Pop Culture

The idea of post-humanism sounds almost absurd. We are conquerors of the globe, overpopulating to the point of ecological disaster. Yet the defining feature of the contemporary moment is not the triumph of humanity, but its redundancy – a condition anticipated long before it was named, and rendered with remarkable clarity in the austere electronic

In the five years since Nick Jonas last released a solo album, the man who has always been regarded as the central figure of his family group, the Jonas Brothers, has stayed booked and busy. Two additional studio albums and tours with his brothers, along with film and television appearances, are plenty in addition to

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I decided to make an unusual list: not of all-time great love songs, but all-time great anxious love songs. Anxious love songs typically involve conflict—around unrequited passion, cheating, or loss—where the singer often feels something unresolved. Most of my favorite anxious love songs are exceptionally well-known—classic, even—so this list

OutKast entered an industry that didn’t consider them as equals. Andre “3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Pattan looked upon a hip-hop scene so concerned in the East Coast/West Coast of it all, that at the 1995 Source Awards, when beating New York natives Smiff-N-Wessun for Best New Artists on their home turf, Andre 3000

A GWAR concert coming to town isan annual event, much like Christmas or Halloween. Each year, we gather again—the faithful and the newly converted—to celebrate, to laugh, to be drenched in blood. As we get older, we remember past holidays and compare them to how they are now. Everything is reframed through experience and perception.

From a cinematic perspective, 2025 provided almost as much agita as it did great art. For all the big studio swings (Sinners, One Battle After Another, Weapons) and plucky indies (Blue Moon, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), the industry was besieged by turmoil and uncertainty. Besides anxiety over mediocre box office and thin

Best of Our Possible Lives Boy Golden Six Shooter 13 February 2026 Canadian singer-songwriter Boy Golden (Liam Duncan) carries himself with the easy charisma of a man who knows a secret you don’t. He possesses a dapper mustache, a wicked wit, and a perennially mischievous gleam in his eye—but you don’t need to see him

So, 2026. Let’s see if we get through this one as well! Regardless, there are already many excellent records to go through. The multiple interpretations of death metal still take centre stage, with Void Monuments going for a more traditional approach, while Voidhammer inject a crust quality into the genre’s form. On the heavier side,

Tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana is from Santiago, Chile, where she grew up as the daughter of a professional saxophone player. She started playing at age six, met the Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Perez when she was 18, and later studied at Berklee College of Music. It almost seems like a jazz fairy tale: she was

Whatever mood you are in, there’s a Dan Snaith track. From his breakthrough album as Caribou, Swim, to the Grammy-nominatedOur Love, and through to the soul-stirring, deeply personalSuddenlyCanadian, electronic artist Dan Snaith has made some of the most incredible electronic albums of the last 20 years. However, Snaith has also forged a no less thrilling

Nostalgia can be inaccurate, sometimes wildly so. There are two types of inaccurate nostalgia: false and manufactured. False nostalgia is the result of misremembering, an honest mistake of which we are all guilty. Who among us doesn’t remember lying on our beds or cruising through town listening to one of our favorite songs? Until we

Yee-haw, it’s time for love and philosophy out on the range. Desire requires an enormous expanse to express itself. There’s a hip spaciousness to the music on “Cowboy Dreams”, the first single from Canadian alternative country singer-songwriter Boy Golden’s forthcoming album Best of Our Possible Lives, out 13th February 2026, via Six Shooter. The title

Wes Craven’s contribution to horror cinema is often reduced to the creation of Freddy Krueger or the success of Scream (1996), but that framing obscures the continuity of his work. Across decades, Craven developed a consistent authorial voice rooted in verbal domination, performative cruelty, and psychological control. That voice appears first in grindhouse form, becomes

Cinema has often romanticised or dramatised vengeance, playing down the old adage, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” This sentiment warns that vengeance only leads to one’s own ruin. In Suzanne Andrews Correa’s The Huntress (La Cazadora), inspired by true events, Luz, played by Adriana Paz, is severely emotionally and

To Whom This May Concern Jill Scott Human Re Sources / The Orchard 13 February 2026 When Jill Scott came to London to perform in the late 2000s, I convinced my father to come along by noting Scott’s musical namesake, the 1970s jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron. I was treading hallowed ground by invoking an artist

