Pop Culture

Matmos have built their decades-long career by making electronic records using constraints and conceptual frameworks. They’ve recorded an album with only sounds made by objects in their apartment. They’ve recorded a record of the sounds of operating room procedures. They’ve recorded an LP by elaborately editing the music of late Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer. They’ve

Author John Patrick Higgins can’t catch a break. Unless you count the shattered bone that left him hospitalised for months in 2002. That had a lasting effect on the author of Teeth and, like Jeffrey Bernard before him, he is unwell. However, that doesn’t mean he can rest on his near-death bed. First, he had

One of the most radical acts of therapy in the 1990s didn’t happen on a therapist’s couch, but in a cartoon, broadcast on Saturday mornings between commercials for L.A. Gear light-up sneakers and the technicolor sugar-blast of Cap’n Crunch cereal for kids. The show was Life with Louie, and its creator, the late comedian Louie

What started as a result of the COVID lockdowns in 2020 has resulted in one of the more refreshing and welcome examples of ambient music in recent memory. Stretched out across the continental United States, Fuubutsushi was formed by Patrick Shiroishi (Los Angeles), Chris Jusell (Raleigh, North Carolina), Matthew Sage (Colorado’s Front Range), and Chaz

The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy James McMurtry New West 20 June 2025 The brilliant singer-songwriter James McMurtry opens his latest ten-track opus,The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy,with a hard-rocking cover of somebody else’s song: Jon Dee Graham‘s “Laredo (Small Dark Something)”. It’s a classy move. The two Austin musicians are regulars at

After breaking through with their sophomore LP Cartwheel, New York’s Hotline TNT return with Raspberry Moon. Hotline TNT has become part of the shoegaze renaissance that has swept indie rock over the past few years. While Raspberry Moon doubles down on that particular sense of nostalgia, the record transitions to a brighter palette of colors,

Film festivals are quintessentially the fixtures and fittings of a film critic’s life. Whether it’s Berlin, Sundance, Cannes, or the Fantasia Film Festival, among many others, they are what command our attention and govern our sense of time. Then there’s the impact of the human footprint that is slowly eroding the environment’s seasons. If changing

Chris DeVille, Managing Editor at Stereogum, presents his labor of love, Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion.Throughout Such Great Heights, DeVille illustrates how indie musicrose to prominence over the last quarter-century. The term “explosion” perfectly captures the impact, as the sheer number of indie fans and musicians remains impossible

Innocence is a topic often discussed by pop stars. Through the Disney pipeline, child-friendly personalities age with their fan bases and shed perceived naivete. In 2017’s reputation, Taylor Swift proclaimed, “Don’t blame me”, and, in 2025, Miley Cyrus‘ high-fashion endeavors feel like a cover-up for the messiness of the Bangerz era. On the other hand,

When Malcolm Cowley assembled the pieces to include in The Portable Faulkner in 1946 for Viking Press, he felt the burden of introducing to his readers a writer whose reputation with the public was questionable. Although William Faulkner had published 13 novels, at that time, only one was in print. So Cowley was cautious. In

What are the chances you’ve heard of Marie-Paule Belle? From approximately zero in much of the world, they increase if you’re a Francophone, a Francophile, French, Parisian, and/or a devotee of modern chanson. As her Wikipedia page notes, “Marie-Paule Belleest unechanteuseetpianistefrançaise, née le25 janvier 1946àPont-Sainte-Maxence(Oise). Elle est connue pour la chansonLa Parisienne, qu’elle a créée

About four years have passed since Anderson East’s last record. The smooth-voiced country singer has mellowed into a more soulful groove, complete with a horn section. The ten tracks on Worthy smolder and burn as he sings about his frailties and failures, and when the singing bursts into flames, the feelings seem earned. The passion

Jazz musician Amir ElSaffar could not ask for a better start to his new Maqām Records label than what he’s produced on Maqam Al-Iraq. A series of performances by Hamid Al-Saadi, reputed to be the last living master reciter of the poetic Iraqi maqām repertoire, is both a finely crafted album and a priceless historical

Forward The Swell Season Masterkey Sounds / Plateau Records 11 July 2025 The Swell Season’s second, and until now last album, Strict Joy, came out back in 2009. The subsequent tour marked the end of a whirlwind few years for the duo of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. The two first met in 2004 and

Elton John’s ninth studio album,Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, was a hotly anticipated item upon its release on 23 May 1975. So hot, in fact, that it was the first album ever to enterBillboardmagazine’s Top 200 Albums chart at #1 the week of its release.It was a commercial and critical peak for John

