“I hope the world explodes, I hope that we all die!” goes one song. “I’ve been having some pretty dark thoughts,” Stefan Babcock sings on one song, which is a massive understatement for an album that kicks off with him wondering if any of his former sexual partners are dead.

Kristin Corryĭespite the good fortune that’s followed them, their third album Morbid Stuff is true to its name, jam-packed with the most fatalistic songs they’ve ever written. The Dallas-born singer’s debut illuminates the ways we participate in our own dysfunction. For the first time, Parx let her guard down and is left wondering if the person she chose is willing to choose her too. When Parx finally falls, she’s left picking herself up from the floor. There are moments where she is afraid to fall (“Afraid to Fall”), and other times when she recognizes she has fallen (“What Can I Say”). Falling is a motif that runs deeply through We Need to Talk and luckily for us we witness her in flight at every stage. The singer bobs and weaves through different sounds, some songs pulling from her pop predecessors like Destiny’s Child (“Rebound”) and Backstreet Boys (“Disconnected”) while ballads like “Easy” show that her voice is limitless. The album steadies itself through a series of conversations-many of which are one-sided-strewn across phone calls and voicemails, a nostalgic choice against Parx’s futuristic pop production.

Tayla Parx’s We Need to Talk borrows from the philosophy of Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun: Parx is an analog girl in a digital world.

Khalid album