Pop Culture

Songs From Behind a Mountain Nathan O’Flynn-Pruitt Figure & Ground 6 June 2025 A dozen years ago, Nathan O’Flynn-Pruitt was touring with Chicago street music legend Little Howlin’ Wolf. He began to lose confidence in the guitar feedback projects he was working on, so he pulled up stakes and moved to rural Humboldt County, California.

In Only Smoke, the new novel by award-winning Spanish writer Juan José Millás, the line between the everyday reality in which readers of a story live and the dimension in which the characters in that story ‘exist’ becomes fundamentally blurred. The line is even more hazy when a fictional character is reading a story, distinguishing

“Light-spirited hard rock” isn’t what you expect from a band ornery enough to call themselves Shitbaby Mammals. Yet it’s hard to describe the crudely named Swedish band’s latest, Godspeed, any other way. The album springs up, humbly and suddenly, from a heretofore unknown confluence of militant goofiness and earnest impressionistic nonsense—scrappy songs about British crime

While El-P found mainstream success with Run the Jewels, and many other greats of the 2000s indie hip-hop boom have hung up their hats, Aesop Rock steadily delivers another stellar release every few years. He is back with Black Hole Superette, and in many ways, it is business as usual–his inimitable voice, his dizzying, dense

If you’re more than a casual fan of the comedies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, you might know Bobby Burns as a supporting player in their films. There was a time, however, before Laurel and Hardy’s stardom, when Burns was the star and Hardy supported him. Resurrected from the mists of time and nitrate

In a 2025 interview with GQ, Alana Haim, the youngest member of the sister indie-rock trio Haim, addressed the tendency of critics to assign a genre to the band. “Pop isn’t a bad word,” she said, displaying ambivalence. “But rock isn’t a bad word either.” Since their 2013 debut, Days Are Gone, the sisters have

One Way Homeintimately understands a primal fear. Jimmy Taylor, waking up after a bus crash to find his hometown transformed, taps directly into a specific subset of childhood horror: the purgatorial space where trauma suspends children between life and death, reality and nightmare. This liminal horror has deep roots across media, yet its evolution reveals

Before Rob Halford of Judas Priest came out publicly in 1998, he was already channeling his identity into the band’s lyrics and imagery. The heavy metal community—often fixated on aggression, masculinity, and spectacle—rarely noticed the deep subtext woven throughout his work. From coded BDSM references to vivid homoerotic imagery, Halford’s lyrics form a complex, emotionally

The Universe Will Take Care of You Holden & Zimpel Border Community 13 June 2025 There’s always been something a little disappointing about the standardization of electronic music. For the first 40 or 50 years of its existence, it seemed like anything could happen, that not even the ends of a composer’s imagination were the

I was still trying to get my head around Turnstile’s new album when I happened upon a cover story on the band. Quinn Batley’s photo captures the members from a low angle, the sun glowing behind them, either setting or rising. Lightly psychedelic, it could be a classic LP cover from Columbia or Fantasy in

Despite their love of jokes, puns, and non-sequiturs, the legacy of the B-52’s is best stated bluntly: they are arguably the most consequential queer band to have ever existed. While most people know them as a party-pop group famous for jokey and meme-able anthems like “Rock Lobster” and “Love Shack”, the legacy and power of

Much has been written about the Beatles’ August 1965 visit with Elvis Presley in Los Angeles. What has not been extensively explored is the meeting between the Beatles and Detroit’s hit makers, the Supremes, only nine days before the Beatles met Elvis. Even though half of the group’s members have been dead for decades and

Florence Adooni – A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise in Unity) (Philophon) A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise In Unity) by Florence Adooni At the end of the title track of her debut albumA.O.E.I.U., an ecstatic Florence Adooni rhapsodizes about music. It is many things, she says: the art of time, a metaphor for life, capable of generating cosmic

Tom Wilson was a young, black Harvard graduate who founded a tiny jazz label that issued the visionary debut recordings of Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Donald Byrd, and crucial early works by John Coltrane. He would ultimately move to the Big Apple, join Columbia Records, and produce the milestone early classics of Bob Dylan (“Like

One characteristic of a compelling work of art is its enduring, cross-generational relevance. Call it the “evergreen effect”: regardless of the epoch, strong art maintains a grasp on the core components within each zeitgeist. In John Carpenter’s action-packed sci-fi satire, They Live (1988), these components include consumerism, authoritarianism, and conformity, which are bolstered by a

