Pop Spotlight

In the learned vocabulary of pop music, staccato means happy and languorous, sustained notes signify sad. It’s the “Getting Better” vs. “She’s Leaving Home” binary established long ago by McCartney and co. But to wilfully defy […]

Sleaford Mods don’t make music about how terrible things are in hopes that they will get better. Over the past decade, Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson have channeled public discontent and everyday malaise in the […]

For Godcaster, everything has to be magnified or it’s not worth examining. Every aspect of the Brooklyn collective seems designed to overstimulate: their six eclectic members, their out-of-breath, cosmological lyrics, and their commitment to song […]

By the year 2000, there were no more pages in the pop star rulebook for Madonna to rip up. At no point in her nearly two-decade career had her star begun to dull; 1992’s Erotica was, by Madonna […]

During a triptych of alternate versions and demos appended to Spilt Milk for this reissue, Styvers at last plays the piano on some of these songs. She is less exacting than Parker, but there’s modest charm […]

Listen to Fever Ray and learn to recognize the unrecognizable. On one of their new songs, “Looking for a Ghost,” Karin Dreijer plunks out a tune inspired by Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk,” stacking calliope synths […]

Four years later, Beasley continues to explore the installation’s collaborative possibilities. His debut album, a double LP also titled A View of a Landscape, brings together artists from his initial Whitney performances, as well as a […]

Reconciling otherness with selfhood is at the heart of Eva Liu’s work as vocalist of indie-rock trio Dama Scout and in her solo project mui zyu. On her debut EP as mui zyu, 2021’s a wonderful thing vomits, […]

Milford Graves was a mentor, among a host of other things: percussionist, professor, autodidact, herbalist, acupuncturist, vegan, and the inventor of his own martial art. Born in Jamaica, Queens, he was at the vanguard of […]

Since The Heist, his breakout 2012 LP with Ryan Lewis, Macklemore has been painfully self-aware in his music. He’s aware of his whiteness, and how it gives him a leg up on his competition. He’s aware of his […]

Young Nudy is known for his appetite: He is a consummate foodie and perpetual victim of the munchies who has become something like the MF DOOM of East Atlanta. To satiate the appetite of his devoted […]

When Oleh Shpudeiko bought a handheld recorder to capture the sounds of his hometown, Kyiv, it’s unlikely he imagined the significance those recordings would one day take on. It was 2012, and Shpudeiko, who makes […]