Pop Culture

It had the makings of just another year. Annual archetypes were hollowed out anew, trends awaited the spark of resuscitation, and disappointments and surprises alike were handicapped by the legions of obsessives. The year saw its share of bands that altered their attack and, as a result, alienated factions of their fan bases while attracting

Few albums embody rock’s essential contradictions as vividly as Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction from 1987. It is both high art and primal sleaze, anthemic yet nihilistic, precision-engineered yet volatile, an album of self-annihilation that became a commercial monolith to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982). Released into a late-’80s rock landscape bloated with posturing

Grey DeLisle’s new double album is chock-full of empathetic songs that are equal parts silly and sincere. DeLisle has a unique voice that makes her singing seem girlish even when she’s serious. There’s something comic and odd about the effect. This ambiguity makes the lyrics’ emotional concerns seem deeper and heavier. If one can’t laugh

That’s the Price of Loving Me Dean Wareham Carpark 28 March 2025 The last time Dean Wareham and Kramer were together in the studio was almost 35 years ago, when they recorded Galaxie 500′s swan song, This Is Our Music. On Wareham’s newest solo effort, That’s the Price of Loving Me, the two reunite, picking

First premise: Playing in a band with Craig Finn must be hard. His songs are elaborate stories that demand a listener’s attention, but his melodies are often static, sometimes drifting toward speaking (or yelling). Instrumentation must be interesting enough to shape the melody, but not wholly upstage the narrative. His main band, the Hold Steady,

First premise: Playing in a band with Craig Finn must be hard. His songs are elaborate stories that demand a listener’s attention, but his melodies are often static, sometimes drifting toward speaking (or yelling). Instrumentation must be interesting enough to shape the melody, but not wholly upstage the narrative. His main band, the Hold Steady,

Music burns as the guiding light through the nights of doubt and sorrow. Faithful to the last flicker, Jeffrey Martin, a true emissary of heartrending songs, may be found standing clear before us through the darkness. Indeed, for the past ten years, Martin, a former school teacher, has mixed penetrating truth with compelling heartbreak, using

New Directors/New Films is one of the most venerable events in America’s film scene. Founded in 1972, the annual showcase at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is a one-stop shop for fresh voices that have been making the rounds of the world’s film festivals. The 54th incarnation runs from 2 to 13 April 2025

Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams Patterson Hood ATO 21 February 2025 Patterson Hood’s passion for film has fed the numerous themed records he has released with Drive-By Truckers, from their calling card Southern Rock Opera to the myth-busting, incendiary The Dirty South. Hood’s latest solo album is a quietly powerful, frequently unnerving series of snapshots

The Standard School Broadcast John Lee Hooker BMG 28 February 2025 It’s rare these days for previously unreleased recordings by a classic blues artist to emerge – especially material of the quality to be found on The Standard School Broadcast Recordings by John Lee Hooker. Largely unheard since 1973, the eight long tracks on the

WITNESS Kronos Quartet and Mary Kouyoumdjian Phenotypic Recordings 14 March 2025 As a first-generation Armenian-American whose family was directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, composer, documentarian, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Kouyoumdjian is eminently qualified to use her skills to create an artistic portrait of the horrors of violent conflict. Likewise,

It is 1845, and a man in Paris has promised to make someone’s wedding ring appear inside an orange. He borrows a ring from his audience, which promptly vanishes inside a handkerchief. A small tree on a table is wheeled onto the stage, and the astonished audience watches as, in less than a minute, the

The question of how to get away with murder has driven many crime dramas, but none more powerfully than Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, which hews closer to character study than thriller. Netflix’s 2024 limited series Ripley reimagines the young, inexperienced criminal of Minghella’s film as a seasoned professional akin to the

Wolfgang Flür was, famously, a member of Kraftwerk during their triumphant synthpop reign that began with Autobahn in 1973. Flür left the band in 1987, disenchanted with Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s preference for cycling over creating music. Flür himself, though, went back to his pre-Kraftwerk vocation of designing furniture. He didn’t release any new

The Darkness are known for imbuing glam metal with homespun English kitsch, fuelled by Justin Hawkins’ piercing, polished falsettos and buzz-saw guitar riffs. A riff-driven band, the Darkness benefit from Rufus Tiger Taylor’s tom-tom heavy drums, and Frankie Poullain’s rubbery basslines. Their musical acumen was never in doubt, but their determination to write novelty songs,