On 6 July 2017, Kesha released “Praying”, and almost everyone who heard it wept. Having established herself as the trashy party-rock pop diva of the 2010s (quite literally: her first single “TikTok” topped the US Billboard charts the first week of January 2010), Kesha‘s extremely public statements and lawsuits regarding her alleged treatment by producer

OK, the heatwaves are on, and some heavy, otherworldly music is always a good way to try and escape them! For this month, there is a black metal depth worth exploring. From Stygian Ruin’s atmospheric waves, Anfauglir’s epic symphonies, to Vauruvã’s and Hexvessel’s folk obsessions and Necromantic Worship’s romantic traditionalism. On the death metal edge,

Even if all is full of love, as Björk decreed on her 1997 song, it can still be notoriously hard to pin down. In her clear-eyed and sophisticated second book, Love In Exile, the British journalist Shon Faye mines from her own life and the past to interrogate why we’re denied, or we deny, love.

Comprising four highly regarded and innately skilled jazz and improvisational musicians, Tropos are a unique and experimental supergroup. Comprised of Ledah Finck on violin, Yuma Uesaka on clarinet and bass clarinet, Phillip Golub on piano, and Aaron Edgcomb on drums and percussion, this foursome has accomplished a great deal in other iterations. However, as Tropos,

When a young influencer launched an OnlyFans account that indulged in pornification just hours after turning 18, she broke the platform’s revenue record, earning $1 million in a single day. The story about this account sparked brief outrage, then quickly became old news, another data point in a culture that seems numb to provocation. It’s

It’s a sunny afternoon in Sonoma County on Saturday, 7 June, and kind vibes abound at the SOMO Village Event Center on the outskirts of Rohnert Park, 40 miles north of San Francisco. The solar-powered venue is hosting Sonoma Wild, a single-day music festival and community gathering featuring Rising Appalachia as headliners. Led by sisters

Bonnie Blue: James Cotton’s Life in the Blues Bestor Cram Freestyle Digital Media 14 February 2025 A crucial component of examining any given genre is understanding its musical vocabulary: how artists utilize motifs, themes, or instruments to convey the message of a given piece, and how that fits in with a greater community of like-minded

It feels reductive to dismiss Blonde Redhead as simply a shoegaze band. Over their 30-year existence, they’ve worked in Sonic Youth-indebted noise rock, psychedelic pop, French chanson, and dream pop, as well as dreamy, cinematic shoegaze. While shoegaze is often excellent for conveying a sense of romantic detachment or a psychedelic “continual derangement of the

Has there ever been a band that has successfully straddled between the mundane and the exotic with such British panache as Pulp? In the 1990s, they had a songbook of coming-of-age stories with memorable, ribald scenes: the narrator of “Babies” hiding inside a wardrobe to eavesdrop on a friend’s sister having sex. However, these were

Alien Strapping Young Lad Hevy Devy | Century Media 22 March 2005 Devin Townsend and David Cronenberg delve deeply into the complex and often unsettling relationship between body, identity, and transformation. Through their respective arts—Townsend’s dense, aggressive music and Cronenberg’s visceral, psychological cinema—they explore the fraught boundaries of human experience. The phrase “Long live the

Punk music generally prioritizes authenticity over technical proficiency and polished execution. The genre was created by young people disillusioned with the self-congratulatory flower power of the 1960s and bored with the rock excess of the early 1970s. A key element of punk is an openness to raw performance that inherently includes what fans might call

Music for 17 Musicians Jameszoo / Asko|Schönberg Brainfeeder 30 May 2025 In 2019, Dutch composer, producer, and musician Jameszoo (born Mitchel van Dinther) delved deeper into the music of his bright, weird electronic debut album, Fool, by collaborating with Jules Buckley and Metropole Orkest to create an organic and electronic reinvention. That result, Melkweg, was

Looking like the Strokes in their Is This It-era heyday, the young Chicago trio Lifeguard are ready-made for critical adoration and indie record shop “best-of” lists. Every so often, a band like this emerges: one that isn’t really experimental or new at all, but manages to flaunt their impeccable influences in a way that is

Sunwise, the new album by Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, begins with a drone. It features almost six minutes of that drone, a risky and utterly transfixing move that clears the way for Chaimbeul to march forth and pipe with wild abandon. What emerges is astounding work, Chaimbeul’s approach to the bagpipes as deeply rooted