Pop Culture

Bonnie Blue: James Cotton’s Life in the Blues Bestor Cram Freestyle Digital Media 14 February 2025 A crucial component of examining any given genre is understanding its musical vocabulary: how artists utilize motifs, themes, or instruments to convey the message of a given piece, and how that fits in with a greater community of like-minded

It feels reductive to dismiss Blonde Redhead as simply a shoegaze band. Over their 30-year existence, they’ve worked in Sonic Youth-indebted noise rock, psychedelic pop, French chanson, and dream pop, as well as dreamy, cinematic shoegaze. While shoegaze is often excellent for conveying a sense of romantic detachment or a psychedelic “continual derangement of the

Has there ever been a band that has successfully straddled between the mundane and the exotic with such British panache as Pulp? In the 1990s, they had a songbook of coming-of-age stories with memorable, ribald scenes: the narrator of “Babies” hiding inside a wardrobe to eavesdrop on a friend’s sister having sex. However, these were

Alien Strapping Young Lad Hevy Devy | Century Media 22 March 2005 Devin Townsend and David Cronenberg delve deeply into the complex and often unsettling relationship between body, identity, and transformation. Through their respective arts—Townsend’s dense, aggressive music and Cronenberg’s visceral, psychological cinema—they explore the fraught boundaries of human experience. The phrase “Long live the

Punk music generally prioritizes authenticity over technical proficiency and polished execution. The genre was created by young people disillusioned with the self-congratulatory flower power of the 1960s and bored with the rock excess of the early 1970s. A key element of punk is an openness to raw performance that inherently includes what fans might call

Music for 17 Musicians Jameszoo / Asko|Schönberg Brainfeeder 30 May 2025 In 2019, Dutch composer, producer, and musician Jameszoo (born Mitchel van Dinther) delved deeper into the music of his bright, weird electronic debut album, Fool, by collaborating with Jules Buckley and Metropole Orkest to create an organic and electronic reinvention. That result, Melkweg, was

Looking like the Strokes in their Is This It-era heyday, the young Chicago trio Lifeguard are ready-made for critical adoration and indie record shop “best-of” lists. Every so often, a band like this emerges: one that isn’t really experimental or new at all, but manages to flaunt their impeccable influences in a way that is

Sunwise, the new album by Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, begins with a drone. It features almost six minutes of that drone, a risky and utterly transfixing move that clears the way for Chaimbeul to march forth and pipe with wild abandon. What emerges is astounding work, Chaimbeul’s approach to the bagpipes as deeply rooted

Matmos have built their decades-long career by making electronic records using constraints and conceptual frameworks. They’ve recorded an album with only sounds made by objects in their apartment. They’ve recorded a record of the sounds of operating room procedures. They’ve recorded an LP by elaborately editing the music of late Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer. They’ve

Author John Patrick Higgins can’t catch a break. Unless you count the shattered bone that left him hospitalised for months in 2002. That had a lasting effect on the author of Teeth and, like Jeffrey Bernard before him, he is unwell. However, that doesn’t mean he can rest on his near-death bed. First, he had

One of the most radical acts of therapy in the 1990s didn’t happen on a therapist’s couch, but in a cartoon, broadcast on Saturday mornings between commercials for L.A. Gear light-up sneakers and the technicolor sugar-blast of Cap’n Crunch cereal for kids. The show was Life with Louie, and its creator, the late comedian Louie

What started as a result of the COVID lockdowns in 2020 has resulted in one of the more refreshing and welcome examples of ambient music in recent memory. Stretched out across the continental United States, Fuubutsushi was formed by Patrick Shiroishi (Los Angeles), Chris Jusell (Raleigh, North Carolina), Matthew Sage (Colorado’s Front Range), and Chaz

The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy James McMurtry New West 20 June 2025 The brilliant singer-songwriter James McMurtry opens his latest ten-track opus,The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy,with a hard-rocking cover of somebody else’s song: Jon Dee Graham‘s “Laredo (Small Dark Something)”. It’s a classy move. The two Austin musicians are regulars at

After breaking through with their sophomore LP Cartwheel, New York’s Hotline TNT return with Raspberry Moon. Hotline TNT has become part of the shoegaze renaissance that has swept indie rock over the past few years. While Raspberry Moon doubles down on that particular sense of nostalgia, the record transitions to a brighter palette of colors,

Film festivals are quintessentially the fixtures and fittings of a film critic’s life. Whether it’s Berlin, Sundance, Cannes, or the Fantasia Film Festival, among many others, they are what command our attention and govern our sense of time. Then there’s the impact of the human footprint that is slowly eroding the environment’s seasons. If changing

