The juggernaut rolls on. Billboard reports that Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus' implausible country-rap smash "Old Town Road" is once again the #1 song on the Hot 100, a position that the song has now held for 12 weeks in a row. In the process, "Old Town Road" has defeated some heavyweights. Taylor Swift and Drake both had new songs out this week. It didn't matter. "Old Town Road" reigns supreme. This...
For the past three years, the Chicago-based podcast Better Yet has been posting longform interviews with punk and DIY musicians. And now they've recruited a bunch of those musicians to pay tribute to one of the greatest albums to ever emerge from their city. The album, Wilco's god-level opus Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, has become the source material for the tribute compilation all of god's money. Out 7/10,...
Dave Grohl is already on the record as a Billie Eilish fan. "My daughters are obsessed with Billie Eilish," the Foo Fighters frontman said in an interview earlier this year. "The same thing is happening with her that happened with Nirvana in 1991. People say, 'Is rock dead?' When I look at someone like Billie Eilish, rock and roll is not close to dead!" Today, Grohl guested on Queens Of The Stone Age...
It turns out Jeopardy! contestants aren't always the biggest music fans. Last year, a contestant confused Uncle Kracker with Kid Cudi. They haven’t been able to get the Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, or Radiohead clues. And it turns out they're not familiar with the 1975 either. "I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It was a No. 1 album for this 'yearly' band," Alex...
Brothers and former Oasis bandmates Noel and Liam Gallagher supposedly put an end to their ongoing feud in December 2017. Of course, not even a month later, Liam tweeted, "Fuck the truce." And so, the Gallaghers' feud blazes on. Last February, Liam said that Noel’s wife is "the reason Oasis is no longer." Now, in a recent column for Wired UK magazine, Noel is firing back. Noel shot down the possibility...
"You wanted the worst, you got the worst." - Fred Durst *** We didn't have smartphones in 1999, and I can assure you no one was lugging a laptop around Westerville North High School back then. Plus by the time Limp Bizkit released "Nookie" in mid-June we would have been on summer break. So it definitely didn't happen the way I half-remember it happening, the way it probably happens now when a teen-beloved...
Yesterday, we learned that Glenn Danzig still uses a flip phone. Today, we learn that Jack White has still never even owned a cellphone of any kind. (Presumably, he only uses antique rotary phones hidden in tastefully upholstered furniture.) And he thinks the rest of us sheeple look damn silly staring down at our tiny little screens all the time. White basically says as much in a new interview with...
Prior to making his name in the early 1990s at the Haçienda and through his big-beat project Lionrock, Manchester-based DJ Justin Robertson once held a Sunday club night called Spice. Among its regulars were Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands, two college students from London who, like Robertson and other aspiring young musicians at the time, attended Manchester University in part to be near the city's thriving...
“Method Man,” the lead single of Detroit-based rock musician Stef Chura’s new album, Midnight, paints a picture of a dude whose condescension is dreadfully magnetic. Driven by an fervor and fixation similar to that that fuels the type of relationship it describes, Chura’s vocals and the accompanying instrumentals speed up and intensify as the song…
Carlos Santana has a lot to celebrate in 2019. It’s the 50th anniversary of his band’s self-titled debut album, which was released on August 30, 1969. Two weeks before that, the band gave a legendary performance at the Woodstock festival in upstate New York. They’d been a popular live act in San Francisco, but their…
The rain can force us into unexpected places. Sometimes, it’s for the better. Such is the case when I meet Welsh musician and novice furniture maker Cate Le Bon in New York City during a torrential downpour. We take refuge in the Guggenheim, as our expected coffee shop has been overtaken by others also finding…
Trevor Shelley de Brauw is a pretty busy guy. In addition to being the guitarist in Pelican and RLYR — and releasing an excellent solo album, Uptown, in 2017 — he’s also a father and works full-time as a music publicist. (Full disclosure: de Brauw did press for my band United Nations’ last full-length in…
Do you remember being small in a big confusing world? Do you remember feeling excitement for the first time or being cognizant of how clothes fell on your body for the first time? Not many people do, or most of us don’t dare to think back on it. For shoegazey Madison rockers Slow Pulp, this…
(Trigger warning: this article contains discussion of sexual assault.)
In 2015, Charly Bliss had self-released a three-song EP called Soft Serve and were more than content to play tiny Brooklyn venues whenever the opportunity arose. “We were crushing it,” says drummer Sam Hendricks. “Spike Hill on a Tuesday.”
You can call Holly Herndon a doctor now. When I meet the experimental composer in lower Manhattan in April, she’s just arrived from the Bay Area, where she successfully defended her dissertation at Stanford’s Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics. Now that her PhD program is behind her, Herndon has moved from California…
Part of Sass’ origin took place at a party in a Minneapolis apartment complex turned personal palace that has 35 rooms and seven bathrooms, all lavishly dedicated to the 1960s. (Really, it’s quite something.) It was in one of those rooms that Stephanie Murck met Willem Vander Ark. Murck had been involved with some other…
“Let’s do the whale.”
It’s impossible to step into the American Museum Of Natural History and not feel a sense of childhood wonder. For anyone who grew up in New York City or the surrounding area, it was the site of class field trips and sugar-rushed weekends where it seemed like the entire…
Not many people would cackle as their house goes up in flames, but that image perfectly illustrates the kind of person and artist Yola is. Named for that tragic experience, her debut album Walk Through Fire came out in February. Its seamless blend of triple fiddles, steel, and shimmering tremolo guitars feels superbly refined, making…
The Get Up Kids were looking for a job and then they found some jobs. After the beloved Kansas punk band went on hiatus in 2011, main songwriter Matt Pryor became a farmhand — “I picked radishes and tomatoes and shit and it was awesome.” Guitarist/vocalist Jim Suptic went back to school and landed with…
In the first half of the decade, the Portland duo Pure Bathing Culture made their name with a mixture of dream-pop, soft rock, and folk leanings — and became a Stereogum Band To Watch in the process. Across their first two albums, 2013’s Moon Tides and 2015’s Pray For Rain, the couple of Daniel Hindman…
If you were a rock photographer in the mid-’60s, being invited to photograph Bob Dylan was perhaps the best thing that could happen to you. You’d get a front-row view to the then-burgeoning countercultural revolution. You’d get to trade wisdom with the tousle-haired genius who wrote “Visions of Johanna.” And, if all went well, you’d…
La Dispute were in a rut. After playing together (give or take a few members) for close to 15 years, the post-hardcore experimentalists were too stuck in routine and familiarity with each other to come up with ideas for their upcoming album. In search of something — anything — to jump-start their songwriting process, bass…
Admittedly, the name Intellexual is a bit of a forehead-slapper, but hear me out here: The record is good. Like, really good. You’d expect as much from Nico Segal and Nate Fox, guys who played a key role in crafting Chance The Rapper’s euphoric sound and who count Frank Ocean (“U-N-I-T-Y”), Kanye West (“Ultralight Beam”),…
