Pop Spotlight

For all that’s changed over the past 30 years, you can still take comfort in certain recurring phenomena, like Martin Scorsese movies that require booking an afternoon off work and North Carolina acts raising the […]

The sound of art-punk quartet ĠENN reflects their collective experience: tenacious drum lines from UK post-punk, sinuous vocal melodies inspired by Maltese folk music, and the heavy guitars of modern psych-rock or even nu-metal. Formed […]

On the title track of her third album as L’Rain, Taja Cheek chants, “I killed your dog.” The repetition of the four words sounds dissociative at first; as Cheek croons through a scrim of vocal […]

Meernaa band leader Carly Bond describes her songwriting process as “psychedelic meditation,” an experience so immersive that when she gets into the flow, she forgets to eat. On the band’s debut, 2019’s Heart Hunger, playful […]

It takes a true optimist to see the upside of a wildfire. Throughout Growing at the Edges, the bottomlessly tender fourth album from his baroque indie project Mutual Benefit, Jordan Lee conjures angry skies, scorched […]

When Elliott Smith and his college buddy Neil Gust formed Heatmiser in Portland in the early ’90s, all the pieces started falling into place. They had two supremely talented songwriters, a thrashing yet tuneful alt-rock […]

In the summer of 2020, the freak show that is Flint’s street rap scene blossomed. Three of the city’s landmark rap songs dropped within the span of a few months, all featuring the scene’s signature […]

In the music video for her breakout single “Telfy,” Maiya The Don shimmies down the aisle of a beauty store in Crocs, flexes her designer handbag, and gets sturdy with her girls at a playground. […]

In the six years since Jlin’s last proper album, the genre-shattering Black Origami, the bounds of her musical practice have exploded. With conceptual artist Kevin Beasley, she transfigured the sounds of a cotton gin that […]

Listening to a Mary Lattimore album is like flipping through a scrapbook full of yellowing photographs. For the Los Angeles-based harpist, no moment is too trivial to capture in music: the lone deer she saw […]

The Darkness pursued rock stardom in the same way that people nowadays strive to be pro running backs or music journalists: headlong, and without care for how the position is currently valued. As East Anglian […]

By the end of the 1970s, disco was dying, and the Twin Cities were at the dawn of a renaissance. Freeform radio had given way to commercial programming, but in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a […]

Whither Drake, the brokenest man in music? The golden bachelor emerged from pandemic lockdown and unleashed a whirlwind of creativity with three albums that explored Afrobeats, club music, and trap, all while sending his emo […]

In 2013, the Oxford Dictionaries named “selfie” its word of the year. Not coincidentally, that’s also when hyperpop star and digital photographer Hannah Diamond debuted with the London label PC Music. Working alongside producer and […]

One night in 1969, 20,000 people gathered at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat, to witness a vision of the future: the Moog synthesizer. An audiovisual spectacle called […]

Dan Knishkowy has spent much of his career as Adeline Hotel exploring the breadth of his acoustic guitar, from the minimalist blues of 2016’s It’s Alright, Just the Same to the reflective folk of 2021’s […]

By 1991, Too $hort was the foul-mouthed face of Oakland rap. He was fresh off a massive three-album run—1987’s Born to Mack, 1988’s Life is…Too Short, 1990’s Short Dog’s in the House—that went a long […]