Listen "Out" music reviews for June 2026
by Jason Drewry
Music Critic
Lykke Li – The Afterparty
On The Afterparty, Lykke Li sounds like she’s slow dancing at the end of the world - mascara running, orchestra swelling, cigarette still burning between her fingers. It’s only twenty-four minutes long, but somehow feels like the emotional aftermath of an entire decade.
The maximalist melancholy of Lucky Again and Knife in the Heart gives the record its pulse, while Sick Of Love drifts into gorgeous electronic numbness. Not Gon Cry opens the album with swagger and resignation in equal measure, and Euphoria closes it like sunrise after a very bad decision.
There are moments when the brevity works against it; a few songs feel more sketched than fully bled out. But maybe that incompleteness is the point. The Afterparty isn’t interested in resolution. It’s about what remains after the glamour curdles, after the comedown arrives, after the lights come back on and you’re forced to look at yourself directly.
Beautiful, cold, exhausted pop music.
Zara Larson – Midnight Sun: Girls Trip
If the original Midnight Sun was Zara Larsson discovering herself as a pop auteur, Midnight Sun: Girls Trip is her throwing the car keys to every woman she admires and speeding straight through the neon wreckage. It’s chaotic, hyper-feminine, occasionally ridiculous and far more fun than it should be.
The PinkPantheress-assisted Midnight Sun turns the title track into a glittering rave hallucination, while Girl’s Girl with Emilia completely reframes the song’s emotional core. Hot & Sexy featuring Tyla is pure sweat-slicked summer pop, and Robyn arriving for Puss Puss feels less like a feature and more like some symbolic passing of the Swedish-pop torch.
Not every remix improves on the originals. Blue Moon loses some of its aching grandeur, and parts of the album feel engineered for virality. But that’s also the point: Girls Trip understands modern pop as collaboration, reinvention, meme, mess, catharsis. Zara Larsson has stopped asking for permission to be huge.
Melanie C – Sweat
On Sweat, Melanie C finally stops pretending she has anything left to prove. Three decades after Wannabe, she sounds liberated, only not by nostalgia, but rather survival. This is unapologetically physical music: pulsing club beats, euphoric hooks, sweat-slicked resilience. The former Sporty Spice has fully merged with the veteran rave kid she’s apparently always been.
The title track Sweat is gloriously absurd in the best way, turning gym-floor camp into an actual thesis statement. Drum Machine and Pressure hit with the emotional urgency of classic Robyn records. At the same time, Emotional Memory and Til’ It Breaks give the album its bruised heart beneath all the neon adrenaline. And Undefeated Champion could only come from someone who’s endured tabloid cruelty, pop-industry ageism, and still walked back onto the dance floor anyway.
MUNA – Dancing On The Wall
On Dancing On The Wall, MUNA lean fully into contradiction: joy and dread, desire and detachment, dancing while the house quietly burns down around you. It’s their sleekest album yet, but also their loneliest. It’s pop music built for packed queer dance floors where somehow everyone still feels emotionally stranded.
Electric Sheep opens the record in a haze of synthetic anxiety, while Honeyblood and Avalanche Heart deliver the kind of soaring, hyper-emotional choruses MUNA have practically patented at this point. Body Language is all flirtation and emotional self-sabotage, and The Void Calls Back may be the bleakest song they’ve ever hidden beneath an irresistible hook.
What makes Dancing On The Wall work is its unafraid embrace of ugliness beneath beauty. Katie Gavin still writes like someone documenting the collapse of intimacy in real time, even when the production is pure chrome-plated euphoria. Not every experiment lands perfectly, and parts of the back half blur together. But when MUNA hit that sweet spot between catharsis and collapse, almost nobody in modern pop touches them.
The Gayly online. 6/30/26 @ 5:49 p.m. CST.