Music reviews: BTS, Luke Combs, and Grace Ives

‘Arirang’ by BTS

★★★

“Comebacks don’t get bigger than this one,” said Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone. The world’s biggest band, after a hiatus during which all seven members fulfilled their mandatory South Korean military service obligation, has returned “stronger than ever” with the group’s first album since 2020. The record’s first half is “one up-tempo stomp after another, loaded with hip-hop braggadocio,” while the second half “stretches out in more interesting directions.” And though the lyrics mix Korean and English, the music repeatedly stresses BTS’s Korean roots. The album title is taken from a popular Korean folk song that’s also woven into the stadium-ready opening track, producing “a powerful collision of the ancient and the modern.” The entire album feels like a fulfillment of the band’s promise to be a bridge of South Korean culture to the rest of the world, said Sheldon Pearce in NPR.com. And while the “grungy pop” of “Like Animals” qualifies as a “quintessential” BTS song, that’s even more true of the rap songs, in part because rapper RM is the lead creative force. The band “has never felt more connected, inwardly or to its calling.”

‘The Way I Am’ by Luke Combs

★★★

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Luke Combs’ new album “plays like an hour of prime contemporary
country radio,” said Stephen Thomas Erlewine in Pitchfork. Mixing ballads with “sports-bar anthems,” the 22-song set “hits the expected marks crisply, sometimes even memorably.” There’s talk of whiskey, Saturday nights, cowboys, and everlasting love. They’re “hand-me-down stories,” in other words, but “distinguished by an expert sense of craft.” The album proves careless only in its “rambling” length. Still, the “honeyed rasp” of Combs’ voice “commands attention,” and on weepers like “15 Minutes,” about a prison inmate, he remains “a storyteller who knows when to not telegraph a twist.” With this frequent Grammy nominee, “consistency is the name of the game,” said Ethan Beck in Paste. Throughout Combs’ catalog, “there are almost no terrible songs but only a few life-changing ones,” because he relies mostly on “well-deployed clichés” and “a blandly rocking atmosphere.” If he’d “get down in the weeds” and reveal more of his personal shortcomings, as rivals Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan do, he’d “strike gold” more often.

‘Girlfriend’ by Grace Ives

★★★

Grace Ives’ latest tunes “bubble with detail,” said Laura Snapes in The
Guardian. The Brooklyn native, who earned her initial acclaim as a DIY
bedroom-pop artist, has expanded her sound for this third album, a record filled with “hyper-detailed songs that streak by like big-city streetlights and shimmer with cosmic awe.” Ives, 30, embraced sobriety just before starting work on the album, and she appears to be exorcising demons. With its collage-like assemblages of club beats, glitchy synths, and stabs of strings, Girlfriend evokes “the broken-mirror glitter” of Lorde’s Melodrama, distinguished by “off-the-cuff vocals” that “nudge melodies into earworms.” After making 2022’s acclaimed Janky Star, said Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times, “Ives was often described as a kind of endearingly sloppy agent of Millennial-girl chaos.” The new album “finds her reckoning with the consequences of such behavior,” but it’s also “relentlessly catchy.” Her songs remain “cut through with her poetic sense of humor,” and they still have an intimacy that makes each sound “as if the listener is eavesdropping on the personal theme songs she hums to herself.”