Pop Spotlight

The National’s ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, is consumed with keeping track: where things diverged, where things were lost, what has been accumulated since. The band is taking stock—sometimes literally. “Eucalyptus” is a breakup […]

If Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is the most common entry point for a new jazz fan and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is number two, a typical next step would be an album by Bill Evans. The LPs drawn from the […]

Musician Remi Kabaka, a Ghanaian-born Nigerian, first landed in London in the early 1960s, flourishing in the expat community’s Soho club scene and performing at joints like Club Afrique, where African bands rubbed shoulders with London’s […]

There are so many ways music can make people uncomfortable, and Portrayal of Guilt have tried nearly all of them. The Austin trio’s journey from screamo to blackened noise culminated in last year’s Christfucker, where new levels […]

Rapper-producer Jim Legxacy opens “miley’s riddim,” the third song from his latest project HNPM (homeless nigga pop music), with two blasts of early 2010s nostalgia. The first is the drop from Iroking.com, a Nigerian digital streaming service that […]

The main thing Matt Ox has going for him is that he has never treated rap like a stepping stone. For a white rapper who went viral at age 12—mostly because he looked like Tom Hanks’ […]

William Tyler’s songcraft was forged in the South, but it needed space to grow, so he set his sights on the West like so many musical pioneers before him. The music of the Nashville-born, Los […]

Stepwise and slowly, Bell Witch have been forever approaching The Clandestine Gate, which is not only the Seattle duo’s new 83-minute, single-song album but also the first volume in a trilogy meant to loop eternally. A decade […]