Last year was prolific for pop music, and 2025 is shaping up to be similar, as artists chime in with their different perspectives on the current over-documented, hyper-individualized era.Streaming diversified pop music by making listening a solitary activity. No longer did the genre that strives for a large listener base need to cater to being

The world lost a good one when it was last call for Shane McGowan. The frontperson of the Pogues left this life in 2023, leaving behind a singularly enjoyable and inspiring legacy captured in part on this mighty sampling of their work. To their fans, the Pogues delivered a vision of a rough, sometimes cruel

Once a cultural icon, Kanye West’s Yeezy brand has suffered a dramatic fall from grace. Now, one of the internet’s most passionate fan communities is shutting down in protest. The Yeezys subreddit is going read-only from this point forward. Why? They say that the Yeezy name is tarnished. They referenced the fact that Yeezy released

“I am a bit old-fashioned,” says Chas (James Fox). He’s a vicious enforcer for a London gangster who, after killing a man, pretends to be a juggler named Johnny Dean and inveigles his way into the huge bohemian Notting Hill mansion of Turner (Mick Jagger), a retired rock star. Chas describes the milieu to a

Today! Mississippi John Hurt Craft Recordings / Bluesville 28 February 2025 Mississippi John Hurt first recorded in 1928 for the blossoming Okeh label, but his music didn’t catch on like his contemporaries. Maybe his voice didn’t have the same grittiness that early blues listeners craved. Hurt seemed content working on the farm and providing for

In Japanese literary sensation Sayaka Murata’s novelVanishing World, sex between married couples (both for pleasure and for procreation) has all but vanished. In response to a largely absent male population throughout the Second World War, extensive research and development of artificial insemination practices subsumed Japan’s medical and scientific community, inevitably supplanting natural conception within families

For Los Angeles-based composer, producer, and guitarist Dustin Wong, guitar loops seem to occupy the center of his creative flow. That’s certainly the case with his earlier albums on Thrill Jockey, like Infinite Love (2010) and Mediation of Ecstatic Energy (2013), as his highly skillful and disciplined playing is given a mechanical, synthetic propulsion while

Arcadia Alison Krauss and Union Station Down the Road 28 March 2025 Alison Krauss hasn’t recorded with Union Station in 14 years—since Barack Obama’s first term, as Rolling Stone’s David Browne noted in his article announcing the act’s latest album, Arcadia. During this time, a lot has changed, including the departure of key Union Station

In 2005, it would have been impossible for Will Sheff to believe that Black Sheep Boy would be Okkervil River’s high-water mark. He was on such a creative streak that Black Sheep Boy Appendix, released the following year, actually included a few songs (“No Key, No Plan”, “Another Radio Song”) that rivaled anything on the

Everything Changes Everything Stays the Same The Loft Tapete 14 March 2025 Maybe it was the intense competition of the times or the vagaries of youth, but a fair number of British indie bands in the 1980s released a single or two, garnered acclaim from the music press, and then split up before even releasing

Jingle Jangle Morning (The 1960s U.S. Folk Rock Explosion) Various Artists Cherry Red 21 March 2025 Most songs on the three-CD anthology of American folk rock from the 1960s (Jingle Jangle Morning) are not surprising selections. As its title suggests, the collection includes the Byrds‘ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and other well-known hits by Simon and

For the video to accompany the track “9°C”, from Loraine James’ second release under the Whatever the Weather moniker, the artist focuses on Japan, featuring grainy shots of Tokyo’s infamous Shibuya crossing, apartment buildings, scenes of a plane taking off from a sun glare-filled window seat with a shot showing the enormity of Tokyo from

Yoko Ono was one of the 20th Century’s most polarizing figures— an edge-cutting conceptual artist maligned for capturing the heart of the Beatles’ John Lennon and daring to establish a musical union with him.With the publication of veteran author David Sheff’s new biography, Yoko, we are fully enlightened about her extraordinary life journey, all 92

If you find yourself wondering at any point during Alex Scharfman’s Grand-Guignol fantasy satire Death of a Unicorn, “Wait, how come there are unicorns in the Canadian Rockies which nobody has seen before?” then this is not the film for you. However, if some part of you is thinking, “I hope those vile ultra-wealthy despoilers

Refrains of the Day, Vol. 2 Pidgins Lexical Records 4 April 2025 In 2023, the Mexico City-based duo Pidgins released Refrains of the Day, Vol. 1, with a mission to “transform the oral and rhythmic methods of traditional trance rituals by phasing metric, melodic, and rhetorical phrases”.Furthermore, by using the clichés of corporate jargon as