It's been a while since we heard from Linda Brady, but she's loud and clear in 2025 with her first album in three decades, Deep Brain Stimulator. As much to herself as to the world, Linda returns to rail against real-life absurdities, well-intended and otherwise. She intercedes, pleads for common sense, consoles the weary, cajoles the morose, smirks and sighs to clarion guitars and a cracking backbeat. Sophomore album releases often hope to glide upon the wings of a first offering. This time, though, Deep Brain Stimulator—named after the medical hardware placed in Linda's brain to pacify the symptoms she experiences from Parkinson's Disease—clearly tops her debut album of three decades past. That album, the warm self-titled folk-rock exploration of youth and innocence, serves as a perfect introduction to the mature artist of Deep Brain Stimulator. Linda's substantial growth in both songwriting and delivery are obvious, and the fact that she has surrounded herself with a talented and dedicated band she calls the Revival, markedly ups her game. The album is packed with deep and sometimes profound guitar-pop songs. Its hardest rockers, "Cary Grant" and "Up The Incline" use distortion, feedback, and heavy drums to mirror the jackhammer and sledgehammer blows that echo the harshness of this world. They paint gritty portraits of people trying to simply make it through the day on this unforgiving planet. "Build Something," "Shut You," and the epic "The Barkers," employ acerbic social commentary to figuratively turn the culture into kindling. Like abstract art, "The Barkers" paints a surrealistic picture of a world not unlike our own, that is populated and operated by clowns who do not understand the stakes. It is a sort of Rorschach ink blot; what you see in the song is what you bring to it, and everyone brings something different to the table. Linda's biting observations of her surroundings arrive with a pessimism that lets no one off the hook, not even herself. The intimate reflections of "SSV" and "Lizzy Use Your Head" offer an intelligent, thoughtful compassion to friends in trouble. The sobering "Same Wolf" and "Crash" reflect Linda's personal forecast of a future that can be disheartening as she manages daily life with a degenerative disease, swapping outlooks of doom and hopefulness moment by moment. With a determination to be hopeful, Linda adds the luminous ascent of "It's a Good Day," a song that momentarily eclipses the darkness of the rest of the album with an almost startling buoyancy, tinged with the memory of recent troubles and the gratitude that comes from looking back. The song is a witness that the love of a good man, a good God, and a good family continually carry her from the proverbial ledge. She makes the choice (at least for this moment), to see the world through lenses of joy and gratitude, even if they are only single-use lenses. Deep Brain Stimulator ignites with mysterious yet pointed and incisive lyrics, memorable hooks, and haunting melodies. Sparkling electric guitars, buoyant bass lines, slamming rock-solid drumming by Kenny Aronoff and production assistance from Jeff Murphy of Shoes all support Linda's soulful, intimate vocals and her unique lyrics. All these sounds uplift the album from its power-pop bedrock to a new plateau—to a brand new thing—Linda's own, original musical and lyrical language. ---Fabares McGinty