Pop Spotlight

Lane Shi sings with the voice of a shapeshifter. Flitting from croon to shriek with ritualistic caprice, the Haining-born vocalist played Boston basements with Berklee art punks DENT before graduating in 2016; these days, her […]

There are a lot of ways not to say what you meant. Maybe you can’t find the words; maybe you just can’t choke them out. Maybe their intended recipient isn’t here and never will be. […]

U.K. polymath Wesley Joseph’s psychedelic, existential ballads play like a score for an Oscar-nominated thriller. Paired with hazy production, his diaristic words of self-reflection and self-deprecation ring out loud. The London-based singer, rapper, and producer has […]

The world might have imagined what Yoko Ono in mourning would sound like—shrieking, moaning, howling—yet this was not the face she turned to the world. On “Goodbye Sadness,” “Toyboat,” “Silver Horse,” and “Mother of the […]

A Parisian whose gateway to jazz and hip-hop was the Beastie Boys, Lex Blondin opened the Total Refreshment Centre in a London warehouse in 2012, creating a space that tripled as a recording studio, artist […]

With their 2012 breakout Dripping, Pile cemented their status as one the loudest, most quietly influential DIY rock bands with riotous live shows and a discography that brawls with post-hardcore. In recent years, however, the […]

Without wishing to spoil one of the best science fiction movies of the 1970s—you’ve had long enough to watch it, surely—there’s a crushing scene in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running that envisions a biome floating through deep […]

Katherine Paul, who performs under the moniker Black Belt Eagle Scout, first learned to drum from her family’s drum group, the Skagit Valley Singers. Years later, her dynamic percussion infuses her third album, the intimate The […]

Seaming To’s musical heritage doesn’t immediately scream rebellion. The London-born singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist comes from a family of concert pianists, and she followed their path at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, where she […]

In a dance-music scene deep in the throes of Y2K nostalgia, Two Shell have managed to ride the zeitgeist without being too obvious about it. Sure, the styles that the mysteriously masked UK duo pluck from […]

The heroes of doom metal seem to hold little regard for anything besides distortion and the devil. After all, subtlety can be difficult to convey with a Gibson SG, cartilage-cleaving vocals, and a cityscape of […]