Pop Culture

The Lathums, among the latest practitioners of the guitar-based pop music style, often referred to as “Britpop”, originally came together as part of a school project in their hometown of Wigan, England, in 2018. Within months of their initial formation, the Lathums released their first single, “Crying Out”, an urgent but elegant rock ballad.  “Crying

Songbouquet Joy Burklund and Her Band Independent 21 March 2025 “While the songs are personal to Joy, the creation of Songbouquet represents a collective labor of love by and for the Philadelphia trans music community.” That’s verbatim from the press materials for the debut album from Joy Burklund & Her Band, 13 tracks produced by

Annie & the Caldwells’ Can’t Lose My (Soul) emerges victorious—against all odds—from the dense overgrowth of history’s enigmatic wilderness. Our journey begins in the early 1970s, when gospel’s DNA, which had already shaped funk and R&B, cross-pollinated back, inspiring a new generation of gospel singers to embrace the same unapologetic, dance-worthy grooves that fueled the Staples

Lust for Life, Or: How to Thread the Needle and Come Out the Other Side to Tell the Story Courting Lower Third 14 March 2021 The Liverpool quartet Courting return with their third album in three years. Lust for Life, Or: How to Thread the Needle and Come Out the Other Side to Tell the

Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and all-around badass musical genius SASAMI made a big splash with her sophomore album Squeeze in 2022. She took her sound to a bold new level with fuzzy guitars and hard-rocking tunes, making the record feel like a lost classic from the golden era of grunge in the 1990s. The heavy sound

On her studio debut, Relish, released on 21 March 1995, Joan Osborne was part of but apart from a burgeoning crowd of popular singer-songwriters. The version of this story that most remember is that Osborne‘s career began and ended with her hit single “One of Us”. However, the album that spawned it highlights her vocal

Showcasing success with its first two seasons on Netflix and remaining inside the Netflix Top 10 TV list during the entire month of first airing, Dark Winds’ Season 3 returned in March 2025. The first two seasons contain six episodes, and the third one contains eight episodes, each running around 40 to 50 minutes. Set

Close to the Edge (Super Deluxe Edition) Yes Rhino 10 March 2025 Yes’ Close to the Edge represented a peak of British progressive rock when it first appeared in 1972. Comprising just three long tracks – Side One’s “Close to the Edge” and Side Two’s “And You and I” and “Siberian Khatru” – the fifth

We live in a golden age for albums. Despite the much-vaunted “death of the album”, no artist desirous of an enduring career achieves it based on singles; the album retains its status as the chief declaration of an artist’s significance and ability. With the internet exploding the format-based preconceptions around what a record might be,

Pianist Caili O’Doherty has been recording as a leader since 2015, just two years after she graduated from the Berklee College of Music. Teaching and touring the world followed, but she may have just come into her own in the last several years. Since 2018, she has been developing a musical and educational project around

Did Capcom, the developer of Monster Hunter Wilds, intend for its monsters to be something more zeitgeisty than scary, wild, fantasy creatures drawn from real-world myths and folklore? Probably not. Does that stop us from finding deeper meaning in the game? Of course not. We all have our monsters to hunt (and evade), and we’ve

Wilco have taken their listeners on a wild, unexpected journey through a confluence of diverse musical styles. From their earliest days as an offshoot of alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo to their dabbling with influences from noise rock, Krautrock, orchestra pop, and experimental jazz, to the folksy, simple songs from more recent albums earning the group

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has long had a thriving music scene, and it was tipped as a possible Next Seattle in the indie rock gold rush of the 1990s. While the Chapel Hill bands were grouped into a scene, the three most visible bands—Superchunk, Archers of Loaf (who were actually from Asheville), and Polvo—didn’t sound

Tim Hecker’s classic albums were typified by volume, presence, and an eerie sense of desolation, creating soundtracks for landscapes devoid of humanity. His first triptych—2001’s Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again; 2003’s Radio Amor; and 2004’s Mirages, developed a vocabulary of static, crackle, and hiss to evoke images of arctic tundras and industrial cityscapes

Yarın Yoksa Derya Yıldırım and Grup Şimşek Big Crown 14 March 2025 Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Derya Yıldırım is no easy artist to pin down, and neither is Yarın Yoksa, the new release from her and Grup Şimşek, the ensemble she leads made up of keyboardist Graham Mushnik, guitarist and bassist Antonin Voyant, and drummer

