Consumer Guide Album

Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive [Nonesuch, 2024]
I only started listening to Bronx-raised Alynda Segarra's so-called Americana in 2017, a decade and six albums into their band's career, so I can't swear this autobiographical lookback is their best work. But I can say that it's the most fetchingly songful of the band's three albums in that span and that although our lifepaths were very different, it brought back my 15,000-mile hitchhiking trek of 50 years earlier, not in its details—my adventures were devoid of both sex and alcohol—but its exploratory mood. Its lyrics evoke and embody the kind of retrospectively narrative mood you seldom encounter in such projects. And for that reason alone it stands out. A-