Pop Culture

Vinyl has made a comeback, but the mores of record collecting have evolved. For example, it wasn’t long ago that DJs, committed to safeguarding the precious sonic treasures discovered through hours of crate-digging, defaced the center labels on their own records. Masking tape, pen scribbles, and even bleach were used to prevent other tastemakers from

Brown Horse are a fable.Their name evokes Cormac McCarthy, Sam Shepard, the American Frontier, and Marty Robbins; the American past weaves into their identity and sound, playing and lyrics—everywhere. On their 2024 debut album,Reservoir, there is a song titled after the country music lyricist Paul Gilley, as well as a namecheck of Jimmie Rodgers in

An alternately somber and charming title in the canon of Italian cinema, Girl With a Suitcase is a feature with the elemental afterglow of the film noir and Neorealismo styles and movements that had passed on by a few years by the time Valerio Zurlini’s film appeared in 1961. This drama, at times, pitches wildly

Rebecca Taylor, aka Self Esteem, has two aspects to her persona, as presented via her second album, Prioritise Pleasure: The indefatigable activist and the unapologetic hedonist. Regarding the former, Taylor adopts the feminist mantle with ease. She extolls the strength, resilience, and resourcefulness of women while advocating for their rights, festively and militantly. Regarding the

Despite the blistering heat on a Saturday night in December 2024, in the city of Belém, a buzzing crowd packed the grounds in front of the Güera Stage, one of the main attractions at Psica Festival — one of the most important music events in Brazil’s Amazonian region. Staff members warn fans to keep their

Flint, Michigan-based Cult Therapy recently released one of the most provocative and essential records of the year. Get Fucked, Sinner is a harrowing and cathartic account of lead singer and lyricist Jason Duncan’s time spent in an abusive religious cult. It has cost him a lot, including his father and a close friend, who were

Producer, performer, and composer Satomimagae’s new album Taba is a work of emergence. On it, she steps out of the introverted depths of pandemic isolation, moving more directly through the gauzy layers of sound she builds. The chrysalis is left behind, the wilder world open before her. It’s a journey gently taken. Taba never moves

If You Asked For a Picture Blondshell Partisan 2 May 2025 Blondshell’s If You Asked For a Picture is one of the most overtly polemical and confessional albums since Hole‘s Celebrity Skin. A cascade of riffs is interspersed with lyrical portraits of characters experiencing distress fueled by societal expectations and an unhealthy dependency on alcohol.

Some might think we have had enough documentaries about New York City in the mid-to-late 1970s. These people can be described as misinformed, misled, or simply missing the point. There is a good reason filmmakers continue to produce documentaries about this period, and will likely do so as long as the form exists, as they

Accelerator, the first album from New Orleans-based duo the Convenience – multi-instrumentalists Nick Corson and Duncan Troast – was released in 2021 and was a joyous celebration of drum machines, synths, and sugary hooks. While their commitment to this particular style seemed to deeply define the band, their press materials indicate otherwise, describing the record

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson quipped. The Golden Dregs’ fourth album, Godspeed, is a paean to London, specifically to the people who make up the city, whose existence is its pulse, and whose stories, whether good or bad, reflect the city. In

The most popular jam bands have a tough go of it when it comes to studio albums. They will never capture the singularity of a live show, which varies not just in terms of setlist but in how each song is played. What ends up being featured, the length of a jam, or a nod

Does anyone still follow the hocus pocus about the Bermuda Triangle? Maybe you do, or maybe it’s all Greek (or Atlantean) to you, but you’ll gain a little insight and a lot of nonsense on this far-reaching phenomenon in Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray of a 1979 “documentary”. As a concept, the alleged triangular stretch of

In most RPG narratives, the story belongs to the present, to the immediate triumph of the living. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 resists this convention. It frames the journey not as an individual victory, but as a dialogue with those who will someday walk the same ruined streets, breathe the same air, and find traces of