For over 20 years, guitar wizard Nels Cline has successfully straddled two slightly different, yet equally enviable musical lines. An accomplished guitarist in the punk, jazz, and experimental music worlds since the early 1980s, he was invited to join alt rock icons Wilco in 2004, in an intact, reshuffled lineup. While Wilco is the band

Coheed and Cambria return with the third record in their current five-album cycle, Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe. It continues the ongoing story of a sci-fi savior, from his parents meeting to his childhood, and eventually, however, it will wrap up. As is customary for Coheed and Cambria, the songs don’t often tell

With 2017’s Reaching for Indigo, Haley Fohr, aka Circuit des Yeux, showcased her compositional savvy, crossing folk and avant-garde leanings. The album also spotlighted her voice in a way that previous projects hadn’t, her emotional and technical range on glorious display. 2020’s Jacqueline (released under her Jackie Lynn moniker) captured Fohr steering a rawer sound

Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) Sierra Falconer 2025 (Sundance) The first objective of any anthology is to find a common thread while avoiding becoming mired in the inconsistencies that often ensnare this type of storytelling. In her feature debut drama, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), Sierra Falconer confidently sidesteps this common faux pas

1. “Planet Telex” The finest musical introductions serve as a welcome party. Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady”, Queens of the Stone Age’s “Feel Good Hit of the Summer”, and TV on the Radio’s “Halfway Home” all proclaim, “You’ve arrived!” to whatever otherworldly realm the band in question has discovered. “Planet Telex” is, undoubtedly, a grand welcome

Severin Films’ Blu-ray of Lamberto Bava’s  The Mask of Satan (1990) is a revelation for fans of Italian Gothic horror, not least because virtually nobody’s ever seen it. The opening scene of The Mask of Satan presents a helicopter dropping off a group of expendable young ninnies to go skiing in the Alps. To Simon Boswell’s pulsing rock score,

If there’s anything axiomatic about contemporary Berlin, it’s that things usually don’t go according to plan. Despite Germany’s excellent international PR in the domains of engineering and economic + social stability, on the ground, you’ll witness anything from more than 20% of the population living in poverty, buses never showing up despite announcements, to massive

Josh Homme formed Queens of the Stone Age from the ashes of the heavier stoner rock band, Kyuss, which broke up in the mid-1990s. The Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age Split EP contained the final studio recordings of his former group but also introduced the world to his new act with, most notably, “If Only

It took five years for Cryogeyser to complete the follow-up to their full-length debut, Glitch, and much happened then. “I got an SG,” lead singer Shawn Marom dryly noted. “I leveled up.” They also shared that five is a significant number for the band’s self-titled follow-up. “Everything is in a stage of five: elements, the grief

With his first award-winning documentary, 2017’s Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, director Alfonso Maiorana illuminated the profound impact of musicians of Indigenous heritage, including Link Wray, Robbie Robertson, Jesse Ed Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and Charlie Patton, on the evolution of rock music. His new film, Goddess of Slide: The Forgotten Story of Ellen

The 42nd edition of the Torino Film Festival swooped into town the last week of November 2024. Known for its lowkey approach to fanfare and its emphasis on showcasing works by first and second-time directors, such as Ali Asgari, in the main competitive section, this year’s event made some radical turns. Under the new director

Previously, we brought you the “100 Best Alternative Songs of the 1980s”, a five-part series that attracted thousands of readers worldwide and explored the best alternative music the 1980s had to offer. Now, we move forward in time and examine what many consider the “golden age” of alternative rock, with the “100 Greatest Alternative Singles

Foxes in the Snow is the first time Jason Isbell has made an album alone. It’s a record with no backing band or instruments, just Isbell and an acoustic guitar. It’s also Isbell’s first record since his late 2023 divorce with his longtime partner, musician Amanda Shires. The couple had been public about their difficulties,

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist Liz Pelly Atria / One Signal January 2025 Music journalist Liz Pelly’s passionate, exhaustive excoriation of Spotify, Mood Machine, isn’t just an invective against music streaming. It’s also another cautionary tale about how tech behemoths and hyper-capitalists have built unprecedented fortunes at

Kentucky native Sierra Hull is a masterful bluegrass mandolin player as evidenced by the many honors she has received, the places she has performed, and those she has accompanied. Hull is a six-time International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA)Mandolin Player of the Year award winner and has been nominated for a Best Folk Album Grammy, played