Amanda Petrusich

There are plenty of albums that might have made the cut on a different day. But good list-making requires hubris, constraint. A moment of wild and fearless conviction.

Critics love to make these kinds of breathless pronouncements. But with this band, currently on tour to promote its album “Getting Killed,” controlled hysteria is sort of the point.

From the daily newsletter: this very young band has reëstablished New York City’s rock bonafides.

, in 2011. Swift was already enormously famous (“Fearless,” from 2008, won a Grammy for Album of the Year; “Speak Now,” released in 2010, sold more than a million copies in its first week), but she hadn't yet become the object of such fervent and unwavering interest that she had to hold her hand over her mouth when she spoke in public, lest she send a nation of lip-readers into a frenzy. Looking at this image is like seeing a picture of yourself taken just before something seismic happened: maybe you met a great love, or learned you were having a baby, or lost someone. There's your smiling face, forever moored in the Before.

In his new songs—and a new documentary—the Vermont singer-songwriter considers how the misery of fame can make you yearn for the place you meant to escape.

Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her criticism and features have appeared in the New York Times, the Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her book “Do Not Sell at Any Price” explores the obsessive world of 78-r.p.m.-record collectors. She is the writer-in-residence at New York University’s Gallatin School.

The polymath musician, formerly of Vampire Weekend, likes to push our idea of what a pop song can be.

Doug Berns, a.k.a. DugLust, is a Knicks nut and a modern-day Weird Al, who counts Ben Stiller among his devotees. With the team in the playoffs, he's busy.

Olivia Rodrigo’s third album charts new sonic ground for the 23-year-old pop singer, inching away from frisky, impish pop-punk and leaning more toward New Wave, with its melodic synthesizers and velvety yearning.

After my husband’s death, I had never been more pliable, tender, open, or raw. It was then that I tried E.M.D.R. therapy.