Pop Spotlight

On Superviolet’s introductory single, “Overrater,” Steve Ciolek hatches a plan: “Surprise release the sixth album as the greatest rock’n’roll band.” It’s safe to assume that Ciolek was addressing fans of his former group, the Sidekicks, and […]

The highs and lows of Yvette Young’s chaotic 2022 all revolved around a new set of wheels. In November, the tour van that the California guitarist and songwriter had just bought for her rock trio Covet […]

Ryan Leslie seemed determined to document every second of his life in 2008. It was the era of a trillion rap blogs, and R&B’s Truman Burbank was shrewd enough to recognize a voyeuristic platform like YouTube […]

Beach House’s very first non-album single, released in the wake of Devotion in 2008, with the “Apple Orchard” demo on the flip, was a scruffy early take on “Used to Be,” a song that eventually appeared in […]

I’m told that we’re living in a sexless era—that Gen Z simply isn’t doing it and that everybody else is too busy or too addicted to their phones or just too freaked out to fuck. There are other […]

Bill Orcutt is an unlikely elder statesman of traditional American guitar music. Though he looks the part, with his professorial eyeglasses and John Berryman beard, his confrontational work with ’90s noise rockers Harry Pussy offered little […]

James Ivy is trying to remember the world as it once was: listening to FM radio, rocking a pair of back-of-neck headphones, falling in love with someone in real life instead of online. The 23-year-old […]

Thirteen years ago, DJ and producer Ron Morelli began releasing records by friends and neighbors like Delroy Edwards and Traxx, quickly establishing a very New York take on Detroit techno and Chicago house. Their residue was both greasier […]

The National’s ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, is consumed with keeping track: where things diverged, where things were lost, what has been accumulated since. The band is taking stock—sometimes literally. “Eucalyptus” is a breakup […]

If Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is the most common entry point for a new jazz fan and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is number two, a typical next step would be an album by Bill Evans. The LPs drawn from the […]

Musician Remi Kabaka, a Ghanaian-born Nigerian, first landed in London in the early 1960s, flourishing in the expat community’s Soho club scene and performing at joints like Club Afrique, where African bands rubbed shoulders with London’s […]

There are so many ways music can make people uncomfortable, and Portrayal of Guilt have tried nearly all of them. The Austin trio’s journey from screamo to blackened noise culminated in last year’s Christfucker, where new levels […]