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. More than 15 years ago, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker considered retiring from music altogether. This was a few years after Pulp’s last album, We Love Life, and shortly following the loss of his...
The Pusha T/Drake beef is still going strong! Apparently, on an unreleased song called "Paranoia" that was originally supposed to be on Pop Smoke's posthumous debut album, Pusha fired some more shots at Drake. "You know reality bites/ It's chess not checkers/ Those empty threats only sound good on your records/ If the patois is not followed by blocka/ It's like marked for death Screwface, without the...
M.I.A. was right. Well, she ended up being wrong about a lot (vaccines especially), but she was on the money about the internet, the focal point of her third album /\/\/\Y/\, which came out 10 years ago today. The songs on /\/\/\Y/\ are mostly about ideas that seem obvious now -- the nefarious rise of social media, the erosion of personal privacy, the inescapable connection between big technology and...
It has been five long years since My Morning Jacket last released an album. And intermittently for some time after The Waterfall arrived in 2015, Jim James would talk about how there was all this other material left over -- enough for a sister album that could come out quicker than MMJ's LPs tended to. Obviously the latter part has not been the case, but that only really made the prospect of a second...
I started Stereogum in 2002 with a LiveJournal and a dream (to get free CDs). Seriously though, I started this site to discuss new music with strangers on the internet. Without all of you who comment thoughtfully on our features, send us hot tips, and aggressively point out our typos, this would be a really boring website. The Stereogum community is millions strong and I am confident in saying it's...
At a certain point, it no longer makes sense to use the word "country." Margo Price does not make country music. Maybe she never did. Price spent years trying to make it into the established systems of Nashville country, and it never happened. Instead, Price found her way to prominence through Jack White's Third Man label -- a Nashville operation that has nothing to do with the Nashville establishment....
Yesterday, the British rock band Kasabian announced that longtime frontman Tom Meighan was "stepping down" from the band, "by mutual consent." They kept the reasoning vague, chalking it up to "personal issues." Today, those issues have become a lot more apparent. The BBC reports that Meighan has appeared in court, pleading guilty to assaulting his former fiancee in front of a child. The band made its...
What makes a song go viral on TikTok? It's obviously not a scientific process, but viewed through binoculars from the brink of 37, this much seems obvious: The tracks that blow up on the youth-dominated video app tend to be ones that lend themselves to silly dancing or sight gags. My fellow old millennial Drake appeared to have drawn the same conclusion when he released "Toosie Slide," a #1 single...
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.…
Anyone who has ever seen the Eurovision Song Contest knows that it’s a spectacle like no other. Between the elaborate special effects, outlandish costumes, and dramatic ballads and upbeat pop songs peppered with awkwardly translated English lyrics, the long-running European institution is ripe for parody. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga — starring…
The last time the Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch released an album was in 2017, and chances are you could still be making sense of that music nearly three years later. The colossal, mind-expanding Mirror Reaper was one 83-minute song that completely warped your sense of time as it stretched everything out into a…
In 2017, Phoebe Bridgers released her debut Stranger In The Alps. With that album alone, she was already greeted as one of the most exciting, assured young songwriters newly on the scene. But in the ensuing years, Bridgers’ stature as a respected musician and generational voice has risen significantly, and quickly. The following year, she…
You could never question Jay Watson’s psych-rock bona fides. The man’s resume, of course, includes Tame Impala, the band that implausibly made the leap from being weirdo hallucinogenic rockers from western Australia to arena-conquerors worldwide. But all along the way, Watson also played in Pond, Tame’s sister band. And alongside that, he’s been putting out…
Aaron Dessner is always working on a ton of music. Quarantine has been no different. Recently, he’s had a couple projects germinating — one of which was a new song with none other than R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. It all sounds pretty idyllic in a way: If you’re going to have to be isolated from friends…
If you’re feeling any guilt about quarantine-induced creative inertia, take heart: Mark Duplass finds himself “weirdly thriving” at the moment and he feels kinda guilty about that too. “The inherent privilege of where I’m at is so obvious and ridiculous,” the wildly prolific 43-year old writer/actor/director says at the beginning of our Zoom call, “so…
Even after years of us knowing them, there is still something weird about Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. On the surface, they are a straightforward, classicist indie band — a group that seems easy enough to get on first listen, a sound that could approach comfort food. But there is something alchemical in their songwriting that,…
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.
This summer, every festival is cancelled. Most of the cancellation announcements have been brief and businesslike, but one was emotional. In April, the…
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.
There were all these other lives Jason Isbell could’ve led. He could’ve never left Drive-By Truckers, and spent a steady career as one…
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.
Over the last decade, Mike Hadreas has steadily remade himself. Back in the beginning, with 2010’s Learning, there was no clear plan for…
If you sat down with any Dublin rock musician in the last year, it wouldn’t take long to pull some thoughts out of them about how their city’s music scene had suddenly become a point of fascination for the international press. There’s been a burgeoning moment, interesting young guitar bands coming out of the UK…
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.
It’s hard to believe that Hayley Williams’ new album, Petals For Armor, will be her first solo effort. She’s been in spotlights of…
After spending his teenage years woodshedding on Bandcamp, Will Toledo and his DIY-project-turned-band Car Seat Headrest arrived in the middle of last decade with the one-two shot of 2015’s Teens Of Style (a rerecording of selections from his DIY days) and 2016’s instant classic Teens Of Denial, both released by the indie institution Matador Records.
If you’ve come into contact with Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” in the last decade or so, it’s likely been in meme form. Pizzas, leashes, Reese’s, Jesus — all things that have been cut into pieces as the deathless chorus to the Cali rockers’ hard-charging hit has, as with so much late-’90s and early-’00s pop cultural…
