Staff Picks for July 2025

Fleetwood Mac, released 50 years ago today, was diverse without being forced, percolating with innovative ideas, all filtered through an accessible yet sophisticated sensibility. While Rumours had more hits and Tusk was an inspired work of mad genius, Fleetwood Mac wrote the blueprint for Californian soft rock of the late '70s and was the standard the rest were judged by.
- Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Not as heavy as Radiohead or snobbish as Oasis, Coldplay were revealed on Parachutes [released 25 years ago today] as a band of young musicians still honing their sweet harmonies. Combining bits of distorted guitar riffs and swishing percussion, Parachutes was a delightful introduction and also quickly indicated the reason why this album earned Coldplay a Mercury Music Prize nomination in fall 2000.
- MacKenzie Wilson

Even though Queen arrived almost fully formed on their endearing 1973 debut, it was their sequel album that put the pieces together. It's also their heaviest, showcasing the lean hard rock band lurking underneath their more florid tendencies. The mighty "Ogre Battle" remains one of Queen's most underrated and hard-edged cuts.
- Timothy Monger

Comin' on like 18th Century pirate dandy gangsters, Michigan vocal pop quartet the Arbors really knew how to sell an album cover lewk. They also had a knack for picking cover tunes, and whether it was their slinky coffeehouse rendition of "The Letter," their harpsichord-laden take of "Like a Rolling Stone," or their balmy, Spanish classical dreamscape re-envisioning of the Doors' "Touch Me," the Arbors gave four part harmony beat downs like nobody else.
- Matt Collar

This year, Garbage released their excellent 8th album and celebrated 30 years of this classic debut. Perfect from front to back, it's the quartet at its simplest and most no-frills. And it remains absolutely potent. All the hits are here, but if you're looking for a moody '90s alt-rock time machine, "A Stroke of Luck," "As Heaven Is Wide," "Milk," and "My Lover's Box" are nostalgic food for the dark soul.
- Neil Z. Yeung

Midnight Oil's fourth album was their first released in North America, and 1983's 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 introduced them when their strength, imagination, and fury were all on point. "Power and the Passion" is that rare dance single that asks you to chant "Better to die on your feet than live on your knees," "Only the Strong" and "Read About It" are smart as they are hard hitting, and "Short Memory"'s slow simmering outrage is masterful.
- Mark Deming

No one expected the success of Dream Weaver when it was released, 50 years ago this month, but it sailed to the top of the charts, and with good reason. Backed with only drums and a wide assortment of keyboards, Gary Wright crafted instantly recognizable tunes such as the title cut and "Love Is Alive."
- James Chrispell

Famously a companion record to his mournful acoustic reflection Nebraska, Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad is an intimate inspection of people on the edges of society. Many of the songs detail the inner lives of both immigrants and multi-generational Americans who end up in steel mills, working the fields, or just under a bridge trying to get through the night. Though the album was released in 1995, lyrics about neglected veterans, disenfranchised outsiders, embedded racism, and police violence still ring loud in today's America.
- Zac Johnson

Patterson's first post-MCA album benefits from a touch so easy and natural that it practically sounds like it was made by a new artist. Throughout, you can picture Patterson surrounded by a small group, cutting most of the material live in the studio. Even the up-tempo party songs -- including "So Hot," a classy dancefloor-filler that updates the best of Kleeer, Slave, and Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson -- have little varnish applied, and are a lot more suited for backyard gatherings than the clothing boutique in the mall.
- Andy Kellman

The last several albums from Low found the band changing their sound more dramatically than any other point in their multi-decade run, with 2018's Double Negative being perhaps the most aggressively experimental example of this change. Made with producer BJ Burton, the album is based loosely on songs, but delivered primarily through sound design, coating the band's quietly beautiful style in extreme distortion, Auto-Tune, and other mismatched production trickery. It takes a moment to find an entry point to this phase of Low's evolution, but once in, the sound is as rewarding as their most traditional slowcore moments.
- Fred Thomas

The singer/songwriter's second 4AD album is rooted in a type of highly orchestrated folk-rock pitched somewhere between Nick Drake and Sandy Denny on the one hand and southern California soft rock on the other. It has a notably live and largely acoustic sound, free of the label's usual phalanx of effects pedals and keyboards, although the carefully layered arrangements, featuring strings, acoustic guitars, piano, occasional steel guitar accents, and various forms of hand percussion, remain as lush and textured as ever. As a result, it has a timelessness many other albums from this time and place lack.
- Stewart Mason