Pop Culture

PopMatters’ Best Folk Albums celebrates and explores some of the most compelling folk music releases of 2024. Each record weaves stories that honor cultural roots while embracing experimentation to capture a spectrum of human experience. These albums transcend genre boundaries, merging folk with Americana, indie rock, Afrobeats, and even electronic influences. Yet, each entry remains

Goldenwings Opa Craft Recordings / Jazz Dispensary 22 November 2024 Uruguayan Jazz fusion may not be a well-known subgenre to listeners outside of South America, but the band that essentially defined it nearly 50 years ago are getting their due, thanks to an impeccable vinyl reissue. Craft Recordings and Jazz Dispensary have teamed up for

Small Changes marks Michael Kiwanuka‘s fourth LP in 12 years. He has been around for some time, but the lack of output gives the false impression that he is still relatively new. This is the artist whose track “Cold Little Heart” was the theme song for HBO’s Big Little Lies after all, a television series

The idea of mechanically reproducing sound opens up countless revolutionary potentials. Recordings may not be able to replicate every aspect of a live performance, but they make it possible to bring music to the masses. This capacity for circulation makes it possible to spread creative ideas beyond any conception of the local. Through increasingly sophisticated

The artist born Joshua Michael Tillman in Maryland in 1981 has seemingly led countless lives. Growing up in a strict Christian household where secular music was forbidden, he played drums in the post-rock outfit Saxon Shore and indie folk band Fleet Foxes, released a slew of rustic folk solo albums as J. Tillman, and eventually

The Grammy Award for Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album was first given out in 1987 but has contained precious few ambient records among its rank of nominees. There have been ambient-adjacent artists, but the Recording Academy’s view of the genre has always skewed towards either the safe pastures of Windam Hill-styled meditations or

When David Fincher‘s Fight Club hit movie theaters in 1999, Baby Boomer critics such as Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times deemed the film “fascist macho porn”, while the Observer’s Rex Reed wrote that Fight Club was a film with no redeeming value. Yet, ten years later, The New York Times dubbed Fight Club “the

It’s unclear why Loose Cattle named themselves that. The phrase usually refers to cows that break from the herd and roam about freely. With all respect to farm animals, this is generally due to ignorance and not paying attention rather than a bovine’s desire for liberty. They can be a danger to themselves and others

Ten Modern American Work Songs St. Lenox Don Giovanni / Anyway 25 October 2024 Andrew Choi has a distinctive style. He’s intelligent and talented, as his credits reveal. The son of Korean immigrants is a Princeton University graduate with a PhD in philosophy from Ohio State University and a law degree from New York University.

Last year, Rogê brought over two decades of experience in the MPB scene to the international stage with Curyman, his first US release. Having fully moved from his home in Rio de Janeiro to Los Angeles, he returns with Curyman II, another set of samba-based tracks through which he connects his carioca roots with his

A drawback of being the mastermind behind one of metal’s most acclaimed bands is that no matter how much he might want to expand their sound into realms beyond heavy/extreme music, there will always be strong opposition from metal purists to anything new Mikael Åkerfeldt attempts. Metal’s bizarre dichotomy – perpetually seeking new ways to

My colleague at PopMatters, Iain Ellis, has embarked on his most ambitious book project. Punk Beyond the Music: Tracing Mutations and Manifestations of the Punk Virus charts how punk has seeped into every crevice of contemporary life, far beyond its familiar associations with safety pins and three-chord songs. As a scholar steeped in punk and

We Will Be Wherever the Fires are Lit Tashi Dorji Drag City 22 November 2024 Search experimental, improvisational guitarist Tashi Dorji‘s vast Bandcamp page, and you’ll discover sinewy-yet-jagged nylon string excursions, electric smoke circles of noise and drone, duos and trios bashing it out, and even a digital album’s worth of yawps, grunts, and other

Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996 Various Artists Light in the Attic 18 October 2024 In the documentary Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996, made to accompany the Light in the Attic compilation album of the same name, journalist and narrator Vitalii Bardetskyi traces the contours of what he calls a

It’s Friday, 1 November, in the City of Angels, and there’s a buzz in the air surrounding the historic arena many know as “the fabulous” Forum, where King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are set to kick off their fall 2024 tour. The Australian psychedelic rockers have grown into a genuine phenomenon in recent years,

