Game Review: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

There’s something quietly bold about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It’s not the way it blends turn-based combat with real-time mechanics like parrying and QTEs, or the visual confidence of its Parisian-inspired world. What’s so bold about this game is what it’s trying to say and the questions it asks about existence itself. Beneath its art direction and theatrical presentation, this is a game deeply preoccupied with fate, impermanence, and what it means to be remembered. This isn’t just a stylish RPG — it’s a philosophical text disguised in battles and metaphors, asking what makes a life worth living when its end has already been determined.

The central storyline is chilling yet simple: once a year, a spectral figure known as the Paintress declares a number, and everyone of that age disappears. There is no explanation or resistance, just absence. You play as part of Expedition 33 — named so because every member is 33 years old, and knows that their time is almost up. What begins as a literal countdown quickly becomes something more reflective. What do we do when confronted with the certainty of death? What obligations do we carry to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the world that will keep spinning after we are gone? The game doesn’t force answers. It refuses to stop asking.

This existential unease is everywhere, from the decaying grandeur of its environments to the ways characters speak to one another. Dialogue feels curated but never stiff. There’s a recurring tension between action and futility. You’re trying to stop the cycle, but everyone around you is already grieving and letting go. That sense of elegy gives weight to every decision and conversation. Even the combat, which is fast and mechanically satisfying, carries the same tension. Every encounter is a delay, and every victory is on borrowed time.

What’s remarkable is how these themes are not just echoed in the story, but in the way the game moves. The pacing feels intentional — neither rushed or indulgent. Even the visual design supports this: blurred edges, sun-bleached architecture, and relics of joy that has faded. There are moments of surreal humor like a mime boss fight or a giant talking character named Esquie, but they’re folded into the melancholy rather than breaking it. The absurdity doesn’t dilute the emotion. This is a game that understands how strange grief can feel, how it loops, disorients and, refuses to resolve cleanly.

The final and most pivotal choice you make in the game isn’t framed as success or failure. It’s quieter than that. You’re asked whether to preserve the system — to take on the role of the Paintress and continue the cycle — or to reject it entirely, even if that means erasure. It’s not a power fantasy, it’s a reckoning. The game spends hours conditioning you to feel the weight of endings, legacy, and unintended consequences, and now it hands you the brush. Not as a reward, but as a question. Are you willing to keep erasing in the name of order? Or is it better to risk collapse for the possibility of something different and real? The choice doesn’t offer resolution, it offers reflection. And that, in many ways, is the most honest conclusion it could possibly give.

Expedition 33 isn’t interested in traditional storytelling. The world isn’t ending in the usual apocalyptic sense — it’s fading. People vanish and are forgotten. The rest move on. The real antagonist isn’t the Paintress, it’s time and escapism itself. The systems that normalize disappearance. The way grief becomes routine. And yet, in the face of that, the game still insists on finding meaning and treasuring memories. It values doing something with the time we’re given. It’s that insistence that lingers after the credits, more than any plot twist or boss battle could offer.

In the end, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is less about saving the world and more about understanding your place in it. It’s a game that invites you to reflect, to feel, and to wrestle with what you can’t fix. And somehow, counterintuitively that makes it feel hopeful. Not because everything will be okay in the end — but because trying to make it so is the journey that matters.

Album Review: Cancionera - Natalia Lafourcade

There is always a timeless quality to Natalia Lafourcade’s music. On her newest album Cancionera, that timelessness becomes deliberate. It’s etched into every lyric, chord, and moment of stillness like new embroidery on old fabric. This isn’t just an album you listen to; it’s an immersive experience you are meant to enter like a small, candlelit room during a thunderstorm. Cancionera is a deeply theatrical and symbolic departure from the grounded earnestness that defined her last project De Todas las Flores. Where that album felt like a diary — vulnerable, rooted in grief, and rebirth — Cancionera feels more like a play. There's a new character that defines it: “La Cancionera,” Lafourcade’s alter ego, who acts as both a muse and mirror, guiding the listener through themes of love, heritage, and healing.

