Pop Culture

Imagine a shelf of classic toys and books. There might be a teddy bear, Barbie, G.I. Joe, a Mouse Trap board game, Star Wars figures, and Mr. Potato Head, along with books like Curious George, Frog and Toad, The Snowy Day, Where the Wild Things Are, and Harold and the Purple Crayon. Comic books would

In the summer of 2011, Dance Moms premiered to an unsuspecting audience of one million. On track to endure the expected post-premiere drop in viewership, the Lifetime show instead found its stride, making not just a name for itself but birthing a seminal franchise. While a number of Dance Moms spin-offs have been greenlit, none

Pianist and keyboardist Craig Taborn is a shape-shifting musician. On his latest ECM Records release, he moves across several of his forms with a single, extremely versatile band. The trio is completed by cellist Tomeka Reid and percussionist Ches Smith, who moves from mallet percussion to drum kit to electronics as artistically necessary. With Taborn

M(h)aol’s Something Soft is an album with a misnomer at its core. Nothing here is soft—certainly not the guitars, which jangle rather than bounce; not the percussion that weirdly pulses throughout the songs; not the lyrics, which offer blunt truths. Certainly not the emotional architecture of the record, which is built around a simple, devastating

There’s a delicious irony to an album called Wormslayer planting relentless earworms in the mind that tunnel through it for days on end. Listeners fond of hook-laden, grand-scale sonic storytelling will find that English rock band Kula Shaker’s eighth effort delivers mystic folk rock every bit as adventuresome as Frank Herbert’s Dune—(ear)worms included. Wormslayer sees

It’s been nearly 15 years since Justin Townes Earle first met Sammy Brue outside an Ogden, Utah club that the pre-teen guitarist and Earle admirer wasn’t old enough to enter. Earle became a mentor to Brue that night, changing the course of Brue’s life. Earle eventually asked Brue to be on the cover of hisSingle

Julian Lage, 38 years old, is part of the generation of jazz guitarists who follow the block of Pat Metheny, John Scofield, and Bill Frisell and have absorbed the way that mainstream jazz (learned in school) and modern popular music (rock, indie or otherwise; soul; funk; hip-hop) can work together seamlessly. The guitar is, of

Landing in the transitional period between post-punk and new wave, Leisure Process were but one of a dozen acts trying to get a foothold in the ever-changing UK pop landscape during the 1980s. Singer Ross Middleton, in fact, had punk roots in a previous group, Scotland’s Positive Noise, a valuable platform that allowed him to

It’s been a rough start to 2026 for fans of the Grateful Dead after guitarist and co-founder Bob Weir passed away on 10 January at age 78. Tribute shows by local musicians around the Bay Area occurred literally every night for the next week, followed by a public memorial event at the San Francisco Civic

The television series Avatar: The Last Airbender has enjoyed a long cultural lifespan for a Nickelodeon cartoon. Since its release, critics have praised its ability to convey heavy emotional themes through a medium aimed at a young audience. Pop music, which also caters to a young demographic, has transformed over the last 25 years to

Is French Noir a redundant term? After all, “noir” is already French. French critics first applied the word to Hollywood films they perceived as dark in outlook, photography, and themes. Critics and film buffs in the US and elsewhere slowly accepted the term and began throwing it around as if everyone grasped its amorphous, terminally

Taroug’snew album,Chott, is named after a giant salt lake in Tunisia. The sound of its latest single, however, is more befitting that of an ocean than a lake. “1995” is enormous, echoey, and expansive—the vocals soaked with reverb, the drums lurching and heaving with the weight of a ship’s anchor. There’s a real “something-wicked-this-way-comes” energyhere,

Megadrought, the latest album from composer Devin Maxwell, is ambitious enough on its own, but the fact that it is the third of four planned releases makes the scope of Maxwell’s musical imagination seem infinitely wider. The four albums – the first two being Timebending (2024) and Selfies (2025) – are part of Maxwell’s “Cloudseeding”

