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The Needle Drop •

CONCERT REVIEW: Hayley Williams at Franklin Music Hall

Hayley Williams has a voice built to radiate across a stadium. For a while, that's what she was doing. Paramore's final leg of touring their 2023 album This Is Why was as support for Taylor Swift on the record shattering Eras tour. They opened the entire European leg, as well as the tour's very first weekend in Glendale, AZ. At that point, though, it was no longer about This Is Why. They would play the hits to a crowd of 70,000 that knew them word for word, and throw in a deep cut or two every s...
The Needle Drop •

MINISERIES REVIEW: Taylor Swift's 'The End of an Era'

As it was presented in its promotional material, The End of an Era promised to be an "unprecedented" look behind the curtain of the most successful tour of all time. The six-episode docuseries makes good on that promise – sometimes. There are many clips of Taylor Swift rehearsing acoustic mashups in her dressing room, segments of prep for four different guest appearances, and a couple brief diversions to rehearsals of new choreography. But after spending eight or so hours with this miniseries, i...
water runs clear •

2025 year end hullabaloo

Welcome to the second annual water runs clear year-end hullabaloo! I have taken the creative liberty to introduce the “Hall of SHAME” to put on my hater hat and highlight what I found to be the year’s most disappointing records (there were unfortunately a lot to choose from). The rest runs the same format as last year, which you can read here. I will be linking my work from this year wherever relevant! Enjoy!The five albums below made me want to punch a pillow on camera in frustration a couple o...
The Needle Drop •

CONCERT REVIEW: Dijon at The Met Philadelphia

It seems as though everything has been coming up Dijon this past year, and the 33-year-old multi-hyphenate is making it look easy. He's the dark horse of the music industry that people never forgot about – even with a four-year wait for his already career-defining sophomore album Baby. His distinct, quirky R&B stylings have penetrated the mainstream via his extensive involvement with Justin Bieber's comeback album SWAG, and its creatively titled companion album SWAG II. While those records were...
Paste Magazine •

Eliza McLamb, 'Good Story' Album Review

There’s a timeline where Eliza McLamb is nearly finished with a law degree, and another where she’s climbed the corporate ladder in the solar paneling industry. In lieu of that, McLamb has fully committed herself to music, something that was once a hobby. At nineteen she gained TikTok virality from a replayable ditty about adolescent sexual confusion, and used that wit and self-awareness as a jumping off point for the career she’s built since. Now at twenty-four, McLamb’s sophomore album Good St...
The Alternative •

Album Review: Taylor Swift – 'The Life of a Showgirl'

Posted: 3rd October, 2025 by The Alt Editing Staff

In a year of disappointing blockbuster pop records, the top dog has just come in to show them how it’s done. Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album, her fifth this decade, is the year’s most disappointing blockbuster pop record. It is disappointing in a way that sparks frustration beyond the apathy that I felt after hearing Midnights, beyond the dejectedness I felt after hearing The Tortured Poets Department. That album’s worst offense was being b...
The Alternative •

Album Review: Wednesday – 'Bleeds' - The Alternative

Posted: 19th September, 2025 by The Alt Editing Staff

Americans love to demonize things–themselves, each other, events they are helpless to trace to a root cause. The best way to combat that inclination, though, is to simply sit back and observe–accept absurdity with a stifled chuckle. That’s exactly what Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman is most gifted at. The 28-year-old Greensboro, NC native is eager to use her pen to string together the beautifully odd minutiae of the “born here, live her...
The Needle Drop •

The Needle Drop’s Recap of ​​Governors Ball 2025

This past weekend, the annual Governors Ball returned to New York City’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. Artists representing the best and brightest in pop, rock, and hip-hop came to perform across three days, bringing a flock of eager fans with them.The Needle Drop’s Jaeden Pinder, Leah Weinstein, and Victoria Borlando showed up all three days, teaming up to cover as much of the large music festival as possible (although, we unfortunately missed the promised Benson Boone backflip). In t...
water runs clear •

Conner O’Malley’s 'Rap World' Is as Fresh as It is Absurd

We have now reached the point where a film set in 2009 can be considered a “period piece,” as evidenced by Conner O’Malley’s Rap World. The 56 minute feature, which O’Malley wrote, directed, and starred in, is available for free on YouTube, but premiered at a series of screenings/Q&A’s in Brooklyn last summer. Through Blair Witch Project style “found footage” shot from the camcorder of the silent fourth member of the friend group Rap World follows, three townie white boys from Tobyhanna, PA set...
water runs clear •

year-end hullabaloo

THIS IMAGE IS NOT INDICATIVE OF ANYTHING FROM THE LIST FYI!!!!In years’ past I’ve done year-end music recaps on my close friends story, but I feel like this is a better format for it. I’ve mapped out my favorite new discoveries of this year, and my top ten songs and albums, with 10 honorable mentions respectively. Also going to do a lot of plugging of my work from this year because this has really been a breakthrough year for me. I can say I’m a music journalist for the first time in my life wit...
water runs clear •

my top ten albums of the decade so far

The turn of the decade happened when I was 16. I was a sophomore in high school, had just earned my drivers’ license, and had been dumped for the first time a few months prior. Now, I lay typing this as a 21 year old in my one bedroom apartment in west Philly. I find myself on the other side of the trials and tribulations of adolescence, only to find myself in the trials and tribulations of young adulthood. I vote in my first presidential election in just under a week, and the only people that a...
Paste Magazine •

