Pop Spotlight

Here’s the annoying thing about creating anything: You have to reckon with a time lag. Pure feeling can never survive the time required to decide to register it, and then jot it down. So you […]

R.E.M. had been a band for 24 years when they released their worst album, 2004’s Around the Sun, a record that magnified that aging act’s growing weaknesses and succumbed to sheer tedium. The National, perhaps […]

Though released to relatively muted fanfare, Born for Greatness, the new studio album from veteran reggae star Buju Banton, still arrives with great expectations attached. Banton was already the first artist to break Bob Marley’s […]

Piotr Kurek’s Smartwoods comes on gradually, then all at once. An electric guitar plucks out a tentative phrase; a harp responds with unhurried plucks; metallic taps, like steel pans, add shading. Finally, an acoustic bass […]

On their third album, Nature of Things, the Singaporean quintet Subsonic Eye pivoted from their usual wide-eyed dream pop to a raw, earthier sound. Nature was frenetic yet loose, mixing the shaggy indie rock of […]

The only time most people have heard the word “revelator” is in the Bible. John the Revelator was the prophet who wrote the Book of Revelation, the final part of the New Testament. As the […]

Lavish reissues of a single album usually signify the record’s general sense of importance: We need to gather all that’s known about this work, they suggest, every note and outtake, in order to more completely […]

The tiny desert town of Valentine, Texas got its name after railroad workers laying tracks east from El Paso first reached it on February 14, 1882. Or maybe its namesake is John Valentine, the American […]

Anyone in the vicinity of a radio around 2006 heard “Put Your Records On,” Corinne Bailey Rae’s warm ode to feeling relaxed and fulfilled in the moment. Since then, the song has become a staple […]

It’s easy to imagine Kipp Stone in one of those videos rappers post of the recording process: vibey lighting in the vocal booth, headphones slightly askew, eyes focused just past the mic on the object […]

Mark Linkous was a devotee of the work in progress. Under the banner of Sparklehorse and until his death by suicide in March 2010, the Virginia songwriter crafted a series of exquisitely fractured indie-rock albums […]

Independence looks good on Tinashe. With former label RCA firmly in the rearview, she’s been free to indulge: On 2019’s Songs for You and 2021’s 333, her first albums to be self-released, she swapped out […]