The poet and artist Barbara Guest, an original member of the New York school of poetry, ended her final collection, The Red Gaze (2005), with the following words by Theodor Adorno: ‘In each genuine art work something appears that did not exist before.’ It’s a quote so pertinent to how we view human creativity today that it seems almost like a manifesto in miniature. Of course, when he wrote those words, Adorno wasn’t thinking of artificial intelligence, at least not in the way we know it, but nonetheless, it seems like a succinct argument for the human over the machine. When a human being makes a work of art, they put something new into the world, something that may draw from a wealth of influences but, at its best, ignites those influences with a creative spark.
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For her fourth album, Maya Hawke regathered key members of her steady writing/recording crew – Christian Lee Hudson, Benjamin Lazer Davis, Will Graefe – who continue to take chances and gradually broaden her sound instead of opting for the warm comfort of a default sweetly melodic, charmingly confessional songwriter sensibility (although there’s some of that here, too). Joining them in the studio was another prior collaborator, producer/engineer Jonathan Low (Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, Caroline Shaw). Hawke’s most ambitious album to date, the 13-song Maitreya Corso is both her wordiest and most assertive-sounding yet, with some of its tracks employing tricks like layered and manipulated vocals in a way that suggests modern…
The Eagles’ 1975 studio album, One of These Nights, was a milestone album for the band, earning them their first GRAMMY® Award and becoming the first of four consecutive #1 albums. One Of These Nights (Deluxe Edition) featuring a new mix of the original album, an unreleased, 16-song 1975 concert at Anaheim Stadium.
Produced by Don Henley, the CD and vinyl editions include a new mix of the album by Rob Jacobs. Originally produced by Bill Szymczyk and recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami and the Record Plant in Los Angeles, One Of These Nights achieved quadruple Platinum certification and the single “Lyin’ Eyes” won the GRAMMY® Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
The unreleased live recording captures…
The legendary Slovenian group’s first original studio album since 2014’s Spectre, Musick – intensely pop, yet intensely Laibach. Available via Mute on limited edition neon pink vinyl and CD.
This record simultaneously celebrates and critiques the current era of warped reality and AI imitation. The title reflects a duality: an oversaturation, being “sick of music” in an age where over 100,000 new tracks, many AI-generated, are uploaded daily, making us question reality; and a “pathological devotion” that continues to drive the band.
The maximalist creation process in their Ljubljana studio involved analogue synths, toys, computers with sound apps, and collaborators like Donna Marina Mårtensson and Richard X. They drew influences from K-pop…
Since breaking out with their fantastic eponymous debut album, which featured the smash hits “Cough Syrup” and “My Body,” Young The Giant has proved time and time again that they are one of the premier indie rock bands working today. Their sixth full-length album and Fearless Records debut, Victory Garden, is no exception and is one of their best albums to date.
Eric Cannata says: “We sonically wanted to capture the energy of all five of us together,” he shares. “A lot of tracks were recorded live. We worked with a producer named Brendan O’Brien, who is just this incredible producer, especially with bands in the way that he captures the energy of multiple people playing at once in a room… It is a little bit of a return to our roots because…
Deluxe double LP reissue of The Head And The Heart’s debut album. Featuring the original album remastered on the first LP, plus seven bonus tracks on the second LP. The bonus tracks are a combination of previously unreleased demos and live tracks, plus one live track available for the first time physically, and one previously unreleased studio track. The Head and the Heart is the self-titled debut album from Seattle folk-rock band The Head and the Heart, originally self-released in 2010 before being picked up and re-issued by Sub Pop in 2011. Built around harmonious vocals, piano, violin, and folk-rock instrumentation, the album captures themes of connection, wanderlust, and introspection across tracks like “Lost in My Mind,” “Down in the Valley,” and “Rivers and Roads.”
British electronic collective Seefeel reappeared after a 13-year hiatus with two mini-albums in 2024 and now present Sol.hz, their first full-length release since the 2011 self-titled LP. The group’s claim to notoriety is as one of the first guitar-based groups signed to the fabled British electronic label Warp, with their 1995 sophomore album Succour. Rock listeners may first have encountered them on the 1993 debut Quique, where the band pushed dream pop beyond guitar rock conventions by dismantling structures that Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine had just about held in place. Instead, Seefeel built their sound around extended tracks of hypnotically recurring motifs, rewiring traditional instrumentation such as strummed guitars and a full drum kit into…
Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow is the second album from funk innovators Funkadelic. Arriving in 1970 mere months after their trailblazing debut, the record saw the band honing their songcraft, while still allowing plenty of space for mind-bending exploratory jams. The album’s origin story famously involved a single marathon session on LSD. It marked the official introduction of legendary keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and would go on to chart at No. 92 on Billboard’s Pop chart.
Factoring George Clinton’s surprise at hearing the voice of Martha Reeves during a retrospective playback of the ten-minute title track, there’s reason to doubt the Parliament-Funkadelic leader’s memory in his claim that Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow was recorded in a day.
GarciaLive Volume 22: September 25th, 1971 captures almost every note played across the early and late shows at San Anselmo’s intimate Lion’s Share, a tiny Quonset hut on the edge of town. The performances were originally recorded to 1/4″ analog reels by Betty Cantor-Jackson and Bob Matthews.
