Nelly’s 2000 debut brought the life and sound of St. Louis to the world. It’s a syntactical maze of local culture that doubles as a flier for the greatest party you could ever imagine.
The Verve’s blockbuster third album—newly reissued in a five-disc expanded edition—has come to be seen as the swan song for Britpop’s cultural hegemony. But in 1997, it felt like a step forward.
The fourth album from Austin, Tx.’s A Giant Dog fuses the gaudy delivery of 1970s rock and the pillars of modern punk. Its songs offer lyrics about sex without typical depictions of love.
The electronic artist Martin Glass makes lounge music informed by exotica, emulating 1970s nippon pop, neo-classical, and ambient. Most of the sounds here are charming and innocuous.
Playing remarkably tuneful pop-rock at sludgy tempos, the Flint, Mich. trio Greet Death benefit from isolation. Their debut album is full of bludgeoning tones and diamond-cut production.
Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Albert Ayler, the Velvet Underground, Eric Dolphy, Dusty Springfield, and the other artists who changed music forever
The punk frontwoman and transgender trailblazer talks about the songs and albums that have meant the most to her, five years at a time.
It was nervous, robotic, nearly alien music. It must have come from over-programmed machines or over-stimulated humans. It was the sound of “de-evolution,” manufactured by a nerdy, uniform-clad band called Devo.
The rebirth of LCD Soundsystem is marked by an extraordinary album obsessed with endings: of friendships, of love, of heroes, of a certain type of geeky fandom, and of the American dream itself.
On his new EP, the 21-year-old Queens singer presents a series of heart-rending song sketches inspired by loss.
The third album from the UK singer-songwriter is unerringly compassionate. Her brooding post-punk is an unsettling backdrop for songs about the refugee crisis, Islamophobia, and poisonous politicians.
On Trash Generator, the Sacramento trio Tera Melos builds on its prodigious mix of post-hardcore and prog, reining-in the chops in service of catchy, harmonically rich songs.