Once upon a time it was weird to hear Green Day on pop radio. At this late date, when they've long been one of rock's definitive crossover bands, it's nearly as strange to see them release new music without pop radio support. Yet that's where we stand on the eve of Revolution Radio, the trio's 12th full-length album -- or 10th if you count ill-fated 2012 trilogy Uno!, Dos!, and Tres! as one drawn-out...
The White Stripes came together earlier this week to make their first statement as a band in a long time, decrying the use of "Seven Nation Army" in a fan-made video in support of Donald Trump's presidential bid. Now Jack White has taken it a step farther: He's selling "Icky Trump" T-shirts, a riff on the White Stripes' 2007 studio swan song Icky Thump. "Icky" doesn't even begin to describe the man,...
Dan Boeckner has one of those voices. He speaks, and it's low and worn and gravelly, the sound of someone who's been around, who has swallowed all the experiences the world tried to give him and has let them etch their marks into his body on the way down. There's that trope: the eyes of someone betraying they've, you know, seen some things. When Boeckner speaks, it's a similar effect. You can hear...
In the last few days, anyone who pays attention to music on the internet probably ran across a video of one very upset lady. A young mother apparently heard Vince Staples' 2015 single "Norf Norf" on a pop radio station and recorded herself freaking out and crying while reading the song's lyrics on her webcam. The video is at least a few months old, but it went completely viral in the last two days....
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters left the band in 1985, and he hasn't done anything with the other members of Pink Floyd since playing a one-off show with the band at Live 8 in 2005. But Waters is a longtime critic of Israel's treatment of Palestine. (Last year, he got into a public dispute with Dionne Warwick over the issue.) And along with David Gilmour and Nick Mason, the other two surviving members...
The virtuoso vocalist Amber Coffman is a longtime member of the Dirty Projectors, but she wasn't a part of that band's recent song "Keep Your Name." And now, she's gone solo, signing to Columbia and planning the release of a solo album called City Of No Reply. She wrote and recorded the whole album in Los Angeles, where she's been living for the past three years. And she's just shared the video for...
There's such a beautiful little irony to the realization that the guy from Fun. is singing backup for the guy from Joyce Manor. The guy from Joyce Manor is Barry Johnson, who, since 2008, has specialized in finely observed and wistful little lyrical details, and who has crammed those details into songs that often clock in at under 90 seconds. Joyce Manor are a pop-punk band, at least in theory, but...
Once upon a time, I couldn't stand Aesop Rock. This wasn't something I was eager to say out loud in public. I still bought his records, because if you cared about the idea of cerebral underground rap, you had to buy his records; it was a requirement. But I would sit there listening, brow all creased, trying to focus, trying to untangle what the fuck this guy was talking about, before throwing up my...
Dan Boeckner has one of those voices. He speaks, and it’s low and worn and gravelly, the sound of someone who’s been around, who has swallowed all the experiences the world tried to give him and has let them etch their marks into his body on the way down. There’s that trope: the eyes of…
The first half of “Denial” — the third single from Mannequin Pussy’s sophomore album, Romantic — is designed to sound like someone having a panic attack. Marisa Dabice is trapped inside her own head, unable to escape a spiraling depressive cycle: “At night sometimes my thoughts collide/ My body shakes/ I feel so separated from…
Back in April, Toronto punk band and Stereogum Band To Watch Greys released their second full-length, Outer Heaven. As it turns out, they have a second new album this year, and it’s out today by surprise.
Warm Shadow is a companion piece, a blearier and experimental sister project that has its roots in…
For those who grew up with the alt-rock ‘90s, the images are permanently seared into the subconscious: a lighthouse beaming across the overcast dawn, a bonfire raging in the pitch-black night, and two of the most iconic singers of the era belting through the long grass (and their own long hair). The video for the…
Four years ago, Solange Knowles released True, a delightfully dizzy and jittery R&B mini-album. It was an immediate sensation, and the joyous live shows that followed remain very happy memories. But after True, Solange largely went silent, releasing little new music in the ensuing years. As she announced earlier this week, she’d been spending that…
Danny Brown is still coming back to Earth. It’s nearing lunchtime, and he’s splayed out on a couch in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel, looking as if he’s just woken up or as if he’s still trying to restore his energy following the previous night’s show. The show in question was at Webster Hall…
Where are you going tonight? What are you doing out without a boyfriend?
