The sound of art-punk quartet ĠENN reflects their collective experience: tenacious drum lines from UK post-punk, sinuous vocal melodies inspired by Maltese folk music, and the heavy guitars of modern psych-rock or even nu-metal. Formed […]
L’Rain: I Killed Your Dog
On the title track of her third album as L’Rain, Taja Cheek chants, “I killed your dog.” The repetition of the four words sounds dissociative at first; as Cheek croons through a scrim of vocal […]
Meernaa: So Far So Good
Meernaa band leader Carly Bond describes her songwriting process as “psychedelic meditation,” an experience so immersive that when she gets into the flow, she forgets to eat. On the band’s debut, 2019’s Heart Hunger, playful […]
Mutual Benefit: Growing at the Edges
It takes a true optimist to see the upside of a wildfire. Throughout Growing at the Edges, the bottomlessly tender fourth album from his baroque indie project Mutual Benefit, Jordan Lee conjures angry skies, scorched […]
The Music of Heatmiser
When Elliott Smith and his college buddy Neil Gust formed Heatmiser in Portland in the early ’90s, all the pieces started falling into place. They had two supremely talented songwriters, a thrashing yet tuneful alt-rock […]
Babyfxce E: The X Tape
In the summer of 2020, the freak show that is Flint’s street rap scene blossomed. Three of the city’s landmark rap songs dropped within the span of a few months, all featuring the scene’s signature […]
Maiya the Don: Hot Commodity
In the music video for her breakout single “Telfy,” Maiya The Don shimmies down the aisle of a beauty store in Crocs, flexes her designer handbag, and gets sturdy with her girls at a playground. […]
Jlin: Perspective EP
In the six years since Jlin’s last proper album, the genre-shattering Black Origami, the bounds of her musical practice have exploded. With conceptual artist Kevin Beasley, she transfigured the sounds of a cotton gin that […]
The Universal Resonance Of Emerald M.’s “I Could’ve Died”
Emerald M., an exceptional singer-songwriter, is mesmerizing audiences globally with her new song, “I Could’ve Died.” Veering away from her Burmese origins, she explores raw and unvarnished life experiences. Inspired by the world around her, […]
Mary Lattimore: Goodbye, Hotel Arkada
Listening to a Mary Lattimore album is like flipping through a scrapbook full of yellowing photographs. For the Los Angeles-based harpist, no moment is too trivial to capture in music: the lone deer she saw […]
The Darkness: Permission to Land… Again (20th Anniversary Edition)
The Darkness pursued rock stardom in the same way that people nowadays strive to be pro running backs or music journalists: headlong, and without care for how the position is currently valued. As East Anglian […]
Hüsker Dü: Tonite Longhorn
By the end of the 1970s, disco was dying, and the Twin Cities were at the dawn of a renaissance. Freeform radio had given way to commercial programming, but in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a […]