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1 week ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
Purposely sloppy but brutally direct in his approach, Ken Carson pushes rage music to its most sonically extreme form. The 22 songs on the rapper’s fourth studio album, More Chaos, aren’t about anything in the traditional sense. They’re just hedonistic flexes of varying length, with Carson riding glitchy, glossy, and often poorly mixed beats packed with deafening, distorted bass.
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2 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
The experience of pop stardom is a paradox that entices even as it ensnares.
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3 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
Following Lil Durk’s arrest on murder-for-hire charges last October, the rapper’s sixth studio album, Deep Thoughts, was postponed a whopping five times. What was once expected to be a standard mix of melodic sex talk and triumphant Chicago drill cuts has seemingly morphed into a raw, introspective cry from behind bars.
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2 months ago | 
filmcomment.com | Paul Attard
This article appeared in the February 14, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. The Gloria of Your Imagination (Jennifer Reeves, 2024). Image courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Jennifer Reeves has long explored the intersections of women’s autonomy, psychology, and the cultural forces that shape them.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
If he hadn’t already used it for one of his earlier releases, Weight of the World would have been an apt title for Brooklyn rapper MIKE’s 10th studio album. But Showbiz! proves just as fitting, as the album portrays the entertainment industry—and, more broadly, the pursuit of success within it—as a relentless, soul-crushing machine that grinds down anyone caught in its gears.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
The first Den of Thieves wore its influences on its sleeve—from Michael Mann’s Heat to Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario—but what set it apart was its gleefully messy, unapologetically scummy energy.
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
Since Snoop Dogg’s 1993 debut, Doggystyle, Dr. Dre has only sporadically produced a track or two for his former protégé, which makes the prospect of the West Coast legend helming an entire Snoop album in 2024 such an intriguing prospect. While Snoop’s claims to artistic legitimacy largely went out the window around the time that he signed with Master P, Dre’s credentials have remained mostly intact.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
“From Zero? Like from nothing?” Linkin Park’s new frontwoman, Emily Armstrong, asks just seconds into the band’s eighth studio album, From Zero. The question isn’t just an allusion to Linkin Park’s original name from 1996 to 1999, Xero, but a subtle acknowledgment of the elephant in the room: the suicide of lead singer Chester Bennington in 2017, leading to the band regrouping. Linkin Park is embracing the inevitability of change, framing it as something that can—and should—be seen as a good thing.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
A course correction after the wild genre experimentation of last year’s Pink Tape, Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake 2 isn’t so much an evolution of 2020’s Eternal Atake as it is a watered-down rehash of it. Gone are the personality, ambition, and world-building visions that defined those previous two albums, replaced with 16 tracks’ worth of disjointed flows, bland beats, and shaky vocal performances.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Paul Attard
Tyler, the Creator occupies a rarefied space within mainstream music as a multi-hyphenated, critically acclaimed hip-hop artist in the mold of idols Pharrell Williams and Kanye West. His bona fides have been well established through a series of carefully constructed projects, but he continues to raise the stakes, ostensibly driven by an inherent need to prove his artistry, his eclecticism, or his relentless urge to push any and all boundaries.