I was 12, maybe 13 the first time a man tried to follow me. I was walking home from the library with a few new books in my bag, wearing a hand-me-down leather jacket and a pair of barely broken-in…
Every teenage balladeer hacking away at a guitar or piano imagines their songs unfolding into the kind of gorgeous sonic panoramas found on Billie Marten’s debut album, Writing Of Blues And Yellows. The difference in Marten’s case is that her songs really are that good, from their bare essentials all the way up to the…
The Olivia Tremor Control lined up their first big hometown show at the 500-cap 40 Watt in 1995. After a few years developing their kaleidoscopic live act in house shows and smaller clubs around Athens, Georgia, the psych rockers had built a reputation among the dozen or so people who might attend a given show,…
When bands last for a long time, it’s easy to forget how delicate they are as social units. In order to work together successfully, bands have to do more than just tolerate each other and sound good onstage. They must maintain a precise interpersonal stasis that exists independently of musical chemistry — a balance in…
The title of Orlando emo band You Blew It!’s new record is a German word with a number of attempted English translations. According to singer-guitarist Tanner Jones, “abendrot” can mean sunset, afterglow, or “the reddish pinks and purples after a sunset.” Jones also sees the word as a synonym for transition — a perfect one-word…
In the lobby of Philadelphia’s Hilton Garden Inn, Charlie Lowe, Beach Slang’s tour manager, leans over and adjusts frontman James Alex’s bowtie. Alex lives an hour away in the suburbs with his wife and infant son, but tomorrow Beach Slang will fly out for a European tour, so the band decided it would easiest for…
“I just wanna be perfect/ Anything less is shameful,” goes one song on gobbinjr’s forthcoming EP, vom night. Encapsulating an artist’s ethos into a singular mission statement is a futile exercise, but if you were to attempt such a feat for Emma Witmer’s endlessly inventive synth-pop project, that would come pretty damn close. Her music…
When Microwave released their debut album Stovall in 2014, frontman Nathan Hardy had recently disassociated from the Mormon Church. He returned to his home state of Georgia over a year before that from school and a missionary trip on the West Coast, itching to play some songs that he had written while out there. He…
Can you be kind? With this half-whispered question, Oliver Kalb opens the new Bellows album, Fist & Palm. It’s a frail assertion that things aren’t going all that well, that this album has a subject and that subject has committed a betrayal. …
Let’s get one thing straight: Chicago’s Slow Mass is not a side project. Although drummer Josh Sparks and guitarist Josh Parks both play in the touring version of Into It. Over It., the quartet treats this as a full-time band, and it’s nothing short of a passion project. Each of the members comes from a…
On virtually the first day Australian psych-dance act Jagwar Ma started to write their sophomore album Every Now & Then, they were nearly struck by tragedy. Having ventured into the wilderness a few hours north of Sydney in search of inspiration, Jono Ma (production, synths) and Gabriel Winterfield (vocals, guitars) found themselves stranded without food.
Brown’s Diner may not look like much, but it’s a Nashville institution. A low, gray, unassuming building with barely any windows, it sits near a busy intersection not far from Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. The dive started life in the 1930s as a roving food trolley, then set down roots in the Hillsboro Village neighborhood, where…
In a small back room of a Radisson Hotel in Appleton, Wisconsin, Chuck Auerbach is offering me a piece of gum. He’s just finished his first-ever live performance in conjunction with the city’s annual Mile Of Music festival, and I’ve been peppering him with questions about his forthcoming debut album. After our 30-minute conversation, which…
Tonight the Go-Go’s — the pioneering California quartet that melded punk and New Wave into inimitable musical staples — embark on a farewell tour signaling that they’re go-going for good. For the next month, the chart-topping band’s “classic lineup” (featuring vocalist Belinda Carlisle, Gina Schock on drums, guitarist Jane Wiedlin, and jack-of-all trades Charlotte Caffey)…
Earlier this year, Pinegrove released Cardinal, one of our favorite albums of the year so far. The group — built on the foundation of core duo Evan Stephens Hall (guitar/vocals) and Zack Levine (drums) — hails from Montclair, NJ and has steadily accrued a fervent following in the DIY rock sphere, often getting lumped in…
“You don’t let someone you love feel afraid,” Jilian Medford sings on the opening track of IAN SWEET’s debut full-length, Shapeshifter. Falling in love is terrifying in and of itself; realizing you’ve lost too much of your individuality in the process is even worse. Shapeshifter is built around a singular flaw — the compulsion to…
Did Sufjan Stevens record an album called Stalker in 1998? A Reddit user under the name lookitzpancakes alleged as much Wednesday afternoon. The user, later identified as a Dallas actor and musician named Marc Rebillet, posted images of the unreleased CD-R’s homemade packaging, which he claimed to have plucked from a Brooklyn dumpster after Sufjan…
Johanne Swanson has lived in many places, but hasn’t felt particularly at home in any of them. She started making music as Yohuna six years ago while on a year-long exchange program in New Mexico, a long ways away from where she grew up in Wisconsin. “I wanted to be in a radically different environment,”
Over this past Memorial Day weekend, four of the original members of the Anniversary — the much-beloved band from Lawrence, Kansas — reconvened to rehearse a few of their old songs. This would be the first time that the four of them — Josh Berwanger, James David, Adrianne DeLanda, and Chris Jankowski — had been…
There’s an intangibility to Katie Dey’s music that’s difficult to articulate. It’s best to point to specific moments: the hopeful opening pings of “you gotta get up to get up,” “all on you“‘s submerged longing, “unkillable“‘s squealing rush. Those three tracks — all from the Melbourne-based musician’s first release, asdfasdf — exhibit a sonic complexity…
Sun Club is a Baltimore quartet that plays a hard-to-define brand of art-rock that’s bright and furious at the same time. There’s sort of an aggression in all the weird angles and intensity of their music, but it’s a weird joyous aggression. The band’s made up of brothers Shane and Devin McCord, Mikey Powers, and…
Tegan And Sara changed my life, or at least that’s what I dramatically wrote when I did a deep dive into the group’s discography two years ago. While the Canadian duo scored their first mainstream hit only three years ago with “Closer,” they’ve been a formative influence throughout my entire life, shaping my identity and…
Halfway through Mitski’s Puberty 2, there’s a short, scratchy blast of noise called “My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars.” If you’ve seen Mitski Miyawaki live at any point over the last few years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard her power through this one like an anxious ball of energy: “I wanna see the…
Prodding punk quartet Speedy Ortiz with a variety of odd and unrelated questions might be a budding tradition at Stereogum. Last August at Outside Lands, we discussed Donald Trump, musician beefs, and the band’s comradeship with comedian Hannibal Buress, and at Sasquatch!, after Speedy’s set at our Toyota Music Den, I talked with lead singer/guitarist/songwriter…
