Pop Spotlight

Once upon a time, Bad Bunny was the king of a movement called Latin trap. Seven years ago, before the Rolling Stone covers and the Gucci ads with Kendall Jenner, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was […]

How much would you let love change you? That’s the dare that singer and songwriter Jamila Woods tosses inside the circle on her sprawling new album Water Made Us. Across 17 songs, she considers love […]

Holly Humberstone had a whirlwind 2021. Around the release of her debut EP, The Walls Are Way Too Thin, she earned touring spots with Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red, collaborated with fellow British success […]

On his 2015 debut, Blue Neighbourhood, Troye Sivan pitched himself as a dreamy outsider torn from the pages of a YA novel, taking in the world with a wide-eyed gaze that saw far beyond small-town […]

Helena Deland’s stirring new record Goodnight Summerland opens wordlessly, with a measured, melancholy piano sketch played by Lysandre Ménard. On the next song, Deland admits: “Saying something isn’t easy.” The introduction is a small moment […]

Something secret is happening in JR Seaton’s work as Call Super. Over the last decade, they have developed a private language for their largely instrumental electronic music, which skirts the edges of the dancefloor like […]

Excelsior is Jasper Marsalis’ first album under the moniker Slauson Malone 1, but it’s his second solo album since leaving the Brooklyn-based collective Standing on the Corner. Where that group fashioned their tastes in jazz, […]

Chris Butler hadn’t actually formed the Waitresses when Village Voice columnist Robert Christgau came to watch them play a showcase of local bands in Akron, Ohio. It was 1978, and Butler had been mailing Christgau […]

Hiroshi Yoshimura was sitting with his eyes closed. Beneath him, a mat. Beside him, several stones. In his hands he held a soprano saxophone. It was September 1977, and he and the musician Akio Suzuki […]

For years, Phoebe Bridgers has been on an odyssey to the moon. She yearned for a spaceship to carry her away from a strained relationship on Boygenius’ 2018 self-titled EP; the trio’s full-length debut ends […]

We hear a drummer counting off and then a half-sentence from his bandleader, Joni Mitchell, who in April 1972, was embarking on the first official recording sessions for For the Roses. One year earlier, she’d […]

For all that’s changed over the past 30 years, you can still take comfort in certain recurring phenomena, like Martin Scorsese movies that require booking an afternoon off work and North Carolina acts raising the […]