Pop Culture

A Matter of Time Laufey Vingolf Recordings / AWAL 22 August 2025 One might be excused for thinking Laufey has become disillusioned with the glamorous life. The 14 tracks on her latest album, A Matter of Time, suggest that neither love nor money, fame nor beauty, are what they seem. The singer’s persona accepts these

The moment I’d been dreading for months arrived on Friday night of Montreal’s Osheaga festival. A dozen years ago, dashing gleefully from stage to stage across the vast grounds of Parc Jean-Drapeau with youthful enthusiasm, in pursuit of seeing as many artists as I could, felt easy. Back to the present day, the desire to

On 19 December 2024, inside Moscow’s cavernous Gostiny Dvor hall in a moment that oddly mirrors Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Vladimir Putin paused mid-answer at his annual press conference, tilted toward the cameras and issued a dare: “We’re ready for an experiment – let the West choose a target, surround it with its best defenses,

James Ketchum and Leon Hu reside in different parts of the world – Pamplona, Spain, and Davis, California, respectively – but recording under the name Mondo Lava, the duo create a sound that’s wonderfully cohesive and uniquely trippy. Following Parrot Head Cartridge (2014) and Ogre Heights (2018), they’re back with Utero Dei, another journey into

In keeping with the albums he’s released recently under his given name (following nine full-length albums under various project names), Fletcher Tucker continues to “explore rationality – aural and poetic expressions of his ever deepening relationships to place, ancestors, ceremonial practice, and kinfolk (human and more-than-human)” on his latest album, Kin, according to the press

After seeing a cut of Legend of the Happy Worker, executive producer David Lynch told its director and his longtime friend and collaborator, Duwayne Dunham, “It’s Disney on acid.” This moment will go down in lore among the other memorable Lynch anecdotes, like the one on the set of Blue Velvet, when actor Dennis Hopper

Songs in the Key of Yikes Superchunk Merge 22 August 2025 Superchunk’s return has been one of the most rewarding second acts in rock. The Chapel Hill indie group have outlasted many of their peers and haven’t lost a step in terms of quality. Since their return with Majesty Shredding in 2010, they have released

New Radiations Marissa Nadler Sacred Bones / Bella Union 15 August 2025 Since signing to Sacred Bones a little over a decade ago, Marissa Nadler’s records have grown increasingly lush and grandiose, her heartbreakingly pure soprano and delicate acoustic guitar shining and resplendent against a backdrop of layered guitars, heavy drums, synth, pedal steel guitar,

It’s a common sentiment among moviegoers that it’s more upsetting to watch a non-human animal in pain than to watch an adult human suffer or die. There’s even a website, Does the Dog Die, which indexes films that contain animal deaths to provide trigger warnings for prospective audiences. Perhaps that explains the scarcity of war

With a new record calledSongs in the Key of Yikesthat is populated with songs called “No Hope”, “Everybody Dies”, and “Train on Fire”, it is a reasonable question to ask: What is giving indie rock institution Superchunk hope these days? “I have never had any hope. I was the oldest five-year-old. I was not a

The true beginning of Louisville punk was 1978, but let’s start this history seven years later, when local new wave band Poor Girls self-released their first and only LP, titled, unsurprisingly, Poor Girls.[1] They had formed in 1982 and took the album with them to Philadelphia three years later, looking for a break. They played

The core trio of Scree – Ryan El-Solh on guitar, Carmen Quill on bass, and Jason Burger on drums – have already released an EP (Slow Bloom), two live albums (Live at the Owl and Live at the Owl, Vol. 2) and a full-length studio album (Jasmine on a Night in July), all exploring dark,

The Beths’ latest album, Straight Line Was a Lie, is a record full of catchy hooks, big guitar riffs, and often introspective lyrics. The New Zealand quartet are at the top of their game. The melodies will grab the listener first, but Elizabeth Stokes’ inventive, thoughtful lyrics will stick around after multiple spins of the

If you were to combine the forward-thinking nature of A Saucerful of Secrets with The Kick Inside‘s steely confidence, then Blue Reminder might be the artistic love child. Although Hand Habits is effectively a thinly veiled nom de plume for Meg Duffy, a long-time Kevin Morby collaborator and guitarist extraordinaire, this 2025 record is suffused

Most of us probably know the fairy tale of the Pied Piper in some form, for it’s had a bewildering array of variants in all media. We’ve probably never liked its disturbing idea of the town’s children being led away by the same merry piping that rid the town of its rats. Versions of the

