Music

"Punk" can mean a lot of different things – an attitude, a perspective, a music genre. All three, or none? It's this open-ended interpretation that's given the "genre" such a long life – and now, the South London band Goat Girl is defining its own version.

Like a perennial blooming in the spring, we're witnessing a beautiful, new beginning for Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast. Her new album, Jubilee, is a sonic departure from the darker songwriting themes of earlier records.

This is an album about joy, goes Michelle Zauner's tweet-sized synopsis of Jubilee.

Buck Meek's solo music is disarming and intimate. If you're familiar with his work as the guitarist for Big Thief, that might not come as a surprise. His music is saturated with peculiar, beautiful imagery — a motel with a telephone seashell, two tons of turtle doves, a cottonmouth swallowing its tail. They're pictures painted with country-tinged vocals, begging to be deciphered.

Just last week, the internet thrilled to The Linda Lindas, screaming and crunching power chords in the middle of the stacks of the Los Angeles Public Library. "Racist, Sexist Boy" — written and performed by four tween and teen punks calling out anti-Asian American bias and misogyny — immediately became something of a 2021 anthem. ("Poser! Blockhead! Riffraff! Jerk face!")

A year ago, Saturday Night Live's 45th season ended in a swirl of late adjustments: A planned 21-episode run had to be shortened to 18, with the final three shows cobbled together from the performers' homes. Ranking the season's musical guests meant comparing, say, a knockout production starring Lizzo to black-and-white footage of Chris Martin singing a Bob Dylan cover. Out of 18 performances, two featured former members of One Direction and two featured current members of Coldplay. It was, taken as a whole, as much of a mess as you might expect.