Pop Spotlight

It’s unlikely that the executives at Adderall manufacturer Teva Pharmaceuticals keep tabs on the UK’s vibrant post-punk scene, but they’ll probably be hearing about Shame soon enough. The South London band’s third and finest album, Food for […]

Workin’ on a World is like a parade on a stormy day, a celebration beneath increasingly ominous skies. Lyrical references to gun violence and police brutality place its stories in a modern context, along with a […]

Sofia Jensen is singing about you. Probably not you, but “you,” as in the subject pronoun, present on all 10 songs of Practice, the debut album from Jensen’s indie-folk project Free Range. Jensen is an 18-year-old songwriter venturing […]

With Bandcamp as their roadmap to discovery and YouTube as their confessional, artists like Soccer Mommy, Clairo, and Jay Som represent a new breed of bedroom-pop musician: introverts who sing confessional lyrics into their Macbooks while turning hazy […]

As a band supposedly made up of cartoon characters, Gorillaz could theoretically do anything: record in outer space; make hip-hop beats out of fish teeth; revive the lambada—an unlimited horizon. Which makes it slightly frustrating that […]

If Nappy Nina were a comic book character, her thought bubbles would fill whole panels. In her music, the Oakland-raised, Brooklyn-based rapper’s thoughts flow in arcing run-ons that skip from prayers to confessions to flexes. Her […]

Screaming Females don’t immediately seem like a band that’s been around for 18 years, but perhaps their longevity can be chalked up to their consistency. They’ve maintained the same power trio lineup, and all eight […]

Skrillex is what tech folks would call a disruptor. For decades, there was only dance music: a patchy network of underground nodes and connections that made sporadic incursions into the mainstream. Then, sometime in 2010, […]

In 1981, a young man sat quietly in Conny Plank’s legendary Cologne recording studio, watching Japanese singer Phew record her debut album. She had been whisked from Osaka to Germany at only 20 years old […]

New York City and London share history, slang, and connections as cultural and African diasporic hubs, and for decades, hip-hop has strengthened the bond. Early stars like Slick Rick and the late MF DOOM were born in greater […]

crushed make music as cliché as that first morning when you wake up next to someone new. Stupid. Excited. Hungover. Phone battery at 10 percent. But then the light hits your face. Was the sun […]

Dylan Khotin-Foote has been bobbing between lo-fi house and moth-eaten ambient music for nearly a decade now. On four albums released between 2014 and 2020, the Canadian electronic musician known simply as Khotin established a remarkably […]