Pop Spotlight

Dionne Warwick had a rocky start at Scepter Records. As a child in New Jersey, she sang with her family’s gospel band, which also included her aunt, Cissy Houston; as a teenager, she recorded back-up […]

In 2017, on the opening night of his European tour, the British trip-hop veteran Tricky quickly needed someone to fill in on vocals. A promoter suggested Marta Złakowska, who was then working at a bar in […]

The great women artists of modern history knew that the most intense, powerful kind of rage may wield a hammer, but the hammer is the means and not the end. Tracey Emin’s bed lies unmade, soiled […]

K Records impresario Calvin Johnson tried the solo singer-songwriter thing for a while, but that’s not usually how people prefer to hear him. Anybody who caught one of Johnson’s acoustic coffeeshop sets around the release of […]

For a microgeneration of angsty teens, the music of London indie folk trio Daughter was a formative soundtrack to aimless Tumblr scrolling and late nights aching for connection. In particular, the band’s 2011 breakout “Youth” provided solace […]

When it came time to promote Erykah Badu’s 1997 album Baduizm, William “Kedar” Massenburg started looking for the right name to describe the sound. It needed to be short, snazzy, something to capture how artists like Badu and D’Angelo—both […]

French house isn’t so much a style of music as a state of mind—an elusive feeling, an inimitable flavor, like saudade or saffron. You know it when you hear it. The genre’s characteristic chords exude […]

When Karly Hartzman tells you “there’s a place where the kids go to kiss,” it’s just one stop on a long, weird tour. The line arrives in the closing verse of a song called “Handsome […]

The Spanish DJ Pépe started producing tracks when he was 16, a full two years before he was of legal clubbing age. Years later, his music still has the dreamy quality of an imagined dancefloor, an […]

When Nakhane began writing Bastard Jargon, they were hell-bent on making “a sex album,” as they explained to Vogue earlier this year. The South African singer-songwriter, now based in South London, devised their third full-length as an outburst of joy—a jubilee […]

Pink Siifu and producer Ahwlee named their group B. Cool Aid after brown Kool-Aid, a potion made by mixing so many flavors of the powdered beverage that the colors smear. “I was like, ‘Oh shit, that’s us,’” […]

Drop the needle at any given point on James Holden’s fourth album, and you might think the music is building toward carefully orchestrated catharsis: the moment when the big melody finally drops in, or the various […]