Pop Culture

Saxophonist Chris Potter constructed his new album, Alive with Ghosts Today, to reflect the story of John Brown, the abolitionist who famously raided the armory at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia in 1859. It was an attempt to initiate a revolt by enslaved people in the American South. His ensemble is built around the sound of

Name that movie: An innocent man is wanted for murder on the front pages of every newspaper, so he sneaks onto a train and hides in the compartment of a sexy blonde, who willingly conceals him. You say it’s Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959)? Sorry, the film we’re talking about is House of Cards

Let X=X Laurie Anderson with Sexmob Nonesuch 8 May 2026 At the beginning of her new live album Let X=X, recorded with the accompaniment of unconventional jazz ensemble Sexmob, avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson introduces herself as our guide for the night. “This is your captain / We are going down / We are all going

Drake is soon expected to drop his first solo album since his ignominious loss to Kendrick Lamar. Amid the fallout of their feud, both Drake and Lamar have continued to amass commercial success. Kendrick Lamar released his sixth studio album, GNX, that same fall of the 2024 beef, with all 12 songs debuting on Billboard’s

Astronomy holds that the larger the star, the more quickly it burns out and “dies”. Size and brilliance don’t guarantee a lasting shine. The same is often true of Earth-bound “stars” who help illuminate the world through their artistic handiwork. Some lose their physical lives sooner than expected, while others’ careers drift languidly into that

Rock ‘n’ roll memoirs are hit or miss affairs. For every insightful offering like Keith Richards’ Life (2010), there are a dozen pale imitations – onerous reads filled with foggy memories and questionable myths of glory days gone by, focused on backstage debauchery and gossip, with little in the way of wisdom about music and

Bill Evans at the BBC is the latest in a series of archival releases by Evans, coordinated by producer Zev Feldman. Working with the estate of the influential jazz pianist, who died in 1980, Feldman has proffered official versions of material that often was bootlegged and, in some cases, undiscovered. Issued on Feldman’s own labels,

The internet was never going to be a safe place. One of the trade-offs of America’s First Amendment is the acceptance of speech and content that do not align with our personal worldviews. The freedom to communicate independent thought is a vital societal function, but in the age of meme culture, it’s also a telling

Braxton Keith writes and sings about drinking, loving, losers, and other familiar classic country themes in a squeaky voice with a twang that sounds made for the juke box. He can convincingly act the fool and/or cry tears in his beer, depending on the song and the mood. The title of his new release, Real

It takes a skilled singer-songwriter to turn everyday scenes and moods into enchantment. To do that work while neither romanticizing nor vilifying—to let the mundane be mundane and to appreciate it for that—takes an expert. On their new self-titled release, Brooklyn-based Wendy Eisenberg is that expert. They strike a perfect balance: each track is a

Matt Evans loves creating musical landscapes that seem mysterious but are imbued with a sound that’s curious and welcoming. The New York-based drummer, composer, and experimentalist mixed warm, unique melodies against synths and percussion on records like New Topographics (2020) and Soft Science (2022), and created calmer, more ambient soundscapes on touchless (2021) has once

Unless you’re Indigenous, you’re to some degree a child of empire. Actually, even if you’re Indigenous, unless you belong to an isolated tribe somehow untouched by the outside world, your personal and shared histories have been affected by imperialism. Some of us are privileged enough not to think about how large forces, such as imperialism,

Tedeschi Trucks Band have spent the last decade wearing their influences on their collective sleeves. Not that there was much doubt as to where their allegiances lie, but their last couple of studio and live releases have tightened the bonds they share with their inspirations even further. In 2022, Tedeschi Trucks Band released the ambitious

If you’re looking for a corrective to the anti-immigrant sentiment that is a core attribute of the Trump administration, you could do a lot worse than the film Bridge of Spies. That may sound like a strange claim to make about a 2015 Cold War thriller directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, but

Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change Kyle Devine Verso July 2026 From protest songs to charity concerts to celebrity political endorsements on social media, pop music has long sustained its cultural legitimacy through engagement with political causes. Yet mixed results have also revealed the limits of music’s ability to shape the world outside its immediate sphere.

