Pop Culture

Twenty-six albums into their career, pop duo Sparks have maintained a level of sophistication that stands up with their older work, complete with a production sheen that gives their idiosyncratic backdrop a contemporary flavor. Having explored their shared history on Edgar Wright’s 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers, Ron and Russell Mael have pointed their attention

I’m With Her is a folk/Americana supergroup. The all-female trio (Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins) have won several Grammy Awards individually and collectively and been nominated for dozens more. Their sophomore album, Wild and Clear and Blue, will win them even more honors. The three singer-songwriters penned all 11 lilting and literate songs

Over the past decade, Will Toledo has done the opposite of what helped him build a solid fan base early in his career. As an artist under the moniker Car Seat Headrest, Toledo released 11 albums over four years and was quickly snatched up by Matador. The record label milked a lot out of his

Eight years have elapsed since TajMo, a blues record that melded old and new by virtue of guitarists Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’. It was a pleasant, albeit safe, affair, and Room on the Porch proves to be much the same, providing a formidable, if conventional listen. However, like they did on the 2017 album,

Jenny Hval’s latest album, Iris Silver Mist, was conceived by the artist as an olfactory experience. Heavily informed by scent, Hval first got a whiff of the central idea for Iris Silver Mist while touring back in 2022. Named after a fragrance designed by French perfumer Serge Lutens, Hval’s album emits the same cool, layered

I Said I Love You First, the title of singer and actress Selena Gomez’s fourth studio album, is a blunt statement, hinting at happiness and conflict. A listener might wonder, “Why did one partner say, ‘I love you’ first?” Did the other hesitate?While promoting the record, Gomez and fiancé Benny Blanco, her main collaborator, projected

There are no creative half measures for Farnaz Ohadi. She comes by it honestly. Born in Iran to parents with strong musical inclinations, she recalls her father playing reel-to-reel tapes front to back, over and over, of music from around the world. At the forefront of his interests was flamenco. A “life-affirming” trip to southern

It had the makings of just another year. Annual archetypes were hollowed out anew, trends awaited the spark of resuscitation, and disappointments and surprises alike were handicapped by the legions of obsessives. The year saw its share of bands that altered their attack and, as a result, alienated factions of their fan bases while attracting

Few albums embody rock’s essential contradictions as vividly as Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction from 1987. It is both high art and primal sleaze, anthemic yet nihilistic, precision-engineered yet volatile, an album of self-annihilation that became a commercial monolith to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982). Released into a late-’80s rock landscape bloated with posturing

Grey DeLisle’s new double album is chock-full of empathetic songs that are equal parts silly and sincere. DeLisle has a unique voice that makes her singing seem girlish even when she’s serious. There’s something comic and odd about the effect. This ambiguity makes the lyrics’ emotional concerns seem deeper and heavier. If one can’t laugh

That’s the Price of Loving Me Dean Wareham Carpark 28 March 2025 The last time Dean Wareham and Kramer were together in the studio was almost 35 years ago, when they recorded Galaxie 500′s swan song, This Is Our Music. On Wareham’s newest solo effort, That’s the Price of Loving Me, the two reunite, picking

First premise: Playing in a band with Craig Finn must be hard. His songs are elaborate stories that demand a listener’s attention, but his melodies are often static, sometimes drifting toward speaking (or yelling). Instrumentation must be interesting enough to shape the melody, but not wholly upstage the narrative. His main band, the Hold Steady,

First premise: Playing in a band with Craig Finn must be hard. His songs are elaborate stories that demand a listener’s attention, but his melodies are often static, sometimes drifting toward speaking (or yelling). Instrumentation must be interesting enough to shape the melody, but not wholly upstage the narrative. His main band, the Hold Steady,

Music burns as the guiding light through the nights of doubt and sorrow. Faithful to the last flicker, Jeffrey Martin, a true emissary of heartrending songs, may be found standing clear before us through the darkness. Indeed, for the past ten years, Martin, a former school teacher, has mixed penetrating truth with compelling heartbreak, using

New Directors/New Films is one of the most venerable events in America’s film scene. Founded in 1972, the annual showcase at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is a one-stop shop for fresh voices that have been making the rounds of the world’s film festivals. The 54th incarnation runs from 2 to 13 April 2025

Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams Patterson Hood ATO 21 February 2025 Patterson Hood’s passion for film has fed the numerous themed records he has released with Drive-By Truckers, from their calling card Southern Rock Opera to the myth-busting, incendiary The Dirty South. Hood’s latest solo album is a quietly powerful, frequently unnerving series of snapshots

The Standard School Broadcast John Lee Hooker BMG 28 February 2025 It’s rare these days for previously unreleased recordings by a classic blues artist to emerge – especially material of the quality to be found on The Standard School Broadcast Recordings by John Lee Hooker. Largely unheard since 1973, the eight long tracks on the

WITNESS Kronos Quartet and Mary Kouyoumdjian Phenotypic Recordings 14 March 2025 As a first-generation Armenian-American whose family was directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, composer, documentarian, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Kouyoumdjian is eminently qualified to use her skills to create an artistic portrait of the horrors of violent conflict. Likewise,

It is 1845, and a man in Paris has promised to make someone’s wedding ring appear inside an orange. He borrows a ring from his audience, which promptly vanishes inside a handkerchief. A small tree on a table is wheeled onto the stage, and the astonished audience watches as, in less than a minute, the

The question of how to get away with murder has driven many crime dramas, but none more powerfully than Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, which hews closer to character study than thriller. Netflix’s 2024 limited series Ripley reimagines the young, inexperienced criminal of Minghella’s film as a seasoned professional akin to the

Wolfgang Flür was, famously, a member of Kraftwerk during their triumphant synthpop reign that began with Autobahn in 1973. Flür left the band in 1987, disenchanted with Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider’s preference for cycling over creating music. Flür himself, though, went back to his pre-Kraftwerk vocation of designing furniture. He didn’t release any new

The Darkness are known for imbuing glam metal with homespun English kitsch, fuelled by Justin Hawkins’ piercing, polished falsettos and buzz-saw guitar riffs. A riff-driven band, the Darkness benefit from Rufus Tiger Taylor’s tom-tom heavy drums, and Frankie Poullain’s rubbery basslines. Their musical acumen was never in doubt, but their determination to write novelty songs,

Last year was prolific for pop music, and 2025 is shaping up to be similar, as artists chime in with their different perspectives on the current over-documented, hyper-individualized era.Streaming diversified pop music by making listening a solitary activity. No longer did the genre that strives for a large listener base need to cater to being

The world lost a good one when it was last call for Shane McGowan. The frontperson of the Pogues left this life in 2023, leaving behind a singularly enjoyable and inspiring legacy captured in part on this mighty sampling of their work. To their fans, the Pogues delivered a vision of a rough, sometimes cruel

Once a cultural icon, Kanye West’s Yeezy brand has suffered a dramatic fall from grace. Now, one of the internet’s most passionate fan communities is shutting down in protest. The Yeezys subreddit is going read-only from this point forward. Why? They say that the Yeezy name is tarnished. They referenced the fact that Yeezy released

“I am a bit old-fashioned,” says Chas (James Fox). He’s a vicious enforcer for a London gangster who, after killing a man, pretends to be a juggler named Johnny Dean and inveigles his way into the huge bohemian Notting Hill mansion of Turner (Mick Jagger), a retired rock star. Chas describes the milieu to a

Today! Mississippi John Hurt Craft Recordings / Bluesville 28 February 2025 Mississippi John Hurt first recorded in 1928 for the blossoming Okeh label, but his music didn’t catch on like his contemporaries. Maybe his voice didn’t have the same grittiness that early blues listeners craved. Hurt seemed content working on the farm and providing for

In Japanese literary sensation Sayaka Murata’s novelVanishing World, sex between married couples (both for pleasure and for procreation) has all but vanished. In response to a largely absent male population throughout the Second World War, extensive research and development of artificial insemination practices subsumed Japan’s medical and scientific community, inevitably supplanting natural conception within families

For Los Angeles-based composer, producer, and guitarist Dustin Wong, guitar loops seem to occupy the center of his creative flow. That’s certainly the case with his earlier albums on Thrill Jockey, like Infinite Love (2010) and Mediation of Ecstatic Energy (2013), as his highly skillful and disciplined playing is given a mechanical, synthetic propulsion while

Arcadia Alison Krauss and Union Station Down the Road 28 March 2025 Alison Krauss hasn’t recorded with Union Station in 14 years—since Barack Obama’s first term, as Rolling Stone’s David Browne noted in his article announcing the act’s latest album, Arcadia. During this time, a lot has changed, including the departure of key Union Station