The dreaded moment of compiling the end-of-year list is upon us, and this year has been particularly challenging. It is always an intense exercise, distilling all that an entire year has to offer into 20 picks, but it also helps to put everything in perspective. Looking back, would it be an exaggeration to call this

K-pop has had its share of scandals, controversies, and accusations of unfair label practices. Yet, 2024 was when it felt like some of the industry’s darkest machinations became alarmingly visible. While the dissolution of LOONA and dismantling of 2023’s crossover rookies FiftyFifty in years prior felt like one-offs, few could’ve imagined that NewJeans, one of

Another mad scientist, another zombie army. A one-hour programmer from Monogram Pictures, Revenge of the Zombies (1943) is redolent, not to say aromatic, of its wartime context. As directed with dollops of visual style by Steve Sekely and shown to its best effect on Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray, the movie mixes Nazi spies with racial and sexual

Tom Waits’ Mule Variations turns 25 this year. Waits marked the occasion with a previously unreleased version of “Get Behind the Mule”, followed by “Mule Conversations”, a 40-minute video of songs and interviews about the album. Meanwhile, his label (ANTI-) announced a limited edition re-issue on silver vinyl. As with all of his work, the

Pavement understood from the beginning that mythologies could benefit a band. Starting in the late 1980s with their cryptically titled debut EP, Slay Tracks: 1933-1969 (1989), Stephen Malkmus, who went by S.M., and Scott Kannberg, who adopted the name Spiral Stairs, seemed intent on creating an enigmatic aura for themselves and their recording project.  There were precedents.

Poet and writer Olivia Gatwood probes the psychology of a fembot who realizes she was created by and for a man. Her first novel, Whoever You Are, Honey, follows a young woman, Mitty, as she connects with her new neighbor, Lena, a beautiful sentient AI woman who thinks she is human. Gatwood takes our anxieties about the

In Session Albert King with Stevie Ray Vaughan Stax / Craft Recordings 18 October 2024 As the story goes, Albert King was playing a residency at Antone’s in Austin, Texas, in the mid-1970s. Club owner Clifford Antone, a strong advocate for a young hot-shot guitarist from just outside of Dallas named Stevie Ray Vaughan, was

Max Richter‘s In a Landscape invites listeners into an evocative world where serene soundscapes capture beauty and complexity. Blending acoustic and electronic elements, the album explores what Richter calls the reconciliation of polarities: “the electronics with the acoustic instruments, the natural world with the human world, and the big ideas of life with the personal

Alex E. Chávez is known as a “borderland sonic theorist”. He not only writes and performs music – most notably as a member of the Chicago-area band Dos Santos – but is also an academic, the author of Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño. His love of music composition

1. Alfred Schnittke – “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled with Grief” arr. the Kronos Quartet (1997) Alfred Schnittke’s most famous piece is probably known to most people through a version that is not quite his own. Initially composed for chorus from the works of St. Gregory of Narek, “Concerto for Mixed Choir” was

Clever Girl: Jurassic Park Hannah McGregor ECW Press October 2024 “Here’s a detail of Jurassic Park you may have forgotten,” writes Hannah McGregor in Clever Girl, “all of the dinosaurs are engineered to be female to prevent them from reproducing.” I had indeed forgotten this fact about Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1993 film. As a child

In her 1968 song from Song to a Seagull, “Cactus Tree“, Joni Mitchell predicted her life’s path: “One will ask her for eternity / While she’s so busy being free.” Mitchell prioritized artistic freedom over relationships that threatened to stifle her. In 1965, at 21, she gave up a daughter for adoption and wrote a

Leonardo da Vinci (Original Score) Caroline Shaw Nonesuch 25 October 2024 Everyone who has heard of Caroline Shaw knows she is some kind of genius. (This was semi-officially certified in 2007 by the MacArthur Foundation.) As a singer, she is a mainstay in the tremendous a capella group Roomful of Teeth. As a violinist, she

The next step is not to let yourself get lost in the story. Chasing your beat at any cost will do you no good. As a reporter, it’s better to follow the abstractions. This was my initial sense of the narrative and lead character’s motivations in the new point-and-click adventure game Phoenix Springs by the

Though Ha Ha Heartbreak, Maarten Devoldere’s third album as Warhaus, was released just two years ago, the emotional arc of the music between that and his newest LP, Karaoke Moon, suggests a long emotional journey. On the sleeve art of the former, Devoldere stands with a cigarette in his mouth, a look close to a