Music journalism is going to the wall, and places for sensible, well-informed, nuanced takes on the latest releases are dwindling. So we thought we might as well put the final nail in the coffin.
Read last week’s album reviews here.
Tyga
$TARFACE
Last Kings / EMPIRE
You might argue that nobody reads record reviews anymore. Tell that to the trembling, sleep-deprived publicist forced to turn up at a Bel Air mansion this week with a fistful of Xanax in both hands and a printed copy of a Pitchfork 0.0 under one arm.
“I’m sorry Mr. Tyga, but they’re suggesting the very existence of your new record $TARFACE has made the world a worse place.”
Obviously I haven’t actually listened to this album. Instead, I laid back and imagined the above playing out like that endlessly retooled scene from Downfall, except when Hitler’s entourage have to tell him he’s lost the war, and they’re all about to die trapped like rats in a cavern underground, their voices and sobs are slathered in AutoTune, as a spectral Keyboard Cat jauntily hammers out “POWDERED DREAMS” over the bunker intercom.
This, as we’ve seen this week, is the power of the music press in 2026. To reduce the audible output of an artist’s soul to a meme.
What are the protocols for giving a record 0.0, anyway? Does Pitchfork have nuclear launch codes that need to be triple co-signed before the lowest possible score is authorized? And while the warhead was armed, did no one think to point out that the suggestion that “$TARFACE places the listener in their own personal Cronenberg film” unintentionally makes the record sound pretty sick?
Then again, what do I know, I’m not a real reviewer; my process for allotting scores is to roll a bejeweled polyhedral D&D dice and then tear down people’s dreams accordingly. I almost felt bad for savaging Dresden Dolls and Twenty One Pilots last week, but now I’m feeling that maybe I was a little too merciful. Go get the arsenic, I won’t make the same mistake again.
Z/10
TIGER’S WOOD
Read Next
This Guy Makes the Worst Music of All Time
Phoebe Bridgers
Lost Weekend
Dead Oceans
Matty Healy, Jack Antonoff, Bo Burnham, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Maya Hawke, Cameron Winter, Alex G, and Christian Lee Hutson are all meant to be somewhere on Lost Weekend—a roster one sad girl on X described as “the Avengers of the psych ward.” It’s been a few years since I last visited a mental health facility, but I doubt too many in-patients are jamming to the new Phoebe Bridgers album. This is music for people who don’t have much wrong with them at all, beyond a chronic case of being ghosted by men that text all in lower case.
What’s that, you want more? OK, basically, this record confirms Phoebe’s status as the definitive songwriter of our parasocial moment. There are lyrical observations and anecdotes so personal they border on self-doxxing. The magical friction that every great (or even just good) record needs comes, amid this onslaught of relatability, from jarring nods to her celebrity existence—dating Paul Mescal, appearing in the new Robert Pattinson movie, etc. The effect on the listener is a form of delusional projection symptomatic of our modern derangement (comorbidities might include grippy socks as a fashion statement and treating DSM diagnostic criteria like star signs).
7/10
RAM’D ASS
Channel Tres
Enigma POV
Alta Music Group
It was a “hard relate” from me when I learned that the idiosyncratic thump of this new Channel Tres record was born from him watching The Wiz (1978) and breaking down in tears. I had a similar crash out while watching the Sixth Sense (1999) after one my school friends died. Sure, I didn’t make any music afterwards—let alone a record of soulful, uninhibited tech-rap—but I guess they’re different films. The big realization for Tres was that “the characters had everything they were searching for all along and that the Wiz was just a man.” While the main guy in Sixth Sense is literally dead and will never be able to speak to anyone he loves ever again. Still, this album is bouncy enough to get Bruce Willis dancing, even if the only person who can see him is that kid who looks like he’s trapped in a Southern Gothic painting.
6/10
LEE HARVEY OSMENT
Getdown Services
Massive Champion
Breakfast Records
Listening to the kitchen sink surrealism of the second Getdown Services record, I immediately thought of a viral tweet I saw earlier this week claiming that “pound for pound the UK might be the funniest place in the world”—engagement-bait that has naturally been QT’d hundreds of times, along with assorted footage of the eccentric chaos that passes for life in my comedy nation which somehow used to rule a quarter of the planet. Any one of these replies could be subject matter for this Somerset duo, who pan the dirty stream of everyday life and come out with gold. They might be best described as LCD Soundsystem for people who’ve just pawned their actual sound system and, unfortunately, have no way to listen to this record.
6/10
FRANK BLACK PUDDING
Maidenhead
Maximum Clonage
Self-released
I’m not just reviewing this because the band share a name with my hometown, but because a part of me is still trapped in the church hall where there were weekly all-ages shows. When I hit play on the purgatorial trash metal of Maximum Clonage, a ghostly moshpit consumed this teenage interzone of corpse paint and body odor, which I fear I’ll never truly escape despite disowning any music with even the hint of a blast beat the second I hit puberty.
4/10
BEVERLEY NIGHT SHIFT
James Ellis Ford
Lost in Another World
Domino
If I had a near-death experience like James Ellis Ford (who was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer with only a 30 percent survival rate) and my life flashed before my eyes, would it be as impressive as his: starting out in an avant-pop band before becoming a member of certified bloghaus royalty, making symphonic rock with Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys and some other guy, producing many of the best albums of the last 20 years, and now releasing a beguiling new solo record of oblique pop songs? The answer, obviously, is no. It would just be a collection of idiotic reviews, full of jokes and digressions, signifying nothing.
8/10
LAIKA ROLLING STONE
The Script
The User’s Guide to Being Human
BMG Records
Step 1: Come out of the womb covered in blood, shit, and piss, which are coincidentally the constituent ingredients of this new record by The Script.
Step 2: Learn to walk, talk, feed yourself, and make music (optional extras: develop taste and/or an artistic sensibility, have experiences which provide you with interesting things to say about the world).
Step 3: Die. There are some deluded souls who truly believe they deserve more from life than this. Those people ought to spare a thought for The Script, who never progressed past Step 1.
1/10
THE BRYAN JOHNSON MASSACRE
Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi
The post VICE Album Reviews, August 14: Tyga, Phoebe Bridgers, and More appeared first on VICE.
