Melissa Kacar

MAITREYA CORSO feels like Maya Hawke 's most fully realized piece of storytelling yet - a record that is built on the beautiful, intentional writing that allows her talents to shine the brightest. The album's title comes from a persona that Maya created, who she said is a "...magical misfit, whose sheer inability to adapt to the surrounding world allows her to create a world of her own, and to explore the positive and negative power of the ego." Much of the album is rooted in the notion of questioning whether inner happiness and fulfillment is ever something to be fully achieved, or rather a never‑ending goal to persist and reach toward through the different seasons of life. The title itself reflects the duality at the heart of the project; Maitreya is drawn from Buddhist tradition and Corso is derived from the last name of Beat poet Gregory Corso. Together, they frame the album as something deeply personal and artful. It is often existential and easily her strongest...

"the cure" by Olivia Rodrigo The second single off of Olivia 's you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is such a cathartic, existential, and melodramatic masterpiece - all of which are traits that have continually made up so much of her best work to date. If the lead single "drop dead" is the embodiment of the girl so in love portion of the album title, then "the cure" in turn feels like the representation of the you seem pretty sad aspect of the time in her life that inspired her to write this. Coming in at the midpoint of the album's tracklist, it's definitely going to serve as a crucial transition piece for the album's overarching narrative. The build‑up to the bridge and the explosive final chorus is absolutely incredible and feels so powerful with every single listen. It's genuinely one of the best songs Olivia has ever written, and also one of the greatest pop songs of recent memory, which is not an overstatement in the slig...

At the heart of it, "Bags" is one of the purest expressions of yearning, encapsulating Clairo 's innate ability to freeze a moment in time and preserve fleeting feelings that seem so brief as they're happening, yet become forever immortalized through this song. "It's definitely about me learning to be comfortable in a place of the unknown," she said in a 2019 interview with Genius.  She brings a sincerity and vulnerability to her songwriting that allows her to be completely open about her feelings, never holding anything back. Recognizing the importance of savoring the mundane, simple details of falling in love is ultimately why this song holds such a special place in her discography. In this track, she opens up with full transparency about the things she left unsaid in an effort not to scare the other person away, even though she so badly wishes she could express the intensity of what she's truly feeling in those moments. There's something so p...

Olivia Rodrigo 's debut album is such a distinct and realistic depiction of all the sweet and sour parts of what it means to be a young woman growing up and coming of age in the modern world. What was initially meant to be just an EP quickly transformed into a full-length project after the massive success of her debut single "drivers license" surpassed everyone's expectations in early 2021 . Olivia and her core collaborator on this project - and on all of her music thus far - Dan Nigro , put this album together in just a few months. While she would go on to further develop her sound and find herself musically throughout the creation of subsequent releases, this stands as one of the defining debut albums of this generation of pop music.  Olivia has always worn both her influences and her heart on her sleeve, and SOUR feels like a natural extension of that. Each song is deeply personal, yet clearly shaped by the music that raised her. Much of  SOUR feels like modern, u...