It seems like a calm Sunday evening in San Francisco here on the 19th of April, but a musical storm is brewing at the SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab. The “future fusion collective” known as Instant Alter are in town, bringing jazzy improv and uplifting vibrations to help listeners transcend the chaos of the modern

It would have been difficult to envision back in 1992, when a young British band, Radiohead, from Oxfordshire, named after an obscure Talking Heads song, released their breakthrough single “Creep” and its accompanying albumPablo Honey,that they would someday become far and away the most important band of their generation. Sure, there were flashes of brilliance

Certain moments feel made for taking stock. A 25th-anniversary. A tenth album. Metric hit both of those marks recently, having passed the quarter-century mark as a band not long before recording their latest album, Romanticize the Dive. Maybe the numbers played a part in looking back. Either way, the Emily Haines-fronted quartet moved in the

Across two centuries of literature and film, the vampire has proven less a monster we flee than one we cannot resist. Unlike most monsters, the vampire in its many forms, not least the Romanian Nosferatu, evinces a capacity to attract us, to draw us in. Surveying the history of the vampire is all the evidence

The story of Lip Critic’s second album, Theft World, is a strange one indeed. While their widely acclaimed debut, Hex Dealer, turned heads for its manic, danceable rhythms, their new album is driven by a bizarre, real-life conceptual crisis. During a previous tour, an obsessed fan stole Kaser’s identity to purchase the band’s entire discography,

The acoustic and electric tremolo-treated guitars that usher in “…Another World”, the opening track on Pat Kelly’s new album, Hook, are almost like a balm, a soothing ointment to the rough state of the world. Kelly complements them with his distinctive baritone voice: “Give us another try / Another world where we can waste our

It’s a late winter Saturday night here in San Francisco’s Mission district on 28 February, yet it’s starting to feel like springtime thanks to the week’s pleasantly warmer weather. The mood of the US is uneasy, though, due to the government having just launched a war on Iran. Thus, it feels particularly timely to have

After three years away, electronic duo Pick a Piper (Caribou drummer Brad Weber and vocalist Sophia Alexandra) return with a new album, Dandelion. It takes the listener on a bold, kaleidoscopic sonic journey whilst also acting as a manual for emotional survival. Finding emotional depth in the exquisite soundscapes, the record focuses on the fortitude

Vigdis Hjorth’s translated novels are a universe unto themselves. They present a networked constellation of recurring themes, archetypes, and interpersonal dynamics that are swapped, slightly inverted, and subtly recontextualized in service to a central character’s moral transformation. The consistency of Hjorth’s authorial voice holds everything together, putting each work in conversation with one another and

Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally Harry Styles Erskine / Columbia 6 March 2026 “Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed,” sings Harry Styles on his highly anticipated fourth studio album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. “But it’s nothing to do with me.” The track in question, the eloquently titled “Paint By

Scrawled on the plaza stone, in both the front and back of the ornate Corinthian portico of Mariupol’s Drama Theatre, the word “дети” — “children” in Russian — was unmistakable.Days later, only one was still legible under the rubble where the building once stood. The theater, a cultural cornerstone for more than six decades, was

There’s something delightfully uncomplicated about the music of Unwed Sailor. Founding member and bassist Johnathon Ford (Pedro the Lion, Roadside Monument) infuses the instrumental tracks with his distinct, melodic bass lines while drummer Matt Putman and guitarist David Swatzell fill in the blanks with a sound that embraces the basic framework of so many different

Cocanha transmit an energy more befitting a choir than two singers. Such is their energy that vocalists Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse dot Flame Folclòre with a multitude of harmonic jumps and counter-melodies, mostly through articulated energy alone. “Diurê Tremblar” is one hugely impressive collage, an audio sample making way for bustles of chorale singing.

Once upon a time, in the comparatively simpler dark ages of the 1970s, a group of musicians from Akron, Ohio, emerged,presenting a provocative ethos about the “devolution” of humanity. They forged a playfully intense musical persona, fusing bouncy synthpop grooves with a ragged-yet-rigid punk rock sound. They are called Devo, and perhaps the most compelling

Kevin Morby’sLittle Wide Openserves asthe final instalment of what was conceived as a trilogy, withSundowner(2020) andThis Is a Photograph(2022) documentingspecific aspectsof his return to Kansas City.The record is penned as a love letter to the Midwest, but it also celebrates the great expanse of middle America in subtler ways. Morby‘s eighth studio album comes across