Pop Spotlight

Nina Sun Eidshem begins her 2019 book The Race of Sound with a concept she calls “the acousmatic question.” When you hear a voice and you’re not sure of its source, your nervous system lights […]

Militarie Gun originally started as a solo side project for Ian Shelton, the drummer and vocalist for the Seattle powerviolence group Regional Justice Center. Across three early EPs, it felt as if Shelton was stuck […]

While some artists begrudgingly hopped on TikTok to market their music, Coi Leray turned the app into her digital playground with bite-sized hits like “Big Purr (Prrdd)” and “Twinnem.” The 26-year-old rapper and singer knows […]

In the beginning, Rrose made techno. Unusual techno, perhaps—heady, psychedelic, convoluted—but techno nonetheless. It maintained the genre’s recognizable form, based on four-on-the-floor beats and boom-tick cadences. It drew its minimalist aesthetic from the early-’90s sounds […]

When Jenn Wasner wrote “Every Day Like the Last,” she wanted the title to be open-ended: “[It] could mean every day like the day that came before, or it could mean every day like the […]

Melodies on Hiatus is a title that sounds better suited to Julian Casablancas, the Stroke who spends his spare time peddling noise skronk with the Voidz. Is Albert Hammond Jr. really trying to tell us […]

After over a decade in the spotlight, Big Freedia has become a sneakily unstoppable force. Following years of hard work on the New Orleans circuit, leading to a long-running reality series and her debut album, […]

Since forming in 1982, Godflesh have mastered a sound that blends overwhelming intensity with superhuman restraint. Along with the announcement for Purge, the duo’s first studio album in six years, Justin Broadrick explained the title […]

Savage spends the first few seconds of his 1984 national television debut frozen stiff. As the intro of his first single, “Don’t Cry Tonight,” begins to play, he poses in a half-kneel, his right hand […]

The Dream Syndicate took their name from a 1973 album by Tony Conrad called Outside the Dream Syndicate. Conrad, in turn, was making a reference to the experimental group he co-founded with La Monte Young […]

Tacked right onto the end of Feed the Beast, Kim Petras’ so-called debut album, is “Unholy,” the German-born pop singer’s collaboration with Sam Smith. Released last year as a single from Smith’s fourth album Gloria, […]

In Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat By the Door, protagonist Dan Freeman is a Black revolutionary moonlighting as a CIA agent, hellbent on protecting himself and his people from a world on […]