Pop Spotlight

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“Let’s get physical,” a phrase originally made famous by Olivia Newton-John and recently repurposed by Dua Lipa, could serve as the implicit throughline of Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based DJ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 […]

You can almost picture Skippers, the stripmall bar that serves as the setting for “Carlos Is Crying,” off the Hold Steady’s ninth album. The place is packed with cubicle drones sharing pitchers of beer and […]

The steadfast devotion between the women of Boygenius is a subject worthy of a dog-eared literary classic, one that’s passed from friend to friend until the pages come fluttering off the spine. In 2016, Julien Baker spotted Lucy […]

We’re well acquainted with Chloe x Halle—“gospel-raised,” genre-bending wunderkinds who didn’t utter a curse word until their second studio album, 2020’s Ungodly Hour. Now a 24-year-old solo star, Chlöe is ready to flaunt her goodies to a pop-trap beat, capitalize […]

Gel make hardcore for the freaks. That’s a statement of intent, established in the title of the New Jersey band’s 2019 demo and reaffirmed at every sweaty, ecstatic show they’ve played since. Increasingly, over an impressive […]

As one half of the noise-pop duo Black Dresses, Ada Rook makes radioactive sleepover music that explores the fear, anger, and trauma spawned by a hostile world. On solo records like 2016’s Void Fantasy and 2020’s 2,020 Knives, she […]

Halfway through Generational Curse, the debut album by the South Central L.A.-born rapper ICECOLDBISHOP, somebody shoots up a house party. Like so many other things in Bishop’s writing—the deaths of parents and friends, the drugs that […]

On her remarkable 2022 album Remember Your North Star, Yaya Bey unearthed grief and heartache amid a slow-burning patchwork of hip-hop, neo-soul, and Afrobeats. The Brooklyn-based singer’s new EP, Exodus the North Star, is a sparkling addendum and […]

Nathan Burns’ furious howl is the sound of someone who’s been screaming relentlessly for days in an otherwise empty room. His home city of Melbourne, Australia holds the record for world’s longest COVID-19 lockdown, totaling almost […]

Back in 2009, Mike Polizze was sitting at home in Philadelphia staring down a pile of solo recordings when he decided to slap the name Purling Hiss on them like a provincial flag. It wasn’t […]