Pop Spotlight

Tex Crick has a rare ability to sound wistful without any sense of pain or longing. On Sweet Dreamin’, the Australian songwriter’s second LP for Mac DeMarco’s record label, his languid vocals take on a […]

When the physical world is stifling, the internet beckons. It’s a sinister trap, one Sarah Morrison knows all too well. On “This Sorry Day,” the second track off the Tallahassee singer-songwriter’s subdued debut album, Attachment […]

In the Odyssey, the lotus eaters existed on a small island, stuck in a dreamy stupor. They subsisted off the daze-inducing lotus fruit and spent their days consumed with narcotic pleasure. Vanishing Twin embrace a […]

A little over halfway through MIKE’s new album, Burning Desire, a recent moment of joy in the New York rapper’s life takes center stage. During an interlude that begins on the title track, TAKA, MIKE’s […]

Westside Gunn has spent his career treating rap music like a high-end commodity through keen juxtaposition: Vivid bars about cooking and selling drugs live side by side with scenic tours of his closet and passport, […]

Devstacks might as well have a PhD in Chief Keef studies. The Springfield, Massachusetts producer is part of a SoundCloud-based community that builds on moments of instrumental grandeur scattered across Keef’s discography (see loosies like […]

For the past few years, Ella Williams has been relentless. The Massachusetts-born, Chicago-based songwriter released her debut album as Squirrel Flower in 2020 and then, after contracting COVID and recovering, recorded and released a follow-up […]

Once upon a time, Bad Bunny was the king of a movement called Latin trap. Seven years ago, before the Rolling Stone covers and the Gucci ads with Kendall Jenner, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was […]

How much would you let love change you? That’s the dare that singer and songwriter Jamila Woods tosses inside the circle on her sprawling new album Water Made Us. Across 17 songs, she considers love […]

Holly Humberstone had a whirlwind 2021. Around the release of her debut EP, The Walls Are Way Too Thin, she earned touring spots with Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red, collaborated with fellow British success […]

On his 2015 debut, Blue Neighbourhood, Troye Sivan pitched himself as a dreamy outsider torn from the pages of a YA novel, taking in the world with a wide-eyed gaze that saw far beyond small-town […]

Helena Deland’s stirring new record Goodnight Summerland opens wordlessly, with a measured, melancholy piano sketch played by Lysandre Ménard. On the next song, Deland admits: “Saying something isn’t easy.” The introduction is a small moment […]

Something secret is happening in JR Seaton’s work as Call Super. Over the last decade, they have developed a private language for their largely instrumental electronic music, which skirts the edges of the dancefloor like […]

Excelsior is Jasper Marsalis’ first album under the moniker Slauson Malone 1, but it’s his second solo album since leaving the Brooklyn-based collective Standing on the Corner. Where that group fashioned their tastes in jazz, […]

Chris Butler hadn’t actually formed the Waitresses when Village Voice columnist Robert Christgau came to watch them play a showcase of local bands in Akron, Ohio. It was 1978, and Butler had been mailing Christgau […]

Hiroshi Yoshimura was sitting with his eyes closed. Beneath him, a mat. Beside him, several stones. In his hands he held a soprano saxophone. It was September 1977, and he and the musician Akio Suzuki […]

For years, Phoebe Bridgers has been on an odyssey to the moon. She yearned for a spaceship to carry her away from a strained relationship on Boygenius’ 2018 self-titled EP; the trio’s full-length debut ends […]

We hear a drummer counting off and then a half-sentence from his bandleader, Joni Mitchell, who in April 1972, was embarking on the first official recording sessions for For the Roses. One year earlier, she’d […]