Cassidy Sollazzo

Cassidy Sollazzo writes close, narrative-driven album criticism that treats records as turning points in an artist’s career rather than isolated releases. She focuses on pop, R&B, and adventurous rock, reading production choices, sequencing, and vocal performances against questions of stardom, artistic identity, and what it means to be an “album artist” in a singles-first market. She does this across Paste Magazine, Pitchfork, and a range of other music and culture outlets.

Album reviews that track stardom and craft

Sollazzo’s most regular work is album reviewing, where she uses each project to situate an artist within a longer career arc. Her recent Paste pieces on Victoria Monét’s Frequency of Love and Tinashe’s Popstar frame both records around how the artists manage stardom, expectation, and control, with the reviews built on clear claims about what the albums add or subtract from their trajectories. In the Victoria Monét review, she isolates “serenity” as the record’s weak point and argues through specific songs and arrangements how that mood affects impact, rather than staying at the level of general adjectives.

The Tinashe review focuses on self-awareness and strategy, reading hook choices, collaborators, and aesthetic pivots as a deliberate stock-take of her position in pop. At Pitchfork, her reviews of albums like Pond’s Terrestrials, Jasper Dean’s TOY COLLAGES, and Icona Pop’s Ritual apply the same approach to rock and electronic-leaning projects, showing how left-field choices, genre blends, and conceptual framing either sharpen or blur an artist’s core.

Across these pieces, she tends to anchor each review in one or two central ideas about the record, then tests those ideas against detailed listening rather than plot summary or fan-service.

Essays on the album format and pop culture

Beyond straight reviews, Sollazzo writes essays that take on structural questions about how contemporary music is made, marketed, and received.

Her Paste piece “Who Gets to Be an ‘Album Artist’ in a Single Artist’s World?” examines the privilege and gatekeeping baked into the album format, arguing that the industry reserves the space for full-length statements for a narrow group of artists while relegating others to playlists and singles. In that essay she combines chart logic, label behavior, and audience habits with case studies, using specific careers to show who is granted the chance to build a long-form body of work. Outside Paste, she runs an independent newsletter focused on music, entertainment, and internet culture, where reported and opinion-forward essays sit alongside recurring media-consumption logs. That work extends the same questions into streaming culture, fan communities, and online persona-building, linking the formal world of albums and reviews to the way people actually encounter and talk about music day to day.

Spotlighting emerging artists and scenes

Sollazzo regularly uses profiles and scene pieces to surface artists who sit just outside the mainstream. Her Paste “Best of What’s Next” feature on Annahstasia is built around patience and long-haul career building, tracing the years between a shelved label debut and independent releases and treating that gap as a story rather than a footnote.

She foregrounds contract details, self-released EPs, and the practical realities of putting out work without label infrastructure, while still keeping the focus on the music itself.

In a regional roundup like “10 Nevada Bands You Should Listen to Now,” she moves from individual narrative to local ecosystem, sketching what a scene sounds like through a set of short, pointed descriptions instead of generic praise. Her prior work for independent music publications such as The Line of Best Fit shows similar priorities: short introductions, track notes, and new-artist blurbs that emphasize songwriting quirks, production tics, and the specific context an emerging act is coming out of.

Taken together, this strand of her work positions her as a reliable early contact for artists, labels, or festivals working in newer or geographically under-covered spaces.

Lists, franchise features, and collaborative packages

Alongside solo pieces, Sollazzo contributes to larger editorial packages that shape how a year or an era gets remembered.

Her contributions to Paste’s “The 50 Best Albums of 2025” show her in a condensed mode: she writes tight blurbs that still manage to connect a record’s sound to its emotional and career stakes, as in her notes on Freeman’s Burnover or Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer. In recurring features like “Your Favorite Artists’ Worst Albums,” she takes a more playful but still critical angle, using a “worst” record as a way to talk through risk, failure, and reinvention in long-running careers rather than simply dunking on missteps.

She also feeds staff columns and themed packages with criticism and rankings, contributing entries to monthly retrospectives on genres, regions, or artist catalogs. Across these formats she balances voice and house style, adjusting length and tone without dropping her core interest in how each project fits into an artist’s wider story.

Range across outlets

While Paste and Pitchfork are her most visible platforms, Sollazzo’s bylines run through a broad set of music and culture publications. Her work appears in outlets including Dazed, PAPER, Air Mail, ANTICS, and independent zines, where she shifts between reviews, reported features, and culture essays. Across these mastheads she tends to keep the same focus: detailed listening, clear stakes for the artist, and an interest in how the internet, industry structures, and fan behavior shape the careers she writes about. That consistency of lens, rather than any single genre or format, is what distinguishes her coverage from more generic music reporting.