When Elliott Smith and his college buddy Neil Gust formed Heatmiser in Portland in the early ’90s, all the pieces started falling into place. They had two supremely talented songwriters, a thrashing yet tuneful alt-rock […]
Babyfxce E: The X Tape
In the summer of 2020, the freak show that is Flint’s street rap scene blossomed. Three of the city’s landmark rap songs dropped within the span of a few months, all featuring the scene’s signature […]
Maiya the Don: Hot Commodity
In the music video for her breakout single “Telfy,” Maiya The Don shimmies down the aisle of a beauty store in Crocs, flexes her designer handbag, and gets sturdy with her girls at a playground. […]
Jlin: Perspective EP
In the six years since Jlin’s last proper album, the genre-shattering Black Origami, the bounds of her musical practice have exploded. With conceptual artist Kevin Beasley, she transfigured the sounds of a cotton gin that […]
Musk’s X Drowning in Israel-Hamas Misinformation Amid Fact-Checking Delays
Community Notes, Elon Musk‘s solution to combating misinformation on X (formerly Twitter), is barely able to keep up with a wave of graphic media, false claims, and hateful content relating to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The […]
Doja Cat’s Edgelord Posts Have People Freaking Out. It’s Nothing New
There’s a popular adage floating around the social media site formerly known as Twitter: “I miss the old Doja.” With the release of her album Scarlet this fall, pop star Doja Cat debuted a new […]
Mary Lattimore: Goodbye, Hotel Arkada
Listening to a Mary Lattimore album is like flipping through a scrapbook full of yellowing photographs. For the Los Angeles-based harpist, no moment is too trivial to capture in music: the lone deer she saw […]
The Darkness: Permission to Land… Again (20th Anniversary Edition)
The Darkness pursued rock stardom in the same way that people nowadays strive to be pro running backs or music journalists: headlong, and without care for how the position is currently valued. As East Anglian […]
Hüsker Dü: Tonite Longhorn
By the end of the 1970s, disco was dying, and the Twin Cities were at the dawn of a renaissance. Freeform radio had given way to commercial programming, but in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a […]
The Iron Roses Prove Youth Isn’t a Necessary Ingredient for Punk
When the Iron Roses formed a couple of years ago, they were a pretty basic angry punk band that stemmed from performing with vocalist Nathan Gray for his solo career. They played as a unit […]
Drake: For All the Dogs
Whither Drake, the brokenest man in music? The golden bachelor emerged from pandemic lockdown and unleashed a whirlwind of creativity with three albums that explored Afrobeats, club music, and trap, all while sending his emo […]
Hannah Diamond: Perfect Picture
In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries named “selfie” its word of the year. Not coincidentally, that’s also when hyperpop star and digital photographer Hannah Diamond debuted with the London label PC Music. Working alongside producer and […]