What’s most impressive is how this character doesn’t obscure Lafourcade’s voice, but instead it sharpens it. By crafting a fictional persona and alternative voice for this album, she somehow becomes even more honest. She lets Lafourcade explore aspects of herself that don’t always get center stage, such as rage, sensuality, absurdity, and defiance. The album’s storytelling is rich with metaphor and symbols like mirrors, rivers, ghosts, and lullabies, but it never feels out of reach. Instead, it invites living interpretation and re-interpretation, like a poem that changes meaning depending on when and where you read it. Natalia has always flirted with duality, but here, she dives in headfirst.

Sonically, the album is a layered tapestry of regional Mexican music, chamber folk, and impressionist pop. Tracks like “Cocos en la Playa” shimmer with vibrant warmth through its plucked strings, suggesting palm trees swaying just out of view. It’s lighthearted and earthy, but even in its breeziness, there's a wistfulness to this track. On the other side of the spectrum is “La Bruja - Versión Cancionera,” a spectral reinvention of a traditional folk song that pulses with quiet menace. Here, Lafourcade doesn’t just cover a classic, but instead inhabits it. This range can at times suggest thematic inconsistency compared to previous projects, but that may be by design here. Her voice slips between registers, echoing like wind, evoking centuries of women who’ve sung same melody, for protection, protest, or something in between.

The album’s production is meticulous but feels incredibly organic. It doesn’t feel overworked or over-arranged — just lovingly handled from its instrumental opening and closing tracks to songs that sound like they were sung in front of crowds. The use of live recordings, analog textures, and layered acoustic instruments gives the album an almost tactile quality. It sounds like a room to stand in, not a file to streaming. Collaborations with Hermanos Gutiérrez and El David Aguilar aren’t marquee moments on the project, they are woven into the fabric of the album like threads of a larger pattern. These guest appearances don’t detract from Lafourcade’s vision. Their voices arrive not as intrusions but as echoes, as if summoned by La Cancionera herself to help add color to the narrative.

Cancionera is more than just a record. It’s a ritual. It’s an invitation to step into a dreamscape where every song is a memory you forgot you had. It’s also a reminder that honoring tradition doesn’t have to mean staying still — sometimes it means dancing with the past, reimagining it, and encouraging it to say something fit for a new context. Lafourcade isn’t just preserving heritage here; she’s conversing with it, complicating it, and making it beautiful all over again. In a time when so much music feels like background noise, Cancionera not only demands to be heard intently and fully, but experienced with every part of you — especially the parts that leans into the romanticization and beauties of everyday life.

Favorite tracks: “Aperatura Cancionera,” “Cancionera,” Cocos en la Playa,” “Amor Clandestino,” “El Coconito,” “El Palomo y La Negra,” “Cariñito de Acapulco,”" “La Bruja - Versión Cancionera,” “Luna Creciente,” “Lágrimas Cancioneras”

SCORE: 9.2/10

Album Review: Revengeseekerz - Jane Remover

Some kinds of chaos feel calculated. Not clinical, but intentional. Jane Remover’s newest album Revengeseekerz is packed full of that kind of chaos. It's erratic, loud, and glitchy in all the right ways, and yet it never loses control or overexerts itself. Coming off the heels of 2023’s Census Designated — a luscious, soft-focus record about isolation and suburban sprawl — Revengeseekerz rips the curtains down. It’s loud where Census Designated was muted, shouts where Census whispered, and emotionally feral in a way that feels like a natural evolution, proving Jane Remover is developing their musical repertoire.

The biggest, baddest moment on the album is “Psychoboost feat danny brown” and sounds exactly like its name. Like its title reference, this song is a Pokémon battle — drums clash, basslines implode, and Danny Brown sounds like his usual unhinged self, in the best way. Jane’s production here is wild but airtight like they’re testing the structural integrity of the song without ever letting it collapse. If you’ve been waiting for them to fully lean into noise and speed and digital distortion, this is your reward.

Then there’s “Dancing with your eyes closed,” which in many ways is the inverse — there is the same sharp detail, but this time aimed at the dance floor. It’s hazy, nostalgic, and maybe the most accessible track they’ve ever made. There’s something earnest in the vocal layering, the way the beat almost stumbles but finds its footing again. Jane doesn’t lose their edge here — they just bend it into something warmer.

