Tunde Adebimpe is best known for his work with TV on the Radio, a band he co-founded and serves as co-vocalist and principal songwriter. TV on the Radio are distinguishable from their indie rock peers, not just because the members are mostly Black, but due to the creative energy they bring to the process. Even
Pop Culture
If you’ve visited a bookstore recently, chances are you’ll have seen displays filled with healing fiction titles such as Michiko Aoyama’s What You Are Looking For Is in the Library (2023, US) and Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop (2022, US). These are slim volumes with eye-catching covers that evoke the colourful symmetry of
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a political tract from 1852, Karl Marxproposed that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Lately, the same could seemingly be said about the films of John Hughes, perhaps especially Pretty in Pink. Forty or so years after the
In the complex world of 1940s and 1950s film noir, good people can turn out to be bad, bad people can turn out to be good, and things aren’t always as straightforward as they seem. That ambiguity often ensnared the female characters of film noir in another web of complexity. Sometimes these women were innocent
The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis Jeffrey Lewis Don Giovanni / Blang 21 March 2025 Jeffrey Lewis records arrive at an alarming rate. Since the late 1990s, it feels like never more than a few months have passed without a new release coming out. Given his penchant for words, Lewis has undertaken an overwhelming writing
To understand Thank You Kirin Kiri, the ambitious and stunning debut album from jazz and ambient multi-instrumentalist Rindert Lammers, it’s essential to get the proper context. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film Shoplifters, Japanese actress Kirin Kiki plays the grandmother of a family who have all fled or lost their own families. In one of her
Rarely is “beautiful” the most accurate or informative descriptor for anything, especially music. Even so, something is striking about In Between, the latest work from singer and composer Elana Sasson, that is hard to describe any other way. Sound, sentiment, and intent all work in exquisite aesthetic and affective concert here, the layering of these
Album of the Year #1 Funkateer Bootsy Collins Bootzilla / Roc Nation 11 April 2025 The word “legend” gets overused, but make no mistake, BootsyCollins is a legend. He cut his teeth playing bass for James Brown as a teenager. You know the bass riff on “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine”?
Nora Schjelderup is one of Norway’s leading DJs, and is also the creative force behind Ora the Molecule, who have just releasedDance Therapy, which might be the most accessible avant-garde disco pop concept album you’ll hear this year. Ora the Molecule has existed since around 2015, releasing a series of singles that were compiled onHuman
The way the press materials talk about I Heard That Noise, one would expect an album consisting entirely of folk music rudely interrupted by screeching distortion and other harsh sounds. While Quickly Quickly absolutely traffics in the noisier end of music, bandleader Graham Jonson is more interested in melodies and catchy songs. To that end,
Aging and becoming old are inevitable; cynicism about “the youth of today” is not. When it comes to music, negativity becomes a way of bonding with others of one’s generation who either gave up active listening decades ago or who need to explain why the latest mutations don’t capture the alchemical magic they possessed in
In its first season, Daredevil: Born Again (major spoilers included) reunites some characters and introduces others to the lawyer-by-day and vigilante-by-night Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox). Taking place about seven years after the events of Season 3 of the Netflix series Daredevil, the season follows Matt as he tries to adjust to a new status quo.
