Pop Culture

The alternative rock band ME., short for “Mark” (O’Connell) and “Eddie” (Reyes), was never supposed to exist. That’s partly because it was formed by two previous members of the Amityville group Taking Back Sunday, and partly because interpersonal tensions locked these members in a state of no contact for nearly a decade. Plenty remained unknown

Elvis Costello opens his 1978 album This Year’s Model with a jagged, two-minute blast of power-pop called “No Action”. It’s a song fueled by romantic obsession, resentment, and the particular frustration of being unable to let something go. The narrator insists he wants nothing to do with someone he clearly can’t stop thinking about. The

“Today’s gonna be tough for us,” mutters an endearing Italian journalist sympathetically as I scramble to find a spot to work amid the backrooms of queuing for security, coffee, toilet, food, screenings, then again security, and so on. He’s right. The Venice Film Festival has always had dubious logistics, but the days when the hottest

Empros. Blood Year. Station. Gnosis. Enter. List off the terse album titles in the discography of the Chicago-based metal outfit Russian Circles, and you might start to feel that you’re uttering a series of codewords meant to unlock an underground bunker in some unmarked part of the world. The enigma of these names is enhanced

As has happened with countless indie artists before him, All Set the Bone marks the moment Vermont musician Greg Freeman has fully come into his own. Upon finishing his critically acclaimed sophomore record Burnover (2025), Freeman had an epiphany about which direction his music should take; something came as a surprise because he thought the

Guitarist Tom Morello assembled the inaugural Power to the People Fest, held on 3 October 2026 at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland. As part of the protest rock group Rage Against the Machine, Morello was well suited to curate the lineup for this day of resistance and rock and roll. With its message of

In an era of deluxe reissues, streaming abundance, and ever-expanding archives, listeners are inundated with music from the past. Recent examples range from Bob Dylan‘s 39-CD The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings to the Beatles‘ five-CD deluxe edition of Revolver. For listeners, the question becomes not whether the material is valuable, but how

The Fool Embla and the Karidotters Die With Your Boots On 4 September 2026 Norway has always had an outsized influence on the music world relative to its small population, from Romantic-era composer Edvard Grieg through 1980s pop sensation A-ha to today’s hugely popular Aurora, Girl in Red, and Alan Walker. Norwegians also have eclectic

In the 12 years since Ibibio Sound Machine’s self-titled debut album, a few constants have emerged about the group’s work. On the most immediate aural level, every Ibibio Sound Machine record draws on styles shaped by longstanding connections between London and Lagos, with the band always working from an anticolonial perspective that recalls the philosophical

In 2019, Anne Helen Petersen published her widely shared BuzzFeed essay, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”. It examined the exhaustion of a generation expected to thrive in every area of life while taking on more debt, enjoying less security, and working harder for increasingly uncertain rewards. Even basic tasks could become insurmountable as the

Being a second-generation rocker following in the footsteps of a parent who blazed a groundbreaking trail is no easy road. Sure, there are built-in advantages to having a famous last name and growing up learning under a master, but then there’s the heavy weight of expectations from fans and critics and the pitfalls that go

Spend enough time around punk music and eventually someone will tell you that something isn’t punk. The band got too popular. The snare drum sounds too polished. Someone signed to a major label. Someone got a corporate job, bought a house, opened an IRA, or admitted to loving an album that millions of ordinary suburban

Hollywood producer Howard Hughes made his money the old-fashioned way. He inherited it. In his late teens, he obtained control of his late father’s Hughes Tool Company in Houston, Texas, which made a fortune by building a better drill bit. On his way to becoming a famous aviator, and long before his later life as

In September 2026 at the Polaris Concert & Award Ceremony in Toronto, the year’s best Canadian album and best Canadian song were awarded to two 333-year-old aliens in polka-dot jumpsuits. Guitarist Khn and drummer Klek, the extraterrestrials behind the microtonal math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine, took home the 2026 Polaris Music Prize for their album,

Two women refuse a martini at Hedda Tesman’s party. Thea does not drink; neither does Eileen Lövborg. Hedda lets Thea’s answer stand. Eileen’s is another matter. An English professor has just shown interest in Eileen’s new book, and she may soon be competing with Hedda’s husband for a university post. Hedda suggests that men who

