Pop Culture

Unearthly Stranger, directed by John Krish, is a weird little British programmer that emerged in 1963 and channels all kinds of English and American horror pictures while sporting its own style. It’s not very well known, but we’ve now got it on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, looking and sounding excellent, with no less than two

Ambition drives new artists. It is common to find up-and-coming musicians striving to extend traditions they deem valuable. More often than not, this is a gradual process of maturation, one that takes time to reach its end goal. Denmark’s Scimitar is one of these rare cases where ambition appears to be almost instantly fulfilled. Their

California native Tyler Sabbag has earned a reputation for his television compositions, earning an Emmy for the miniseriesLive to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones and nominations for Lost L.A. and Chef’s Table. So, it’s not at all surprising that his first solo album has an innate cinematic quality. Novella, an EP of sumptuous instrumental

The consolidation of Hollywood studios during the 1910s has never stopped regional independent filmmaking, but it’s obscured much of that history. That’s why researchers still discover odd little flawed gems fashioned from imagination and sweat. A case in point is House of Dreams (1963), a slice of nocturnal horror made by a handful of Indiana

Scottish singer-songwriter Johnny Lynch, also known as Pictish Trail, has been writing, recording, and performing music that blends electronic and organic sounds for more than 20 years. On his new album,Life Slime, Lynch continues to mix and match sounds and moods in surprising and thoughtful ways. Dualities abound throughoutLife Slime: electronics burble throughout the album,

You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love Olivia Rodrigo Geffen 12 June 2026 “I lead a very private life, sort of,” Olivia Rodrigo told British Vogue earlier this year, “that makes me feel protected enough to be able to bare my soul in the songwriting.” With the release of her third studio

Garry Winogrand’s street photography remains compelling decades after he took the pictures, capturing raw human emotions that convey beauty, comedy, absurdity, and heartbreak. His photographs represent the act of creating art in the moment. Winogrand once boiled down his approach to a simple, yet revealing koan: “I photograph to find out what something will look

My memories of 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, are fragments of images pulled from the television news broadcast. Back then, I was too young to recognize the significance of what was happening. For a generation, it wasn’t a surreal moment in time; it was incomprehensible. The event is mentioned briefly in

Two things can usually be expected from the folks at Hausu Mountain: experimental soundscapes and wild, abstract artwork. The Chicago-based label, founded by Max Allison and Doug Kaplan, frequently releases records that feature innovative artists making music that’s often challenging to classify. In addition to giving an outlet to a steady roster of musicians, the

Americana artist Jenny Reynolds understands what it is like to have too much time on one’s hands yet not enough time to get the things that really need to be done. She will sit aimlessly and listen to the rain on one cut, then bemoan having to wait for the next. That situation resembles what

Considering Yes’ long and convoluted history, it would be unfair to compare Aurora to their early records. More fittingly, it should be considered among the albums Jon Davison has sung on. One of three younger members, Davison flits between the new blood (Billy Sherwood and Jay Schellen) and older guard (Geoff Downes and Steve Howe)

With 2024’s Dark Times, Vince Staples turned introspective, inventorying his trauma, disillusionment, and sense of being lost in a limbo (neither connected with the reality of his childhood à la 2021’s self-titled set and 2022’s Ramona Park Broke My Heart, nor particularly at home in the world of rap, gangsta-biz, and/or Hollywood). With his new

For most of the last 20 years, the official World Cup song has been the kind of project that gets the cynical wing of the music press cracking its knuckles before the first listen, a co-write between four songwriters in a Stockholm studio, a chant repurposed from a deodorant ad, a hook held together with

“I don’t ever want to dream too small,” confides Tabitha Meeks, 90 minutes into a conversation where the Zoom link has already dropped at least a couple of times. Her patience is commendable, and her disposition sunny. Indeed, the sun seems to radiate through every gap in the curtains as she sits comfortably on a

The YouTube channel Chris and Jack produces comedic video sketches that frequently begin with recognizable pop-cultural clichés and gradually push them beyond their conventional logic. The channel does not follow a consistent release rhythm, but each video is structured around the deconstruction of familiar cultural conventions. In “A vital message from your future self”, a

