecting in early 2020 to bring their collaboration to life. Dubbed Silk Sonic by funk legend Bootsy Collins一who also acts as master of ceremonies on the record一the pair embarked upon an album-length tribute to the sounds of the 1970s.