September is a time of transition, a time of new beginnings, as a new school year begins, and bittersweet endings, with workers dragging themselves back into the office after summer breaks and vacations. It’s the month when the world begins to cool, and the leaves begin to crisp as the nights begin to overtake the

Conversations with Don DeLillo, edited by Thomas DePietro, is a 2005 collection of interviews with the greatest American novelist that somehow some people have never heard of. Conversations with Don DeLillo is now also a 2026 comic collection by artist Drew Lerman. His peripatetic interviews with DeLillo, however, are, as it happens, entirely imaginary. According to

When I first saw a preview for Digger, I thought it would be a survivalist movie, with Tom Cruise playing some guy who looked like he had walked out of an episode of Doomsday Bunkers. Turns out I was wrong on the specifics, but more or less right on the overall vibe. Digger is about

Day and Night Carly Rae Jepsen School Boy / Interscope Records 18 September 2026 The royalty structure of music streaming platforms has made lengthy tracklists profitable for artists and their labels, but pop savant Carly Rae Jepsen has been releasing double-sided albums for the better part of a decade. After the success of Emotion’s 2016

Over their three-set oeuvre, the Dublin-based Gilla Band have trafficked in jagged, lurching, fragmented noise forays. Singer Dara Kiely—juggling wry observations, glossolalic confessions, and meme-like nonsensicalities—operates as a hyper-vigilant trickster, gyrating amidst the artifacts of contemporary life. If Kiely fleshed out his agitated persona on 2022’s Most Normal, he cranks the panic volume another notch

The Juniper Tree Midori Hirano Viernulvier / Thrill Jockey 2 October 2026 Composer, pianist, and electronic music producer Midori Hirano is a uniquely gifted artist who moves across a variety of experimental sub-genres and, in the process, constantly builds an eclectic catalogue of music. Her projects are as varied as they are numerous, even just

Jack and Lily Wolter, the siblings who head up the British indie band Penelope Isles, spent the five years between their second and third albums doing the kinds of things people in indie bands tend to do. Namely, they started side-project bands, released solo albums, and went surfing. Well, the surfing may not be all

For nearly 30 years, the Album Leaf has made instrumental music that seemed to exist somewhere beyond songwriting. Jimmy LaValle’s new album, A Body of Voices, changes that, bringing a succession of guest singers into his ambient electronics. The result is a surprisingly convincing pop record, but its real achievement is how the voices seem

Meshell Ndegeocello’s new album of soulful, inventive duets, Synonym, is among her most intriguing and pleasing. The bassist, singer, and songwriter covers 15 songs here, but she works considerable magic on them all. Her taste is famously wide, even though her own sonic signature is clear: she loves great songs from many genres, but she

Worst Girl in America is about class. From bleak Midwestern landscapes to sparkly outfits, Slayyyter’s 2026 album takes us on a tour of life among the lower classes, where partying and DIY art are among the few outlets for those who feel economically and culturally marooned. It also looks and sounds like the film projected for

I recently binged Season 8 of Love Island USA, reality TV’s premier summer dating property. My friends, and surely the rest of the world, were watching too. In the chat, we gasped over Sincere’s bad behavior, ogled Carl’s Instagram, traded Reels reenacting Titi’s row with Trinity. When our hapless spouses came into the room during

Rock ‘n’ roll and politics make strange bedfellows. Never was that more the case than in 1972, when Bloodrock, a Texas-based hard rock band from Fort Worth, wrote a song dedicated to one of America’s most important political whistleblowers: Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers. The story begins in 1967 when Secretary of Defense Robert

In 1945, French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut (“raw art”) to describe creative expressions born entirely outside the boundaries of official artistic institutions. Visiting psychiatric hospitals, observing folk artists, and collecting the work of self-taught recluses, Dubuffet outlined his thesis in his foundational 1947 manifesto, L’art brut préféré aux arts

Scholar Eleanor Johnson’s Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women begins with a historical reversal. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Johnson looks backward, searching literature and popular culture for the long history behind what she sees as a recurring phenomenon: the tendency of patriarchal societies

There is something strangely sincere about calling an album “I Love My Computer”. For many born just before Y2K or just after the new millennium, computers were part of your childhood. As technology expanded, so did your online experiences. The computer became a venue for formative moments: music becoming personal when you downloaded albums for