Pop Culture

“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” exclaims former silent film star Norma Desmond, played by actual silent star Gloria Swanson, in Billy Wilder’sSunset Boulevard(1950). Even though silent films did clutter the screen with dialogue cards when necessary, and sometimes when not, the basic truth of the line can be proven by two of the

ALKEBULAN III: The Water Remembers Matt B Vitae Records 21 August 2026 The two objects that define the Middle Passage are a door and a body of water. Matt B has built his third and final ALKEBULAN album around both. It opens with “At the End of the Door”, which is not a metaphor: he

In a year teeming with excellent, as well as excellently marketed, films (anyone heard of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, or Project Hail Mary?), the start of the fall festival season marks the transition from manageably overwhelming to outright insane levels of hype. The notorious awards season is around the corner, and the larger the number

Listening to Lost Pieces, I realized that I am done with the stock-in-trade of the record reviewer: genre. Jazz is how Youn Sun Nah is usually categorized. Yet, from her debut singing with the Korean Symphony Orchestra, she has inhabited more styles with her clear, quietly powerful voice than it would be sensible to list

Philadelphia’s Cold Court’s EP (^_^) /, or “hands up”, is a thrilling kitchen sink of influences that pulls off the challenging task of creating something that sounds fresh and unique. The city of brotherly love has a deep bench of talent right now, and Cold Court seemingly came out of nowhere to become one of

The configuration of bass, drums, and piano is an all-too common one in the world of jazz music, but when those instruments are somewhat turned on their heads, the results can be unique and often stunning. That’s certainly the case with Enneads. Their self-titled debut features Zach Layton on an unusual 17-string electric bass and

Sheep in the Box Hirokazu Koreeda Neon | Picturehouse 24 July 2026 (US) | 14 August 2026 (Edinburgh) Sci-fi fantasy Sheep in the Box follows Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto), a grieving couple who lost their seven-year-old son, Kakeru (Kuwaki Rimu), in an accident and, two years later, still cannot move on. Director

From poetry to music to acting to filmmaking, Saul Williams doesn’t stay in one lane. You may recall seeing him last year in Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-winning smash Sinners, his directorial effort Neptune Frost, or in his debut feature, the Cannes and Sundance Audience Award-winning Slam. Maybe you encountered him through his guest features on songs

When a band lose one of their founding members, as Mastodon did with last year’s tragic departure and death of guitarist Brent Hinds, the music that comes afterwards is unavoidably haunted. Absence has its own acoustics. The amp is still there, the guitar is not, and the air seems to remember. More interesting, though, is

Even after his untimely death in 2013 at age 39, Jason Molina remains the flagship artist of Secretly Group, the Bloomington, Indiana-based record label that has grown into one of the largest and most respected indies today. Molina played a major role in that rise, releasing an astonishing but not impenetrable amount of material, from

There’s a fabulously loaded moment in Bouchra when a seductive mother bear confesses to the title character, an anthropomorphic coyote, “I love your chipped tooth, and the way you lick it all the time.” A tight close-up shows us one of Bouchra’s upper canines, which we’ve seen protruding sharply from her jaw in myriad shots

Ahh, the 1970s. It gave us regrettable ubiquity like avocado-green kitchen appliances, the gas-guzzling Oldsmobile Cutlass, the reverse-heeled Earth Shoe, fondue pots, shag carpet, leisure suits, waterbeds, mullets, and a brand of soft-in-the-head and softer-on-the-ears rock music that was a 360-degree turn from the prior decade. It was a laundry list of sins that cultural

Jesse Malin’s memoir Almost Grown is a quintessential New York story, filled with chance encounters with legends such as Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone. It’s also the story of an artist growing up in New York City, discovering his identity, and his journey from hardcore to punk to singer-songwriter, rubbing elbows with Bruce Springsteen. Of

“I have something to say,” the opening line of Paris Paloma’s raw, visceral, and powerful sophomore album The Fatal Flaw, is a colossal understatement. It’s unfortunate that portraying a world through the female gaze, glaring down on misogyny, superficiality, and capitalism, is considered radical. Paloma knows that the only way to crumble power structures is

May is a month of long-awaited returns. In the month’s best metal, stalwarts of the old-school death metal ethos, Funebrarum, return after 17 years, still radiating the same cryptic and decadent stench. On the genre’s more primal side, Necroccultus also return two decades after their excellent debut, Encircling the Mysterious Necrorevalation, with a frenzied and

