Pop Spotlight

It would be nice to resist the reference points, but Lungs offers them so readily. When he was in the fifth grade, he told the blog RhymeBeat, his mother gave him a birthday present: the Fugees’ The Score. The […]

A good punk demo can feel either like a riveting mission statement or the fuck-around doodles of some booger trying to make their friends laugh. Kel Mason’s first bedroom-recorded outing as Gee Tee, in 2016, was […]

In Model/Actriz’s music, sex is everywhere and might sound like anything—a meltdown in a crowded train, a terrible fight heard through the wall, the crunch and squeal of two colliding cars—but never, at any point, does […]

With his viscous, authoritative baritone, impenetrable Southern drawl, and hard-earned street smarts, BigXthaPlug’s trap tales possess candy-painted Texas cool. Most importantly, the Dallas rapper is a dramatist. He taps into his inner playwright on “Dream,” a […]

New York City was in decline when Rupert Murdoch sat down at Kate Fagan’s desk at New York Magazine in the late 1970s and fired her and some 80 colleagues. It was a classic case of stock […]

Sam Gendel’s ascension to beloved ambient-jazz savant has been fueled, in part, by the inexhaustibility of his output. His prolific catalog foams with free-improv sessions, bedroom recordings, a three-and-a-half-hour archive dump, and a bevy of collaborative projects showcasing his stuttering […]

Avey Tare’s solo records have always sounded like opportunities to break away from whatever Animal Collective was doing at the time. Co-founder Panda Bear’s solo work has roughly followed the group’s trajectory, morphing from folksy and melancholy to expansive […]

In Radiohead’s best music, songs and arrangements have a holistic and nearly inextricable bond. The free-jazz freakout in the middle of “The National Anthem” is just as crucial as the lyrics or vocal melody; “Pyramid […]

To an extent, that’s what happened with Burnin’, the fourth album he released on Vee-Jay. Unlike its Windy City rival Chess, Vee-Jay wasn’t primarily known for blues. They specialized in harmony groups, gospel, jazz, and […]

During his last visit to New York City in the early days of the pandemic, California rapper Maxo decided to undergo an artistic process called lifecasting. The brainchild of conceptual artist John Ahearn, the casting is […]

With four albums neatly spanning the 1990s, Naughty By Nature is bound in the sonic and cultural fabric of that decade. The group’s original lineup supplied grim portraits of urban decay, visions pithy enough to […]