Pop Culture

The term tropicanibalismo has been circulating within experimental music scenes in Colombia since at least the early 2000s, broadly encompassing new and innovative approaches to coastal popular and folkloric music forms. Cumbión Planetario is Bogotá-based duo Rizomagic’s newest contribution to this tropicanibalismo landscape. Rooted in cumbia (with a particular nod to languid, Monterrey-born cumbia rebajada),

Pink Pocket Pistol Willow Avalon Atlantic Outpost / Assemble Sound 26 June 2026 The title of Willow Avalon’s new album, Pink Pocket Pistol, suggests she wants to have it both ways. She has a soft, feminine side as indicated by the color and small size of her gun. However, the fact that she has a

Most college bands die quietly. A debut, a handful of shows, then the slow drift into jobs and separate cities until nobody bothers to announce it’s over. Matt Jones and the Bobs nearly went that way. They formed at Radford University in 2011, released “Brother’s Hymn” in 2014 while they were still students, and disbanded

Dead Pioneers should be the soundtrack to your discontent this summer as the country celebrates its milestone birthday with nary a mention of the genocides that occurred to “Make America Great Again”. The band, led by artist Gregg Deal, are on the rise with their brand of acerbic, rage-filled punk, including a run of shows

Alexander Noice makes music that is full of complexity yet also full of mirth. On his 2019 album NOICE (also the name of the ensemble he gathered for that record), his guitar work joined forces with alto saxophone, bass, drums (both acoustic and programmed) and the twin vocals of Karina Kallas and Argenta Walther as

Psychological thriller series The Testaments opens with a black screen. We hear a radio signal — fragmented, static, fading in and out. “Radio Free Boston.” “Radio Free America.” “Forever the sound of freedom.” The voices overlap, cut off, begin again. Words and phrases appear on screen, one by one: Gilead. A totalitarian regime. Plummeting birth

The eccentric British singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock seems intent on telling his life story not in a grand rock opera but in a series of verbal 45s. The latest installment is Stranded in the Future, the follow-up to his sublime 2024 micro-memoir about the one year that most shaped his artistic vision and future, 1967: How

Crawlspace of the Pantheon Guided by Voices GBV Inc 29 May 2026 Guided by Voices are an institution that could have entered the “phoning it in” era decades ago, coasting on recreations of past success to appease their devoted fanbase. They cemented their legacy as one of the greatest indie rock bands in their 1990s

Palagoma Odd Okoddo and Ogoya Nengo Cool Waters 5 June 2026 Odd Okoddo and Ogoya Nengo, the artists behind the new album Palagoma, make for an eclectic combination. A Nairobi-based duo made up of German-born experimental drummer and producer Sven Kacirek and Kenyan-born dodo singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Olith Ratego, Odd Okoddo have been performing electrified

In the press materials for Union Made, Old Crow Medicine Show frontman and fiddler Ketch Secor talks about missing out on the party that was the United States’ bicentennial celebration in 1976. Born in 1978, he encountered leftover Spirit of 1776 memorabilia in antique stores and pawn shops growing up and was determined to be

The Smiths: A Novella reads as an ekphrasis, or a literary description of a work of art, which is to say an ode to the Smiths. Although the Smiths serve, for the English writer Michael Bracewell, as a memory-laden madeleine to enter the 1980s, they are the obvious anchor for the book. To read Bracewell’s

Consonance Live at the Jazz Showcase Joe Henderson Resonance 25 April 2026 Live in Chicago Live at the Jazz Showcase Ahmad Jamal Resonance 25 April 2026 Alight Upon the Lake Live at the Jazz Showcase Yusef Lateef Resonance 25 April 2026 Stardust & Starlight Live at the Jazz Showcase Mal Waldron Resonance 25 April 2026

As I listen to multi-instrumentalist and tradition-bearer Nana Osei Twum Barima’s debut album Journey into the Unknown, I have the distinct impression that I am not just an audience for his music, but a witness to him. His performance here is intimate. He sounds nearby. His voice and instrument—the seperewa, an Akan instrument resembling a

“So stop giving me your toxic positivity,” sings Bebe Rexha on her fourth studio album, Dirty Blonde. “You know you’re only making it worse.” The record marks her first release as an independent artist after parting ways with Warner last year, her label of over a decade. Since the release of her last LP, Bebe

