Pop Spotlight

Trevor Powers has reinvented himself with every release. Across his first three albums as Youth Lagoon, he moved from small-town innocence to cosmopolitan experimentalism and hip-hop low end, and on to a bellicose clarity born out of personal tragedy. Then, in dramatic terms, […]

About halfway through the lead single from Kassa Overall’s third studio album, Animals, the Seattle-based, ex-Brooklynite drummer, producer, and MC introduces an alter ego of sorts. Amid the cosmic jazz and methodical rap of “Ready to Ball,” […]

In her 1977 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde provided a profound reinterpretation of the literary form. “I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience,” she […]

For more than 150 years, amateur orators have been clambering atop soapboxes in Speakers’ Corner—as the quadrant along the northeastern edge of London’s Hyde Park is known—to rant, declaim, and pontificate. Karl Marx and George Orwell […]

Amaarae is sounding expensive these days. Not necessarily in a material sense, though there is mention of vintage Impalas, box-fresh Mowalolas, and copious Dior drip. Rather her voice is extra luxurious, her music lavish with […]

I am writing about the pianist Rob Grant for the same reason you are likely reading about the 69-year-old serial entrepreneur: He is the father of Lizzy Grant, or Lana Del Rey, the American pop star […]

Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian bond over shared anxieties like a pair of introverts at summer camp, unearthing every new inch of common ground with a sigh of relief and a much-needed dose of laughter. For Ticket […]

Saleh and Daoud Al-Kuwaity were giants in Iraq. The brothers played violin and oud in the courts of kings and composed new standards for the greatest singers of the Arab world, reshaping Iraqi classical music […]

“There are things you can say in a song that you would be too embarrassed to say in conversation,” Labi Siffre told a BBC interviewer in 1972. “In a song you can say it and it sounds […]

There’s a simple reason that “Sunflower,” a single from the soundtrack to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, became an Earth-conquering smash hit: It works outside of the context of the movie. In that film’s opening scene, our protagonist Miles […]

During a routine memory-erasing operation, the New Order—the oppressive regime at the center of Dirty Computer’s “emotion picture”—comes across information about an underground resistance army. Sporting a kufi crown, Janelle Monáe’s alter ego Jane 57821 leads the […]

A King Krule song tends to sound woozy, even slick, until you get close enough to smell the rot. Blue notes curdle in grimy pools of reverb. Hooks wilt in the muck. Then he sets loose […]