As a jazz studies drummer at the University of Michigan, Erik Hall encountered a life-changing moment when he was first exposed to Steve Reich‘s enormously influential Music for 18 Musicians. Long considered a lodestar of the minimalist genre, Reich’s piece influenced Hall to the point that he reconstructed it as a solo artist, painstakingly recreating

Crisis Actor Lily Platt 25 January 2026 (Sundance) There is no title sequence or fade from black at the beginning of director Lily Platt’s short film Crisis Actor (2026). Instead, she thrusts her audience into the dysfunction of the main character’s life. It’s a blunt but effective opening because it sets the tone for a

The fact that the London-based singer-songwriter Alice Costelloe, the great-great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, is, on her debut album Move on With the Year, probing into her unconscious to conjure up memories of her estranged father might seem too on the nose or a send-up. Don’t worry, it isn’t either. Instead, it’s a gallant portrayal of

The 38th annual Folk Alliance International conference, billed as the largest gathering of folk musicians and industry professionals in the world, was held at the stylish Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street in New Orleans on Wednesday, 21 January. It began with a program that honored both traditions and new artists. At the opening show, the

Whitney have always sounded like a band you put on when the light is just wrong and you’re trying to make sense of something you can’t quite say. Their music lives in the pause between sentences: guitars that breathe, horns that console, falsetto that finishes a thought you didn’t realize you were having. Small Talk,

“Swimming”, a 2022 single by the Dublin-based garage-rock/post-punk band SPRINTS, fuses a working-class fury at capitalism’s grind with a fierce joy in fighting back. Karla Chubb’s distinctive, full voice lays out the issue: “I’ve been working full-time since I was 17 / And I still got four coins in my pocket.” Surprisingly, her response to

A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking Neba Solo and Benego Diakité Etoile Audio / Nonesuch 13 February 2026 There’s a sincerely grounded quality to A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking. The new album from balafonist Neba Solo and donsongoni (hunter’s harp) player Benego Diakité–their first as a duo–shines a light on two Malian

Keep Moving Forward is certainly a fitting title for guitarist and composer Jan Esbra’s new EP. It’s a translation of a phrase Esbra’s father used throughout his childhood. In this context, it becomes “both mantra and mandate across the songs on the album,” according to the press notes, “reminding you to continue onward even when

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie Matt Johnson Neon February 2026 Your patience for Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie will depend on your appetite for the comedy of Matt Johnson, who in his films usually plays an overcaffeinated buffoon whose ideas run the gamut from nonsensical to borderline dangerous. It’s a bit

Silent films, as we’ve often observed here at PopMatters, are bigger than ever. We live in an age that celebrates their restorations in film festivals, on home video, through streaming services, and even works on the printed page. While the majority of viewers probably remain apprehensive at the thought of sitting through something old and

Managing expectations was never a problem for PUP. From the very beginning, their dream was to make enough money to keep touring. Now that Sum 41 have unofficially passed them, Canada’s ceremonial pop-punk torch, I’d say their dream is still very much alive and kicking. However, back in 2015, right before PUP blew up, the

This Can’t Be Today: A Trip Through the US Psychedelic Underground 1977-88 Various Artists Cherry Red 13 February 2026 Rolling Stone journalist and Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad was inspired to write his acclaimed chronicle of 1980s indie rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life, after watching a rock ‘n’ roll TV miniseries which, in its

Trumpet player and bandleader Dave Douglas used to record and perform for long stretches with bands like his Tiny Bell Trio and his quintet. Recently, he has been generating fresh bands and collaborating with new musicians at a quick pace, giving his distinctive, mysterious compositions many different voices and casts. His latest band, as represented

Let’s face it, there is no dearth of disturbing “love songs” out there. From stalker odes to rapey hits to even murder ballads, they’re strangely all over the place. Most of these, however, are intentionally scary. The Beatles’ “Run for Your Life” is one of John Lennon’s many introspections into his own jealousy (luckily, this