Language shapes and sculpts our reality. It delineates what’s possible, what’s probable, and what’s merely a flight of fancy. It helps us clarify what’s possible, stand up for our rights, and call out injustices. Words are our roadmap and the keys to our prison. The powers that control language control our reality, and we might

On View at the Five Spot Café: The Complete Masters Kenny Burrell With Art Blakey Blue Note 25 April 2025 Since there is not a lot of golden-era jazz music left in the vaults, the question begged by the constant stream of reissues is, Why? There is money, of course. However, many classic jazz titles,

Space Junk Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives Snakefarm 12 April 2025 It takes all of two seconds of Space Junk to realize what Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives are up to. That alternate-picked run is straight out of the surf rock playbook; Dick Dale would be proud. Stuart has played a little bit

Song of the Earth David Longstreth, Dirty Projectors, and s t a r g a z e New Amsterdam / Nonesuch 4 April 2025 As floodwaters rise and we “Walk the Edge”, Song of the Earth emerges as a reckoning. David Longstreth’s recent album is an ambitious 24-part song cycle for voice and orchestra, performed

Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans”, has teamed up with that city’s beloved funk band, Galactic, to deliver a joyful and life-affirming new album,Audience with the Queen. While acknowledging that some things aren’t great right now, the LP brims over with love and hope, and fabulous music. Audience with the Queenis the perfect

In the relative safety of comfortable hindsight, think back to that moment of propulsion as our collective species hurtled towards one of time’s inevitable barriers. One of the most expansive and reflexive centuries in history was slamming to a close, and an equally mythologized future was careening toward us, promise, and uncertainty reaching out to

Safety has become a virtue. Yet what if too much safety becomes dangerous? What happens when ensuring one’s safety causes one to avoid the pleasures of life? When does the fear of being hurt mutate into a refusal to engage, relate, and change? Two absurdist cartoon television series—SpongeBob SquarePants and South Park—expose the dangers of

People bombarded with images of what their lives can be can’t fully grasp the importance of representation in pop culture. When you don’t see people like you who are ahead of you in life’s journey, it can be difficult to conjure an image of the future. It was for Tiff Hannay, lead singer for Rodeo

Laura Glipin’s powerful poem “Two-Headed Calf” inspired Rodeo Boys’ first single from Junior, a raucous heartbreaker of an album that has staked a claim for one of my favorite albums of the year. The Lansing, Michigan-based band self-describes as “the sound of a quiet rebellion of a queer, blue-collar heart” and “what happens when the

A Living: Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor Michael D. Stein Melville House April 2025 Michael D. Stein’s A Living: Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor is a human-centric depiction of labor and identity. The book is a collection of vignettes based on conversations between Dr. Stein and his patients. Stein’s book serves as both

With the 2020s halfway over, the past seems painful yet tangible, the present chaotic, and the future… well, perhaps just an exercise in retaining the core of humanity’s soul in a world increasingly like that of Lord of the Flies. For many, emotional trauma seems to be life’s painful act of branding — hollowing out

It is always nice to see how varied the trends within a genre can be. Take death metal, for instance, where Ancient Death and Diabolizer represent two vastly different strands. The former are informed by Timeghoul’s off-kilter progressive visions, which Blood Incantation brought back to prominence with their early works. The latter find purpose in

Long After the Fire Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill Label 51 Recordings 18 April 2025 Nothing comes from nothing, especially in music. Every song has its roots in something that came before it. That said, the magic of a great new track is found in how creatively interesting the artist tweaks an older formula and

Living with grief is one of the most challenging assignments every one of us has to take on. The ones we love are imprinted on our memories and artifacts. At times, it feels like they are everywhere, and while that can overwhelm us, sometimes we can reach a place where we feel the presence and

Mogwai: If The Stars Had a Sound Mogwai Lightbulb Film Distribution 28 April 2025 There is an early moment inMogwai: If the Stars Had a Soundwhen John Peel, the esteemed BBC presenter, is quoted as saying he never thought Mogwai would gain wide acclaim. Peel made this remark as a diehard fan, and his assessment