Pop Spotlight

When was the last time New York dance music was “hot”? Some would probably argue the answer lies in the culture’s initial Brooklynification in the early 2000s, as chronicled on the margins of Lizzie Goodman’s […]

The first 10 minutes of Tomb Mold’s triumphant The Enduring Spirit make it obvious why they’re one of the most beloved death metal bands of the past decade. The Toronto trio emerged in 2015 amid […]

On his debut album, Ralphie Choo, a former chemical engineering student, toys with genres with radical abandon, manipulating sounds like reagents and catalysts in a lab. Across 14 tracks, fluttering flutes, dembow riddims, and flamenco […]

Irreversible Entanglements is a band built on improvisation, five jazz virtuosos—poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes—coalescing around an idea and discovering where […]

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 […]