Music reviews: Ethel Cain, Amaarae, and The Black Keys

'Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You' by Ethel Cain

★★★

If Ethel Cain's second album reminds you of the music from TV's Twin Peaks, it's no accident, said Chris Kelly in The Washington Post. Last year, Cain tracked down the same synthesizers that Angelo Badalamenti had used on the 1990 series soundtrack. The result is a stately paced concept album that "drips with the yearning of young love and the pain of your first real heartbreak." It marks the 27-year-old singer-songwriter as "the true heir to Lynch" because she's "the musical artist most capable of capturing the beauty of all-consuming love, the terror of man's capacity for evil, and the traumatic toll taken by both."

While Cain's world is "a landscape of despair," said Mark Richardson in The Wall Street Journal, she presents her Gothic tales with "a tender, almost nostalgic edge." She shows great empathy for her characters, even the self-destructive ones, and uses beautiful arrangements to draw listeners in before "taking them somewhere dark and foreboding." Willoughby Tucker serves as a prequel to Cain's first album, 2022's Preacher's Daughter, but the new music is where new listeners should start. It's "a stunning artistic statement."

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'Black Star' by Amaarae

★★★★

Amaarae's "hugely enjoyable" third album "requires a slight resetting of expectations," said Shaad D'Souza in The Guardian. The Ghanaian American singer's previous album, Fountain Baby, was "sensual and musically dense," establishing her as a creative force on a level with Rosalía and Charli XCX. But because that record didn't break through commercially, "this is her take on a club record, weaving elements of house, trance, and EDM into Afrobeats and spiky rap cadences." The new sound comes with a heaping side of hedonism: The songs "exalt drinking, drug‐­taking, and rowdy sex in such an unapologetic way that they would elicit blushes even from the Weeknd, pop's reigning king of smut."

On Black Star, Amaarae is "pursued by hangovers and hangers-on," said Walden Green in Pitchfork. While the album's rave-ups sound "powder-dusted in ketamine and coke," Amaarae the lyricist "has never sounded quite so guarded." The album's "lacquered surface" finally begins to crack on "Dream Scenario," revealing a hint of candor. Otherwise, Black Star is the record you make when you've wallowed in every indulgence and wonder, "Is this all there is?"

'No Rain, No Flowers' by The Black Keys

★★

"The Black Keys' clockwork competence is a durable wonder," said Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone. Sure, the duo's last album, 2024's Ohio Players, and accompanying tour were market flops. But more than a dozen years since they broke through as unlikely retro-rock hitmakers, guitarist-singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Pat Carney didn't mope. Instead, they retreated to their Nashville studio, gathered a few high-profile collaborators, and put together "one of their most precision-tuned LPs yet." The 11-track set evokes the song list of a radio station of yore that leaps from "bubble-funk workouts" to Bee Gees–style falsettos to a "fuzzed-out blues-metal stomp." It's all "seamlessly smooth" and "a poppy far cry from the garage-grind they built their career on, but it's not without heart."

Unfortunately, the title track is "massively cheesy," said Will Hodgkinson in The Times (U.K.), and the disco-inflected groove of "Make You Mine" is "an awkward fit" for these garage revivalists. "Babygirl," at least, "has the mix of pop catchiness and retrograde rock that made their biggest hits so all-conquering." Most else sounds like "a band in crisis, unsure of where to go next."