Pop Culture

Certain moments feel made for taking stock. A 25th-anniversary. A tenth album. Metric hit both of those marks recently, having passed the quarter-century mark as a band not long before recording their latest album, Romanticize the Dive. Maybe the numbers played a part in looking back. Either way, the Emily Haines-fronted quartet moved in the

Across two centuries of literature and film, the vampire has proven less a monster we flee than one we cannot resist. Unlike most monsters, the vampire in its many forms, not least the Romanian Nosferatu, evinces a capacity to attract us, to draw us in. Surveying the history of the vampire is all the evidence

The story of Lip Critic’s second album, Theft World, is a strange one indeed. While their widely acclaimed debut, Hex Dealer, turned heads for its manic, danceable rhythms, their new album is driven by a bizarre, real-life conceptual crisis. During a previous tour, an obsessed fan stole Kaser’s identity to purchase the band’s entire discography,

The acoustic and electric tremolo-treated guitars that usher in “…Another World”, the opening track on Pat Kelly’s new album, Hook, are almost like a balm, a soothing ointment to the rough state of the world. Kelly complements them with his distinctive baritone voice: “Give us another try / Another world where we can waste our

It’s a late winter Saturday night here in San Francisco’s Mission district on 28 February, yet it’s starting to feel like springtime thanks to the week’s pleasantly warmer weather. The mood of the US is uneasy, though, due to the government having just launched a war on Iran. Thus, it feels particularly timely to have

After three years away, electronic duo Pick a Piper (Caribou drummer Brad Weber and vocalist Sophia Alexandra) return with a new album, Dandelion. It takes the listener on a bold, kaleidoscopic sonic journey whilst also acting as a manual for emotional survival. Finding emotional depth in the exquisite soundscapes, the record focuses on the fortitude

Vigdis Hjorth’s translated novels are a universe unto themselves. They present a networked constellation of recurring themes, archetypes, and interpersonal dynamics that are swapped, slightly inverted, and subtly recontextualized in service to a central character’s moral transformation. The consistency of Hjorth’s authorial voice holds everything together, putting each work in conversation with one another and

Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally Harry Styles Erskine / Columbia 6 March 2026 “Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed,” sings Harry Styles on his highly anticipated fourth studio album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. “But it’s nothing to do with me.” The track in question, the eloquently titled “Paint By

Scrawled on the plaza stone, in both the front and back of the ornate Corinthian portico of Mariupol’s Drama Theatre, the word “дети” — “children” in Russian — was unmistakable.Days later, only one was still legible under the rubble where the building once stood. The theater, a cultural cornerstone for more than six decades, was

There’s something delightfully uncomplicated about the music of Unwed Sailor. Founding member and bassist Johnathon Ford (Pedro the Lion, Roadside Monument) infuses the instrumental tracks with his distinct, melodic bass lines while drummer Matt Putman and guitarist David Swatzell fill in the blanks with a sound that embraces the basic framework of so many different

Cocanha transmit an energy more befitting a choir than two singers. Such is their energy that vocalists Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse dot Flame Folclòre with a multitude of harmonic jumps and counter-melodies, mostly through articulated energy alone. “Diurê Tremblar” is one hugely impressive collage, an audio sample making way for bustles of chorale singing.

Once upon a time, in the comparatively simpler dark ages of the 1970s, a group of musicians from Akron, Ohio, emerged,presenting a provocative ethos about the “devolution” of humanity. They forged a playfully intense musical persona, fusing bouncy synthpop grooves with a ragged-yet-rigid punk rock sound. They are called Devo, and perhaps the most compelling

Kevin Morby’sLittle Wide Openserves asthe final instalment of what was conceived as a trilogy, withSundowner(2020) andThis Is a Photograph(2022) documentingspecific aspectsof his return to Kansas City.The record is penned as a love letter to the Midwest, but it also celebrates the great expanse of middle America in subtler ways. Morby‘s eighth studio album comes across

The 1990s were great because they were an entire decade with absolutely no rules. Everything from the music to the films to the fashion was so objectively arbitrary that in retrospect they seem completely absurd. This was a time when music videos still mattered, unflattering clothing was in style, Ben Stiller was given his own

