Pop Spotlight

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 […]

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, […]