Pop Spotlight

Purelink’s debut single might have been a time machine. One track, the B-side’s “Head on a Swivel,” invoked the ’90s drum’n’bass of artists like Photek and Source Direct, in which breakbeats splintered like shards of […]

There are protest songs that rage with righteous fury. Then there are protest songs that simply gesture at the headlines, powerless and numb. “Ten Dead,” a glassy-eyed track on Wilco’s Cousin, is the latter. Counting […]

The Alchemist is not an unrealistic man; he understands that even his powers have limits. In an interview with Tidal in late 2022, the legendary beatmaker admitted that a full-length collaboration with two artists presents […]

CHAI’s songs glimpsed a band seemingly in a perpetual state of youth. Moles and blemishes became irresistible chocolate chips through their eyes; donuts were equally, if not more, important than a passionate crush. But on […]

Nation of Language made their first two albums in the confines of the pandemic, and their lean and understated synth-pop was hewn from varying degrees of convenience. Keyboardist Aidan Noell, who is married to vocalist […]

The Kübler-Ross model has done the bereaved dirty ever since it entered the public consciousness in the 1970s. Its five tidy stages are woefully inadequate to handle the myriad shifting forms of grief: unpredictable physical […]

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 […]