Pop Culture

The internet was never going to be a safe place. One of the trade-offs of America’s First Amendment is the acceptance of speech and content that do not align with our personal worldviews. The freedom to communicate independent thought is a vital societal function, but in the age of meme culture, it’s also a telling

For most indie fans, Broken Social Scene are considered indispensable thanks to You Forgot It in People (2002) and Broken Social Scene (2005), which is good news for the mostly overlooked producer David Newfield, who helmed both efforts. The Toronto collective did take quite a step up from their debut album, even if their initial outing was among the first

There’s something delightfully uncomplicated about the music of Unwed Sailor. Founding member and bassist Johnathon Ford (Pedro the Lion, Roadside Monument) infuses the instrumental tracks with his distinct, melodic bass lines while drummer Matt Putman and guitarist David Swatzell fill in the blanks with a sound that embraces the basic framework of so many different

Taking the mickey out of pop culture and music specifically is nothing new for Laibach. The Slovenian group, sometimes called an “art-pop” outfit, have been at it for 40-plus years. During that time, they’ve had their go at everything from Queen to the Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar to The Sound of Music, “White Christmas” to

Scrawled on the plaza stone, in both the front and back of the ornate Corinthian portico of Mariupol’s Drama Theatre, the word “дети” — “children” in Russian — was unmistakable. Days later, only one was still legible under the rubble where the building once stood. The theater, a cultural cornerstone for more than six decades, was

Cocanha transmit an energy more befitting a choir than two singers. Such is their energy that vocalists Caroline Dufau and Lila Fraysse dot Flame Folclòre with a multitude of harmonic jumps and counter-melodies, mostly through articulated energy alone. “Diurê Tremblar” is one hugely impressive collage, an audio sample making way for bustles of chorale singing.

Once upon a time, in the comparatively simpler dark ages of the 1970s, a group of musicians from Akron, Ohio, emerged, presenting a provocative ethos about the “devolution” of humanity. They forged a playfully intense musical persona, fusing bouncy synthpop grooves with a ragged-yet-rigid punk rock sound. They are called Devo, and perhaps the most compelling

Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open serves as the final instalment of what was conceived as a trilogy, with Sundowner (2020) and This Is a Photograph (2022) documenting specific aspects of his return to Kansas City. The record is penned as a love letter to the Midwest, but it also celebrates the great expanse of middle America in subtler ways. Morby‘s eighth studio album comes across

Across two centuries of literature and film, the vampire has proven less a monster we flee than one we cannot resist. Unlike most monsters, the vampire in its many forms, not least the Romanian Nosferatu, evinces a capacity to attract us, to draw us in. Surveying the history of the vampire is all the evidence

Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom Kim Nguyen National Film Board of Canada 29 April 2026 | Hot Docs Documentaries sometimes do something simple and useful: they make a well-known historical image feel unfamiliar again. Kim Nguyen’s Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom begins with Eddie Adams’ Execution, Saigon, South Vietnam,

The 1990s were great because they were an entire decade with absolutely no rules. Everything from the music to the films to the fashion was so objectively arbitrary that in retrospect they seem completely absurd. This was a time when music videos still mattered, unflattering clothing was in style, Ben Stiller was given his own

Industrial music often gets the rap of sounding cold or distant, but not Chicago’s rising Body Shop. The Florida transplants recently released Sex Body, an EP that challenges that stereotype, with a bracing sound that blends danger and wit and a reputation for confrontational live shows. The music drips with danger and sex, but isn’t

How many Japanese women have directed films? Wikipedia’s page on the topic lists 51. How many can you name? From now on, the world’s film buffs should at least be familiar with Kinuyo Tanaka, because all six of her films have been restored and presented in Kinuyo Tanaka Directs, the 48th volume in Criterion’s Eclipse series

Since their early beginnings as post-punk novices at the dawn of the 1980s, England’s And Also the Trees have steadily evolved in their trade of goth-inspired rock. The band’s earliest incarnation, comprised of two sets of brothers—singer Simon Huw Jones and guitarist Justin Jones, along with drummer Nick Havas, and bassist Graham Havas—proved possibly the

Unfortunately, there are so many deserving LPs that are often underrated by critics and overlooked when compiling “Best of” decade lists. For every album by Beck inducted into the “Best of the 1990s” canon, deserving records by the Lemonheads and Belly are tossed aside. Moreover, for every obvious choice by a well-established artist, more subtly