Lemoncello produce a fine mist that floats over their homeland, Ireland, and drifts across the water, reflecting their world and the wider world. “At the edge of the weather,” they sing, representative of their message of living just ahead of your past. Laura Quirke on lead vocals and guitar, and Claire Kinsella on cello and

In a culture grappling with mental health and existential challenges, the rock band Shinedown seem to have risen to the top not by mere fortune but by necessity. For millions across America and abroad, they’ve become a bastion of resilience rooted in a sincere faith that life can turn in our favor. After years of

Werewolf, the fourth album from the Brook and the Bluff, is a title that suggests something a little fiercer than what this record contains. The band are mostly not looking to blow listeners away at full volume, although there are a couple of songs that at least get into that neighbourhood. Instead, Werewolf is more

Vila Fabiano do Nascimento & Vittor Santos Orquestra Far Out 27 February 2026 In the near-decade since my first Fabiano do Nascimento review (of 2017’s Tempo dos Mestres), his catalogue has expanded in beautiful ways. With preternaturally nimble fingers blazing, he has dabbled with electronic loops, collaborated with other luminaries (most notably saxophonist Sam Gendel,

The Vancouver-based musician Ora Cogan exists in liminal spaces, or, rather, her music does. It transcends anodyne signifiers—folk-gaze and psych rock—to reach an indeterminate realm, where her prayer-like songs float like mist. Ephemerality prolongs. Her songs are the stuff of dreams until they morph into a nightmare: the nymph-like Cogan will lure you to a

Guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli has been working professionally for about 45 years and has recorded over 30 albums as a leader. Pizzarelli‘s preferred format is with a trio, in the style of Nat King Cole: his swing-styled seven-string guitar, piano, and upright bass — and his casual but confident vocals. For all his success

Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhlaghi’s documentary, A Fox Under a Pink Moon, begins from conditions of extreme instability. Soraya Akhlaghi, a young Afghan refugee living in Iran, moves through a world shaped by precarity, violence, and the long afterlife of displacement. Her mother emigrated to Austria when she was still a child, and the film

Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies Market Western Vinyl 27 February 2026 Nate Mendelsohn’s skills in the studio are legendary in New York’s indie music world. The multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer has collaborated with the likes of Yaeji, Frankie Cosmos, Phony Ppl, Dougie Poole, Office Culture, Adeline Hotel, and many more. For more than a decade, he’s

Tokyo supports one of the densest record store ecosystems in the world. Across the metropolitan area, roughly 250 record stores continue to operate, ranging from major chains to tiny genre-specific specialists occupying upper floors and basement rooms near train stations. In many Western cities, this kind of retail infrastructure largely collapsed decades ago. In Tokyo,

Walter Smith III is a fine tenor saxophonist from Houston, Texas—a legendary place to get your start playing that legendary horn. This year marks his 20th anniversary recording as a leader—he also keeps great company, having played in Ambrose Akinmusere‘s band and recorded with folks like Eric Harland, Kendrick Scott, Terence Blanchard, and many others.

Last year’s mix for BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend, his last high-profile mix, found Joshua Spence Mainnie – better known as the Scottish DJ/Producer Barry Can’t Swim – stringing warm, soulful disco, house, funk, soul, and African music across light, floaty trance and uptempo bangers like so many fairy lights on a blonde balustrade. On

Netflix’s Beef follows a rich Korean storytelling tradition of genre-bending, offering viewers a sophisticated blend of dark comedy, drama, thriller, and social commentary. The show’s Korean American writer and director, Lee Sung Jin, draws inspiration from this tradition as well as Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow self: the idea that denying or repressing parts

Film is sex searching for the sun as a partner. So says Teo Hernández in Three Drops of Mezcal in a Glass of Champagne (Trois gouttes de mezcal dans une coupe de champagne, 1983), a 16-minute short that’s part of the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective on the films of Hernández and his colleagues. According

It’s been 15 long years since Southern California’s Social Distortion released an album. Barack Obama was still in his first term, and Donald Trump was hosting The Apprentice, where he should have stayed. A global pandemic occurred in 1918, not, God forbid, in the present day. Fifteen years is longer than many bands last. The