June 27, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic returns from a personal voyage and finds herself swimming in songs that seem to be reaching out across a divide.

Kasia Wozniak

Hello reachers,

It’s lovely to be back in touch after my recent odyssey, which did, in fact, take me to a Greek island as part of a writers’ and musicians’ salon that felt like an extraordinary gift. Communing with like-minded souls striving to find forms for their creativity — and swimming in the Aegean every day — rearranged my priorities and, perhaps predictably, got me thinking deep thoughts. I brought this mindset back to Nashville; maybe that’s why, when I put my nose back on the pop-critic grindstone, I found myself seeking the sublime.

This isn’t where most pop songs go. The hits we tend to clasp to our heart usually home in on really small moments, little human exchanges that love or lust or frustration make huge. Olivia Rodrigo does this with delightful accuracy throughout her new album you seem pretty sad for a girl in love, which follows a folie a deux from flirtation to detonation to clearing up the rubble. She starts right away, in the first track, “drop dead,” when she fully captures the tingly anxiety of watching a guy she’s flirting with nurse his beer in order to keep talking to her. “Kiss me and I might drop dead”: There are just two people inside that big feeling.

In Phoebe Bridgers’ new single “Lost Boys,” she does the same in a less immediate context, constructing the memory of a puppy love forced into maturity, then oblivion, by war. Still, she locates the story in a double bed, “hands in each other’s hair” — a deeply private moment. Such songs speak directly to the listener and often for her: Through the process of identification, a song can address whatever object of desire someone inserts into the narrative. By formalizing and even ritualizing intimacy, such perfect pop songs make us feel both understood and empowered.

It’s more challenging to write a successful song with a broader reach, one that goes beyond imagining interpersonal drama to express the desire to connect on a more communal or even cosmic scale. I’m not talking about generic uplift here, but about songs that run toward the sublime.

What is the sublime? According to the Romantic poets, it’s a sense of awe at something bigger than yourself: the beauty of a sunrise or the terror of an open grave. It’s not something that can be contained within an Instagram post. The idea of the sublime is often abused, muted within pastel melodies or blown up by corny beats. In fact, the experience should startle, be a little ugly. It sounds like gospel music and the best dark metal. It goes beyond.

That feeling of going beyond surfaces on Beth Orton’s wild-spirited new album The Ground Above, a fearless exploration of loss and testimony of survival that I’ve been playing on repeat since my return. The London-based singer-songwriter begins with the line “I’m invincible as grief,” and across its eight-song span, realizes that line’s implications by balancing power and vulnerability, struggle and insight. Orton’s imperfect voice echoes through lush arrangements, grounding them in the striving of someone who’s accepted her limits, but still yearns beyond them.

The album’s final track is its most inspirational. Written after a sleepless night, “Otherside” begins with a birdcall. In it, Orton hears the thrum of Freud’s eros, the instinct to survive — “I am alive, I’m still here.” The sound breaks Orton, then lifts her up; she dreams of other mothers, including the earth, crying, fighting, surviving. What is the other side toward which a song like this reaches? For Orton, it’s the undefinable presence of the non-human — of the dawn’s creature she hears at her window and the animated, dwindling light she sees during sleeplessness. If she can grasp those energies, she may better understand what afflicts people, the inexpressible full experience of suffering, the balm of hope. She can keep on loving despite the reality of life’s finitude.

For Son House, the other side was an incomprehensible place, but he tried to grasp it by standing at its portal. A new recording of the Mississippi-born bluesman’s devastating song “Death Letter” captures the supernatural dread its plainspoken description of death evokes. Sung with dogged fierceness by 84-year-old Taj Mahal within an arrangement that features a full blues band and the black-majority Chineke! Orchestra, this “Death Letter” was commissioned as part of the actor Morgan Freeman’s new 12-LP symphonic exploration of the blues. Its sound evokes the bloody mood of last year’s Sinners, reminding listeners that Black Americans have lived through too many bites on the neck.

House’s plainspoken, detailed account of encountering his lover’s dead body in the morgue and at the grave reveals the peril of love’s bonds. This is a one-on-one encounter, but the silence of the dead renders it alien and open-ended. When Mahal sings “I didn’t have a soul to throw my arm around,” despair has engulfed him. He has lost himself. But then he sits in that dark place, and the confrontation saves him. He comes to accept the misery generated by a severed bond, to see it clear-eyed and know that to be human is to find a way to name it.

Loss is the specter that haunts the other side, however it’s defined. Death can be its avatar; so can forms of distance that are less final but no easier to endure. The Paris-based Sudanese singer Sulaf makes exile her muse on her upcoming album ABA, dedicated to her late great-grandfather Abdelazim Sayed Ahmed (known as Aba). Exiled in Paris because of Sudan’s ongoing wars, Sulaf creates a bridge between herself and her European contemporaries and her home and family by setting Aba’s Sufi poems, which she’d memorized, within up-to-the-minute musical settings. She doesn’t know if the notebook that held his poems still exists. She must carry them within herself.

Throughout ABA, the glitchy glow of synthesizers and electric guitar interacts with Aba’s highly imagistic, often explicitly pious verses to make the deep yearning within them feel deeply immediate; Sulaf’s singing incorporates traditional techniques while retaining a soulfulness that is hers alone. A song like the traveler’s prayer “Shogi Ana” — which translates to “My Longing” — becomes multidimensional, intertwining the fervor of devotion with the exquisite melancholy of remembering the spirits you love but can no longer encounter in the flesh. It crosses the border. As wide as a song’s embrace can be, it can’t encompass everything, but this song reaching out to the other side proves it’s the effort that makes it beautiful.

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A few things that I found excellent this week (if not sublime)

Amanda Petrusich’s clarity and open-heartedness in this piece on coping with grief following her husband Bret’s sudden death in 2022 is remarkable. I especially love what this excellent music critic wrote about how songs changed for her after her loss: “I developed a new and funny admiration for the ways in which music distilled and centered emotion. I liked that songs, for the most part, took living seriously. I did, too.”
There’s tons of talk about how hard life is for musicians in the cruelly rearranged entertainment economy. None have captured the reality so powerfully as this song, “Beater Car,” from River Shook’s new self-titled album. The whole album is great; you should buy it.
If you’ve got 20 minutes and the Criterion Channel, I highly recommend Pepi Ginsberg’s short film WassupKaylee — a kind-hearted, haunting depiction of young people’s lives under the tyranny of influencer culture.
Scholar Dan DiPiero’s reminiscence of falling in love with Joan Osborne — and her notorious nose ring — as a kid who wondered if God was one of us is both adorable and profound. Incidentally, Joan was the subject of my only Rolling Stone cover story back in 1996.
Foundational riot grrrl/queercore band Team Dresch is releasing its first album in 30 years this fall. Exciting! Here’s “One Song,” the first single from Furthermore. In a sweet intergenerational twist, the video features bassist Jody Bleyle’s daughter, Twylo Landey, dancing to her own choreography.
Want a listen that’s deep and just beautiful? I love the new album by South African pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini, The Myth We Choose. Spiritual jazz at its realest.

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