The music that Bern-based outfit Da Cruz has been making for the last couple of decades or so has always been rooted in the upbringing of frontwoman Mariana Da Cruz. Born near São Paulo, Mariana leads the group–producer Ane H., guitarist Oliver Husmann, and percussionist Pit Lee–in performances that draw on Brazilian styles with African

A well-known idiom says, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” The habitual tendency for horror movies to disappoint, stoking strong feelings of frustration and despair, creates the illusion of a third certainty. This is not unique to horror in general, but the genre is as specific as

The new album from young jazz vibraphone star Joel Ross is called Gospel Music. For most of its two-LP running time, however, it is not an exploration of “gospel music”. Ross grew up playing that style in a Black church in Chicago, but we know him as a premier contemporary jazz improviser with a taste

They Started As One (Kind of) Band Brace yourself if you do a web search for the Depraved. Search results weren’t an issue in the mid-1980s, when this hardcore punk band were rocking the town of Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England. Now, even if you add “punk” to your terms, DuckDuckGo (not the information-eating maw of

Bill Callahan is an alternative country and indie rock institution, so it is difficult to think about a time when he will no longer be around. However, Callahan‘s legacy is clearly at the forefront of his mind with his newly announced record, My Days of 58, out 27 February 2026 on Drag City In that

Thanks to its political connotations, the phrase “No Labels” has become a nasty word. However, Nashville by way of Boston guitar rockers Twen have embraced it for entirely different reasons; they have no record label, and don’t want one. “Twen” was a German youth magazine from the 1960s. There is indeed plenty of 1960s influence

Emmylou Harris’s catalog is eclectic, but some releases stand out for showcasing her unusual approach to reinvention. Her 1998 live album, Spyboy, is one of them. In 1995, Harris, a foundational figurehead in contemporary Americana and country, released Wrecking Ball. Her collaboration with producer Daniel Lanois, known for work with U2 and Bob Dylan, helped

Returning to Myself Brandi Carlile Interscope / Lost Highway 24 October 2025 Of course, Brandi Carlile needs to get back to herself. She’s been busy since her last solo album, 2021’s masterpiece In These Silent Days. Carlile has produced albums, hosted festivals, helped revitalize Joni Mitchell’s career, collaborated with Elton John, and more. In her

Mercy Armand Hammer and the Alchemist Backwoodz Studioz 7 November 2025 At a recent show near Detroit, touring to support his masterful GOLLIWOG, Billy Woods commanded the dark stage, shrouded in mystery. His presence on stage is so hypnotic that I found myself not so much nodding along as staring in awe. He and the

While many often reduce the whole of French cinema between 1959 and 1968 down to the machinations of the Nouvelle Vague, it’s a mistake to overlook the many filmmakers who weren’t hip to that movement, including Robert Hossein. The actor-turned-director is the subject of a wonderful new box set from Radiance, Wicked Games: Three Films

It’s been a while since K-pop fans have been “accusing” K-pop of becoming too “Westernized”, stagnant, or bland. Many fans blame BTS for this: ever since their The Most Beautiful Moment in Life era, the group had already begun drifting away from K-pop‘s ornamental maximalism toward a more introspective, narrative-driven pop — something that felt

The multi-disciplinary artist Oliver Ray—writer, poet, and singer-songwriter—has an edifying Substack page called Rimbaud’s Lost Papers, where his posts range from Achilles to the American abstract painter Mark Rothko to French theorist René Girard, showcasing his kaleidoscopic and esoteric mind. From 1995 to 2005, Ray was a member of Patti Smith’s band, during which he

Ratboys have spent more than a decade growing from a dorm-room songwriting duo into one of indie rock’s most consistently compelling bands. Formed in 2010 by Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan while the pair were students at the University of Notre Dame, the project has steadily expanded in both membership and ambition, eventually settling into

Kula Shaker formed in the 1990s and came to prominence during the Britpop era. The group’s debut K was released to the music-buying public in 1996, followed by Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts. Fronted by guitarist/frontman Crispian Mills, Kula Shaker similarly comprised Paul Winter-Hart and Alonso Bevan on rhythm, not forgetting keyboardist Jay Darlington, who toured

The Olympians released their eponymous debut record about ten years ago. Helmed by Toby Panzer, the instrumental album performed by an ensemble comprised of Daptone Records all-stars, combined funk rhythms and horns with Greco-Roman mythology. Songs about the Gods and their emotional journeys (“Apollo’s Mood”, “Diana By My Side”, Sagittarius by Moonlight”, “Pluto’s Lament”) were