Ben Folds is widely regarded as one of the major music influencers of our generation. Folds first rose to fame in the mid-’90s with Ben Folds Five, whose genre-bending take on piano pop helped define an entire era of alternative rock. 

Folds’ masterful new album, What Matters Most, marks his first new studio release in eight years, and it’s a bold, timely, cinematic work, one that examines the tragic and the absurd in equal measure as it reckons with hope and despair, gratitude and loss, identity and perspective.