Hello Mary, 'Emita Ox' Album Review

Grabbing the mic and screaming directly into it until your lungs give out at a basement show is one of life’s simplest pleasures, and that’s exactly how it feels to listen to Hello Mary’s sophomore album, Emita Ox. Teaming up with Alex Farrar, the producer behind some of the best indie rock of the past five years (Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, Indigo De Souza’s All of This Will End, Snail Mail’s Valentine and Squirrel Flower’s Tomorrow’s Fire, just to name a few), the New York trio’s ambition and vir...
Paste Magazine •

Rex Orange County, 'The Alexander Technique' Album Review

During the summer of 2022, Alexander O’Connor (professionally known as Rex Orange County) had to abruptly cancel his tour dates in Australia and New Zealand due to “unforeseen personal circumstances.” The public would later find out that the circumstances in question was just one: a legal battle pertaining to six charges of sexual assault, which were eventually dropped due to CCTV footage exonerating him. While it’s not particularly relevant to dwell on the minutiae of the substance of this case...
Paste Magazine •

beabadoobee: 'This is How Tomorrow Moves' Album Review

Continuing the biggest momentum of your career thus far (2022’s Beatopia) is a daunting task on its own. To do it with extensive care and reverence for the craft is just as complicated. The presence of “death bed (coffee for your head)” by Christian hip-hop artist Powfu at the top of beabadoobie’s most-streamed songs is nothing short of a shame, as “death bed” loops a sped up sample of Bea Laus’s first single, “Coffee,” an acoustic ditty she wrote at 17. The artistry and innate musical instincts...
Paste Magazine •

oso oso: 'life till bones' Album Review

When I interviewed oso oso frontman Jade Lilitri last December, life till bones was merely a skeleton like the ones on the album’s cover. He was prepared to enter the studio the following month with one main goal in mind: make a back-to-basics record. Some of the songs being brought into these sessions were older than the band’s 2019 record Basking in the Glow, but the plan was not to bring in something bare and build on it until fully dressed and accessorized, but to instead record pure embodim...
Paste Magazine •

Odie Leigh: 'Carrier Pigeon' Album Review

Having a crush can often feel like a death sentence, and the side-effects of sleepless nights, heightened anxiety and the weight of some inevitable, impending doom are really just the tip of the iceberg. In a matter of days, “I met you at a party” becomes “I wanna know how this one ends.” Detroit singer-songwriter Odie Leigh’s debut record, Carrier Pigeon, takes you through that internally chaotic cycle in a succinct 33 minutes.The timbre of Odie’s voice is what makes her music so distinct, and...
water runs clear •

romantico by 800 cherries was ahead of its time

800 cherries are a duo that have been largely shrouded in mystery. Hailing from Tokyo, the band consists of Manami Marufuji (vocals, guitar, keyboard) and Masayuki Takahashi (guitar, bass, keyboard), and virtually no information about them or their creative process exists online—other than that a third member, Ritsuko Ôtera, had joined the group in 1994 but left by 1997. Their music nestles nicely within the pop microgenre of Shibuya-kei, which primarily circulated in Japanese hipster communitie...
Paste Magazine •

Camila Cabello: 'C,XOXO' Album Review

If there’s one way to start an album cycle off on the wrong foot, it’s with ripoff accusations. The imagery for Camila Cabello’s “rebrand” for her fourth album C,XOXO garnered attention across the internet almost entirely due to its suspicious similarities to that of Charli XCX’s BRAT. If the camcorder videos and dancing in fancy cars weren’t already raising eyebrows, lead single “I LUV IT” certainly did with its flow being almost identical to Pop 2’s “I Got It.”What I find most unfortunate abou...
water runs clear •

What The Tortured Poets Department means for Taylor Swift's legacy

I really wanted this album to be good. Taylor Swift is in the midst of her victory lap around the world. She could have easily continued her meteoric Eras Tour through 2025, released the two remaining Taylor’s Version records, and taken a few years away from the public eye. But as we’ve grown to learn over her oversaturated run of releases this decade, Swift is insatiable — in her own words, “A diamond’s gotta shine.” The logical path was not the path she chose. Instead, just moments before the...

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