Pop Culture

Meco’s disco version of the Star Wars theme hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in October of 1977, selling two million copies internationally. Space Disco had taken off, and it remained in orbit for nearly a decade. At its best, Space Disco sounds less like Meco’s effects-sampling gimmickry and more streamlined and pulsing

The global narrative of Nigerian music is a tidy one, a triumphalist story of unambiguous ascent. It’s the story of Afrobeats as a monolithic, polished export, a sonic empire ruled by stadium-filling titans. Yet this account, like all such stories, obscures a more complex and fractured reality. Beneath the gloss exists a sprawling, restless underground:

It’s one more Saturday night at the Fillmore in San Francisco here on 7 March, and the vibe is high with Margo Price back in town for her second performance at rock’s most hallowed hall. The Wild at Heart Tour finds the Nashville-based troubadour returning to her outlaw country roots behind her 2025 album Hard

Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally Harry Styles Columbia 6 March 2026 The music video for “American Girls”, the second single from Harry Styles’ fourth studio album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally, shows Styles swapping places with a stunt double while filming an action movie. This switch represents Styles’ relationship to fame. As one

Gouge Away released one of 2024’s best records, Deep Sage, and to say this is more of the same yields more of a “hell yeah” than an exasperated sigh. That record signaled a dramatic leap forward in creativity for a band that had already carved out a lane in the scene. Christina Michelle is still

It’s easy to greet covers albums with skepticism. Is this a cynical cash grab? A contractual obligation? Does the world need yet another cover of “Drift Away”?Jesper Lindell and his band, the Brunnsvik Sounds, have just released3614 Jackson Highway,and it’s the best kind of covers album. Named for the address of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio

Paper Masks Phew and Danielle de Picciotto Mute 20 February 2026 Berlin-based visionary artist Danielle de Picciotto’s recent solo work tends toward eerily disquieting sonic landscapes, sounding like soundtracks to Edward Gorey’s disturbing Edwardianism. Often, she recites poetry over these soundscapes, clearly enunciated and intentional. Yet, Paper Masks, her collaboration with Japanese experimental vocalist Phew,

Vol. 1: El Sueño Se Deshizo Para Siempre Sonetos del Amor Oscuro Zephyrus 21 November 2025 Granadino poet and playwright Federico García Lorca wrote the poems published as Sonetos del amor oscuro in the last years before his assassination. They are heartrending pieces, bursting with love, eroticism, and the keen sorrow that seemed to undercut

Marking our lives and times with music can feel like we are in a conversation with the bands we love. Sometimes those conversations only last for a few records or years. Other times, we are lucky enough to continue that conversation for decades. As I wrestle with middle age, I’m glad that many of the

As the hit Netflix show Stranger Things concluded its fantasy epic in December 2025, now is the perfect time for the arrival of Rock of Pages: The Literary Tradition of 1980s Heavy Metal. What, you ask? The Stranger Things character Eddie Munson is a fan of heavy metal music and the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing

Contemporary pop exists in a permanent tension between acceleration and disposability. Artists appear, reinvent themselves, fade away, or are replaced by newer versions of themselves. The cycle is fast, voracious, and rarely allows enough time for an identity to take shape fully. In that context, the consolidation of a clear voice is not merely a

It’s simple enough to account for the cutthroat kind of gravitas at the forefront of Consuelo, the sophomore release from experimental Catalan duo Los Sara Fontán. Like most of us, violinist Sara Fontán and percussionist Edi Pou are fed up with many of the phenomena that shape our small world: rising authoritarianism, the worsening climate

It’s been nearly 50 years since the founders of Tishoumaren group, Tinariwen, first started making music together, and nearly 25 years since theirRadio Tisdas Sessionsbrought them to a global audience. In that time, they have been key in shaping how audiences around the world conceptualise Tuareg art and society, no easy task for any one

Genuine Negro Jig (15th Anniversary Edition) Carolina Chocolate Drops Nonesuch 23 January 2026 The Carolina Chocolate Drops brought music that had been forgotten and even looked down upon into the rarefied world of art music—the country mouse ushered from dusty backwoods to the velvet seats of the city mouse’s concert hall. While at first listen

