Pop Spotlight

“Why is the measure of love loss?” Jeanette Winterson asks in her 1992 novel Written on the Body, where a genderless narrator mourns their previous relationship so deeply they write long, vivid paragraphs cataloging the […]

Even before he perfected them, Neil Tennant respected pop singles enough to hate them. As a journalist at the beloved, now-shuttered British music magazine Smash Hits in the early ’80s, his reviews of the 7-inches […]

Like many of us, Joshua Homme has had a rough few years. Unlike most of us, the Queens of the Stone Age frontman’s troubles have been splattered across the music press. He’s been embroiled in […]

Asake’s on top of the world right now and isn’t coming down. On “Olorun,” the meditative opener to his second album, Work of Art, he extols the Supreme Being of the Yoruba religion before praising […]

Nothing signals synthesizer psychedelia quite like the combination of an arpeggio and a delay. The arpeggio divides a chord into looping sequences of notes. The delay allows those sequences to overlap. Once set in motion, […]

Greg Foat likes to build up, up, up in search of transcendence, augmenting his keyboard playing with so many choirs, horns, and strings that his music sometimes sounds like a ‘70s Joni Mitchell album stripped […]

Half a decade or so ago, the electric guitar received a wellness check. As sales plummeted and legacy manufacturers slogged through financial straits, concerned parties blamed the popularity of pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, genres […]

Only a few rap songs from the past few years have lyrics that offer a welcome shock every single time I hear them. On the shortlist is Rio Da Yung OG’s punchline-driven madness “Legendary”; RXK […]

BabyTron likes to goof around. On his early scam raps, he bragged about wheeling and dealing with Russian gangsters on Telegram and punching holes in walls like Dragon Ball Super villain Lord Beerus. He spit […]

Christine and the Queens’ last record, Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), was a lengthy and labyrinthine concept album wrapped around a fuckboy alter ego. It should have been fun, but the music was plodding and unwieldy, […]

Time Ain’t Accidental is a road-trip record full of open space and vivid detail. Listening to its 11 radiant country songs, you’ll encounter a singalong to Townes Van Zandt, “cigarettes and cheap incense,” and a poolside […]

A performer who survived Toys R Us commercials, anti-drug PSAs, and the Shelley Long comedy Troop Beverly Hills, Jenny Lewis has tried to be, to quote Henry James, one of the people on whom nothing is lost. The former co-leader […]