Bad Bunny is at the top of his game. In under five years, the Puerto Rican rapper has become the biggest Latin pop star on the planet. His success is transcending cultural and language barriers that can be limiting for Latin acts. He’s mainstream. After making history in December with the first all-Spanish LP to […]
When Mark Ronson was working on his namesake AppleTV+ documentary, Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson, there was no shortage of not just internationally acclaimed artists he had access to, but genre sonic pioneers willing to sit down with the super-producer and expose secrets behind some of their biggest songs. Calm, yet exceedingly curious in […]
Alex Lifeson didn’t have some grand master plan for all of this: the glossy-looking website, the big rollout of new music, the subsequent parade of interviews. But the dominos just keep tumbling, and he’s going with the flow. With the launch of his new signature Epiphone electric guitar, the Alex Lifeson Les Paul Axcess Standard, […]
There’s a staggering sentence in the bio that accompanied the sample of singer-songwriter Yola’s sophomore album, Stand For Myself. In discussing a perspective shift since the release of her 2019 Grammy-nominated debut, Walk Through Fire, she says she was persuaded from being her true self, sharing, “There was a little hiatus where I got brainwashed […]
Almost exactly two months ago, Bill Stevenson and Milo Aukerman of the Descendents joined our Twitch stream for a very special episode of our weekly rock ‘n roll interview show/therapy session, Noise Pollution. Normally, our streams stay on Twitch for the limit of two weeks and then disappear into the ether, but today, we brought […]
“I’m ready to move on to the next thing,” Bartees Strange tells SPIN. It’s a logical impulse, especially since his debut LP, 2020’s Live Forever, restlessly shuffles through genres — indie-rock, folk, emo, hip-hop, soul — like playing cards. October also wasn’t the most optimal time for a life-changing career move: With COVID-19 grinding live […]
Pat Flynn knows the nightmare of being in a full-time band. He’s lived on the road and in studios. He’s depended on album sales to pay his bills. And he’s watched as the need for commercial viability and stable income helped to tear apart his 2000s hardcore band Have Heart after they’d finally risen out […]
Playing blisteringly tight, searingly good, and crowd-drenching sweat-filled live sets were giving Dublin’s Inhaler an old-fashioned breakout-in-the-making buzz, that is until the pandemic put a halt to just about everything. They were on the eve of their biggest tour yet in America, set to play sold-out venues, extra added dates, and had landed a sweet […]
It’s taken generations for Juneteenth to become the kind of holiday that Black Americans feel comfortable getting loud about. For pedal steel guitar prophet Robert Randolph, it wasn’t until his mid-30s that he learned the history behind the holiday commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865. But his passion […]
In the world of reggae-rock, Rebelution remains one of the staples that have held together the scene for the last decade-and-a-half. Along with peers like Pepper and Iration, the four UC Santa Barbara alumni have churned out one album after another of reggae Billboard chart-topping hits. Ever since bursting into the scene with 2007’s self-produced […]