Pop Spotlight

You don’t see a lot of bands with their own theme songs these days. Time was, Black Sabbath introduced themselves with a spooky dirge called “Black Sabbath,” Bad Company peddled a slow-burning anthem called “Bad […]

Even when she’s slipping between vantage points and historical perspectives, Haviah Mighty maintains a strict sense of focus. On “Snowfall,” the opener to her latest album, Crying Crystals, she vaults between first- and second-person narration […]

Across his recent albums, Colter Wall has turned the vistas of his native Saskatchewan into old-timey slideshows full of hardscrabble folk heroes roaming the land, weary cowboys trading campfire tales, and couples two-steppin’ across the […]

In 1992, no one wanted to hear organ on a rock song. At least that’s how Jakob Dylan, pragmatic frontman of the Wallflowers, explained the mediocre sales figures for his band’s self-titled debut. Those warbling, […]

With Saturn transiting the water sign of Pisces for the next few years, it’s fitting that Rauw Alejandro’s 2022 album SATURNO found its way to the beach. The blue-haired bad boy from the Puerto Rican […]

In 2019, Blake Mills and Chris Weisman were tasked with recording new music that sounded like it was 50 years old. They basically wrote an album’s worth of songs as a made-up band for the […]

Both Ana Roxanne and Brian Piñeyro operate with a perpetual slowness. Piñeyro’s productions as DJ Python might be more club-focused than Roxanne’s gently unfolding ambient lullabies, but he is just as patient in his approach […]

Lifeguard have a spry, freewheeling, and continuously evolving sound, emblematic of the scene that birthed them. The Chicago trio met as members of the self-declared “Hallogallo Kids,” a loose constellation of local teenagers who attended […]

For most of its existence, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra didn’t much resemble an orchestra. They sounded more like the house band at a bacchanal in an imagined, druidic British past, and no matter how much […]

PJ Harvey has dedicated the second half of her career to finding new ways to sound unlike herself. Since her 2007 reboot, White Chalk, Harvey has retired the seething yowl that was once her signature, […]

Marc Ribot keeps watering the roots of no wave. The New York genre, while it seemed to wither 40 years ago, is a key ingredient in his gloriously messy alchemy, which mixes flippant interpretation, heavy […]

The finer points of regional rap geography are sometimes lost on listeners outside those places. Due to their tight affiliation with the Screwed-Up Click, UGK became honorary Houston heroes, but the duo was actually from […]