At long last, Tom DeLonge and Blink-182 are back together again. After months of rumblings, the guitarist reunited with Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker, and fans of the pop-punk pioneers couldn’t be happier. The band’s co-founding guitarist has been out of the lineup since 2015, replaced during that stretch by Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba. But […]
There are few bigger indie success stories in the past 20 years than Death Cab for Cutie. The group, founded in Bellingham, Washington in the mid-’90s, began like many underground acts — with witty and intricate songs recorded on a budget. But they quickly displayed a penchant for radio-friendly rock anthems that tapped into a […]
What makes a truly awful metal album? It’s not just a lack of riffs, awful production, or quarter-assed vocal takes. Most of these records suffer from overdosing on compromise, whether it’s hopelessly chasing a trendy sound or a failure to age gracefully; others have visions more realized yet too noxious to raise the horns with […]
For decades, having a signature guitar was reserved for classic rock legends — the Claptons, the Hendrixes, the Pages, the SRVs and EVHs. But that’s no longer the case. From pop-punk to heavy metal, alt-country to neo-soul, modern artists of all genres and backgrounds are getting signature guitars from companies big and small. Among the […]
“Even though I did punch her, I thought she was a genius,” Courtney Love said of Kathleen Hanna in 2002, while attempting to explain riot grrrl to The Strokes live on MTV. Twenty years later, and about 30 since the movement’s inception, trying to define it still feels fraught. Riot grrrl was always a nebulous concept, […]
If punk rock’s heart belonged to any one person, it beat in the chest of Joe Strummer. At a time when the movement was largely defined as a glue-sniffing “blank generation” with no future, the Clash’s frontman shaped it into something more purposeful, empathetic, ambitious, and even idealistic. In their brief time together, The Clash […]
Michael Stipe met Peter Buck in an Athens, Georgia record store in January 1980, and that fortuitous moment spawned one of the defining ‘80s bands. Joined by the rhythm section of Bill Berry and Mike Mills, R.E.M. worked up a jangly yet esoteric sound – equal parts Velvet Underground and The Byrds — that quickly became their […]
Looking back at 1982 in music, the headline is obvious: Thriller Sells A Bajillion Copies, Becomes World’s Biggest Album. But is it the year’s best album? Funny enough, Michael Jackson‘s sixth LP hardly even affected the charts that year — it snuck out in late November, just as Men at Work’s 1981 blockbuster, Business as […]
In the U.K., Kate Bush has been a major star since her chart-topping debut single, 1978’s “Wuthering Heights,” and has grown into a beloved national institution over the last few decades. In America, she’s closer to a cult artist who reached her peak of mainstream popularity with 1985’s gold-selling Hounds of Love, which spawned her […]
Compared to the last couple of years, 2022 has been a bonanza of incredible rock record releases. It seems like every week there are two or three projects just begging for proper time and attention. Many artists who were kept off the road due to the pandemic and were inspired to write during their forced, […]