There is no logical reason for Chuck Klosterman to have written Rock* – A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music. That is one reason I’m glad he did. Klosterman says as much himself. He describes the book as something he was compelled to write because it was fun, partly because he misses the days

“What the fuck,” Loudon Wainwright told the audience at his birthday tribute concert. The singer-songwriter had turned 80 on 5th September. A week later, fans, friends, family members, fellow artists, and (morbid?) curiosity seekers had assembled at the Midtown Manhattan venue Town Hall—itself over 100 years old—to celebrate the milestone by performing Wainwright’s combinations of

Is it fair to describe Will Maclean’s Solace House as an off-campus novel? It arrives as one of the year’s most anticipated works of horror, following on from Maclean’s debut, the widely admired lockdown hit The Apparition Phase (2020). Solace House contains themes that will be familiar to fans of stories centering on young people

Everything must change. That’s a cliché, but it is true. Nothing stays the same. The theme of Teddy Thompson’s latest release, his first full-length album of original material in six years, plays on transformation. Ironically, he doesn’t sound that much different from the way he did on his earlier albums. He still has the same

Until recently, my personal familiarity with the music of Phillip Golub was limited to two brilliant, unique records he made on Joseph Branciforte’s forward-thinking label, greyfade. Filters (2022) is a hypnotic collection of loops for solo piano, while Loop 7 (2025) is an extended piece created with midi-controlled Disklavier pianos. A move from those concepts

Radiohead’s Ok Computer was labelled a progressive rock album in certain quarters, a label that likely made frontman Thom Yorke uneasy, who turned to more ambient textures throughout the 21st century. Bandmate Ed O’ Brien’s Blue Morpho, on the other hand, is unapologetically proud of the genre: of the seven tunes here, only three keep

It’s the spring of 2026, and Phish are lighting up Las Vegas once again with their highly anticipated return to the technological marvel known as Sphere. The beloved rock quartet from Vermont was the second group to play Sphere after U2‘s opening residency, and Phish’s four-night run in April 2024 set a high bar for

In 2020, Nolan Nunes, live bassist for Ghostmane, formed If I Die First alongside emo rappers and post-hardcore royalty. Their mission was simple: reignite the pop screamo flame. The genre’s convergence of nasally emo-pop-punk vocals and melodies; screamo screams and dissonance; and metalcore breakdowns totally defined post-hardcore in the early 2000s. The foundational works of

The fourth album by singer-songwriter Maya Hawke, Maitreya Corso, includes a track called “Slacker in the Rye”, a title that parodies Hawke‘s self-professed fear: that she would become a modern-day Holden Caulfield, needlessly cynical about her privileged circumstances. As a whole, the record describes the perils of ambition and the difficulty of maintaining relationships in

How far into The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch must one wade before feeling qualified to review it? About 900 pages, probably, which is awkward because the novel itself is only 747 pages long. It resists quick judgment, obviously. Its conclusion refuses tidy answers to its tangled weave of philosophy, neo-noir, metafiction, and literary

Colson Whitehead’s relationship with the crime fiction genre is complicated. Like Jonathan Lethem, another New York-centric writer who came out of less salubrious districts of literature before being accepted into the pantheon, Whitehead has long been one of America’s top-ranked practitioners of critically approved fiction (awards, good speaking gigs, New Yorker appearances). This is what

Dolly Parton and Beyoncé are two cultural icons united by a song that challenges aspects of the public persona they have constructed. “What matter who’s speaking?” writes Samuel Beckett in Stories and Texts for Nothing (1966). Beckett’s question lies at the heart of Michel Foucault’s famous essay “What is an author?”, first delivered as a

Reel 2 Reel 4 Real Ray Wylie Hubbard Bordello / Soundly Music / Thirty Tigers 21 August 2026 Ray Wylie Hubbard claims that Reel 2 Reel 4 Real will be his final album. If so, that’s fair enough. The singer-songwriter will turn 80 this fall, and this album makes his 20th full-length release, giving him

Thunderous riffs and memorable hooks are two things many bands can do successfully, but to combine them seamlessly is a bit more of a rarity. Brooklyn’s Upper Wilds thrive on pummeling listeners with heavy doses of bass, guitar and drums that recall metal and punk’s finest moments, but their melodies will also stick around long