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Vampire Weekend released their instant-classic third LP Modern Vampires Of The City on May 14, 2013. It was a different world back then: We were all still wondering what Yeezus would sound like, Arcade Fire hadn't even announced Reflektor yet, and Miley Cyrus was still a few weeks away from releasing "We Can't Stop." A more innocent time, to be sure. More than 52 months have passed since then with...
For a song that's been so often reduced to '60s Montage Cliche #00001B (Note: Please use only in case of rights restrictions for the Youngbloods' "Get Together"), the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" is still something of a miracle -- a successful translation of avant-garde jazz into pop music, a harmonic convergence where every singer and player is at their best, and a song that actually feels more resonant...
We were only there for three or four songs. It was enough. Last Thursday was one of those rare nights when Chris DeVille and I, the two Stereogum staffers who refuse to live in New York, were in the city anyway, splitting a hotel room the night before we jumped on a train up to the Basilica Soundscape Festival. We'd been at another show, and we'd left early. I'd read something about MHD, the French...
The Houston-based Day For Night festival is entering its third year, and it just announced a stacked lineup. Nine Inch Nails, Thom Yorke, St. Vincent, Tyler The Creator, James Blake, Justice, Phantogram, Pussy Riot, the Jesus Lizard, Laurie Anderson, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Perfume Genius, and Sky Ferreira make up the top half of the bill, and the lower rungs are filled with great acts like Cardi...
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 superfriends, collaborations with a veritable music industry who's who on his resume,...
There are weeks when the "Album Of The Week" idea seems entirely ridiculous and insufficient, when there are so many great records flooding in that it seems sad and unfair to highlight just one. This is one of those weeks. There is a whole lot of fucking great music coming out right now. Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Luciferean Towers is an overwhelming surge of power, a soaring and crashing light...
Alvvays are currently touring Europe in support of their very good sophomore album Antisocialites, and some shit went down at their concert in Antwerp, Belgium over the weekend. While the band was playing "Party Police" off of their 2014 debut, some idiot in the audience crashed the stage and tried to kiss frontwoman Molly Rankin. That's really not an OK thing to do, but for some reason, the dude seemed...
Last month, Morrissey announced that he'd signed a deal with BMG to launch his own label and that he had a new album called Low In High School ready to come out this fall. And today, Morrissey has confirmed all of it. Low In High School, which Morrissey recorded with past collaborator and veteran rock producer Joe Chiccarelli, is set to come out this summer. It has a tracklist full of song titles that...
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…
Emily Haines has been releasing music for 21 years, stretching her ineffably gorgeous songwriting across a variety of genres from synth-pop to raw acoustic instrumentation. Under the name Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton — a fitting moniker that evokes mortality as well as comfort — she continues her talent for soundtracking intimate emotional burdens…
Twenty years ago this month, in September of 1997, Capitol Records became the first major label to sell and digitally distribute a single from a well-known artist on the internet, arguably one of the most significant milestones in the history of the music industry. Duran Duran’s “Electric Barbarella,” the second single from the band’s Medazzaland…
Next Monday, a unique double-header is coming to LA’s Hollywood Bowl: New Order and Goldfrapp. The pairing is an interesting one, New Order being legends and progenitors in the field of synth-pop and the shape-shifting Goldfrapp (mostly) being a like-minded descendent from two decades later. Having just released a new album, Silver Eye, back in…
Welcome to the third installment of “Tracking Down,” a new Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
There are streets like this all over America. Broad boulevards lined with roadside diners, fast-food outposts that haven’t been updated since the ‘80s, small stores with signs from the decade before, auto-parts shops, blocks where everyone knows everyone else who lives there. In pop culture, it often gets figured as “nowhere,” but it’s more accurate…
With three rapid-fire albums in just 14 months throughout 2014 and 2015, high-octane garage-psych combo Wand established themselves as one of the most prolific bands in America. Plum, the Los Angeles band’s fourth LP, is the sound of Wand slowing down and broadening their palette.
A silver van with California plates has just pulled up outside Brooklyn’s Murmrr Theatre, off Prospect Park’s Grand Army Plaza, and behind the wheel is a familiar face. And yet, different.
It’s not just that DIIV’s Zachary Cole Smith now sports two-tone locks, his familiar bleached blond hair newly offset by long dark roots.
Pig-headed masculinity run amok? America in spiritual crisis? A dying Earth? This sounds like a job for Tori Amos!
Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley — the songwriting duo at the core of Toronto-based indie-pop band Alvvays — look a bit drained as they both lean on the edge of a picnic table in Chicago’s Grant Park. It’s hard to blame them, given that it’s the final day of a sprawling four-day Lollapalooza. I’m drained…
The Cool Kids are a decade deep in the game but they feel like rookies again. To compare them to the new wave of rookies in the NBA, they would be most like Ben Simmons. The 6’10” 21-year-old is officially listed as a forward but he can truly play every position on the floor. The…
The US record industry was doing numbers in the late 1990s that seem incomprehensible now. The year 2000 was the all-time peak, with 785 million total album sales according to Soundscan. In 2001, that number would drop to 763 million, and 681 million the year after that, and it’s been downhill ever since. But in…
