Mariam Abdel-Razek

Mariam Abdel-Razek is a music writer and critic at Paste whose work treats records and artists as stories about risk, freedom and the edges of genre. Her coverage moves between reviews, features, interviews and lists, but keeps a tight focus on how musicians push against form, history and expectation. Her writing has also appeared in The Line of Best Fit, The Tonearm and Varsity.

Album reviews: Actress, Jungle, Leon Bridges and more

Abdel-Razek reviews new releases across pop, electronic, jazz and experimental music, often concentrating on the gap between an artist’s ambition and what the record delivers. In her review of Actress’s Radical Frame, she frames the album through Black avant-garde theory and describes a tension between truly experimental passages and a conservative streak that keeps the record from fully breaking loose. Her piece on Jungle’s Sunshine characterises the album as pleasant enough to leave on but rarely compelling enough to listen to with intent, underlining her willingness to call out safe songwriting even when the sound is agreeable.

Reviewing Leon Bridges’ Happiness Anytime, co-produced by Jungle, she notes its strong moments but ultimately treats it as an inoffensive retread of familiar ground, showing a consistent concern with artists repeating themselves.

Across Tori Amos’ In Times of Dragons and Haruomi Hosono’s Yours Sincerely, she pays close attention to how veteran artists revisit their own mythologies. On Amos, she writes about an album that is reflective, angry, self-referential and sorrowful, effective in places but sometimes cumbersome, stressing the weight of allegory and narrative in her music. On Hosono, she parses a record that borrows from doo-wop, freak folk, bossa nova and classical music, noting how parts feel like hollow echoes of his rich discography while still recognising the album as a soothing trip through his worlds. Her reviews of SML’s Spontaneous Live Music and Saul Williams’ Leap Life show a parallel interest in records that tackle complexity head-on: she presents SML as staking its claim as one of America’s best bands with a gloriously unwieldy and unpredictable sound, and describes Williams’ album as devoting itself to colonialism, technology, empire and ancestry, often all at once.

Her Asher White and other reviews sit within the same frame: concise but conceptually driven criticism that balances aesthetic judgment with the ideas embedded in the music.

Legacy and icons: Miles Davis, Mariah Carey and World Cup songs

Abdel-Razek’s features often focus on legacy figures and classic records, treating them as live questions rather than museum pieces. In a long feature on Miles Davis, she explores what made him a pioneer “in every sense of the word,” emphasising his refusal to treat any musical rule as fixed and the way he made changing music look easy. Her Time Capsule piece on Mariah Carey’s Butterfly marks its approaching thirtieth anniversary by arguing that the album’s uneven, occasionally unconvincing nature is exactly what makes it great, focusing on artistic freedom and the costs that come with it.

She is comfortable sitting with imperfections and mixed legacies, and her writing tracks how those qualities separate an artist from their peers rather than smoothing them over.

That interest in how music intersects with broader culture surfaces in her feature on World Cup songs, which she openly calls a “brief and biased” history. There she singles out the two best songs in World Cup history as clever, catchy and inventive in their genre-bending, capturing the chaos and excitement of football without feeling confused. The piece shows her range: it moves from football culture to pop craft while still attending to arrangement, hooks and the challenge of trapping collective emotion in a three-minute song. Taken together, these features mark her as a critic who returns to older work to understand how style, context and risk age over time.

Artist profiles: Medium Build and Nick Hakim

Alongside reviews, Abdel-Razek writes artist profiles that follow musicians through career pivots, personal upheaval and shifts in sound. Her feature on Medium Build tracks Nick Carpenter’s path through multiple albums in quick succession, major-label signing, chart entries and collaborations, using these milestones to show how work ethic and constant touring shape his newest record King of Having Fun.

She pays attention to the small details - crash-outs, scaring Mumford & Sons fans, opening for Lewis Capaldi - as a way of grounding bigger claims about what the music is trying to do.

In her profile of Nick Hakim, she focuses on an artist who has been trying to run away from himself and is now lunging toward clarity with his album I Can See.

The piece explores how self-doubt, experimentation and the search for identity filter into his songs, presenting the record less as a neat resolution and more as a statement of where he has arrived. Across these profiles she tends to foreground process and interior life, but always ties these back to the records themselves rather than drifting into personality sketch alone. Her coverage of new album announcements, including Johnny Marr’s The Age of Everything, sits in the same lane: an interest in how each release fits into a longer story rather than as a standalone event.

Lists, capsules and ongoing coverage

Abdel-Razek contributes to Paste’s recurring roundups, including the 10 best albums of June 2026, where her blurbs highlight improvisational looseness, intelligent control and creative zenith in artists like Kelsey Lu and others. These capsules show how she compresses her critical style into a few lines, still balancing description with judgment. Her name appears frequently in Paste’s reviews archive, signalling steady coverage across the outlet’s music section and a willingness to follow artists from early records through later experiments. Across formats, her distinctive thread is clear: she writes about music as an ongoing negotiation between constraint and freedom, genre and play, and she is precise about where each record lands on that spectrum.