Pop Culture

Another year gone, and narrowing down the year’s best metal albums remains as excruciating as ever, but then again, that’s part of the fun! What I enjoy is the retrospective exercise, and what it has resulted in over the past few years is that every subgenre, every stream, is producing excellent work. Take grindcore. This

Without one record truly dominating my listening habits, it turned out to be a varied and exciting year in the best punk and hardcore. Sometimes that can feel underwhelming, but it is not. In preparation, I realized there were at least 20 releases I considered seriously for this list. I think of punk and hardcore

“Farm Emo.” That’s how Tiberius likes to describe its music, and it’s a fitting title once you hear their latest record, Troubadour. Originally a solo project for Brendan Wright, the vocalist, guitarist, keyboard player, and songwriter expanded their noisy outfit into a brash four-piece, matching deeply personal lyrics to confessional, relatable songwriting, drawing heavily on

Rufus Wainwright’s fascination with Kurt Weill began early. “I first came in contact with Kurt when I was about 12 or 13,” Weill recalls. “I was at a record store, and I saw an album with Lotte Lenya on the cover… it was really the photograph that got me first. I had to buy the

Multi-instrumentalist Chris Franck and DJ and producer Patrick Forge have been making music under the moniker Da Lata for a good quarter-century now. In all that time, the gist of the project has remained largely consistent: Da Lata‘s music is warm, soulful, and made, more or less, in collaboration with (or at least inspired by)

What would you do for a $30 glass cup? The average answer probably (hopefully) wouldn’t be, “Verbally spar with my local Starbucks workers at five in the morning,” or, “Drop the price of a new pick-up truck on a predatory reseller’s eBay listing.” Alas, this is the Year of Our Lord 2025. Micro trends have

Tim Burton’s Batman Returns unfolds as a nocturnal opera of desire, repression, and theatrical self-invention. Costumes, with every stitched seam and shiny surface, convey a psychological mirror, reflecting what each character has chosen or been forced to become. The film’s iconic poster makes this explicit. “The Bat. The Cat. The Penguin.” The tagline announces archetypes,

As the leader, brainchild, and sole consistent member of Adeline Hotel, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Dan Knishkowy approaches each new release as an opportunity to present a new (or modified) version of his stellar band. The new Adeline Hotel record, Watch the Sunflowers, draws on elements from previous releases but remains a fresh-sounding album with tons

Bassist and composer Ro(b)//ert Lundberg’s new album, by-passing-upon, continues what he called on his Bandcamp page “my long-running watery fascinations, here with a central fixation on the curb stop”, referring to the small metal covers in sidewalks and yards covering the shutoff valve in a water pipe flowing to a building. Curb stops also mark

Composer and bassist Linda May Han Oh’s latest album,Strange Heavens,builds its central premise around the concept that humans will typically choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. We’ll stick with something bad that we know rather than find something better that’s scarily new. It makes sense as a method of preservation (who were the

Mr Bad Guy (40th Anniversary) Freddie Mercury EMI 5 December 2025 It took him more than a decade after Queen‘s debut to go solo, but Freddie Mercury finally got it together in time for 1985’s Mr Bad Guy. The Game and Hot Space had flirted with gay undertones, but Brian May‘s resistance to queer pop

Vibrations in the Village: Live at the Village Gate Rahsaan Roland Kirk Resonance 28 November 2025 Rahsaan Roland Kirk was known simply as Roland Kirk back in November 1963, when an unknown filmmaker recorded these live dates at the Village Gate in New York City. The documentary was never made, and the tapes sat in

So, Here We Are: Best of Doves Doves EMI 14 November 2025 Less bombastic than Muse, less self-serious than Radiohead, Doves carved out a nice place for themselves in the turn-of-the-millennium British indie landscape. Most people wouldn’t recognize Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Andy and Jez Williams on the street, yet three of their six

Arthur Hiller’sPromise Her Anything, now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, embodies the sexual neuroses of the major Hollywood studios in the allegedly Swinging Sixties. With its leering title, it comes on like a saucy treat starring Warren Beatty and Leslie Caron, who were in the middle of their own tabloid scandal. If you paid your

Apologies to the Queen Mary Wolf Parade Sub Pop 27 September 2005 With the seemingly ever-growing list of “wolf” bands circa 2005 (Wolf Eyes, Wolfmother, Superwolf), Wolf Parade could have been nothing more than a novelty act, especially considering their slapdash formation. This was a time when the indie apparatus felt compelled to churn out

Things in Nature Merely Grow Yiyun Li Farrar, Straus and Giroux May 2025 Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow brought to mind that I keep a death list on my phone, but it’s not that I’m one to hold grudges. Rather, it is a list of important people in my life who have died.

One doesn’t have to be a Buddhist to know life is full of pain and suffering, and then you die. Sure, there’s more to it than that, but the existential reality cannot be denied. How we deal with it reveals a great deal about our character. Singer-songwriter/guitarist Tommy Talton knew he was dying of cancer

W What did you hear? Really. Blonde on Blonde’s nasally whine or Nashville Skyline’s country croon? Which one is Bob Dylan’s real voice? Despite, or perhaps because of, Dylan’s vocal masks, his voice rings true. Or, according to Steven Rings, author of What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan, you believe it does.

Richard Patrick’s story is one of rebellion, ambition, and fractured mentorship. Once the touring guitarist for Nine Inch Nails, known as “Piggy”, Patrick left Trent Reznor’s shadow to forge his own path with Filter. His journey was far from a straightforward rise. It was a complex dance between admiration and defiance, control and chaos, loyalty

It is sometimes said that humor is at its best when a country is at its worst. So, in this time of No Kings protests, are we living through a golden age of comedy in America? Humor has always been at the heart of America’s culture wars, but those skirmishes have been more divisive and

Despite not fitting the tropical stereotype often attributed to (and intensely exploited by the Latin music industry, Argentina has always found ways to stand out. Historically known for tango and one of South America’s richest rock legacies (thanks to names like Fito Páez and Soda Stereo), the country is also an inexhaustible source of pop

Swiss label Bongo Joe has been an unstoppable force of cosmopolitan post-punk gems this year, and perhaps no single-artist release encapsulates their 2025 sound more cleanly than 2, the trilingual sophomore release from Yalla Miku. The lineup has shifted since their first album. However, the sonic scope remains very similar, as the group trace their

From synth-pop mimicry to thrash-industrial chaos, Ministry’s four-decade evolution is less a career arc and more a chemical reaction: unstable, volatile, and guided by the dark alchemy of Al Jourgensen. Even the band’s name, “Ministry”, evokes something both political and religious — a morphing symbol suited to whatever Jourgensen needs it to mean at the

English singer Dusty Springfield is best remembered for her blue-eyed soul recordings, especially her masterful Dusty in Memphis (1969) album with her sultry “Son of a Preacher Man”. However, Springfield’s career was much longer and varied than this release. The London chanteuse first achieved stardom in 1960, singing folk pop with her brother Dion and

Patricia Brennan is a master composer and improviser on mallet percussion, and her last album, Breaking Stretch, was a high-arcing highlight of 2024 in jazz. The follow-up, Of the Near and Far, is also one of the best and most exciting albums of this year in creative music. Although Breaking Stretch incorporated subtle electronic elements