Melissa Kacar

Wicked: For Good is such a beautiful celebration of the people who enter your life and leave an indelible mark on you forever. It's a powerful representation of friendship and sisterhood in their purest forms, as well as a reminder of the younger versions of ourselves that continue to live within us years later. Once again, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo deliver truly incredible performances. I said this in my review of the first part too, but it bears repeating: there is no one else in the world who could have embodied Glinda and Elphaba the way Ariana and Cynthia did. They were made for these roles, and their commitment shines through every moment. Jonathan Bailey also stood out as Fiyero, bringing depth and growth to his character arc in ways that was so crucial to the overall story.  The second part of Wicked is undeniably darker than the first, but it builds beautifully on top of it, adding new layers of complexity to each character's journey. It's not only a creati...

The newly expanded version of Djo 's The Crux is more than just a regular deluxe album. As a whole, these additional twelve songs give so much more insight into the journey he took while writing this album and all of the different directions he could've taken with it narratively. The Crux (Deluxe)  is more so a companion project of songs that were written during the same creative period as the rest of The Crux , but didn't make the initial cut. That said, they don't feel like leftovers. Each track is truly like a natural expansion of the time in his life that inspired this music, and collectively, they feel like a culmination of some of the more unhinged parts of himself that he had to work through to arrive at the final version of The Crux . From working through the early aftermath and heartache of a breakup, to navigating some of the darker parts of fame, virality and newfound pressures of the music industry that he experienced when making this album throughout 2024,...

Ten years ago,  Billie Eilish  uploaded her very first song onto SoundCloud. When she recorded "ocean eyes" she was only 13 years old, yet instantly cemented herself as one of the defining voices of this generation of music. The track was written, produced, and mixed by her brother,  Finneas , who was 18 at the time. Originally intended for his band, he realized his sister's voice would suit the song much better. They recorded it together and uploaded it independently to SoundCloud, simply with the intention of wanting Billie's dance teacher to choreograph a routine to it. What happened next was beyond anything they imagined, with the song organically going viral overnight. "So my brother wrote it, and he kind of just came into my room one night and said, 'I have this song, and I want you to sing it.' I sang it, and it was weirdly exactly what I was going through at the time, which was weird," Billie said in a 2017 interview for Lexus' Artist Spo...