Pop Spotlight

Since their 2006 debut, Fucked Up have fearlessly merged the ferocity of hardcore punk and the grandiosity of prog-rock. Anchoring their ever-evolving sound is Damian Abraham’s throat-rending bark, barreling through immaculately layered rock riffage laden […]

Fear, anger, and alienation have long been the dominant emotions in Ruhail Qaisar’s music. His early solo releases and live sets—under the now defunct moniker SISTER—married the blackened death metal of his short-lived band Vajravarah with […]

Nas follows “Destroy & Rebuild” with “The Flyest,” a charmingly overproduced AZ duet that functions as a victory lap but is, frustratingly, betrayed by the filler that comes next. Stillmatic’s original pressing included “Braveheart Party,” a […]

It’s awards season, so I’d like to nominate Sam Smith for 2022’s Best Celebrity Cameo in a Magazine Profile. The publication was New York Magazine; the subject was Joel Kim Booster, the writer and star of last year’s […]

White Reaper have been one album away from their big break for a while. Since the early 2010s, they’ve paid their dues as a punk-adjacent band with indie rock credibility, a glorified Iron Maiden T-shirt […]

We Are Scientists were never the center of the zeitgeist. The California band arrived in New York City just as the post-millennial party was winding down; they released their debut album in 2005, by which point […]

In 2021, Memphis rappers Aleza, Glorilla, K Carbon, Slimeroni, and Gloss Up dropped a string of Hitkidd-produced posse cuts that were sparks for the already thriving local rap circuit. They were addictive and electric, like trying to hang with that […]

As long as he can create how he wants, Oddisee has been content to exist on rap’s fringes. The Brooklyn-via-Washington, D.C. rapper-producer has treated his independent music career like a small business long before that became […]

Paul Dickow, best known as the Portland, Oregon, electronic musician Strategy, once sent a demo to a European dance-music imprint, and the Europeans liked it—they just wanted it a little cleaner, tighter, more professional sounding. Problem […]

Listen closely to the numerous “lockdown albums” released in the past couple of years, and you might hear shared among them the tacit understanding that the cultural reckoning is still unfinished—that anything that attempts to […]

In the early 1970s, the Grateful Dead were playing the most exciting music of their long career, writing many of the songs that would sustain them for the next two decades, but they weren’t spending […]

In the creative doldrums following UK drill’s ascent to the mainstream, that style’s musical forebear, road rap—the cruddy sound spearheaded by Giggs and co. back in the early 2000s—is getting some shine, with a new generation […]