.Music

Alphabet Rockers is a community-based children’s music project helmed by Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Shepherd. With the help of a group of collaborators—some of them as young as nine years old—they write, produce and record songs that...

Naima Shalhoub’s first album of original material, Siphr, covers a lot of emotional, geographical and musical ground. It plays like a suite and includes arrangements that draw on Middle Eastern and American modes. It also includes her reinvention of “Lamma Bada Yatathanna,” a song from Moorish Spain that’s more than 1,000 years old. The music was recorded in San Francisco, but Shalhoub said the idea behind it began brewing a few years before, during a trip to Lebanon, her parents’ birthplace.

The album has a larger-than-life sound, with bedrock rhythms complimented by washes of steel guitar and reverberating electric guitars that take up an immense sonic space.

By turns comic and camp, heart-rending, occasionally chiding and ultimately a nuanced, clear-eyed expression of what it means to be a trans artist and person of color in this cultural moment, In Mirrors has all the earmarks of a creative milestone—an achievement that is both now and timeless. Its latest manifestation is In Mirrors, a new EP from her band Pretty Frankenstein, now out on Spotify and Bandcamp.

thuy rhymes with R&B Last November, fans from the Bay Area and beyond milled around the Brick & Mortar Music Hall, waiting for a glimpse of homegrown rising star thuy—pronounced “twee” and stylized in lowercase. Awkward and enthusiastic,...