Mike Frazier doesn’t waste time. A title card flashes over footage of him opening a garage door: “The Belly Is In the Brain.” It immediately cuts to Frazier, now seated and centered in the frame. “For two years I felt debilitating nausea, chronic pain, and the worst mental health crisis of my life.” As he […]
It’s an eventful day in the world of North Carolina indie duo Sylvan Esso, who have released their first single in three years, “WDID,” and pledged to remove their digital catalog from Spotify. The confrontational cut is the first to be released on their own label, Psychic Hotline. “As we prepare to release new music, […]
There was a stretch in 1990 when our Saturdays belonged to midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. My friends and I would don our best bondage gear and join the long queue outside the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles, waiting in “anticipation” to belt out the cult musical’s songs while performing the […]
French musician Melody Prochet’s fourth album as Melody’s Echo Chamber, Unclouded, will arrive Dec. 5 from Domino Records and, as previously reported, was produced and co-written with Swedish musician Sven Wunder. A new song, “In the Stars,” is out now. “The music I create unusually inhabits the liminal zone between realism and fables,” says Prochet. […]
Though he began releasing music in the early ’90s, Jeff Tweedy has been a steady, calming force for aging indie fans for the past 20 years. After kicking a painkiller addiction and seemingly moving past the anxiety that fueled early Wilco classics such as Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy has mainly explored warm, genial […]
It takes guts to call yourself the world’s best American band. To be fair, White Reaper never technically did that. They just released an album in 2017 called The World’s Best American Band, stocked it with top-to-bottom arena-slash-convertible rock reminiscent of the opening of an ’80s movie shot in a high school parking lot establishing […]
You know Seth MacFarlane’s voice. You’ve heard it a million times as Peter, Brian, and Stewie Griffin. Or maybe as Stan and Roger Smith on “American Dad!” Or maybe as the eponymous bear from the Ted movies. If you’ve seen a Seth MacFarlane vehicle, you’ve not only heard his voice plenty, but you know that […]
Ruston Kelly was in the middle of a years-long existential crisis when he left his own body and watched himself sitting at his piano. An astral projection. He was sober, clean from drugs for a few years. An apparition approached him while he floated. It was Jesus. As the figure came closer to Kelly, the […]
Even in our post-genre era, Doja Cat remains hard to pigeonhole. Since hitting superstardom in 2019, her hits have shifted between hip-hop, pop, R&B, Afrobeat, and even indie singer-songwriter. But even with all that, I didn’t expect Vie. In the lead-up, buzz suggested Vie would be a retro pop album. And it is, but let’s […]
Chris Cuffaro here tells Matt Thompson how he captured this band as the sonic storm was set to break. The shoot came through SPIN. I got a studio at the lot on A&M Records. I walked into the studio at the lot, looked around, and said, “OK, we’ve got a gray backdrop, a black backdrop; […]