Dave Grohl is a multi-threat: singer, songwriter, drummer, guitarist and producer. His ability to multitask also has its disadvantages, given that his focus is spread all over the place. Foo Fighters’ second record following the death of co-frontman Taylor Hawkins, Your Favorite Toy, shows an artist struggling under the weight of overwork. Grohl started compiling

Anyone familiar with the work of Ben “Baby” Copperhead will be pleasantly surprised, a little shocked, maybe, at what they heard on Catch a Cold, his fifth studio recording and his first since 2023’s Wailing Viridescence. The psychedelic folk, tinged with the odd pop sensibility and a voracious appetite for unique arrangements and instrumentation that

The moment is ripe for vibes these days. In jazz, there may never have been more exciting new players of the vibraphone (or vibraharp). It’s the mallet instrument with the beautiful resonating sound, the chill but blues-rich instrument of Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson. For generations, it seemed like there would be one or, at

It’s been 40 years since They Might Be Giants released their debut album. While the duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have made plenty of changes in their working methods and instrumentation over the decades, their core philosophy seems to have remained unaltered. They combine catchy melodies and big hooks with whatever bizarre musical

Croz Boyce is the newest offshoot of the indie rock institution Animal Collective, featuring Avey Tare (Dave Portner) on guitar and Geologist (Brian Weitz) on electronics, as well as David “Croz” Crosby in spirit. When I think of David Crosby, I think of the hushed reverence of his signature song “Guinnevere”, his ragged intensity on

As Is Josiah and the Bonnevilles Rounder 8 May 2026 In 2008, Josiah Leming appeared on American Idol, after which he landed a contract with Warner Bros., resulting in 2010’s pop-inflected Come on Kid. Leaving Warner, he went his own way, embracing a folk sound and releasing Josiah and the Bonnevilles’ debut EP, Cold Blood, in 2016.

Armed conflict has long served as inspiration for contemporary popular music in America. Country singer Johnny Horton detailed life as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War in the 1959 song “Johnny Reb”, for example, and Poco dedicated an entire album to the conflict with Blue and Gray, which was released in 1981 on MCA Records. Both

Music’s Mother Superior of Smut, Peaches, is back with a new album for the first time in more than a decade. Titled No Lube So Rude, the Canadian artist has called her latest album’s title a call for a socio-political smoothing rather than a direct reference to the kind of sticky substance that appears on

Soap operas are the most prominent form of dramatic narrative in which actors age in real time. François Truffaut’s sequence of films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as the filmmaker’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel; Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014); and Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides (2024) are films in which actors age onscreen in the same role, shot over a couple of decades. In the

Where are you tonight, Kyle Craft? Sailing the Mississippi River like Mark Twain? Or performing “Visions of Johanna” to any punter who gives him half a chance at the Bob Dylan Center? You tell me. After releasing three studio albums with Sub Pop, nothing has been publicly heard of him since 2019. It is as

Unless you’re Indigenous, you’re to some degree a child of empire. Actually, even if you’re Indigenous, unless you belong to an isolated tribe somehow untouched by the outside world, your personal and shared histories have been affected by imperialism.  Some of us are privileged enough not to think about how large forces, such as imperialism,

The Pinochet years keep returning to Chilean cinema because the dictatorship did not stay in the past. It was long and brutal, and its damage outlasted the regime that produced it. The 1973 military coup overthrew a government and remade the state. It destroyed the Popular Unity project led by Salvador Allende and inaugurated a

When asked about how he feels about UltraBomb’s latest, punk rock legend Greg Norton simply says, “This is one of the best recordings I’ve been a part of.” When Norton, who was one-third of Hüsker Dü, one of the most influential punk bands of all time, says his new record is a career highlight, it’s

In an influential and controversially sweeping formulation, cultural theorist Fredric Jameson argued 40 years ago that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” To tell stories from the decolonizing global South using forms and genres developed and disseminated within the

Weller at the BBC: Vol. 2 Paul Weller Warner / Parlophone 24 April 2026 Paul Weller may be something of a cult artist in the United States, but in his native UK and across Europe, he’s a well-deserved living legend. As a founding member of the Jam in the 1970s and the Style Council in