It’s after midnight in the early days of the new millennium and Chris Carrabba is wide the fuck awake. He hasn't been getting much sleep lately — especially not at nighttime. Like a handful of his Southeast Florida skate and surf world comrades, the 24-year-old aspiring musician primarily lives out of his van, only occasionally borrowing a couch or indoor shower from friends with more stationary...
Songs For Australia is the new Julia Stone-curated compilation benefitting Australian brushfire relief. The comp features artists including Damien Rice, Joan As Police Woman, Kurt Vile, Martha Wainwright, Sam Amidon, and more covering Australian classics by the likes of Nick Cave, Sia, Gotye, and Gang Of Youths. Upon the announcement of Songs For Australia we heard Stone's own rendition of Midnight...
"If I was a man, then I'd be the man." So goes the chorus of Taylor Swift's latest Lover single "The Man." In the video, the hypothetical comes true. Swift stars as a man who makes the most of his privilege: manspreading on the subway, being loud and obnoxious in public, throwing an ostentatious Wolf Of Wall Street-style self-celebration in the office. You might not even notice it's Swift behind the...
Dan Snaith still hasn’t quite learned how to sit still. "If you want to change it, you must break it/ Rip it up and something new will grow," he sings on "Sister," the opening track from his new album Suddenly. For the first half of his career, that's exactly how he continually reinvented himself. After emerging in the wake of the '90s IDM boom with 2001's bloopy Start Breaking My Heart, the producer...
Phoebe Bridgers will release her second album this year, but it sure doesn't feel like her second album. Since rocketing to indie stardom with 2017's Stranger In The Alps, the Pasadena native has launched high-profile releases with a pair of supergroups. In 2018, she teamed with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus to release an instantly iconic EP under the name boygenius. In 2019, she and Conor Oberst teamed...
Less than 30 seconds into his new album, the Detroit rapper Boldy James murmurs the kind of line that can rattle around in your head all day: "My friends came and went, but most of them was murder victims/ Dead before 20, or caught a frame and had to serve a sentence." There's an implacably sad coldness to a line like that. The dead are murder victims, and so are the people who went to prison for murder....
Car Seat Headrest has long had its acolytes, but Will Toledo's project really took off upon the release of 2016's Teens Of Denial. Beyond being one of the best albums of the decade, it represented a whole new level of Toledo's songwriting and arranging after years of churning out music online. Since then, Toledo re-recorded his 2011 collection Twin Fantasy as a proper, full-fledged studio album, but...
Soccer Mommy's music has a distinctive turn-of-the-millennium touch. Twenty-two-year-old bandleader Sophie Allison grew up listening to Avril Lavigne and Michelle Branch, pop artists whose clean guitar lines and glossy grunge appealed to suburban teens whose hangout of choice was, by necessity, the mall. The aesthetic of her sophomore album, color theory, is a veritable moodboard for the era that she...
It’s after midnight in the early days of the new millennium and Chris Carrabba is wide the fuck awake. He hasn’t been getting much sleep lately — especially not at nighttime.
Snarls’ music is as much about self-preservation and baring teeth as their name suggests, even though that wasn’t the point. One day someone blurted out “The Snarls” at practice. From there they dropped “the,” and the Ohio-based band had the perfect moniker to contain their roaring emo pop-punk fusion.
If there’s one moment on Caribou’s upcoming album Suddenly that boils down its elastic essence, it’s the transition from verse to chorus on second single “You And I.” Initially, the song floats on pillowy chords, a twinkling lead melody, and a persistent midtempo beat, instantly recalling the spaciest moments on the last Caribou album, 2015’s…
It’s been said before, quite possibly about every album Destroyer’s released in the past 15 years, but the latest, Have We Met, is a very different Destroyer album.
If you live in the British coastal town of Brighton, it’s hard not to feel the ever-present draw of the sea, for better or for worse. For Dana Margolin, the pebbly beach and great watery beyond that signal the end of Brighton’s city center became particularly entangled with her life around the time she was…
No matter how vulnerable or genuine a musician’s work is, when they get up on stage there is always an added performative element. Whether under their own name or an alias, they’re recreating a past state of mind — one that still might be fresh, but is reconstructed nonetheless. Ella O’Connor Williams considered this when…
Every album Daniel Lopatin has made feels like a portal into an alternate universe. His earliest work as Oneohtrix Point Never, made almost solely on his father’s old Roland Juno-60 synthesizer and collected on Rifts, formed a sprawling multi-album narrative about an astronaut dying in space. The crumbling TV commercials of Replica, MIDI church hymnals…
David Bazan is crying while driving. Many scenes in the new documentary Strange Negotiations find the once and future Pedro The Lion frontman alone, steering his sedan down endless highways between emotionally taxing house shows. In this one, he reaches his breaking point, despairing over the loneliness of his chosen path and the conflict between…
Over the course of this decade, Jenny Hval has built up a catalog of boundary-pushing, thought-provoking electronic music that’s rightfully earned her consistent acclaim and fascination. Two months ago, she released her latest collection, The Practice Of Love, the culmination of that decade’s worth of work. The immediate impact on first listen was hearing the…
For the sake of technical accuracy on their Bandcamp tags, Glass Beach identifies as a Los Angeles “post-emo” group. But ask the infectiously gleeful quartet where they live spiritually, sonically, and socially, it’s all the same answer: “online.” “Us, and people who are online as us, get information about the outside world from our Twitter…
Over the years, Brittney Parks has undergone her own personal apotheosis. It all started with the fiddle. She was mesmerized as a child after witnessing an Irish folk band performing in her hometown of Cincinnati. She begged her mom for a violin. Parks became mostly self-taught growing up, defining her style in church and warping…
Emily Yacina’s new song “Gleaming” is an upward rush of momentum. “Meet me here/ I’ll show you/ The same light/ I’m feeling,” she sings, her delivery breathless, words spilling out in an incantatory pulse. The track was originally supposed to be entirely instrumental, and it wasn’t until late in the process of making her new…
The legendary Liz Phair is releasing a memoir today, Horror Stories — you can read an excerpt from it here — and she’s also releasing a brand-new song, her first new track since 2010’s Funstyle, if you don’t count this Christmas original from 2014. “Good Side” finds her reuniting with producer Brad Wood, who she…
I am trying very hard to make this orange look like an orange. But after trying my best to bring my illustration of Adrianne Lenker’s snack to three-dimensional justice, I must concede that I have inadvertently drawn the sort of bowel movement that should make one hurriedly call their doctor.
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.…
