Pop Spotlight

Will Westerman can’t escape his head. Self-deluded and spiritually adrift, he’s wondering how to construct a meaningful life amid so much suffering. On his ambling, often brilliant second album, An Inbuilt Fault, the Athens, Greece-based singer-songwriter […]

Of all the maximalist pop futurism that’s flowed out of the PC Music camp over the past decade, felicita’s take on the kinetic form stands apart. Melding woozy lullabies with jerking beats and pummeling rave explosions, […]

Éliane Radigue is drawn to the sound you cannot control. The French composer’s early pieces worked with electronic feedback; more recently, her Occam Ocean series has featured drone-like acoustic vibrations. In all her compositions, she observes how long-held […]

“Every time you say you wanna know me/I get anxious/cause I would probably tell you about some dumb shit,” Greg Mendez warbles at the beginning of “Maria,” a highlight from his subtly stunning self-titled album that […]

The twin duo of Rachael and Paul Swinton makes lonely, unassuming music as Cloth. Another word to describe their sound is “muted”—as in “quiet,” but also palm-muted guitar riffs,  deadened drums, and whispered vocals about struggling […]

In their brief yet prolific tenure as Zoon, the Toronto-based composer Daniel Monkman has reoriented shoegaze away from an insular, obfuscating aesthetic into a modern form of folk music—a vehicle through which they can tell their […]

In 1998, Jay-Z had finally accomplished his mission. With “Hard Knock Life,” he’d blown up on the pop charts, taking his Roc-A-Fella business venture into the big leagues and escaping street life for good. Nevertheless, he […]

The index of experimental musicians known colloquially as “the Nurse With Wound list” came printed on the inner sleeve of the British industrial pioneers’ debut album, 1979’s Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine […]

In billy woods’ music, personal history is global history. There’s a recurring figure in his songs: the Average Joe thrust onto the world stage and forced to select from a menu of bad choices. “It ain’t […]

“Once Upon a Time,” the intro track to Mike Dean’s latest album, 4:23, addresses the raging debate over artificial intelligence’s place in music with all the urgency of the first draft of an abandoned Tron sequel. In a story narrated […]

On the cover of Bird Hour, twin sisters Inez and Ella Johansson have their backs turned as they hunch over a sparsely furnished dollhouse, blissfully unaware of the camera. The music they make together as 7ebra is […]

Parisian producer NxxxxxS was among the first wave of artists who shaped the aesthetic of SoundCloud’s phonk scene in the early 2010s, finding equal inspiration in the dreamlike stillness of filmmakers like Tarkovsky or Jarmusch and the […]