Pop Spotlight

Call it the latest surreality of Taylormania ‘23. Next week, Taylor Swift’s meticulously re-recorded “new” album, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), will become the pop deity’s 12th consecutive No. 1 album, passing Jay-Z for the longest […]

A lot can change in a year. Just ask Donna Missal. Last year, the singer-songwriter was dropped by her label, severely depressed, and was living out of her car. This year, she’s back on her […]

Forgive me, but let’s open with some math. Depending on what sounds you consider canonical—never an easy decision in Frank Zappa world—the enigmatic composer released somewhere around 60 albums in his lifetime. His first, the […]

That Mexican OT (Outta Texas) was mumbling raps before he could write them. When he failed grade school classes, he remembers his mother saying, “Fuck that school — my son is going to be a […]

You have to be a total maniac to go to a festival focused on uncommercial, loud, raucous, confusing music in the summer in Austin, Tx. Hopefully, like me, you are a total maniac. Oblivion Access, […]

Welcome to Difficult Fun! Each month, SPIN will spotlight the best punk on the planet and discuss it here, with the ambition of challenging preconceived notions of what the four-letter word actually means and, ideally, […]

In the past year, Mexican singer/songwriter Peso Pluma has gone from an unknown to the second most-streamed Latin artist on Spotify, trailing only Bad Bunny. His trap-infused take on the age-old folk song form of […]

Ian Shelton always gets right to the point. It’s what people like the most about him. He formed Militarie Gun during the pandemic, recording demos on his iPhone, and visiting his practice space every day. […]

McKinley Dixon spent his childhood and adolescence searching for community. The rapper and poet bounced back and forth between Maryland and Queens, New York as a child, feeling untethered from both, alienated and in need […]

If Protomartyr’s 2020 album Ultimate Success Today was a meditation on our broken world, its newest release, Formal Growth in the Desert, is an exploration of healing (frontman Joe Casey’s mother died from Alzheimer’s in […]

Just three weeks after she graduated high school in 2020, Hannah Jadagu randomly received a DM on Instagram from Tony Kiewel, co-president of Sub Pop Records, the storied indie label that was home to Nirvana […]

It’s hard to think of a band with a career trajectory similar to Rancid. When punk exploded in the ‘90s, it was always the band repping first-wave British punk acts like U.K. Subs and GBH. […]

Blue Chips is a monthly rap column that highlights exceptional rising rappers. To read previous columns, click here. Name five Boston rappers. Take a second. Stop reading and think about it. Kudos if you got […]

Printed simply on the back cover of the new Foo Fighters album But Here We Are are four words that pretty much say all one needs to know about its reason for existence: “For Virginia […]

Forget indie sleaze – there was something much, much darker and more captivating growing in New York’s underground in the early 2000s. Khanate were stretching doom metal far beyond conventional musicality, as guitarist Stephen O’Malley’s […]

Kirsten Izer, who was “always making music, since I was 11 years old,” started her career at 18 as a publicist for indie artists. After a while she decided to become a journalist, and interviewed […]

On a refreshingly cool Saturday night in late April, Austin’s Urban Heat is just back from touring the east coast and southwest and about to begin a homecoming set at Hotel Vegas’ outside patio stage. […]

Welcome to Difficult Fun! Each month, SPIN will spotlight the best punk on the planet and discuss it here, with the ambition of challenging preconceived notions of what the four-letter word actually means and, ideally, […]