Like many musicians, Tim Burgess had big plans for 2020. The Charlatans frontman was slated to showcase a forthcoming solo album, I Love the New Sky, in an appearance at the New Colossus Festival in New York City and at SXSW in advance of the LP’s May release. Things didn’t go quite as planned, of […]
When Ben Gibbard was putting the finishing touches on Death Cab For Cutie‘s 10th album, Asphalt Meadows, he had a feeling that it would appease longtime fans. And he was correct. “As we started playing it for friends and people close to us, we started to get that reaction that was not just people being […]
While studying at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, Sampa the Great encountered an “intense culture shock” — one that nearly stopped a journey of self-exploration and expression of her African culture. “Being visited with the actual reality of how the world works and how the world sees me as a young African girl, that […]
New Jersey’s Armor for Sleep first came onto the scene in the early 2000s during the rise of emo with their 2003 debut Dream to Make Believe. At a time when a sophomore record could make or break a band, Armor for Sleep found further success with their sophomore breakthrough, What to Do When You […]
As 42,000 perpetually nervous New York Mets fans looked on as the team clinged to a one-run lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have the best record in baseball, on a breezy late-summer night in September. Ahead of the ninth inning, Australian trumpetist Timmy Trumpet waltzes out of the stands and onto the grass […]
A new generation has discovered the infinitely danceable punk and electro-pop of Le Tigre and their songs of pride and protest. More than a decade after the trio went on indefinite hiatus, teenage TikTokers have begun attaching clips of frustration and hope to the thumping basslines and Casio keyboard hooks of 1999’s “Deceptacon,” as singer […]
Domo Genesis is driving through Los Angeles with a red fitted cap on his head, the blue sky blaring through his sunroof, and his phone positioned vertically so you can barely see anything else. While he’s barely in the frame, Domo is more focused on being heard over Zoom. For the first time in over […]
The first time Hayley Kiyoko performed on a two-foot-wide stage, she was playing at a mall in Oregon for five people. It was around 2013 and she was promoting one of her earliest records, A Belle to Remember. The night before Kiyoko speaks with SPIN, however, was notably the first time since then that she […]
Pussy Riot has come with a full agenda to Los Angeles’ El Rey Theater, ready to bounce and rage to a soundtrack of sultry pop hooks and noisy, glitchy electronics. And yet nothing onstage is more essential to the night’s purpose than the confrontational words and graphics flashing on the big screen behind them. “Vasectomy […]
Marcus King is all of 26 years old, but he plays rock’n’roll as if he was genetically engineered in a laboratory from bits of Duane Allman, Jimmy Page, Billy Gibbons and Stevie Ray Vaughan. King’s music feels timeless, especially when he’s laying waste to concert stages with his longtime mates in the Marcus King Band. […]