The best British films do not offer the easy bromides of Hollywood heroes. They reject redemptive arcs and moral uplift. Instead, they dwell in ambiguity, class friction, emotional repression, and the slow erosion of certainty. These films are not about heroic journeys, but the collapse of simple certainties into deeper, darker psychogeographies, from which a

On 13 June 2025, Israel carried out a string of precision assassinations inside Iran. Code-named Rising Lion, the attack used a blend of pre-planted explosives, fighter aircraft, and AI-enabled autonomous drones. The operation killed senior Revolutionary Guard commanders and civilian nuclear scientists in their private residences, triggering the 12-day Iran-Israel War. Despite geopolitical tensions already

In Canadian author Liann Zhang’s debut novel Julie Chan is Dead, Zhang takes us on a winding journey through the sordid underbelly of the influencer economy. Told from the perspective of Julie, a downtrodden grocery store cashier, Julie’s life is turned on its proverbial head after she receives a mysterious call from her estranged twin

In the 2020s, Hailey Bieber, spouse of the pop star Justin Bieber, began to outshine him as the more prominent public figure in their relationship. While Justin‘s 2019 album Changes received mixed critical reception, and, due to health concerns, the singer cancelled 2022’s Justice World Tour, Hailey’s beauty company, Rhode, was acquired by the conglomerate

In the cinematic world of Pete Travis’ dystopian cyberpunk film DREDD (2012), the Peach Trees megablock housing project is more than a setting — it’s a concrete colossus that functions simultaneously as a city-state, a tomb, a prison, and a vertical battlefield. The Peach Trees setting is not unique. Across film, games, comics, and real-world

On July 25th, Marvel Studios will release Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. On the eve of the new film’s release—the fourth attempt at a summer blockbuster—it seems an opportune moment to look back upon the original Fantastic Four comic books and explore how Marvel’s first family plays a vital role in offering contemporary

Imagine you’re an executive at Cinemax. Let’s say you suddenly find yourself in possession of a warehouse full of gory special effects equipment—fake severed limbs, the gear for numberless decapitation gags, and especially the mechanical and pneumatic systems that create arterial spurts. Palettes full of those. Also, there are crates full of katanas, swords, saws,

In their latest single, “Killing Fields”, released on 15th July 2025, hard rock band Shinedown burst back onto the emotional battlefield armed with sharpened convictions and a flame-throwing authenticity. The multi-platinum, chart-topping Florida quartet have fortified their motivational modus operandi, as showcased in this year’s earlier singles—”Three Six Five” and “Dance, Kid, Dance”—as well as

Cosmopolitanism, scholar Paul Gilroy tells us in his 2004 work After Empire, is a dangerous framework when applied from the top of the power structure downward. Too often, he writes, powerful agents who participate in such “have never paused over the actual history of past imperialism and the ongoing effects of colonial and imperial governance”

Personal is not the first adjective you’d reach for when describing techno, a genre made almost entirely out of sculpted electricity or shaped samples. Technically, it’spossibleto program slides, slurs, trills, or other affectations that give instrumentalists and vocalists a unique identity, but it’s time-consuming and a bit of a pain. Also, techno is primarily meant

Deadguy have a new record, an outcome as surprising as it is disorienting, 30 years after their first and only full-length release. In the time since, these pioneers of metalcore transformed into something like a cautionary tale, or maybe a cult object, depending mainly on how much you’re willing to sit with music that’s essentially

The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America David Baron Liveright August 2025 In a better universe – where HBO is never called Max, everyone can agree on which prestige show we should watch, and The Walking Dead has never happened – a late season of Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded

Elliott Smith’s self-titled second album, Elliott Smith, marks a significant turning point in his recording career. It’s not his first album, but it might as well be, as 1994’s Roman Candle was more of an attempt to get down a bunch of songs during a particularly prolific period for Smith. It’s raw, scrappy, full of

“I write when I feel overwhelmed in my life,” explains Miles Chandler, singer, songwriter, and guitarist with the Boston-based band Clifford. “I want to disobey the impulse to keep these things private.” True to this confession, which appears in the press materials for their latest album, Golden Caravan,Clifford are a quartet that produce lumbering, guitar-heavy

The World Is on Fire Isaiah Collier & the Chosen Few Division 81 18 October 2024 It’s a Friday night in the People’s Republic of Berkeley here on 20th June, and the man that Downbeat has hailed as “The Next Sax Giant” is back in the Bay Area for a Summer Solstice blowout at The