Pop Spotlight

Welcome to Tyler, the Creator’s The Estate Sale, where everything is out of your budget. DJ Drama returns as host, hyping up Tyler like a proud uncle greeting you at the finish line with Gatorade and grapes. Though […]

After 20 years, it’s hard to stop calling the New Pornographers a power-pop supergroup, even if neither is really true at this point. Dan Bejar and Neko Case have ceded creative control almost entirely to […]

The acoustic guitar and the piano are chummy enough in popular recordings, but there’s little concert music written for the duo. Without the magic of compression, how could a mere six or 12 hand-stirred strings, […]

On a first spin, Brooklyn trio Scree’s debut, Jasmine on a Night in July, scans as a promising little electric guitar record. Ryan El-Solh’s subtle, trebly strings touch almost every corner, whether opening the fractured waltz “Beautiful […]

Since the mid 1980s, when 14-year-old rapper Roxanne Shanté’s diss track “Roxanne’s Revenge” sent the New York rap world into a frenzy, teenage rappers have been prone to blowing up fast without trying all that hard. […]

Growing up in Lublin, in the east of Poland, Piotr Kurek could never quite decide what kind of music he wanted to make. First he played drums in a garage-rock band; then he banged out gabber […]

“I sing in Catalan in some of my songs because it’s my most private language and I want to keep it alive,” says Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, aka NOIA. The Brooklyn-based Barcelona native is the daughter of activist parents (her […]

Since forming almost three decades ago in pre-dotcom San Francisco, Deerhoof have been some of indie rock’s most effective ambassadors for the power of anarchic creativity. A sense of mischievous delight is never far from the […]

Larry June raps like he’s guiding a meditation, his voice rarely rising above a soothing monotone. In another timeline, the prolific San Francisco rapper might have been a self-help expert, using the power of mindfulness […]

Elton John has said that Honky Château did for him what Revolver did for the Beatles: It pried open the gilded gates, lifting him “onto a higher plane” as an artist. In 1972, when Honky Château went to No. 1, ending the Rolling […]

“Let’s get physical,” a phrase originally made famous by Olivia Newton-John and recently repurposed by Dua Lipa, could serve as the implicit throughline of Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based DJ Tzusing’s sophomore album, Green Hat. It’s not the physicality of […]

“Desperados Under the Eaves,” the tale of personal and ecological apocalypse that remains Warren Zevon’s single greatest song, takes place at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel. It was a real establishment where Zevon stayed sometimes—the sort of […]