Pop Spotlight

You grow up in the Midwest; your dreams sprawl wider than the freeways; the big city starts to beckon. Chappell Roan, daughter of Willard, Missouri, secured her ticket out through YouTube, where as a teenager […]

Eartheater songs, which reference chrysalises, diamonds, and other natural symbols of metamorphosis, sound like they emerge from an analogous process of transformation. Alexandra Drewchin takes amorphous elements and alters them into something rare and precious, […]

“Atlas” is a weighty term for a weighty tome—hardbacked, oversized, cutting the whole world down into perfect-bound pages. To the mythologically inclined, it has other associations, too—namely, the weight of the world itself, resting heavily […]

Devendra Banhart has never shied away from the esoteric. On “Für Hildegard von Bingen,” from 2013’s Mala, he recast the eponymous 12th-century Christian mystic as a “VJ on rotation” over a playful disco-rock groove. “María […]

While René Laloux’s 1973 animated film La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) is celebrated for its enduringly shocking, Dali-esque visuals, Alain Goraguer’s soundtrack is a surrealist triumph in itself. Composed for the French-language story of a […]

Doja Cat’s arachnidemonic no-features rap album would like a word with anyone who ever said that she’s not really a rapper. Scarlet asserts Doja’s ability to rap, and her right to be multi-talented and difficult—“difficult […]

It took Mykki Blanco years to bloom into their current arc. After almost a decade of putting out raucous, multi-modal hip-hop collections, the artist’s sound softened and brightened for 2021’s Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep. […]

Föllakzoid’s V begins like an incoming transmission from a distressed spaceship. The barbed remnants of a synth tone modulate and wriggle; low-slung bass notes throb with menace; a kick lumbers into the mix as spiky […]

Sophie Allison might be exactly the type of person you don’t want to do karaoke with: Instead of screeching off-key high notes four vodka crans deep, she’s making it good and making you think. On […]

About three-quarters of the way through One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, the beat stops and Sam Cooke says he’s gotta tell us about his baby right now. Backed by drumrolls, clattering […]

By late 1984, the Replacements were transforming from a shoddy Minneapolis barroom punk band into the biggest prospect in the underground alternative rock scene. They had just released their third album, Let It Be, a […]

When yeule uncorks their roar, it sounds like a full-body exorcism, like they’ve been waiting their entire life to let it out. Wrapped up in grungy angst, hurtling alongside rambunctious cymbal crashes, and shadowed by […]