A Reason to Feel Cheerful You’d need to have a tough heart not to appreciate doo-wop. If you have such a calcified ticker, no argument can convince you to hear the late 1950s doo-wop group the Cadets. Still, these talented, versatile singers deserve your attention, their small body of work being a reason to feel
In the aftermath of Gatsby’s death in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, an eerie silence soon envelopes West Egg as the world collectively turns away from the tragedy. The enormous mansion, once alive with music, laughter, and the endless murmur of guests, stands as a hollow monument to a life snuffed
At nearly an hour runtime, Beirut’s A Study of Losses is Zach Condon‘s most extended release to date. Condon was approached by Viktoria Dalborg, director of the Swedish circus Kompani Giraff, and asked if he would create music for their next project, based on the novel (translated as) An Inventory of Losses by the German
Sunday morning in Sacramento, an eclectic crowd chills at Forgotten Bakery while Levitation Room vibes on the speakers. Locals sit with their dogs, eat empanadas, and sip iced coffee. The atmosphere is hip, relaxed, and far from the Sacramento portrayed in Michael Angarano’s film, Sacramento, which debuted this April at our beautiful Tower Theater. In
Modular synthesist and composer JakoJako’s new album Tết 41 begins looking outward. Opening track “Xin chào” (Vietnamese for “hello”) is a compilation of field recordings that convey a gently jubilant feeling: an ensemble of lively percussion plays in the distance, bamboo flute and zither sway to a much slower rhythm somewhere to the right, and
Viagra Boys crack open their new self-titled album with a howl and a stomp, hurling us right back into the gaping maw of their signature cartoon hellscape—a world as grotesque as it is musically precise, as absurd as it is emotionally intelligent. “Man Made of Meat” sets the tone: part Hieronymus Bosch, part Ren &
Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues Nancy Harrow Candid 18 April 2025 Jazz critic and historian Nat Hentoff served as head of A&R for the short-lived, but legendary Candid Records during the early 1960s. The story goes that one day he heard singer Nancy Harrow perform, signed her up, and produced her first album, Wild
Vinyl has made a comeback, but the mores of record collecting have evolved. For example, it wasn’t long ago that DJs, committed to safeguarding the precious sonic treasures discovered through hours of crate-digging, defaced the center labels on their own records. Masking tape, pen scribbles, and even bleach were used to prevent other tastemakers from
Brown Horse are a fable.Their name evokes Cormac McCarthy, Sam Shepard, the American Frontier, and Marty Robbins; the American past weaves into their identity and sound, playing and lyrics—everywhere. On their 2024 debut album,Reservoir, there is a song titled after the country music lyricist Paul Gilley, as well as a namecheck of Jimmie Rodgers in
An alternately somber and charming title in the canon of Italian cinema, Girl With a Suitcase is a feature with the elemental afterglow of the film noir and Neorealismo styles and movements that had passed on by a few years by the time Valerio Zurlini’s film appeared in 1961. This drama, at times, pitches wildly
Rebecca Taylor, aka Self Esteem, has two aspects to her persona, as presented via her second album, Prioritise Pleasure: The indefatigable activist and the unapologetic hedonist. Regarding the former, Taylor adopts the feminist mantle with ease. She extolls the strength, resilience, and resourcefulness of women while advocating for their rights, festively and militantly. Regarding the
Despite the blistering heat on a Saturday night in December 2024, in the city of Belém, a buzzing crowd packed the grounds in front of the Güera Stage, one of the main attractions at Psica Festival — one of the most important music events in Brazil’s Amazonian region. Staff members warn fans to keep their
Flint, Michigan-based Cult Therapy recently released one of the most provocative and essential records of the year. Get Fucked, Sinner is a harrowing and cathartic account of lead singer and lyricist Jason Duncan’s time spent in an abusive religious cult. It has cost him a lot, including his father and a close friend, who were
Producer, performer, and composer Satomimagae’s new album Taba is a work of emergence. On it, she steps out of the introverted depths of pandemic isolation, moving more directly through the gauzy layers of sound she builds. The chrysalis is left behind, the wilder world open before her. It’s a journey gently taken. Taba never moves
If You Asked For a Picture Blondshell Partisan 2 May 2025 Blondshell’s If You Asked For a Picture is one of the most overtly polemical and confessional albums since Hole‘s Celebrity Skin. A cascade of riffs is interspersed with lyrical portraits of characters experiencing distress fueled by societal expectations and an unhealthy dependency on alcohol.
Some might think we have had enough documentaries about New York City in the mid-to-late 1970s. These people can be described as misinformed, misled, or simply missing the point. There is a good reason filmmakers continue to produce documentaries about this period, and will likely do so as long as the form exists, as they
Accelerator, the first album from New Orleans-based duo the Convenience – multi-instrumentalists Nick Corson and Duncan Troast – was released in 2021 and was a joyous celebration of drum machines, synths, and sugary hooks. While their commitment to this particular style seemed to deeply define the band, their press materials indicate otherwise, describing the record
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson quipped. The Golden Dregs’ fourth album, Godspeed, is a paean to London, specifically to the people who make up the city, whose existence is its pulse, and whose stories, whether good or bad, reflect the city. In