Sometimes, ends come unannounced. In the mid-2010s, Britain nurtured a second generation of the unfortunately named genre, “soft grunge” (ironically, an outgrowth of emo and hardcore). At its forefront were Milk Teeth, Wallflower, Muskets, and, the era’s breakout stars, Bloody Knees. They released only four EPs, but bumped shoulders with national stars like Wolf Alice

Monsters spawn from humanity’s appraisal of what it most fears. The lycanthrope wears the symbolic flesh and fur of animalistic appetites. Blood drinkers embody spiritual death and disease. Godzilla, whose cinematic existence traces back to American hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950s, is another such incarnation of terror. Mothra, in some ways, slots into the

Chloé Zhao’sHamnetmight be best viewed through the lens of cultural memory, mourning, and the politics of representation. Rather than reproducing the death of William Shakespeare’s son, which inspired Hamlet, the film foregrounds the invisible labor, grief, and historical silences that shape artistic legacy. By contextualizing Hamnet within early modern English history and contemporary cinema, Zhao

The enduring myth is that the Beatles and their UK brethren were a much-needed shot in the arm for an otherwise moribund American pop music scene of the early 1960s. The story goes that “the establishment” of the time, musical and otherwise, had run the early breed of trailblazing rock ‘n’ rollers out of town

An MGM musical classic, initially overlooked but reclaimed in later years on the strength of its cinematic daring, 1952’s Lovely to Look At stands as one of Hollywood’s Golden Age’s most forward-thinking pictures. Impossibly slick with all the baroque and neoclassical trappings to accent a thermonuclear color palette, this Mervyn LeRoy-directed film one-ups the power-couple

Isobel Waller-Bridge casts a large net with her film scores. Her work on such films and TV series as Munich: The Edge of War, Sweetpea, Emma, Fleabag, and the BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse shows a composer who is refreshingly eclectic and varied. Her latest release, however, may be her

When a former member of the world’s most successful boy band releases an album, there can be credit given to him for trying. When that record is a cohesive collection of sunny pop anthems, even more credit can be given. On this third solo album, titled How Did I Get Here? Louis Tomlinson, one fifth

The world of Guided by Voices is a kaleidoscope—fragments of melody, flashes of surreal imagery, and a dizzying number of songs tumbling out year after year, including 14 records this decade alone. Robert Pollard has built a universe so vast and so alive that even longtime fans struggle to keep up, yet the music never

Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Bernstein did not set out to sanctify Justin Townes Earle, nor to reduce him to a cautionary tale. With What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome, Bernstein instead accomplishes something far more difficult: he restores dimensionality to a life too often flattened by myth. The result is a biography that neither

Maybe it’s that the music recalls classics by Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, Lucinda Williams, et al. Perhaps it’s Mac McAnally’s pristine yet warm production, full of strummed guitars. Maybe it’s the ease of Amy Grant’s delivery, with her melodic variations serving as hooks. Perhaps it’s the verse about John Lennon. Amy Grant‘s “The 6th of

Ryan Gabos, who sings, plays all the instruments, and writes all the songs as Sotto Voce, balks at the term “concept album”, but all of the songs on his latest record, The Sound of Trying, are about the same thing, so he feels that it qualifies. “These are seven offerings of what it’s like to

Imagine a shelf of classic toys and books. There might be a teddy bear, Barbie, G.I. Joe, a Mouse Trap board game, Star Wars figures, and Mr. Potato Head, along with books like Curious George, Frog and Toad, The Snowy Day, Where the Wild Things Are, and Harold and the Purple Crayon. Comic books would

In the summer of 2011, Dance Moms premiered to an unsuspecting audience of one million. On track to endure the expected post-premiere drop in viewership, the Lifetime show instead found its stride, making not just a name for itself but birthing a seminal franchise. While a number of Dance Moms spin-offs have been greenlit, none

Pianist and keyboardist Craig Taborn is a shape-shifting musician. On his latest ECM Records release, he moves across several of his forms with a single, extremely versatile band. The trio is completed by cellist Tomeka Reid and percussionist Ches Smith, who moves from mallet percussion to drum kit to electronics as artistically necessary. With Taborn

M(h)aol’s Something Soft is an album with a misnomer at its core. Nothing here is soft—certainly not the guitars, which jangle rather than bounce; not the percussion that weirdly pulses throughout the songs; not the lyrics, which offer blunt truths. Certainly not the emotional architecture of the record, which is built around a simple, devastating