Pop Spotlight

Just a few years ago, Squid were frenzied, bugged-out chroniclers of urban anxiety. Emerging from London’s fertile new guitar scene and influenced by dystopian science fiction, their full-length debut Bright Green Field documented the suffocation of city […]

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit launched their supporting tour for Weathervanes, Isbell’s eighth collection of original material, three months before its release, a tacit admission that these songs were built for the long haul. An […]

A majority of the rappers who have treated Whole Lotta Red like the Bible have misunderstood something fundamental about Playboi Carti’s album: It isn’t cool just because of its self-mythologizing spirit. Sure, Carti flexed the same expensive […]

According to the credits, Saya Gray recorded the bulk of her new EP, QWERTY, on her floor. It’s easy enough to imagine: Gray sprawled in a tangle of machinery, plucking strings and smashing buttons, funneled into a […]

By now, fans know what to expect from a Juan Wauters album. A folksy hodgepodge of short songs delivered in a nasal croon. Unpretentious lyrics observing the beauty of ordinary life, sung in English and his […]

Jam City’s debut album, 2012’s Classical Curves, rewired grime textures and electro-funk chords through sleek, off-kilter sound design and blistering rhythms. The English electronic producer born Jack Latham cited both Philly club and Laurie Anderson—indicators of his […]

On October 24, 1964, the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia gained independence, ending 75 years of colonization. The newly sovereign African nation renamed itself Zambia, for the Zambezi River that carved its way through the […]

As he prepared to close his first decade of making music, Anthony Naples reached an impasse. Having established his club bona fides with a growing catalog of tough, distorted house and techno, the New York producer […]

The symbolic and literal centerpiece of Protomartyr’s new album Formal Growth in the Desert is “Graft Vs. Host,” a song about forcing yourself to experience happiness after a crushing loss. In Joe Casey’s typically circuitous and surreal […]

The folk tradition looms large over the work of Rufus Wainright. Approaching the craft as a white gay Canadian man for whom the canon of his own folkie dad was there to be overcome, Wainwright lavishes the […]

If you listen to enough contemporary, small-label punk music, it becomes very easy to identify the points of intrigue. There’s the structural simplicity. The ragged ferocity. The extreme speed and decibel levels. Nuanced and unusual […]

Dave Grohl opens the 11th Foo Fighters album with a realization: “It came in a flash/It came out of nowhere/It happened so fast/And then it was over.” The line likely refers to the shocking death of beloved, […]