Pop Spotlight

When she was in high school in Creston, Iowa, Julee Cruise was a popular girl with a host of deep-rooted suburban fears—boys, cars, getting sucked down the bathtub drain—and a secret pastime that even those […]

Fom Alice Coltrane to Joanna Newsom to Mary Lattimore, a rich lineage of artists have sought to liberate the harp from its familiar roles in the symphony and the church. In the worlds of jazz, […]

Siavash Amini makes music of almost unfathomable complexity. Like a weather system, it might appear relatively static from afar, but inside, it churns. On his recent album Eidolon, released in early July, the Tehran-based composer […]

Madeline Kenney sings like she has a lump in her throat: Every time you think she might be on the cusp of sliding into a note that’s soaring and clarion, she hovers for a moment, […]

Like Mission of Burma or Minor Threat, Bush Tetras are a band whose influence vastly exceeds the quantity of their initial output. They shaped the no wave scene of the early 1980s, made Thurston Moore […]

While writing Prefab Sprout’s 1984 debut, Swoon, bandleader Paddy McAloon hatched a character named Green Isaac. “I was fooling around with the word ‘green’,” McAloon said later that year, highlighting his idiosyncratic writing process. “In […]