The whole album lives in the tension between rage and release. “TURN UP OR DIE” is straight-up aggro rave destruction, while “Dark night castle” pulls things back into something more spacious and haunted. But no track here feels tangential. Even the weirder, spikier cuts have a sense of direction, like Jane knows exactly where they want to take you — even if they’re kicking up sparks along the way.

Revengeseekerz isn’t easy, accessible listening, but it’s not trying to be. It’s a breakup album, a power fantasy, and a digital exorcism all rolled into one. And it might be Jane Remover’s best work yet — a sign that their artistry will continue to evolve, mature, and improve with time. If Census Designated was about observing the world through a dusty lens, Revengeseekerz is Jane smashing that lens and dancing in its shattered glass.

Favorite tracks: “Psychoboost feat danny brown,” “Star people,” “Experimental Skin,” “Dreamflasher,” “TURN UP OR DIE,” “Dancing with your eyes closed,” “Professional Vengeance,” “Dark night castle,” “JRJRJR”

SCORE: 8.6/10

Album Review: Portrait of My Heart - SPELLLING

With her fourth studio album Portrait of My Heart, SPELLLING, also known as Chrystia Cabral, has decided to step confidently into new emotional terrain. Peeling away the layered symbolism and surrealism that once defined her work in favor of something more personal, Cabral invites us into the vast and complex reality that exists within her. Known for crafting worlds from otherworldly textures, Cabral instead turns inward on Portrait of My Heart, exchanging her usual mythic narratives and celestial metaphors for a more grounded, humanist vulnerability. The result is a rich, emotionally saturated record that expands her sonic palette while simultaneously clarifying and centering her voice as an artist.

To fully appreciate Portrait of My Heart, it’s important to first trace the entirety of Cabral’s discography. Her debut album Pantheon of Me introduced us to a DIY experimentalist with a taste for spectral R&B and gothic synth-pop, channeling bedroom-produced mysticism into a haunted tracklist. She refined this sound with her sophomore record Mazy Fly, a critically acclaimed release that pushed further into Afrofuturist storytelling and eerie, analog dreamscapes. Then came The Turning Wheel, her magnum opus of theatrical orchestration and baroque pop grandeur. This record served as a kaleidoscopic concept album about transformation, societal structures, and rebirth. The Turning Wheel flirted with Broadway-style melodrama and chamber pop, setting the stage for what felt like a definitive culmination of her maximalist vision.

But Portrait of My Heart is something almost entirely different. It’s more vulnerable but no less ambitious or at times abrasive, demonstrating a move from operatic allegory to more confessional and heartfelt songwriting. Tracks like “Alibi” utilize 90s alt-rock aesthetics and instrumentation, while “Keep It Alive” pulses with the kind of emotional urgency Cabral previously disguised behind her character-driven songwriting. “Destiny Arrives” is an obvious standout — its soaring chorus and cosmic arrangement channels the spiritual awe of Mazy Fly, but with a new emotional clarity. Cabral’s voice glides with conviction and wonder, turning fate into a kind of gospel. Equally compelling is “Drain,” a slinky, bass-heavy dirge that morphs and winds its way into an earned cathartic release. Its ghostly atmosphere and stark lyrics evoke emotional exhaustion without sacrificing its groove, capturing the ache of disillusionment in a way that feels haunting and hypnotic. Her closing cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” wraps the album with grace by distilling shoegaze melancholia into a heartfelt plea; it encapsulates the record’s emotional transparency. By choosing to cover this song, SPELLLING identifies herself with the progressive and visionary artists that paved the way in the same genre that she’s now exploring and defining.

Collaborators such as Toro y Moi and Turnstile’s Pat McCrory help translate the album’s emotional intensity into genre-blurring arrangements. The fingerprints of SPELLLING’s past remain: otherworldly synths, spectral vocal layering, and theatrical flourishes emerge like ghosts from older records, gently reminding us that Cabral’s surreal sensibility hasn’t vanished, but instead that it has grown and evolved.

Ultimately, Portrait of My Heart doesn’t abandon Carbal’s past; it synthesizes it. Where her previous work explored mythical identities and societal abstractions, this album brings those lessons inward, asking what it means to love, to hurt, and to heal. It’s SPELLLING’s most vulnerable and personal work yet, and thus her most bold and courageous. By unmasking herself, she invites and encourages the listener to do the same.

