Pop Spotlight

When an interviewer asked Joshua Abrams how he tends to start writing a new song, he demurred: “Our process is one of continuance.” The Chicago composer and bandleader’s music, through the conduit of his ever-expanding ensemble Natural Information […]

When Ben Watt was diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening autoimmune disease, he made two albums with his wife, Tracey Thorn, that wore the couple’s trauma on their sleeves: Amplified Heart arrived in 1994 and Walking Wounded two […]

MC Yallah doesn’t sweat getting lost in translation. The Kenya-born, Uganda-raised rapper shoots off high-speed rhymes in Luganda, Luo, Kiswahili, and English, sometimes keeping pace with 300 bpm singeli beats. “Even if they don’t understand, […]

Fenne Lily wrote her latest album amid a creative slump whose timing is no doubt familiar to many. Her work stalled out during a post-2020 malaise that The New York Times summed up in an unsurprisingly […]

New York drill has gone through an astounding number of mutations in the last nine years. Technically, it’s a third-generation copy of a subgenre that already had two distinct homebases: the warbling 808s of the […]

Dinner Party offers incontrovertible proof that great music requires great restraint. The group comprises three of the most highly rated jazz musicians of modern times—saxophonist Kamasi Washington, pianist Robert Glasper and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin—plus North Carolina producer 9th Wonder, […]

Rage and oppression are historical constants. Poison Ruïn’s Härvest marries feudal revolt with contemporary punk wrath, holding up a medieval mirror to the genre’s familiar symbols of disenfranchisement. The Philadelphia band trades the defiant cityscape of Bad […]

On paper, a style rooted in Playboi Carti-inspired vocals and Memphis hip-hop bounce sounds like the most played-out shit ever. But the singles and mixtapes that Chicago’s ICYTWAT has released since 2021, when he was officially reborn […]

You could be diplomatic and call Kiko el Crazy an influence, or you could cut the bullshit: The man fathered many of the trends that your favorite Spanish-speaking pop star is currently borrowing for style and […]

A little more than a dozen years ago, Kristian Matsson—the Swedish singer-songwriter better known as the Tallest Man on Earth—was so captivating it has become his retroactive curse. Onstage alone, with so much room to roam, Matsson […]

When Jana Horn was writing songs for The Window Is the Dream, she had almost no access to music—her record player, laptop, and phone were all broken. “I didn’t hurry to have them fixed,” she admitted. The […]

Patrick Wolf’s resounding baritone easily conjures up gravitas, lending his best songs a combined air of theatricality and raw emotion. The English musician’s first two records were tightly wound, explosive with pent-up angst, and beguiling […]