Pop Culture

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

Black Country New Road immediately won over the hearts of many a music critic with For the First Time, an angular album from a band that dazzled us with their unexpected fluency in both the language of jagged post-punk and the idiosyncratic, colorful chatter of free jazz. If their debut didn’t nab you, well, 2022’s

Sam Wilkes is not on TikTok, and that’s OK. Shortly before speaking to the Los Angeles-based bassist and avant-jazz figurehead, I did a quick search on the video-sharing app to see what people were posting about him, and outside of his records coming up on lists of recommendations for chilled-out records, one guy was out

The way songwriter, singer, and cellist Ollella describes the flux of daily events on her latest album, Antifragile, humanizes the randomness of the events that shape the world. The record’s title comes from writer and teacher Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s influential 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, which continues the Lebanese-born thinker’s theories on

Congolese band Kin’gongolo Kiniata’s name is a Lingala-language reference to the sounds of metal oil barrels being moved down the streets during the power cuts that marked 2000s Kinshasa. The group translates it as “the crushing sound”. In some ways, it’s apt; their dense grooves and bold sounds make for a hefty blend. All the

Eric Puchner’s new novel, Dream State, follows a group of friends, Charlie, Garrett, and Charlie’s fiancée Cece, from their college days to the end of their long lives. The story opens with Cece staying in Charlie’s parents’ home in Montana to make wedding preparations while Charlie remains with his medical practice in California. On a

It’s not all that surprising that Salif Keita’s 2018 farewell album Un Autre Blanc was not the end of his recording career. After all, as Keita himself has explained over the years, music is his life, a path for which he gave up his standing in Mandinka royalty, a mode of expression through which he

In 2010, Sleigh Bells’ debut album Treats sliced clean through the neck of several tired and corny indie trends like a cartoon katana set ablaze, then wrote its sole demand in its victims’ blood: LOUDER. The LP remains singular 15 years after the fact, stuffed to the brim with crunchy, destroyed beats blown into the

In Paul Thomas Anderson‘s melodramatic masterpiece Magnolia, more than one character utters the phrase, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” This could be the thesis of the Ophelias’ latest and best record, Spring Grove. The press release proclaims that this collection contains “zero songs about break-ups”, somewhat

Seafaring tales of gruesome revenge and underwater redemption mark a double feature of silent melodramas on Blu-ray from Flicker Alley. Behind the Door / Below the Surface combines two silent films directed by the forgotten Irvin V. Willat and starring Hobart Bosworth, an actor-producer of tremendous importance in the development of the Hollywood industry. Although

New York writer Rosie Schaap moved to the small County Antrim coastal town of Glenarm in 2019. Her 2024 memoir of this relocation, The Slow Road North, is peppered with blunt observations about the natives of Northern Ireland. The women in this seaside town – and others like it across the province – get their

“It’s a rainy day in Los Angeles,” Dean Wareham says, looking away at the start of our interview. “People get very excited when it rains here. Or afraid. They’re like, ‘Oh, be careful. Be careful out there driving.’” This brief exchange captures the spirit of Wareham: observational, reflective, wry, sincere, and with a sensibility attuned

Karen Shakhnazarov’s In the Moscow Slums (2013), a peculiar and topsy-turvy murder mystery from Russia, is based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1890 novelThe Sign of Four but interprets its source material from an entirely separate universe. It’s a loose adaptation, as it also interpolates the works of writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky. This doesn’t exactly hijack Doyle’s

Canadian vocalist Cold Specks is returning to the spotlight after a seven-year hiatus, and Light for the Midnight showcases an artist thirsty for the spotlight. Compared to I Predict a Graceful Expulsion and Neuroplasticity, Cold Specks‘ newest release is mournful, suggesting that the climate has utterly changed the artist in the intervening years. “I have