Pop Culture

January tends to be a slow time for new releases, as no one wants to be forgotten by the time the Best Albums of the Year lists start rolling out in December. Luckily, electronic artists don’t sleep, nor do many lose much sleep over awards shows and golden statues. January 2026 has been no exception,

Thirst, Slow Crush’s first album in four years, is a collection of ten tracks that draws heavily on shoegaze’s “wall of guitars and constant noise” aesthetic. There are also elements of rock and doom metal, shoegaze’s slower, heavier cousin. Bassist and frontwoman Isa Holliday’s vocals drift through the band’s crashing sound, giving the songs an

Dick Clark sits there on the set of American Bandstand looking as smooth as ever, his neat tie and slim pocket square just visible from the breast pocket of his well-tailored suit. His hair neatly combed and slick, he presents just a slightly older version of the teenagers that surround him. “Teenagers” – even the

When I say that Syd dePalma’s new album, Paris, is dreamlike, I mean it literally. Echoes abound, sculpting recognizable rock, folk, and pop stylings into imaginative new shapes. As he plays with light and shadow, the borders between fantasy and reality blur. The familiar soars. An eerie melancholy fills even the most straightforward of dePalma’s

3 April 1961 must have been a quietly epic day at Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. That was the day folk blues singer/guitarist Furry Lewis recorded material for two albums—Back on My Feet AgainandDone Changed My Mind. Back on My Feet Again, recorded by Scott Moore (the guitarist on Elvis Presley‘s Sun Records), has now

In the liner notes of his new album Manifeste, pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan writes, among other things, that his role as an artist is to facilitate catharsis. This idea goes back to Aristotle and has been explored by countless artists and philosophers across countless media since. Even so, I am sure I have never

Pop-punk fans are notoriously fickle. They are often unwilling to embrace bands who evolve their sound as they mature as artists and people, dismissing later records with the dreaded, immature, “Their first one is the best one” designation. With at least one stone-cold classic in their discography, 2014’s Never Hungover Again, Joyce Manor are experts

Loss is something we constantly experience and explore through art, writing, and film, seemingly increasingly so in our fraught world. However, along with loss, something is often found: a sense of self, justice, hope, a voice. In the independent documentary Coexistence, My Ass!, Director Amber Fares shines a light on activist-cum-comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi, who gives

On a hot afternoon in August 1982, Blondie stepped onstage at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia to play a snappy set, heavy on the hits but with room for a few deep cuts and a Rolling Stones cover. Their performance was about an hour long, smack dab in the middle of a summer festival that also

Liverpool has produced many great bands, but for Cast, there is only one worth listening to. There’s no greater testament than the title of their latest record, Yeah Yeah Yeah. “Don’t Look Away” is punctuated by John Lennon-esque sneers, particularly during the chorus. To call the comparison derivative and clinical is too simplistic; compared to

Criterion’s sets ofMartin Scorsese’s World Cinema Projectwere something I looked forward to since the project began. These boxes collect restorations of classic films from byways of world cinema, largely untraveled and unknown even to those of us who seek out “foreign films” made far from Hollywood. In countries that tend to dominate the narrative of

Lucinda Williams has always sung with a leathery ache in her throat. Even when proclaiming the wonders and beauty of the sweet old world in which we live to a suicidal protagonist, there was pain in her voice. Of course, that’s part of being a blues singer. Williams may rock, but she’s always been bluesy

When you have an established sound and a devoted, ever-growing fan base like Joyce Manor, the thrill of creating is finding the sweet spot between avoiding repetition and staying true to the sound that endeared them to fans who revere records like 2014’s Never Hungover Again, now considered a classic of the genre. Surprisingly, that

The pen may be mightier than the sword in some cases, but both can kill if imprudently wielded. A blade can end a person’s physical life; a pen might cut down reputations and careers. Critics—whether of food, film, or other art forms—occupy a unique position to render substantial judgments on creative craftsmen, acting as arbiters

North Carolina Americana fraternalists the Avett Brothers have pooled their powers with Mike Patton (yes, that Mike Patton), the avant-metal contortionist, on a stripped-down, barstool-weepin’ roots LP that’s not as conceptually unhinged as the premise suggests. The secret history here is that the adolescent Avetts were way more likely to have Helmet‘s Betty rattling in

Jesse Welles is having a dream year for a musician in 2025, rocketing to stardom in a way that makes him seem sort of like an overnight sensation. Yet digging into his backstory reveals a long and winding road. He toured for years, leading multiple rock bands, while making little career progress and getting burnt

We live in a time when our online memories outlive us. Pantheon, a beautiful animated series, takes that reality to its logical conclusion: what if we could upload not only our photos and texts, but our very minds? Blending family drama with speculative philosophy, it turns digital immortality into a story about love, loss, and

The Brutalist opens with Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) stepping out of a crowded room and into the sunlight. He catches a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, but it’s upside down – an image that foreshadows the events to come and sets the tone for Brady Corbet’s inversion of the American Dream. Toth, a Bauhaus-trained

The way Tom Waits romanticized his artistic idols fundamentally altered his own art; he perceived, and was transmuted. His early influences – beats like Burroughs and Kerouac, oddballs like Lord Buckley and Little Richard – arguably shaped his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), more than any other. They almost speak through him in

A Lifetime of Riding by Night Rhett Miller October 10 October 2025 Rhett Miller had throat surgery last winter. More precisely, he had a cyst removed from his vocal cords. You can hear the rawness in his voice at various moments on his latest release, A Lifetime of Riding by Night. That’s intentional. Miller has

For fans of Laura Ann Singh, her latest album is well worth the wait. The multilingual American singer, recording artist, and composer based in Richmond, Virginia, is often associated withmusica popular brasilieraand Latin boleros, and has recorded and performed globally, with a repertoire drawn from all over Latin America,including American Songbook standards, women composers, and

In a 2021interview, experimental composer Claire Rousay went some distance in explaining the aloof gauze that so much of her music seems to be enveloped by. “I guess I primarily identify as a broken person, a struggling person, a fuck up, a letdown. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is out to get me.

Memories of Home John Scofield and Dave Holland ECM 2025/11/21 Memories of Home, the new album of guitar and bass duets from John Scofield and Dave Holland, is two things at once. It is a jazz master class and a supremely relaxed example of a couple of guys just hanging out and playing tunes. Holland

Elton John had scored 14BillboardTop 40 singles in the United States before the release of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”, the only single from his albumCaptain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, in June 1975. Following the ascent of “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” to #4 on the Hot 100, John would subsequently crack the

If “the only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor,” as AFL-CIO leader Thomas Donahue suggested, then we live in truly ineffective times, something envisaged by Peter Hyams’ 1981 film, Outland. Arrow Video has celebrated the film with a 4K reissue, and revisiting it four decades later is somewhat surprising. While Outland suffers from

About ten minutes into the comedy podcast The Adam Friedland Show‘s episode featuring comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, something enigmatic happens that demands of the viewer and/or listener to opine: Is this real or is it theater? It’s the kind of moment that perhaps only makes sense on a show that’s spent the last year becoming a

The news hit everyone like an electric shock on Sunday night. Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer, were murdered in their California home. The 78-year-old Reiner had been directing films for more than 40 years, and before that, he was best known for playing Mike Stivic on the iconic sitcom All in the

The shift away from hip-hop dominating the mainstream music conversation has been good for the culture. There is a level of craft and an unbound creativity going on in the independent corners of the scene that hasn’t been like this in at least a decade, maybe longer. The proliferation of fresh voices most closely resembles