Pop Culture

The myth of America’s past is a strong and compelling one. A person doesn’t need to be a MAGA believer to feel seduced by the history of the United States as a golden age. Who doesn’t weep a metaphorical nostalgic tear when thinking of diesel-powered trains, cowboy heroes, baseball as the national pastime, black and

Calendar Year, the new album from Chicago-based psychedelic folk songwriter and musician Jessica Risker, evokes a timeless, dreamy vibe that sounds like it could have come from this year or maybe even 1972. The songs are impeccable, but the arrangements have an indefinable quality that is both comforting and mysterious. Coming off a seven-year hiatus

Mosquitoes (Le bambine) is a movie full of youth’s yearning for freedom and the desire to play, as well as the impetuous and cheeky attitude that childhood is riddled with. We are also reminded that adults can be quirky, wild, and dysfunctional, and children sometimes survive adolescence because of, or in spite of, their parents.

Self-producing an album wasn’t something that Sunny Sweeney spent much time pondering – until it happened. Rhinestone Requiem is the pinnacle of her taking charge, hoeing her own bean row, and flexing her self-determining vigor. It’s just the latest from an artist committed to exploring her imaginative energies on her terms. “I’m happy with what

Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You Ethel Cain Daughters of Cain 8 August 2025 Ethel Cain is nothing if not ambitious. Before coming to music, she wanted to make movies, only to realize that sketching out atmospheric music on four-tracks, iPhones, and DAWs was far more accessible for a poor young trans girl living in

In my many years as a reader and writer, there are only a few books to which I can endlessly return. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is one (though some sections now tire me, mostly when hobbits are absent). James Clavell’s Shōgun is another. I hope you caught FX’s Shōgun series; it was

Ask a jazz fan to name the greatest players of the bebop/hard-bop/post-bop era of the 1950s and 1960s, and they might list a dozen or two dozen names. However, the odds are above even that Kenny Dorham won’t be among them. Narrow the focus to trumpet players of the same era, and Miles Davis is

In 2020’s Tickets to My Downfall, the rapper MGK (formerly Machine Gun Kelly), born Colson Baker, transformed into a pop-punk prodigy, recruiting Blink 182’s Travis Barker as a producer. In a 2022 interview with Billboard, looking back on that album’s number one debut, Baker said, “I know it kills certain bands in the [rock] community

Fritz Lang’s career as a filmmaker is strewn with crime melodramas that stand as iconic examples of film noir. His vision is dark and fatalistic as he specializes in characters caught in what he called “nets of circumstance”. A 1953 masterpiece of brutality called The Big Heat is probably his most hard-hitting work in terms

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