Pop Spotlight

On MERCY, memory is treacherous. “Not the End of the World” sparkles with a reassuring grandeur, but each time his processed, multi-tracked voice repeats the title, it feels more like a lie. Incendiary “The Legal Status […]

Ty Segall has spent the past 15 years building a vast discography of solo releases, side projects, and genre experiments branching into familiar yet distinct phenotypes of the California auteur’s strummy rock’n’roll. The C.I.A., however, is […]

In the eight years since her debut album, saxophonist and composer Mette Henriette has kept busy: She’s held residencies at Southbank Centre and Edvard Munch’s Ekely, performed at the opening night of the Berlin Jazz Festival, been commissioned […]

Ask anyone to impersonate a teenage girl and they might roll their eyes to the point of retinal detachment and, in the voice of a catatonic zombie, say, “OMG, like, totally.” Once dubbed one of […]

Two years ago, Ladytron’s immortal “Seventeen” briefly went viral on TikTok. The track came out back in 2002—before many of the platform’s users had even been born—yet the Liverpool band’s brittle, dead-eyed electroclash struck a nerve. […]

Consider Saccades a fruitful experiment. It began in 2018, when Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes invited British producer Rian Treanor to hold a residency in Kampala. After hearing a recording from local fiddle master Ocen […]

Kylie Minogue asks what if. In her radiant pop world, every feeling tingles with possibility: the longed-for romance that you barely dare whisper, the intoxication after just one drop, the liberation under the strobe light. She […]

Bob Rafelson’s 1970 film Five Easy Pieces ends with the hero, played by Jack Nicholson, hitching a ride on a northbound truck and disappearing into anonymity. Mac DeMarco is too larger-than-life to ever be anonymous, […]

A few years ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking that BabyTron and his Detroit-area trio ShittyBoyz were an elaborate spoof. With mixtape titles like Dookie Brothers 2 and an entourage regularly referred to as the Dog […]

Núria Graham’s homespun folk-pop carries a playful sensibility. A sense of wonder pervades the Irish-Catalan singer-songwriter’s breezy music: When Graham relays a laconic story or asks a lilting question in her velvety, laid-back voice, you […]

First Ohio, then the world. Brainiac laughed at their own ambition with the tongue-in-cheek cover of their 1995 Internationale EP, which read “Dayton London Paris Tokyo Berlin Moscow.” Still, the band moved from strength to […]

In filmmaker Charlotte Wells’ feature debut Aftersun, memory is elusive. In the “emotionally autobiographical” drama, a woman named Sophie (played as a child by Frankie Corio and as an adult by Celia Rowlson-Hall) remembers a vacation […]