Norwegian rapper Ivan Ave first garnered attention as the author of the Low Jams EP. The five-track project was released by Berlin label ..
Automatic for the People was intended to be a fast rock album. So if you’ve ever needed proof of R.E.M. as a band guided by their ..
In live performance Sam Smith sometimes seems to forget about the audience. Eyes half-closed, hands hugging elbows or buried in pockets, ..
Shamir Bailey’s tale is one of reclamation. The 22-year-old musician underwent a series of personal and professional dilemmas over ..
Fever Ray has always been an outlet for independence. Karin Dreijer does things on her own terms, and while that’s obvious in The Knife ..
Westside Gunn, the high-pitched voice and gold-toothed face of Buffalo’s Griselda Records, did not originally plan to be a rapper. ..
No one is more critical of Julien Baker than herself. Throughout Turn Out the Lights, her groundbreaking second album, and first for Matador ..
For the life of me, I’ve never been able to tell if Rivers Cuomo grew up too soon or was some kind of late bloomer. It shouldn’t ..
The most freeing — and to some, confounding — thing about the music of Destroyer, the decades-long personal project of The New Pornographers’ ..
Losing is a record marked by loss within the life of Bully mastermind Alicia Bognanno, but it’s not that loss, however multifaceted, ..
Margo Price doesn’t seem to care for the notion of being a country traditionalist and the cult success that comes along with it. The 34-year-old ..
Over the past seven years, Jessie Ware has built up a stellar reputation as a critically lauded pop singer always on the cusp of breaking ..
On every previous St. Vincent album cover, you see Annie Clark’s face. On her first records, Marry Me and Actor, the images are simple ..
In recent years, a certain kind of New York City rap experienced a resurgence of sorts. Ushered in by the likes of Action Bronson, Joey ..
If the respective rises of alternative rock and hip-hop were the most significant musical developments of the 1990s, we can credit Beck ..
There’s something desperate about the Midwestern summer, a certain revved-up edge to any nice day that’s brought about by memories ..
Kelela is unafraid of the darkest parts of herself and frequently given to diving deep on her long-awaited debut album, Take Me Apart. ..
In 2005, Wolf Parade named their album in playful regret of an incident that occurred aboard an ocean liner. With Cry Cry Cry, they’re ..
Looking back at collaborative albums by rock artists over the past decade, especially considering all-star team-ups in rap like Watch ..
Right, he was the King of Pop and all that stuff, but Michael Jackson was a capital-A album artist through and through once Quincy Jones ..
Former Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher may be one of his generation’s greats, but that doesn’t mean anyone was expecting ..
From the hyperpolarizing emergence of the Trump Administration to social justice activists battling actual Nazis in the streets, the American ..
Now, the first new Shania Twain album in 15 years, has a strange dual existence. There are an abundance of questions and expectations ..
Heraclitus of Ephesus, also known as “The Obscure” or “The Weeping Philosopher,” had a saying: “No man steps ..
When Sprinter, Mackenzie Scott’s second album as Torres, came out in 2015, it was an astoundingly assured statement from a young artist ..
If hard work is the key to success, then patience is the carabiner that keeps it from being misplaced along the way. It’s about ..
There’s a winnowing that comes from distance and absence, in a way that reduces our connections with a person, place, or thing to a series ..
Brandon Flowers spent most of the promotional tour for the fifth Killers’ studio album apologizing for the fourth one. Back in July, ..
The forward slash in Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ billing says quite a lot about the folksinger’s return to conventional Western recording ..
Son Little first came to prominence as Aaron Livingston, the unassuming Philadelphia-bred singer-songwriter with a clarion tone that pierced ..
“I got a high IQ and a low credit score,” confessed Project Blowed stalwart Open Mike Eagle on 2011’s audacious Rappers ..
You know, it’s not that Dave Grohl doesn’t care about music. That idea would seem preposterous to his zillions of fans. But he wins ..
Tom Waits. Bruce Springsteen. Guns N’ Roses. The list of artists who’ve released two albums on the same day is short, and the list ..
When Hundred Waters began five years ago, the Florida band was quiet by design, operating on a small scale with hushed whispers as they ..
On June 28, 1996, Tori Amos performed to a sold-out Greek Theatre in Los Angeles months after the release of her third album, Boys for Pele. ..
In just three years’ time, when we begin to look back and reflect on the music of the ‘10s, one of the most significant moments ..
Even as he’s settled into his mid-70s, Neil Young has continued to record at a blistering pace. Since 2010, Young has released roughly ..
Find someone who skates through life with no issues, and chances are the person you’re talking to doesn’t live on Earth. For some, ..
If you take 10 years off between records, you might as well be starting from scratch. That was certainly the case for Death from Above 1979, ..
There’s something sinister swimming around beneath the surface of The National’s seventh album. It’s not the spiders crowding ..
In 2011, A$AP Mob provided a jolt to a New York hip-hop scene that had been without a new star since 50 Cent’s debut eight years prior. ..
A sizeable chunk of our childhood memories aren’t memories at all. During the toddler years, our brains are busy taking in sights ..
Never the kind of band to do things by the book, Brand New’s career the last two decades has felt like a series of mazes. The Long ..
Sam Beam has a traveler’s heart. After making a name for himself at the vanguard of indie music’s folk fascination of the early ..
Truth be told, Josh Homme has it all. He’s reached the top of the rock A-list without ever appearing to have struggled for a hit single, ..
The War on Drugs should be headlining music festivals. Seeing how it’s 2017, and the model for rock bands who can feasibly headline ..
Revisiting Yellow House, the 2006 folk masterpiece that helped Grizzly Bear break out to a wider audience in the indie rock community, ..
Mass appeal is what every artist wants but almost never asks for outright. There’s no better way to insure the longevity of one’s ..
We as music critics need to stop applying the overused term “victory lap” to Everyone Who Succeeds; what is the victory over ..
Arcade Fire’s 2013 rollout for Reflektor was, in many ways, as memorable as that record’s music. There was the guerrilla graffiti ..