On her fifth album, Black Encyclopedia of the Air, Camae Ayewa (better known as Moor Mother) paints a world where time is broken, a shifting wasteland where she explores issues of violence and identity on a generational scale. This catastrophe is a familiar setting for the Philadelphia artist, who blends her poetry and music in […]
Perhaps no artist was better equipped to withstand quarantine, at least from a logistical perspective, than Brandi Carlile. The singer lives on a farm in rural Washington state, about 45 minutes outside Seattle (and 10 minutes from her tiny hometown of Ravensdale). Her core bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth are her neighbors, and their families […]
Eddie Vedder was slated to pull headlining double duty at his Ohana Festival this weekend with a solo set on Saturday and bringing Pearl Jam back to Southern California for the first time since 2013. However, following Kings of Leon’s sudden withdrawal on Thursday to tend to a family matter, Vedder sprung into action. The […]
On a windy rooftop above Pier 17 of New York’s South Street Seaport—and approximately three and a half hours after the show’s advertised start time—the Fugees performed together for the first time in 15 years, presenting a colossal show taped to be aired as part of this weekend’s Global Citizen Festival. Billed as a pop-up […]
On his breakout mixtape, 2019’s Die for My Bitch, rapper-producer Baby Keem chants “I am 50 Cent” over and over in an almost-monotone fashion, bringing in the disorienting beat-switch on “MOSHPIT.” Though he claims to have been “just randomly saying it,” in a Complex interview after the mixtape’s release, his references and similarities to the […]
By late 1969 the Beach Boys were in deep trouble. The sunshine surf rock sound that skyrocketed the band to international fame was now firmly out of fashion, replaced by harder rock. Their long-running distribution deal with Capitol for their Brother Records imprint was over. It had been three years since their last big hit, […]
ABOUT THE FESTIVAL The highly anticipated, multi-weekend festival in Palm Springs is fundamentally a giant pool party. Mix in sold-out hotels, after-hours parties, and world-class electronic headliners and you get Splash House. The colorful, sun-soaked weekend event spanned the Renaissance, Saguaro, and Margaritaville hotels and festival-goers took over the pool areas and booked out the […]
The National and Bon Iver are two of the biggest names in indie music, and they rose to prominence around the same time. The National cemented themselves as mainstays with their 2007 breakthrough, Boxer, and Bon Iver released their storied debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, just a couple of months later. It only makes sense […]
In 2019, Halsey released the fiery “Nightmare,” an urgent, industrial anthem that aptly captured the universal “female rage” amplified by the patriarchal doom of the Trump era. The song, a stark departure from her pop-centric releases in the past, was noticeably left off of their third album Manic. The track, however, was never written off […]
What the fuck are perfect places, anyway? Those were the biting last words, the closing lyrics to Lorde’s Melodrama — an album that magnificently captured the blissful madness of being 20 years old: liquor-soaked limes and parties ‘til dawn; identity crises and cataclysmic breakups. That record, released in 2017, was addictively urgent, a work of […]