Release Date: 19 September 2025
Song Count: 12
Rating: 6.1/10
Description:
(Note: Written and published past midnight.)
Haling from the young and upcoming Philadelphia-based band Golden Apples, today's album is Shooting Star, the fourth album of theirs and the most recent addition to their catalogue. Presenting itself as an accessible sounding and yet reflective, deep and lyrically meaningful album, Shooting Star most definitely sends out a lot of promises for the listener. But to what degree does it truly deliver on what it sets itself out to be?
While the album consists of 12 entire songs, it is shorter in duration than a lot of other albums with similar song counts due to the individual tracks rarely exceeding four minutes - and though this means that there was a smaller sample size of music to listen through, the shorter songs ends up acting to the album's advantage, as the songs don't end up dragging for an excessively long time.
The songs themselves generally comprise of the sounds of acoustic guitars, tender vocals, and other additions leading through the entire runtime, and while they don't commit any outright musical sins or show any active deficits in any way, they simultaneously don't grasp one's interest in a major way either, existing in a nice-sounding but rather less memorable state of limbo over anything else. Though the pleasantry of some sections of the album spring off enough to stick out as the shining stars of the bunch, the energy and the general quality generally remains the same throughout its runtime as a whole. It doesn't help that the individual components of the songs also don't try to innovate or tread any new territory with their played style - this is especially noticeable in the vocals that, after a while, lose part of their their charm in their tenderness and begin treading more into monotony.
Overall, Shooting Star is a relatively decent work, but not one I am likely to revisit past this listen.