For three days in August of 2000, in the Bulgarian town of Koprivshtitsa – a city-museum nestled in the Sredna Gora mountains east of Sofia – Jeff Mangum, of the former indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, bounded through the National Festival of Bulgarian Folklore with a tape recorder and microphone. The festival, a celebration

After two decades of nearly continuous touring, folk-Americana singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell is stepping away from the road—not as an ending, she insists, but as a recalibration. Her “indefinite hiatus” from touring marks a deliberate pause in a life shaped by motion, performance, and the steady accumulation of miles across continents. Yet even as she pulls

Bob Dylan (née Zimmerman) recently wrote a piece for theNew York Timesabout being 80(Dylan is 85). He said the best thing about living to an advanced age is “the freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control”. The Nobel Prize-winning provocateur should know. In our youth we think we know all that matters

Listening to men’s World Cup songs over the last century, one could be forgiven for thinking that AI slop is far from a recent phenomenon. Few music genres are more formulaic or more clinically constructed. That said, while these songs’ traits and purposes remain the same, their music styles have changed with the times. Moreover,

A World of Our Own: The UK and Irish Folk Explosion of 1965 Various Artists Cherry Red 24 April 2026 Cherry Red Records compilation album A World of Our Own is a colossal release for one with such a finite scope. Comprising three discs and 86 tracks, it covers, as its subtitle suggests, The UK

There is always more to do: places to see, people to meet. This relentless pressure to keep moving forms the basis of DJ Seinfeld’s new album, If This Is It. At the heart of the record lies an inherent tension. As he admits, he has struggled to stay in the present. This restlessness has meant

The Hudson River Music Festival in New York is a revival of a traditional event conceived by folk music legend Pete Seeger and his wife, Toshi, who put together the Hudson River Revival to give music fans a chance to appreciate the river while also organizing efforts to clean it up. “Participation—that’s what’s gonna save

After what has felt like aeons of U2 chasing relevance, it seems thegroupmight finally be comingto terms with the fact that, yes, relevance is relative. It’s not about being the biggest band in the world, although U2 were just that at one time. It’s about being who you are, at your core, and relevance, whatever

My Death Is More Beautiful Than Your Life My Heart an Inverted Flame Crucial Blast 15 May 2026 The descent to the ritual is immediate. The slow progression of “Every Step Is Corpsed” acts like a pendulum, centred around Andee Connors’s deliberate drumming. At the same time, Marc Kate’s synthesisers carve through the void in

The press materials for Ruth Garbus’ striking new album, Profound, compare the record to the sounds of both experimental jazz guitarist Wendy Eisenberg and the acclaimed vocal trio the Roches. Those are fitting comparisons; Profound has a distinctly jazzy feel, and embraces unique harmonies and arrangements. The result is a style that can’t be easily

Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! Horse Lords RVNG Intl. 12 June 2026 When talking or writing about Baltimore math-rock quartet Horse Lords in 2026, it seems inevitable to refer to the Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine, who’ve edged quirky time signatures and microtonal scales into the mainstream, thanks to their multiple viral moments

In a 2026 interview with Rolling Stone, Niall Horan, a former member of One Direction, noted the band signified the “start of community-based fandoms”. Indeed, the X-Factor-spawned group arrived on the music scene at an opportune time: the nexus of reality television’s highest ratings and the explosion of social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter,

The singer-songwriter Malcolm Todd knows the rules of the game. His self-titled debut opens with a track titled “Harry Styles,” a career mission statement. Declining to imitate a pop forebear, the song describes disaffection with millennial pop stardom, which benefited from a combination of early 2000s celebrity news consumption and the onset of social media.

For some bands, the myth is mightier than the music. That’s not the case with the Velvet Underground. Now, NYC’s original art punks, the collective that merged Brill Building-inspired pop craft and avant-garde sonics with lyrics about the darkest sides and simplest beauties of the human experience, are the subject of a biography that does

Boots Riley’s most recent sci-fi comedy, I Love Boosters, is fun, visually stunning, and quirky. Some find it confusing near the end. I agree, with the caveat that I let the confusion take me where it would. Where was that? No place that’s revolutionary. This matters. Both Riley and critics interpretI Love Boostersas an anti-capitalist,

Rock ‘n’ roll has been declared dead so many times that its obituary now reads like a genre unto itself. Streaming economics, algorithmic discovery, and the fragmentation of mass audiences have all contributed to a sense that rock no longer holds cultural centrality. Audiences are fragmented across niches. Songs arrive, circulate, and disappear in the