The tone for the evening was established early. Peter Murphy stormed the stage, scepter in hand, before the house lights could be dimmed. “Let’s get going,” he shouted at his bandmates. “Fuck the lights.” The occasion was the opening night of Bauhaus’ 2022 U.S. tour — a short run of dates that sticks to the […]
Fifty-nine seconds into “The Same,” the first track from The Smile’s debut release A Light for Attracting Attention, the unmistakable voice of Thom Yorke begins singing about how “we are all the same” atop a sci-fi pulse of piano, acoustic guitar, and analog synthesizers. There’s no easy release from the tension of the song’s slowly […]
A little over two decades into his career and approaching his 45th birthday, Pusha T is a veteran working in an industry constantly searching for new talent, and a genre redefining itself as quickly as it grows in popularity. Despite that, Pusha’s success comes from a discography decidedly contained by the single subgenre of “coke […]
Arcade Fire’s We — a project of resolute, zeitgeisty grandeur — is not only an album built for 2022. It reflects this week, this day, this moment. Why? Because it’s deliberate in its thesis that America is fucked beyond repair. There is no space for misinterpretation. And at this deeply troubling juncture in our history […]
Most people at rapper-producer redveil’s age are working on an identity outside a prescribed cycle of routines–at school, at work, at home–to ready themselves for the independence and uncertainties of early adulthood. On the Maryland artist’s latest project, learn 2 swim, released on his 18th birthday, this search has been a public as well as […]
The emotion started welling up during, of all songs, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Something about the sight of a gaggle of teen girls, singing the nonsense chorus of that White Album classic started to crack my critical resolve. By the time Paul McCartney hit the chords of “Hey Jude,” already two-plus hours into the opening night of […]
When we first met Melody Prochet, the Paris-based singer-songwriter wasn’t mourning love lost; she was patiently feeding lost love to a sonic kaleidoscope and minting a DayGlo, beat-assisted species of shoegaze as lush, warm, and candied as Cam’ron’s 2002-2005 wardrobe or an interactive Yayoi Kusama installation. Her project’s 2012 debut remains a psychoactive magic carpet […]
When Bloc Party released their debut studio album, Silent Alarm, in 2005, it garnered the kind of praise that young, bright-eyed musicians fantasize about. Earnest comparisons to legendary acts like Blur, U2 and The Cure were just the beginning. They, alongside bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Futureheads, were considered an intricate part of indie […]
Vinyl Nation, a new documentary from directors Kevin Smokler and Christopher Boone, is, as the title may suggest, as much a chronicle about a growing community than it is about the medium of vinyl records. To be clear, the history of vinyl pressing, from its early market dominance to its later decline due to the […]
At a time when it would be understandable to pack things in, Spiritualized leader J Spaceman (Jason Pierce) found himself thriving in the past few years of isolation. As he’d walk through an eerily silent London, Spaceman found himself inspired by the world “full of birdsong and strangeness and no contrails.” The experience allowed him […]