New Order's Bernard Sumner worked with Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe on a few tracks from Electronic, his late-'80s/'90s side project with Johnny Marr. And now New Order and Pet Shop Boys, two giants of '80s UK synth-pop, are joining forces for a full co-headlining tour. The North American leg of the Unity Tour, which is what they're calling it, kicks off 9/5 in Toronto and runs for about...
Meet The Conan Staff is a new mockumentary-style digital web series from the Conan writing team that purports to be a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at the show. In its latest episode, rock stars and Better Oblivion Community Center partners Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers play production assistants. Oberst is tryhard and happy-to-be-there, though he can't stop breaking out into song. Bridgers...
Elder have announced Omens, the progressive psychedelic rock band's fifth full-length album and their first record since last year's experimental EP The Gold & Silver Sessions. Composed as a concept album about the lifespan of a civilization and recorded with a new lineup including guitarist Michael Risberg, new drummer Georg Edert, and guest performer Fabio Cuomo on Rhodes piano and synthesizers,...
Nobody was prepared for Have One On Me. Technically, yes, there was advanced notice. There were cartoon-strip clues and whisperings of a triple album and a graceful lead single. Eventually two more followed and, barely a month after the initial news broke, the massive album had arrived. Fans prepared themselves for a two-hour-long opus, a crash course in all things Joanna Newsom loves and hates and...
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. Guitarist Mick Martinez and singer Chlo White assure me that there was no overdrawn origin story....
Sturgill Simpson has never exactly been easy to pin down. After independently releasing two albums, he moved on up to major label Atlantic to release his well-received 2016 album A Sailor's Guide To Earth, which won for Best Country Album at the Grammys and was nominated for Album Of The Year. After that, he moved over to Elektra Records with last year's Sound & Fury, which was paired with an anime...
Some albums are meant to be listened to after dark. Yo La Tengo telegraphed such intentions for And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out with the cover art, a cozy nighttime suburban scene in which something extraterrestrial appears to be happening just outside the frame. It's fitting imagery for an album on which Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley breathe supernatural beauty into their sighing domestic...
It's hard to take anything Grimes says seriously. Over the last few months, she's joked (?) about getting experimental eye surgery so that she can't see blue light, she's said that she didn't Google pregnancy before deciding "sure y not," and she's gotten into a heated debate about retiring from touring and having a hologram perform in her place. A year ago, when she first announced her new album Miss...
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.…
The music of Lower Dens has always been dense and to some extent difficult, even when cathartic or hypnotizing. Across their first two albums, 2010’s Twin-Hand Movement and 2012’s Nootropics, the band perfected a kind of shadowy then nervy rock sound — exemplified by the albums’ respective highlights, “I Get Nervous” and “Brains.” Then, on…
