Pop Culture

Werewolf, the fourth album from the Brook and the Bluff, is a title that suggests something a little fiercer than what this record contains. The band are mostly not looking to blow listeners away at full volume, although there are a couple of songs that at least get into that neighbourhood. Instead, Werewolf is more

Vila Fabiano do Nascimento & Vittor Santos Orquestra Far Out 27 February 2026 In the near-decade since my first Fabiano do Nascimento review (of 2017’s Tempo dos Mestres), his catalogue has expanded in beautiful ways. With preternaturally nimble fingers blazing, he has dabbled with electronic loops, collaborated with other luminaries (most notably saxophonist Sam Gendel,

The Vancouver-based musician Ora Cogan exists in liminal spaces, or, rather, her music does. It transcends anodyne signifiers—folk-gaze and psych rock—to reach an indeterminate realm, where her prayer-like songs float like mist. Ephemerality prolongs. Her songs are the stuff of dreams until they morph into a nightmare: the nymph-like Cogan will lure you to a

Guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli has been working professionally for about 45 years and has recorded over 30 albums as a leader. Pizzarelli‘s preferred format is with a trio, in the style of Nat King Cole: his swing-styled seven-string guitar, piano, and upright bass — and his casual but confident vocals. For all his success

Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhlaghi’s documentary, A Fox Under a Pink Moon, begins from conditions of extreme instability. Soraya Akhlaghi, a young Afghan refugee living in Iran, moves through a world shaped by precarity, violence, and the long afterlife of displacement. Her mother emigrated to Austria when she was still a child, and the film

Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies Market Western Vinyl 27 February 2026 Nate Mendelsohn’s skills in the studio are legendary in New York’s indie music world. The multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer has collaborated with the likes of Yaeji, Frankie Cosmos, Phony Ppl, Dougie Poole, Office Culture, Adeline Hotel, and many more. For more than a decade, he’s

Tokyo supports one of the densest record store ecosystems in the world. Across the metropolitan area, roughly 250 record stores continue to operate, ranging from major chains to tiny genre-specific specialists occupying upper floors and basement rooms near train stations. In many Western cities, this kind of retail infrastructure largely collapsed decades ago. In Tokyo,

Walter Smith III is a fine tenor saxophonist from Houston, Texas—a legendary place to get your start playing that legendary horn. This year marks his 20th anniversary recording as a leader—he also keeps great company, having played in Ambrose Akinmusere‘s band and recorded with folks like Eric Harland, Kendrick Scott, Terence Blanchard, and many others.

Last year’s mix for BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend, his last high-profile mix, found Joshua Spence Mainnie – better known as the Scottish DJ/Producer Barry Can’t Swim – stringing warm, soulful disco, house, funk, soul, and African music across light, floaty trance and uptempo bangers like so many fairy lights on a blonde balustrade. On

Netflix’s Beef follows a rich Korean storytelling tradition of genre-bending, offering viewers a sophisticated blend of dark comedy, drama, thriller, and social commentary. The show’s Korean American writer and director, Lee Sung Jin, draws inspiration from this tradition as well as Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow self: the idea that denying or repressing parts

Film is sex searching for the sun as a partner. So says Teo Hernández in Three Drops of Mezcal in a Glass of Champagne (Trois gouttes de mezcal dans une coupe de champagne, 1983), a 16-minute short that’s part of the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective on the films of Hernández and his colleagues. According

It’s been 15 long years since Southern California’s Social Distortion released an album. Barack Obama was still in his first term, and Donald Trump was hosting The Apprentice, where he should have stayed. A global pandemic occurred in 1918, not, God forbid, in the present day. Fifteen years is longer than many bands last. The

Weird Nightmare is the solo project of Alex Edkins, best known as the singer-guitarist of the noise-rock band METZ. Weird Nightmare’s eponymous first album was a self-produced, lo-fi affair, recorded during the COVID lockdown. The new record, Hoopla, is not. Edkins recruited Spoon drummer Jim Eno to co-produce with him, and the result is just

SUSS’ Pat Irwin, Bob Holmes, and Jonathan Gregg are, for all intents and purposes, the inventors and perhaps finest purveyors of what’s known as “ambient country”. They even came up with the term, but its origins can be traced back to everything from Brian Eno’s meditative soundscapes to Ry Cooder’s atmospheric score of Wim Wenders’