Chris DeVille, Managing Editor at Stereogum, presents his labor of love, Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion.Throughout Such Great Heights, DeVille illustrates how indie musicrose to prominence over the last quarter-century. The term “explosion” perfectly captures the impact, as the sheer number of indie fans and musicians remains impossible

Innocence is a topic often discussed by pop stars. Through the Disney pipeline, child-friendly personalities age with their fan bases and shed perceived naivete. In 2017’s reputation, Taylor Swift proclaimed, “Don’t blame me”, and, in 2025, Miley Cyrus‘ high-fashion endeavors feel like a cover-up for the messiness of the Bangerz era. On the other hand,

When Malcolm Cowley assembled the pieces to include in The Portable Faulkner in 1946 for Viking Press, he felt the burden of introducing to his readers a writer whose reputation with the public was questionable. Although William Faulkner had published 13 novels, at that time, only one was in print. So Cowley was cautious. In

What are the chances you’ve heard of Marie-Paule Belle? From approximately zero in much of the world, they increase if you’re a Francophone, a Francophile, French, Parisian, and/or a devotee of modern chanson. As her Wikipedia page notes, “Marie-Paule Belleest unechanteuseetpianistefrançaise, née le25 janvier 1946àPont-Sainte-Maxence(Oise). Elle est connue pour la chansonLa Parisienne, qu’elle a créée

About four years have passed since Anderson East’s last record. The smooth-voiced country singer has mellowed into a more soulful groove, complete with a horn section. The ten tracks on Worthy smolder and burn as he sings about his frailties and failures, and when the singing bursts into flames, the feelings seem earned. The passion

Jazz musician Amir ElSaffar could not ask for a better start to his new Maqām Records label than what he’s produced on Maqam Al-Iraq. A series of performances by Hamid Al-Saadi, reputed to be the last living master reciter of the poetic Iraqi maqām repertoire, is both a finely crafted album and a priceless historical

Forward The Swell Season Masterkey Sounds / Plateau Records 11 July 2025 The Swell Season’s second, and until now last album, Strict Joy, came out back in 2009. The subsequent tour marked the end of a whirlwind few years for the duo of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. The two first met in 2004 and

Elton John’s ninth studio album,Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, was a hotly anticipated item upon its release on 23 May 1975. So hot, in fact, that it was the first album ever to enterBillboardmagazine’s Top 200 Albums chart at #1 the week of its release.It was a commercial and critical peak for John

The best British films do not offer the easy bromides of Hollywood heroes. They reject redemptive arcs and moral uplift. Instead, they dwell in ambiguity, class friction, emotional repression, and the slow erosion of certainty. These films are not about heroic journeys, but the collapse of simple certainties into deeper, darker psychogeographies, from which a

On 13 June 2025, Israel carried out a string of precision assassinations inside Iran. Code-named Rising Lion, the attack used a blend of pre-planted explosives, fighter aircraft, and AI-enabled autonomous drones. The operation killed senior Revolutionary Guard commanders and civilian nuclear scientists in their private residences, triggering the 12-day Iran-Israel War. Despite geopolitical tensions already

In Canadian author Liann Zhang’s debut novel Julie Chan is Dead, Zhang takes us on a winding journey through the sordid underbelly of the influencer economy. Told from the perspective of Julie, a downtrodden grocery store cashier, Julie’s life is turned on its proverbial head after she receives a mysterious call from her estranged twin

In the 2020s, Hailey Bieber, spouse of the pop star Justin Bieber, began to outshine him as the more prominent public figure in their relationship. While Justin‘s 2019 album Changes received mixed critical reception, and, due to health concerns, the singer cancelled 2022’s Justice World Tour, Hailey’s beauty company, Rhode, was acquired by the conglomerate

In the cinematic world of Pete Travis’ dystopian cyberpunk film DREDD (2012), the Peach Trees megablock housing project is more than a setting — it’s a concrete colossus that functions simultaneously as a city-state, a tomb, a prison, and a vertical battlefield. The Peach Trees setting is not unique. Across film, games, comics, and real-world

On July 25th, Marvel Studios will release Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. On the eve of the new film’s release—the fourth attempt at a summer blockbuster—it seems an opportune moment to look back upon the original Fantastic Four comic books and explore how Marvel’s first family plays a vital role in offering contemporary

Imagine you’re an executive at Cinemax. Let’s say you suddenly find yourself in possession of a warehouse full of gory special effects equipment—fake severed limbs, the gear for numberless decapitation gags, and especially the mechanical and pneumatic systems that create arterial spurts. Palettes full of those. Also, there are crates full of katanas, swords, saws,