reviews

  • Our Rating: 7/10 There’s a quiet confidence to “Homegirl” that doesn’t shout for attention, and that’s both its strength and its limitation. Built around warm acoustic guitar, soft harmonies and that lightly percussive xylophone line, the track leans fully into a kind of storybook folk aesthetic. It’s gentle, melodic, and intentionally small in scale. You…

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  • I recently watched Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere and honestly, it’s less a documentary and more an autopsy, not of masculinity, but of what happens when insecurity gets monetised and handed a microphone. It lays bare the social rot that parts of the internet have become, not chaotic but corrosive, engineered even, a space where…

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  • A new UK Music report titled “Black Music Means Business” quantifies what has long been understood but rarely measured: Black music is not a category within the UK industry; it is the foundation of it. The data now makes that impossible to ignore. This report proves that Black music isn’t just a category—it accounts for…

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  • Our Rating: 10/10 From the opening line, “Take a look at the world today; we have got to find a better way,” this track lands exactly where it needs to. It is as emotional as it is liberating. And when that line keeps coming back, it doesn’t feel repetitive; it feels absolutely necessary. Because we…

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  • Our Rating 8/10 Some songs arrive loudly. Others move quietly, like someone stepping into a room and simply standing there until everyone notices. “Grace”, the new single from Irish alt-pop artist Chubby Cat, belongs firmly in the second category. Built around a sparse electronic foundation, the track leans into atmosphere rather than immediacy. Soft synth…

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  • Our Rating 10/10 Music has long been described as a healing force. Not the clinical sort found in a pharmacy, but the quieter medicine that settles somewhere deep in the chest when the right song arrives at the right moment. When I pressed play on “Golden Thing,” the new single from West Cork songwriter Molly…

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  • At a certain point in life, time stops feeling abstract. It becomes physical. It lives in the body, in memory, in the quiet realisation that the person you once were is not the person you are becoming. For Ndidi O, that realisation sits at the centre of her new album It’s About Time, released March…

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  • Thursday rolls around again and our new ritual of Tracks of the Week begins here at TIR. New and indeed great music never really stops arriving. It seeps out of studios, bedrooms, basements and tour buses like groundwater. The job is simply to listen closely and separate the sparks from the noise. Here are four…

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  • Our Rating 6/10 When BLACKPINK release music, it is never just a drop. It is a recalibration of global pop temperature. Deadline arrives after a period where each member expanded her individual identity. That matters. You can feel it in the control here. This EP is not chaotic spectacle. It is sharpened, deliberate, aware of…

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