Album Of The Week

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…

Fascism came back. The past year and a half has been a strange time in human history, when voters across Europe and North America showed…

Seven or eight years ago, I saw Nika Roza Danilova lift a mace over her head in a Chicago bar, and the image has stayed…

Nine years after "Blind," when you look up Hercules & Love Affair on any streaming service, most of the top results are going to be…

Erika M. Anderson has now spent a solid decade getting us ready for this historical moment. Back in 2007, Gowns, the noisy drone-folk trio that…

Once upon a time, a band could name itself after a 19th century Austrian modernist poet without coming across precious. The members of a band…

On their 2015 sophomore LP, Providence punks Downtown Boys throttled authority with a saxophone by their side. The album was called Full Communism, and it…

In 1986, the British music magazine NME released the cassette-only compilation C86, a collection of songs by indie bands from across the UK. The bands…

When Vic Mensa bounded onstage in Chicago last week, he was a rock star. Maybe this is a Chicago-specific thing. When I saw Mensa open…

It hasn't been easy to sell out in this century, but Dizzee Rascal pulled it off. Dizzee first came to international attention at the age…

We don't deserve the Crutchfields. These two Alabama-raised, Philadelphia-based twin sisters are so beyond the rest of the indie rock world that it's not even…

Out on the road today, I saw a Memory Tapes sticker on a Cadillac. Little voice inside my head said don't look back, you can…

Wintres Woma, the first solo album from the Chicago-based English guitarist James Elkington, opens with a display of raw technique that's enough to leave you…

Twenty-five seconds into his new album Beautiful Thugger Girls, Young Thug lets it go. He's been singing over a faraway whistle and a lightly strummed…

Jason Isbell seems like the sort of person who looks you in the eye when he talks to you. In his songs, Isbell says exactly…