Epiphanies come, as epiphanies do, in unexpected and often far-flung settings. For trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, three such horizon-openers converge in his latest album, New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal. Recorded at the famed Frank Gehry-designed concert hall, it’s a scintillating performance in which he is joined by Ole Mathisen on saxophone, Tomas Fujiwara on […]
Mark Feld was born in London in 1947, and adopted the stage name Marc Bolan as a teenager. Like many British rock stars of his generation, Bolan flirted with different sounds as he adapted to the rapidly changing times, starting a skiffle band as a child before becoming a mod and then a psychedelic folkie. […]
Richard Philip Henry John Benson was not a normal person. In the mid-90s, he was a hunk Italian prog guitarist in nuts-tight denim, bare-chested beneath a black silk blazer, famous across Rome for his fretboard stunt show VHS tapes. The guitar tricks on his mail-order “instructional” videos were nearly irreplicable — dizzying two-hand tap triplets […]
Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series. In ancient Greek literature, the lost city of Atlantis was a fictional island that sank into the Atlantic Ocean. In late ’70s Washington, D.C., Atlantis was briefly the namesake of a key […]
Horror Show is a new series uncovering the stories of artists’ experiences with the supernatural, paranormal, and unexplained—and how surviving it provided new appreciation for creating in the here and now. For many generations, the family of filmmakers Ximena and Eduardo García Lecuona has experienced a long-running phenomenon: When it’s your time to leave this […]
In December of 1991, I was asked to do a photoshoot with Henry Rollins for SPIN. The majority, if not all, the photos I had seen of Henry had presented that intensity and punk-like rage he was known for. I planned to capture images that went beyond that facade while remaining true to the Rollins […]
Of course you’ve missed some great stuff since 1985! A lot of you weren’t even born then! Not only has the advent of digital releases made more music available, but it has also made keeping up (whatever that means these days) increasingly impossible. So regard the following 40 recommendations as mini-subsurface maps and drill accordingly! […]
For all of the much-needed weirdo adrenaline and absurdity that Sarah Sherman brings to Saturday Night Live — acting casually with singing meatballs protruding from her neck, or portraying 1922’s pointy-eared, silent film Nosferatu irked by 2024’s muscular iteration — nothing mesmerizes more than her stand-up persona, Sarah Squirm. Beloved for taking outrageous body-horror comedy […]
Walk into any Fluevog store—from Vancouver to Amsterdam—and you feel it immediately: this is not fashion as usual. It’s part art gallery, part spiritual sanctuary, part joyful rebellion. For 55 years, Vancouver-born legendary designer John Fluevog has been quietly reshaping what a shoe can mean, building a world where craftsmanship, whimsy, and radical self-acceptance stand […]
Rumors of MTV’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In October, it was announced that many of MTV’s subchannels in Europe and South America would be discontinued at the end of 2025. But the social media telephone game quickly led to many believing that MTV as a whole, in the U.S. and everywhere else, was shutting […]