Saxophonist Chris Potter constructed his new album, Alive with Ghosts Today, to reflect the story of John Brown, the abolitionist who famously raided the armory at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia in 1859. It was an attempt to initiate a revolt by enslaved people in the American South. His ensemble is built around the sound of

Name that movie: An innocent man is wanted for murder on the front pages of every newspaper, so he sneaks onto a train and hides in the compartment of a sexy blonde, who willingly conceals him. You say it’s Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)? Sorry, the film we’re talking about is House of Cards

Let X=X Laurie Anderson with Sexmob Nonesuch 8 May 2026 At the beginning of her new live album Let X=X, recorded with the accompaniment of unconventional jazz ensemble Sexmob, avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson introduces herself as our guide for the night. “This is your captain / We are going down / We are all going

Drake is soon expected to drop his first solo album since his ignominious loss to Kendrick Lamar. Amid the fallout of their feud, both Drake and Lamar have continued to amass commercial success. Kendrick Lamar released his sixth studio album, GNX, that same fall of the 2024 beef, with all 12 songs debuting on Billboard’s

Astronomy holds that the larger the star, the more quickly it burns out and “dies”. Size and brilliance don’t guarantee a lasting shine. The same is often true of Earth-bound “stars” who help illuminate the world through their artistic handiwork. Some lose their physical lives sooner than expected, while others’ careers drift languidly into that

Rock ‘n’ roll memoirs are hit or miss affairs. For every insightful offering like Keith Richards’ Life (2010), there are a dozen pale imitations – onerous reads filled with foggy memories and questionable myths of glory days gone by, focused on backstage debauchery and gossip, with little in the way of wisdom about music and

Bill Evans at the BBC is the latest in a series of archival releases by Evans, coordinated by producer Zev Feldman. Working with the estate of the influential jazz pianist, who died in 1980, Feldman has proffered official versions of material that often was bootlegged and, in some cases, undiscovered. Issued on Feldman’s own labels,

The internet was never going to be a safe place. One of the trade-offs of America’s First Amendment is the acceptance of speech and content that do not align with our personal worldviews. The freedom to communicate independent thought is a vital societal function, but in the age of meme culture, it’s also a telling

Braxton Keith writes and sings about drinking, loving, losers, and other familiar classic country themes in a squeaky voice with a twang that sounds made for the juke box. He can convincingly act the fool and/or cry tears in his beer, depending on the song and the mood. The title of his new release, Real

It takes a skilled singer-songwriter to turn everyday scenes and moods into enchantment. To do that work while neither romanticizing nor vilifying—to let the mundane be mundane and to appreciate it for that—takes an expert. On their new self-titled release, Brooklyn-based Wendy Eisenberg is that expert. They strike a perfect balance: each track is a

Matt Evans loves creating musical landscapes that seem mysterious but are imbued with a sound that’s curious and welcoming. The New York-based drummer, composer, and experimentalist mixed warm, unique melodies against synths and percussion on records like New Topographics (2020) and Soft Science (2022), and created calmer, more ambient soundscapes on touchless (2021) has once

Tedeschi Trucks Band have spent the last decade wearing their influences on their collective sleeves. Not that there was much doubt as to where their allegiances lie, but their last couple of studio and live releases have tightened the bonds they share with their inspirations even further. In 2022, Tedeschi Trucks Band released the ambitious

If you’re looking for a corrective to the anti-immigrant sentiment that is a core attribute of the Trump administration, you could do a lot worse than the film Bridge of Spies. That may sound like a strange claim to make about a 2015 Cold War thriller directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, but

Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change Kyle Devine Verso July 2026 From protest songs to charity concerts to celebrity political endorsements on social media, pop music has long sustained its cultural legitimacy through engagement with political causes. Yet mixed results have also revealed the limits of music’s ability to shape the world outside its immediate sphere.

It seems like a calm Sunday evening in San Francisco here on the 19th of April, but a musical storm is brewing at the SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab. The “future fusion collective” known as Instant Alter are in town, bringing jazzy improv and uplifting vibrations to help listeners transcend the chaos of the modern