Pop Culture

We live in a time when our online memories outlive us. Pantheon, a beautiful animated series, takes that reality to its logical conclusion: what if we could upload not only our photos and texts, but our very minds? Blending family drama with speculative philosophy, it turns digital immortality into a story about love, loss, and

The Brutalist opens with Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) stepping out of a crowded room and into the sunlight. He catches a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, but it’s upside down – an image that foreshadows the events to come and sets the tone for Brady Corbet’s inversion of the American Dream. Toth, a Bauhaus-trained

The way Tom Waits romanticized his artistic idols fundamentally altered his own art; he perceived, and was transmuted. His early influences – beats like Burroughs and Kerouac, oddballs like Lord Buckley and Little Richard – arguably shaped his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), more than any other. They almost speak through him in

A Lifetime of Riding by Night Rhett Miller October 10 October 2025 Rhett Miller had throat surgery last winter. More precisely, he had a cyst removed from his vocal cords. You can hear the rawness in his voice at various moments on his latest release, A Lifetime of Riding by Night. That’s intentional. Miller has

For fans of Laura Ann Singh, her latest album is well worth the wait. The multilingual American singer, recording artist, and composer based in Richmond, Virginia, is often associated withmusica popular brasilieraand Latin boleros, and has recorded and performed globally, with a repertoire drawn from all over Latin America,including American Songbook standards, women composers, and

In a 2021interview, experimental composer Claire Rousay went some distance in explaining the aloof gauze that so much of her music seems to be enveloped by. “I guess I primarily identify as a broken person, a struggling person, a fuck up, a letdown. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is out to get me.

Memories of Home John Scofield and Dave Holland ECM 2025/11/21 Memories of Home, the new album of guitar and bass duets from John Scofield and Dave Holland, is two things at once. It is a jazz master class and a supremely relaxed example of a couple of guys just hanging out and playing tunes. Holland

Elton John had scored 14BillboardTop 40 singles in the United States before the release of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”, the only single from his albumCaptain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, in June 1975. Following the ascent of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” to #4 on the Hot 100, John would subsequently crack the

If “the only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor,” as AFL-CIO leader Thomas Donahue suggested, then we live in truly ineffective times, something envisaged by Peter Hyams’ 1981 film, Outland. Arrow Video has celebrated the film with a 4K reissue, and revisiting it four decades later is somewhat surprising. While Outland suffers from

About ten minutes into the comedy podcast The Adam Friedland Show‘s episode featuring comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, something enigmatic happens that demands of the viewer and/or listener to opine: Is this real or is it theater? It’s the kind of moment that perhaps only makes sense on a show that’s spent the last year becoming a

The news hit everyone like an electric shock on Sunday night. Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer, were murdered in their California home. The 78-year-old Reiner had been directing films for more than 40 years, and before that, he was best known for playing Mike Stivic on the iconic sitcom All in the

The shift away from hip-hop dominating the mainstream music conversation has been good for the culture. There is a level of craft and an unbound creativity going on in the independent corners of the scene that hasn’t been like this in at least a decade, maybe longer. The proliferation of fresh voices most closely resembles

Another year gone, and narrowing down the year’s best metal albums remains as excruciating as ever, but then again, that’s part of the fun! What I enjoy is the retrospective exercise, and what it has resulted in over the past few years is that every subgenre, every stream, is producing excellent work. Take grindcore. This

Without one record truly dominating my listening habits, it turned out to be a varied and exciting year in the best punk and hardcore. Sometimes that can feel underwhelming, but it is not. In preparation, I realized there were at least 20 releases I considered seriously for this list. I think of punk and hardcore

“Farm Emo.” That’s how Tiberius likes to describe its music, and it’s a fitting title once you hear their latest record, Troubadour. Originally a solo project for Brendan Wright, the vocalist, guitarist, keyboard player, and songwriter expanded their noisy outfit into a brash four-piece, matching deeply personal lyrics to confessional, relatable songwriting, drawing heavily on

Rufus Wainwright’s fascination with Kurt Weill began early. “I first came in contact with Kurt when I was about 12 or 13,” Weill recalls. “I was at a record store, and I saw an album with Lotte Lenya on the cover… it was really the photograph that got me first. I had to buy the

Multi-instrumentalist Chris Franck and DJ and producer Patrick Forge have been making music under the moniker Da Lata for a good quarter-century now. In all that time, the gist of the project has remained largely consistent: Da Lata‘s music is warm, soulful, and made, more or less, in collaboration with (or at least inspired by)

What would you do for a $30 glass cup? The average answer probably (hopefully) wouldn’t be, “Verbally spar with my local Starbucks workers at five in the morning,” or, “Drop the price of a new pick-up truck on a predatory reseller’s eBay listing.” Alas, this is the Year of Our Lord 2025. Micro trends have

Tim Burton’s Batman Returns unfolds as a nocturnal opera of desire, repression, and theatrical self-invention. Costumes, with every stitched seam and shiny surface, convey a psychological mirror, reflecting what each character has chosen or been forced to become. The film’s iconic poster makes this explicit. “The Bat. The Cat. The Penguin.” The tagline announces archetypes,

As the leader, brainchild, and sole consistent member of Adeline Hotel, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Dan Knishkowy approaches each new release as an opportunity to present a new (or modified) version of his stellar band. The new Adeline Hotel record, Watch the Sunflowers, draws on elements from previous releases but remains a fresh-sounding album with tons

Bassist and composer Ro(b)//ert Lundberg’s new album, by-passing-upon, continues what he called on his Bandcamp page “my long-running watery fascinations, here with a central fixation on the curb stop”, referring to the small metal covers in sidewalks and yards covering the shutoff valve in a water pipe flowing to a building. Curb stops also mark

Composer and bassist Linda May Han Oh’s latest album,Strange Heavens,builds its central premise around the concept that humans will typically choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. We’ll stick with something bad that we know rather than find something better that’s scarily new. It makes sense as a method of preservation (who were the

Mr Bad Guy (40th Anniversary) Freddie Mercury EMI 5 December 2025 It took him more than a decade after Queen‘s debut to go solo, but Freddie Mercury finally got it together in time for 1985’s Mr Bad Guy. The Game and Hot Space had flirted with gay undertones, but Brian May‘s resistance to queer pop

Vibrations in the Village: Live at the Village Gate Rahsaan Roland Kirk Resonance 28 November 2025 Rahsaan Roland Kirk was known simply as Roland Kirk back in November 1963, when an unknown filmmaker recorded these live dates at the Village Gate in New York City. The documentary was never made, and the tapes sat in