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On October 7, 1977 -- 40 years ago tomorrow -- Queen ensured the music world, and the sports world, a good four decades' worth of stomping and clapping and yelling when they released "We Will Rock You" as a single. In a formatting choice that goes 100% counter to every possible way it was played afterwards, "We Will Rock You" was put on the B-side of the 7" single with "We Are The Champions," Queen's...
Beck should give the Grammy back. Kanye West is wrong a lot, but he was right about this. Back in 2015, Beck took home an Album Of The Year Grammy for the thoroughly OK pastoral lifestyle-folk album Morning Phase, and Kanye pretended that he was going to storm the stage before laughing and waving it off. But after the show was over, West said that he really wasn't kidding at all: "Beck needs to respect...
I once got busted trying to steal a magazine from my hometown library. The 8/8/91 issue of Rolling Stone apparently had one of those sensors on the last page and it beeped from my backpack on the way out. I was gonna bring it back. I just wanted to take it home to read the Tom Petty cover feature and you're not allowed to take periodicals home. It wasn't even a new issue. Petty's songbook may not have...
In the relatively short amount of time they've been a band, Toronto four-piece Weaves have garnered a good amount of well-deserved acclaim. Last year, we named them a Band To Watch ahead of their self-titled debut, a collection of bright, frazzled art-rock that wound up earning Weaves a ton of buzz and a nomination for Canada's Polaris Music Prize. You might expect that the band would be taking a little...
What a time to be a live television program. The only TV many people watch in real time these days is sporting events, Game Of Thrones, and maybe primetime political talk shows -- and even that last category you're far more likely to encounter excerpted on social media after the fact. Saturday Night Live's ratings are up again in the age of Trump, but our shared cultural experience of the show still...
Ten years ago, when R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People turned 15, Stereogum released a compilation of artists covering each song from the album (Drive XV is still available here) and, at the time, we got Mike Mills to talk a little bit about every track. Today, Automatic For The People turns 25 -- an extensive reissue will be released next month -- and we figured that, in honor of the occasion, it would...
Early next year, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame will induct a new class of honorees -- usually about five bands or artists. And this morning, the Hall Of Fame has announced its list of 19 nominees -- artists who might make the cut. Artists are eligible for the first time when it's been 25 since their first records were released, which means artists who debuted in 1992 are now eligible. So for the first...
On Sunday night, an absolute piece of human shit named Stephen Paddock murdered 59 people and injured hundreds more at Route 91 Harvest, a country music festival in Las Vegas. And while Paddock, at least as far as we know, did not have a violent history, he may have been planning similar massacres at a pair of other big music festivals. TMZ reports that Haddock booked rooms in a hotel overlooking Chicago's...
“Hello, baby, how are you doing,” Princess Nokia greets me on the phone. Her voice is tender and genuine. She has been touring for the last year and a half and remains ridiculously busy, but in this rare free moment she’s chatting about 1992 Deluxe, Rough Trade’s expanded re-release of last year’s breakout mixtape 1992.
In the relatively short amount of time they’ve been a band, Toronto four-piece Weaves have garnered a good amount of well-deserved acclaim. Last year, we named them a Band To Watch ahead of their self-titled debut, a collection of bright, frazzled art-rock that wound up earning Weaves a ton of buzz and a nomination for…
Ten years ago, when R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People turned 15, Stereogum released a compilation of artists covering each song from the album (Drive XV is still available here) and, at the time, we got Mike Mills to talk a little bit about every track. Today, Automatic For The People turns 25 — an extensive…
It’s hard to place Faris Badwan. There’s the fact that his name alone sounds exotic. There’s the fact that his demeanor is some improbable mix of stoned, moody detachment and wired, up-all-night intensity. He speaks in a wispy, wandering murmur that could equally signal boredom, mild frustration, aloofness, or reflection. And, obviously, there’s the way…
Welcome to the fourth installment of “Tracking Down,” a new Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
When Jessica Lea Mayfield moved from Ohio to Tennessee a few years ago, it was not merely a professional decision. The relocation put her at the heart of the music industry in Nashville, but more crucially it gave a new start after some incredibly traumatic events in her life. A singer with a gracefully laconic…
Strike one for an indie band forming in 2009: playing “really bad, wussy emo rock 10 years after it was relevant.” Strike two: doing so in Willimantic, Connecticut, a city commonly known as “Heroin Town” in a state whose most renowned rock band to that point was probably Hatebreed. Strike three: call yourself the World…
Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz are twin sisters who make up the aptly named duo Ibeyi, which translates to “Twins” in the Yoruban language of West Africa. When I met up with them in New York, the two had arrived in the city an hour before — Lisa-Kaindé flew in from London and Naomi from Paris.
Someone hands Joe Casey another drink. He leans back, a smile breaking his reddened face as he observes it, his fingers now cradling an empty whiskey glass and a new apple juice/whiskey concoction, which looks pretty much just like whiskey. An unlit cigarette — the who-knows-which installment in a seriously endless lineage of pre-show smokes…
Rick Antonoff looks like he’s second-guessing this. Wearing a T-shirt and shorts, he’s perched on a board in a dunk tank, surveying the crowd gathered to watch as people take their shot at hitting the target — which clangs with a sound that immediately conjures state fairs and old carnivals — to send him into…
Michael Cera tends to come off as a music fanatic that occasionally moonlights as an actor. He played with Sex Bob-Omb in the film Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and the indie-rock supergroup Mister Heavenly (featuring his friend Nick Thorburn) in the real world, played on a Weezer album, and even released a lo-fi folk…
Nothing about Moses Sumney is ordinary. When you set out to solve for x in the equation of two strict Ghanaian parents who also happen to both be pastors, the solution is usually not one acclaimed singer-songwriter operating at an intersection of genres. Especially one that has a B.A. in Creative Writing, a circle of…
There may be better places to see Zola Jesus than a desiccated upstate New York factory full of intense-looking art-goths, but there probably are not many. The bottom of the Mariana Trench, maybe? A deep-space probe? Adrift on an ice floe through inky-black nighttime water while the Northern Lights dance above you? Point is: There…
Ask almost any musician and you’ll get the same answer: Making albums is hard work. From the creative side, wrangling the abstract forms and ideas of music into a tangible presence, to all the technical aftermath, like the long list of minute tweaks that make a record sound good and correct, a lot of exertion…
Chris Hillman bought his first smartphone just a few months ago. “I didn’t want one,” he admits. “I had a flip-top phone and that was fine. But there’s a new baby in the house. My daughter had a girl, so I got the smartphone for the camera.” Soon his trepidation turned to astonishment at the…
