Kurt Vile’s proven to be one of the more prolific songwriters of this generation, with seven tremendous albums under his belt before the age of 40. In 2017, Vile teamed up with Courtney Barnett on a collaborative album, Lotta Sea Lice, that showcased the two riffing off of one another's loose, lackadaisical styles. His last proper full-length, 2015's b'lieve i’m going down, saw Vile as an observant...
Elton John began his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour with a goodbye to a much younger artist. Performing in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Sir Elton dedicated "Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me" to Mac Miller, the Pittsburgh rapper who died Friday at age 26. As USA Today reports, John's dedication went like so: I'd like to dedicate this song to Mac Miller. Unbelievably, 26 years of age, and passed away...
After taking home the Outstanding Variety Special (Live) award for his work as a producer on Jesus Christ Superstar Live In Concert at the Creative Arts Emmys Sunday night (9/9), John Legend has officially completed his EGOT -- making him the youngest person to do so. Legend now joins the select ranks of performers who have taken home an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. Andrew Lloyd Webber and...
It feels like a whole lifetime has passed since Watch The Throne, the blockbuster collaborative album by Kanye West and Jay-Z. Technically, it's been seven years. The album generated lots of hits, debuted at #1, put up multi-platinum numbers, and launched a very popular and entertaining co-headlining tour. It was the rare event-rap collaboration that lived up to the hype. But Jay and Kanye's relationship...
Mac Miller has died. TMZ reports that the Pittsburgh rapper was found earlier today at his home in the San Fernando Valley, dead of an apparent overdose. Miller has battled substance abuse for some time, and he was arrested for a DUI and a hit-and-run in May. Miller was 26. Miller was born Malcolm James McCormick in Pittsburgh. In high school, he started rapping, and he also taught himself to play...
One marker of a great musical act is that nobody can agree on their best album. At first glance, that designation might not seem to apply to Sunny Day Real Estate. The Seattle quartet's 1994 debut album Diary towers over their discography in terms of influence and recognition. It's universally regarded as one of the sacred texts of '90s emo, one of those releases that spawned countless imitators and...
California has long been the land of reinvention in the American imagination, the place that people go to lose and find and then lose themselves again. Even the word "California" is synonymous with "freedom" in our popular culture -- in some cases boundless, in others extremely limited. There is no place that better exemplifies California’s mythology, its promises and failures, than Los Angeles....
Have you ever really stopped and thought about what it must be like to go to space? We've spent our entire existence as a species looking up at the sky and making up stories to try and explain the endless, unknowable mysteries waiting for us. And then, millennia later, there was just the tiniest percentage of human beings who actually made it up there, who traveled into that expanse and got just a...
Tim Kasher is really, really glad to be back in a band. Though the longtime artist put out a solo record, No Resolution, just last year, he hasn’t released anything with his best-known project, post-hardcore stalwarts Cursive, since 2012’s I Am Gemini. But that’s all about to change: Come October 5, Cursive will drop an…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
Yowler debuted in 2015 with the release of The Offer, a short, lush collection of songs that honed in on a very particular strain of sadness. The project started as a songwriting outlet for Maryn Jones separate from the music she worked on with the Columbus-based indie-folk act Saintseneca and her scrappy rock band All…
Kennesaw, a small Georgia town just north of Atlanta, is most famous for two incidents. The first, the 1982 passage of a law mandating gun possession as a largely symbolic rebuttal to a handgun ban in a county three states away, gives you context for the community that would erupt in the second event: the…
There’s a lyric on Thou’s new album that sums up their 11-plus year existence pretty succinctly: “We are vast unknowable beings without the confines of your perception.”
John Rossiter came of age as an emo kid in the Midwest, so it goes without saying that he’s had some formative Saddle Creek experience. But with only the slightest prompt, the Young Jesus frontman is gonna say it anyway: “Album Of The Year is one of my all-time favorite records,” he gushes, describing the…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.
1991 is the year alternative rock went mainstream. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden were about to take over the world; Out Of Time and “Losing My Religion” turned R.E.M. into megastars;…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.
Jill Cunniff is a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised. But today the Luscious Jackson frontwoman and founding member is in Los Angeles visiting her brother, who, naturally, works in TV.
Rico Nasty is a nu metal-channeling rager, a Balenciaga-wearing pop trap diva, and a bullish shit-talker. All three personas, and the ones in between, thrive on an infectious catharsis. The rager — sporting black, spiked-out hair and the leather choker to complement it — is who shows up to perform at New York’s SOBs on…
Jeremy Enigk is backstage at San Francisco’s Rickshaw Stop, hours away from beginning the next chapter of his life. The singer-songwriter — and, as frontman of the now-defunct Sunny Day Real Estate, the critically dubbed “king of emo” — has spent the past year performing stripped-down acoustic shows in living rooms across the US. But with…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.
Ed Kowalczyk has just flown from Denver to Austin. Immediately before that, it was back to the States after playing a festival in Europe. But the Live singer doesn’t sound tired…
Susanna Nicchiarelli was first drawn to that voice. A low alto, lightly accented, dipping in and out of key, it could have been a man’s voice; after all, the singer’s name was Nico. “I remember being somehow attracted to this voice. It has something,” Nicchiarelli told me. “It said something. It spoke to me, in…
Tierra Whack was never boring. Even within the abbreviated context of a festival set, most musicians cannot make that claim — many of her fellow performers last weekend at Pitchfork Music Festival certainly could not — but Whack is not most performers. The Philadelphian rapper and singer is a rainbow-colored whirlwind of ideas with the…
Jim O’Rourke is searching for a word he’s forgotten how to say in English. After more than a decade living in Japan, the experimental musician doesn’t speak his native language much anymore and warns me at the beginning of our interview that he may occasionally have trouble. He’s trying to describe his new album, Sleep…
Over the last five years, the British quartet Wolf Alice have built up the kind of career arc that feels like the beginnings of a storied career. After a couple initial iterations, the group cohered into a lineup consisting of frontwoman Ellie Rowsell, guitarist Joff Oddie, bassist Theo Ellis, and drummer Joel Amey before launching…
