One day last February, inside a fairly plain, concrete-block building in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Samara Joy stood in a glass booth. She closed her eyes, took a breath and said to herself, “This is it. […]
Jaden Smith Is Teaching Us a Thing or Two About Love
Jaden Smith loves going to the movies alone. He visits the same theater regularly and knows every employee there. “Every single one of them,” he says, on a virtual call from Los Angeles. “And when […]
Wendy Eisenberg Ponders Outer Vision and Inner Space
Wendy Eisenberg – ViewfinderAmerican Dreams In the liner notes to Viewfinder, Wendy Eisenberg talks about how getting Lasik surgery changed the guitarist’s relationship to the visual world. Does clearer vision lead to greater understanding? Or […]
Etran de L’Aïr Bring the Desert to You
Etran de L’Aïr – 100% Sahara Guitar(Sahel Sounds) In their native city of Agadez, a trading hub of the nomadic Tuareg tribe in the high Sahara Desert, Etran de L’Aïr have been playing since the […]
Max Richter Floats Away on ‘In a Landscape’
Max Richter – In a LandscapeDecca Records Max Richter, the German-born British composer, has never shied away from a concept. More from Spin: Band Jury: Los Bitchos’ Serra Petale Defends Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘One […]
Peel Dream Magazine’s Weightless Exercise in Memory Tourism
Peel Dream Magazine – Rose Main Reading RoomTopshelf Records If you’re ever looking to come down from a panic attack, the fourth album from Peel Magazine Dream, Rose Main Reading Room, would be a novel […]
Uniform’s ‘American Standard’ Is Brilliantly Devastating
Uniform – American Standard Sacred Bones Some light verse from the pen of Uniform vocalist Michael Berdan: More from Spin: At Oblivion Access, Heaviness Comes in Many Forms The 25 Best Metal Songs of 2017 The […]
Laurie Anderson Soars on ‘Amelia’
Laurie Anderson – AmeliaNonesuch “Here come the planes,” intoned Laurie Anderson on “O Superman,” the lead single from her debut album, 1982’s Big Science. Now, 42 years after her narrator witnessed the coming of American […]
Body Meat Elevates Experimental Vision on ‘Starchris’
Body Meat – StarchrisPartisan Records Chris Taylor likes leaning into sonic chaos—fusing dance, metal, and trap to shape Body Meat’s strikingly tumultuous electronic pop. More from Spin: SPIN Returns to Print for the First Time […]
Zeal & Ardor Sound Burdened By Black-Metal Roots on ‘GREIF’
Zeal & Ardor – GREIF Redacted GmbH Rejection of metal orthodoxy is baked into the concept of Zeal & Ardor, the onetime solo project of Swiss-born musician Manuel Gagneux, who now oversees a full six-piece […]
For Melt-Banana, ‘3 + 5’ Equals Amped-Up Exhilaration
Melt-Banana – 3 + 5 A-Zap Call it Japanoise, hardcore, noise-rock, grind-core, noise-punk (as yours truly did above) or what have you, but after 30 years of banging out inordinate chunks of brain-melting genius, Melt-Banana have […]
Fontaines D.C. Leave Post-Punk Behind on the Exhilarating ‘Romance’
Fontaines D.C. – RomanceXL Where do you go after you’ve made a debut like Dogrel? More from Spin: Lee DeWyze’s ‘Gone For Days’ Is An Introspective Love Letter To the Moon Unit Zappa and Back […]