Favorite tracks: “Portrait of My Heart,” “Keep It Alive,” “Alibi,” “Destiny Arrives,” “Ammunition,” “Mount Analogue,” “Drain,” “Love Ray Eyes,” “Sometimes”

SCORE: 9.0/10

Album Review: Forever Howlong - Black Country, New Road

Shortly after its release in 2022, Black Country, New Road’s sophomore album Ants From Up There was heralded by many critics and fans as an instant classic. Packed to the brim with complex instrumentation and deeply-compelling lyricism, the album helped the young band achieve heights that many bands simply dream of, and this was with only one release (For the first time) under their belts. Ants From Up There’s rollout perfectly complemented the bittersweet themes of success despite struggle throughout the project, as the group’s lead vocalist and co-founder Isaac Woods announced his departure just days before its release, citing his mental health. Ants From Up There, which I consider a masterpiece, exists as a time capsule of Black Country, New Road and who they were when Isaac was contributing both musically and spiritually to the outfit. While his identity is found deeply throughout every moment on Ants From Up There’s tracklist, the gorgeous backing instrumentation and talented musicians who supported him also helped lift the project to the level of ascendancy that it reached. There was just one problem with this success… the group no longer had its lead vocalist moving forward, and fans’ hopes and expectations for their future were sky high.

Luckily for them, though, those same talented instrumentalists also happen to serve as incredibly unique and gifted vocalists with their own perspectives, aesthetics, and performance choices. In 2023, the group released Live at Bush Hall — their first output since Isaac’s departure. This performance was not released as an official album, but instead as a collection of dynamic performances and tracks that showcased each band member’s individual skills and styles. While there were some growing pains found throughout this release, the cohesion and raw talent that put the band on the map in the first place was still very apparent, and there was hope that they could forge a new identity upon future releases.

That brings us to the subject matter of this review. On April 4th, 2025, Black Country, New Road released their third full-length studio album Forever Howlong. Over the course of this project’s rollout, the band released three ambitious singles: the opening and harpsichord-laden track “Besties,” the beautifully discordant “Happy Birthday,” and the long-awaited, until-then-unreleased fan favorite “For the Cold Country.” Each of these tracks features a different lead vocalist, with Georgia Ellery, Tyler Hyde, and May Kershaw takings the reins, respectively. All three women have a cohesive and somewhat similar sound, but their differing perspectives and artistic nuances add so much character throughout the album as a whole. While all of these singles are great and serve as reflective examples of what the album’s themes consist of, the album is best consumed from start to finish, because there is just so much you don’t want to miss.

The sometimes larger-than-life, grandiose, and progressive instrumentation and vocal performance found throughout Ants From Up There is turned up a notch on Forever Howlong. The group has no hesitations when deciding to ignore standard time signatures or experiment with typical song structures, instead opting to create songs that constantly develop, build tension, and defy norms. That allows moments like the whimsical opening of “The Big Spin,” the insane tempo change on “Two Horses,” or the signature peculiar lyricism of the title track to not only pay off, to build upon one another to create a cohesive experience.

Each song on this album is absolutely necessary, and while there are still some areas of opportunity for the group’s new identity to expand, many of the tracks here are among the group’s best, which is saying a lot when considering the absurdly high bar they have set for themselves. Haunting lines like “I make eye contact with the dawn / We both look away” and vignettes like those found on “Nancy Tries to Take the Night” are both career highlights for the band. Additionally, the project gains new depth and complexity upon each listen — sonically, lyrically, and thematically.

Ants From Up There is my favorite album of the decade so far. While I was cautiously hopeful that Black Country, New Road would be able to pivot and adjust post-Isaac, I never expected them to craft such a unique and impressive sound and identity so quickly. Isaac’s impact is still felt deeply on this album despite his absence, and I hope he is well. While they may not have been able to capture lightning in a bottle twice with this project, Black Country, New Road’s Forever Howlong is a joyous and jubilant clap of thunder signifying a rebirth of some of the world’s most talented musicians proving that they are here to stay. How long? Forever, I hope.

Favorite Tracks: “Besties,” “The Big Spin,” “Socks,” “Salem Sisters,” “Two Horses,” “Happy Birthday,” “For the Cold Country,” “Nancy Tries to Take the Night,” “Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”

SCORE: 9.3/10