Taking the mickey out of pop culture and music specifically is nothing new for Laibach. The Slovenian group, sometimes called an “art-pop” outfit, have been at it for 40-plus years. During that time, they’ve had their go at everything from Queen to the Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar to The Sound of Music, “White Christmas” to

Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom Kim Nguyen National Film Board of Canada 29 April 2026 | Hot Docs Documentaries sometimes do something simple and useful: they make a well-known historical image feel unfamiliar again. Kim Nguyen’s Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom begins with Eddie Adams’ Execution, Saigon, South Vietnam,

For most indie fans, Broken Social Scene are considered indispensablethanks toYou ForgotItin People(2002) and Broken Social Scene (2005), which is good news for the mostly overlooked producer David Newfield, who helmed both efforts. The Toronto collective did take quite a step up from their debut album, even if their initial outing was among the first

Beauty is best served with rage. Artemisia Gentileschi, Clarice Lispector, and Anne Sexton all apotheosized through the sublimation of rage. Why? Their works refuse to be timid reactions against patriarchal society; they violently threw themselves against oppression. Therefore, it endowed their creations with the risk of self-annihilation. You’re unwilling or unable to look away as

Paul Newman had nearly every attribute a leading man can hope for—good looks, an appealing baritone, the kind of confidence that puts others at ease rather than setting them on edge. His greatest talent as an actor was his ability to make audiences believe that a person with all these winning traits could still be

Oregon has a rich history of excluding Black people. During westward expansion, while whites were incentivized to “settle” the inchoate Oregon through the “Donation Land Claim Act,” Black people were prohibited from entering the territory. In 1859, Oregon became the 33rd state in the Union, and the only one admitted with an “exclusion clause”. Oregonians

As raw as it is melodic and as smart as it is funny, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest marked Young Fresh Fellows as early, unknowing architects of what we now call alternative rock. Loaded with wiry hooks, relentless energy, and sharp instincts, the 1984 debut set an electrifying standard for a sound still

The 40th SXSW Conference & Festivals is over. The fest is not the same as it used to be, but then again, neither is the rest of the world. We now live in a digital universe with search engines, streaming services, and smartphones. Those were unknown in the analogue era. Experiencing music has radically changed.

The debut album of New German Cinema, the solo moniker of Fear of Men‘s Jessica Weiss, is mainly preoccupied with one idea: the Self. In the opener “Sub Rosa”, Weiss makes a statement that acts as the axis upon which the record spins: “Looking to lose my sense of self to build something new.” Over

Upon finishing William J. Mann’s newest true crime book, Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, Agnès Varda’s 1985 psychological drama, Vagabond, comes to mind. The film stars Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona Bergeron, a young woman who lives on the streets of France and ultimately freezes to death in a ditch on a

PJ Harvey? No. Georgia Knight? Who? You’ll soon find out. The Australian singer-songwriter Georgia Knight’s debut record, Beanpole, is a dark, introspective meditation on desire—the Lacanian kind: desire rooted in the Other. Always is, isn’t? In some sense, we’re actors waiting to be seen and chosen, as if by a film director (where are you,

When quintet Imarhan emerged onto the world stage with their first City Slang release ten years ago, they stood out for their keen melodic sensibilities within the international tishoumaren scene. Hailing from the southern Algerian oasis city of Tamanrasset, they offer a distinct iteration of what has been referred to asdesert blues, in which they

Morrissey’s latest album,Make-Up Is a Lie,invites us to view the singer’s remarkable life through a new lens. Its storyline follows a lonely boy from a Manchester bedroom, the inspirations that shaped him, the miracles forged in an extraordinary musical partnership, of the masks he’s worn — and their cost. In an attempt to get as

Conceived as an almost literal blast in the face of cinema,Daddyis one of the highlights of the Museum of Modern Art’s January festival of film restorations, To Save and Project. Created by Niki de Saint Phalle and Peter Whitehead,Daddyis often referred to online as a “surreal horror film”, although that’s as misleading as any other