Returning to the scene of a milestone triumph can be a challenging task where many bands fall short of the assignment. This is the challenge for King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard in their return to the historic Hollywood Bowl, where they delivered a magical three-hour “epic” rager for the ages on the 2023 summer

How did John Lennon write so many excellent songs? The conventional wisdom credits the Beatles’ performances in Hamburg, Germany, where the band played in strip clubs. Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who first made his reputation by debunking what he called “the talent myth”, claimed that it wasn’t innate ability that made the Beatles great, but

Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From? Mádé Kuti LegacyPlus 27 July 2025 There’s ambition suggested by the title of Mádé Kuti’s sophomore release, Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From?, that makes sense for an artist of his lineage. As a musically inclined son of Femi and grandson of Fela, multi-instrumentalist Mádé surely has

Since the death of Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell has assumed the crown as the King of Country Music, at least the Americana side of the genre. The 75-year-old former son-in-law of the Man in Black has a complete record of accomplishments and achievements as a singer, songwriter, and producer. Earlier this year, Willie Nelson put

The Making of Five Leaves Left Nick Drake Island 25 July 2025 “Fame is but a fruit tree, so very unsound. It can never flourish ’til its stock is in the ground,” sang Nick Drake on “Fruit Tree” from his perfect debut album, which recently received the four-disc retrospective, The Making of Five Leaves Left.

Music holds many forms, and for Jens Kuross, it’s a vehicle of inner expression, dotted with piano chimes. Curdled instrumentation decorates Crooked Songs, a record bristling with anguished vocals and pulverised piano patterns. Such is the frenzy that Kuross momentarily takes a break from singing during “No One’s Hiding from the Sun” to let out

Long before writing, recording, and performing songs with titles like “Call a Cowboy”, “Counting Chickens”, and “4×4×U”, Lainey Wilson embedded herself in a country-western kind of existence while growing up in the rural northeast Louisiana town of Baskin. Momma Michelle and Daddy Brian gave her and her sister Janna a proper upbringing down on the

Seeing the chairs overturned on the tabletops, we start to turn away, but the owner of the Italian restaurant insists his place is open. We resist a little. He slaps the table: “Sit! Eat!” Eight of us fill a small nook by the front window, and it fogs. Outside, New York City is cold and

Guitarist Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars has carved out a career as one of Generation X’s great modern bluesmen, with a slew of stellar blues-rock albums over the past quarter century, while also earning a reputation as one of the most prolific road warriors of the current era. Known for blending traditional influences

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass The Quay Brothers The Match Factory 29 Aug. 2025 Stephen and Timothy Quay have been the most prominent successors to the great history of Polish animation, following in the hallowed footsteps of Walerian Borowczyk, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Jan Lenica, and a few other filmmakers. With Sanatorium Under the Sign

Margo Price lets the listener know right away; she’s a hardheaded woman. She unpretentiously declares that in the opening acoustic “Prelude”. That doesn’t mean she’s cold-hearted. The opposite is true. She’s hardheaded in the sense that she’ll stubbornly stand up for the things she believes in. Her emotional warmth pervades her worldview and artistic sensibility.

Guedra Guedra, the moniker under which producer Abdellah M. Hassak crafts energetic electronic landscapes, invokes a specific scene in and of itself. Among Amazigh groups indigenous to Hassak’s native Morocco and other parts of North Africa, the guedra is a dance and a cooking pot that can be converted into a drum, embodying music, movement,

On a song named after a popular HBO series, the singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert says, “This isn’t Sex and the City / Nobody’s watching me write in my room.” While emphasizing the solitude of a writer, this observation combines that profession with celebrity. On her debut album, Who’s the Clown? Hobert invites listeners into this contradictory

In our times, just over a decade after Spike Jonze’s 2014 AI sci-fi film Her was released, it has proven to be highly prescient. In the film, lonely and recently divorced Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with a superintelligent operating system named Samantha. “She” projects a voice in his ear, serving as a

Bruce Springsteen’s make-or-break album Born to Run is a tale of resilience and hope, betrayal and perfidy—a rock and roll odyssey complete with a bloody denouement. Magic Rat, the protagonist in “Jungleland” (the last track on Born to Run), travels from New Jersey to New York City, where he ends up trapped and gunned down—dead.