For her new video, the singer assembles the white house in which everything looks beautiful and nothing feels true.

Ariana Grande is an enviably talented singer, and, seemingly, hardworking one — in the last few years she released two highly-successful albums, and her new long-play is on the way. The pop star has also been quite outspoken about supporting women rights and fighting against social oppression, both in her music and social media posts. Her song “God is a woman” — alongside its music video — is probably the most striking feminist anthem of the decade.

Last week, Grande released the new single “Positions” together with a politically-charged music video in which she appears as the commander-in-chief residing in the White House with her fellow “ministers”, mainly women of all colours and shapes, and a couple of gay men. It’s weird to put such an emphasis on the composition of Grande’s white house, but that’s what the singer and her team want people to pay attention to. …

Have you heard all of them?

It’s almost five years since Adele released “25”. She has been away for so long, and so many things have changed for her along the road. I wonder if it had much of an impact on her storytelling.

Now she’s back, hosting “Saturday Night Live” this week. Does it mean a new album is on the way? Are we getting more powerhouse ballads? Or less? Maybe she made a disco album like her fellow brit Jessie Ware?

Rumour has it she might drop new music this Halloween.

Whatever it is, Adele can surprise us. She did before.

Yes, she might be known the most for her personable love songs, but her music isn’t as homogenous as one might think — there’s more to it than melodrama. …

Featuring pearls of wisdom from Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Ray BLK, Jamila Woods and India.Arie

Do you ever feel like half of your life is being spent on reliving past experiences?

I do.

To dwell in the past is, probably, a bad habit to have, but I can’t help it: a tiny curator in my head likes to play old movies for me. Today he’s playing “Teenage Memories” — my coming of age story. The soundtrack to the film features five women. Confident, unapologetic women with a strong sense of self-worth.

These women taught me some important life lessons.

Here are five of them.

1. Your apples are as good as anyone else’s — they’re just different.

“Appletree” by Erykah Badu was the first soul song I’ve ever heard in my life. …

Well, it’s mutual. I care about Kamala Harris too.

I’m not an American citizen and I’ve never been to the US — so why do I care about the presidential elections there? It’s hard to explain. Sometimes I get so emotionally involved in other countries’ elections that it feels like I’m there. Making the momentous decision that will change the way my future will look like in… in the future.

It’s like I care about people making good choices. If we all choose something better instead of something worse today, then tomorrow we will be living in a better world.

The fairytale no one asked me for. …

Allergy advice: Contains traces of depression, anxiety, and frustration.

A bright ray of sun falls from the clear blue sky on my petite face. I wake up. I feel wholesome. I feel wholesome the way only a white paper could ever feel. If it could. But maybe it can? Do we really know what a white paper feels when we draw some obscure lines on it? I bet it hates it. I bet it wants to go back to the times when it had roots, and branches, and leaves. To the times when there was no white paper at all.

Sometimes I want the same. Sometimes I want to feel that very same ray of the sun warming my baby cheeks and my big brown eyes. There was no past. There was no future. Only the sun. A shiny dot stretching its way through time and space towards a predictable destination. …

A short note on Angel Olsen’s epic record

On the ride back home from Odessa, I was scrolling through my Spotify to find something cheerful to play to keep me awake but I ended up looping “All Mirrors” by Angel Olsen for two hours.

Not like I’ve never done it before but that night Olsen’s apathetic chanting felt extra-special because that night I was losing beauty together with her.

It’s always quite unpleasant, to be losing beauty. One moment you feel cathartic — on the highest hill of your emotional well-being — but then suddenly the earth starts melting right under your feet. …

Her latest LP “MAGDALENE” is an interstellar voyage through the dust of the broken heart to the planet of self

During her long-lasting hiatus, the avant-garde pop princess FKA Twigs got crushed by the brutal hands of her troubled relationships — falling in love with the ex-blood sucker Robert Pattinson and splitting with him in a seemingly heart-wrecking manner. Two years following the end of this romance, twigs comes back feeling quite herself and ready to baptise her loyal fanbase in the career-defining shrift.

In the pre-“MAGDALENE” era, British-born singer and songwriter Taliah Barnett took on a cunning challenge to manufacture the new RnB sound — blending her fragile-sounding soprano and the spooky art-house opera inspired imagery with the precision and inanimation of electronic music. …

Here are three things you should know before it goes viral

Ukrainian music is far from being homogenous — it varies and varies greatly depending on a genre you listen to.

This way, listening to Ukrainian folk and electronic music might feel like discovering a new and vibrant city somewhere in the midst of Western Europe or the US. But once you switch to hip-hop, in an instance you get carried over to a sparsely populated countryside where your dear grandma lives — place vaguely familiar and warming to your heat, but too depressing to stay in for more than a week.

The above is the most flattering terms one could describe whatever was happening to the rap and hip-hop scene throughout the years of Ukrainian independence. The industry just wasn’t there, and acts like VUZV and TNMK were nothing more than a couple of bright spots on the otherwise blank canvas. …