Jerry Garcia’s partnership with Merl Saunders carved out a parallel musical life in small Bay Area clubs. Joined by rhythmic anchor John Kahn, Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, and Tom Fogerty on rhythm guitar, who recently departed from Creedence Clearwater Revival. This quintet specialized in power pockets and strong grooves, giving Garcia space to elaborate and extend his musical knowledge…
It’s probably no accident that Weird Nightmare is releasing its sophomore album, Hoopla, on May 1st via Sub Pop. If ever there was a record primed and ready to inhabit the experiences of a carefree summer (ideally the one after your senior year of high school), it’s this one. Even if your summer is full of life’s painful realities, like funerals or the consequences of tax evasion, Hoopla may yet be the album on repeat wherever you listen to it.
Weird Nightmare is the solo project of Canadian musician Alex Edkins, guitarist and singer of the noise rock trio Metz, which is on an indefinite hiatus. Drop in on almost any point of any of the five studio albums Metz has released on the Sub Pop label since 2012, and you will hear a nearly exact antithesis of what…
White Flowers, the long-running collaboration between Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, exists within what they call “the realm” – a shared creative space, wherein time, rather than being a restrictive force, is fluid and boundless, and music exists as an endless conversation with their past and present selves. Adopting what the band describe as a “sketchbook” approach to writing, White Flowers is the product of a decade’s worth of recordings – snippets nestled away on hard drives, only to truly make sense years later.
On Dreams For Somebody Else, the Preston duo expand upon the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, channelling the catharsis of dance music via repetitive structures and “sad, euphoric sounds”. Working alongside…
…Since reuniting in 2014 after a decade-plus dormancy, American Football hasn’t simply returned to its past. It has moved forward in parallel with its audience, writing music that reflects the disorientation, compromise, grief and hard-won perspective of middle age.
Its fourth self-titled album (LP4) is the clearest and most satisfying expression of that evolution yet. It’s simultaneously the band’s darkest and most playful, its most complex and — paradoxically — its most generous. Throughout, LP4 stares matter-of-factly at despair while refusing the comforts of melodrama or easy resolution.
…Their biggest swings are front-loaded on LP4, and they are also the biggest wins. The first two tracks channel the grand melancholy of…
Fans of the Black Keys in their earliest incarnation shook their heads in wonder as the flailing, wild-eyed garage-blues duo they’d come to adore became one of the biggest bands of the 2010s. 2011’s El Camino and 2012’s Brothers offered an unexpectedly streamlined, irresistibly catchy update on their blues-rock template, with smash singles ‘Lonely Boy’, ‘Gold On the Ceiling’ and ‘Tighten Up’ proving that modern, chart-friendly R&B was a game that could be played with guitars.
But staying on the pop radar is never easy. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Pat Carney looked uncomfortable in the glare, and the effort of maintaining popularity appeared to impact on the records – as on 2019’s airless Let’s Rock. The slick title track of 2025’s No Rain, No Flowers…
Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People is the aural equivalent of comfort food. It’s warm, goes down easy, is simple at the core, and hits many of the right spots. The title alone suggests a universality, the common rhythms of life, the pendulum of emotions, and connection. As you likely know, Hiss Golden Messenger is the moniker for North Carolina singer-songwriter MC Taylor. Taylor penned these songs in a farmhouse on the edge of a bay in California, at his home in the North Carolina Piedmont, and in a motel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Taylor was searching for inspiration, an elusive kind of magic, but instead found himself writing about running toward and away from things, about realistic expectations and slivers of hope in these trying times,…
The octogenarian roots master and national treasure, Taj Mahal, is still going strong. He has a 22-date tour planned for the Spring and Summer, backed by his three-decade collaborators, The Phantom Blues Band (PBB). Surprisingly, they have a ‘new’ record to tour behind. Most of us thought this partnership reached its peak with the back-to-back Grammy wins for 1997’s Senor Blues and 2000’s Shoutin’ in Key. Since then, The Phantom Blues Band has released their own records, but not with Taj, the most recent being 2020’s Still Cookin’. So, we have a resurrection of this partnership, apparently by unearthing the 2010 recording, unreleased until now, Time. Given that some of the music on the record was composed seventy or eighty years ago, as has been…
It was clear from the opening moments of Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” concert that the Boss had a few things to say about President Donald Trump and the state of the nation. In a dramatic flash of patriotic red light, he strode onto the stage in his best proletariat preacher mode and addressed his flock.
“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll in dangerous times,” he proclaimed during a tour stop at San Francisco’s Chase Center on Monday, April 13. “The America that I love — the America I have written about for 50 years that has been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world — is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and…
California sounds revival? Not called as such yet, but that line leading from The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield through the ‘70s scene seems to be being revived and modernized by the likes of The Lemon Twigs and a number of other artists. Judging by Entropy, its new album, San Diego trio Foxtide should definitely be included in any such revival list. You can add to that revived term modernized one, as Elijah Gibbins-Croft, Oey James, and Ian Robles, who comprise Foxtide have that modern touch to songwriting and production, as they filtered their digest of all sounds California through current concepts of pop/rock music. The key lies in an excellent songwriting that relies on that well-proven concept ‘let’s write and sing something that sounds like…
Make your first listen to Seismo a naive one. Don’t think about its makers, and the many excellent projects they have worked on. Don’t think about how exciting it is to hear a bold percussionist like Valentina Magaletti collaborate with a producer who can match her inventiveness and unrestricted approach to form and genre. Try not to think about PAN, the storied label backing it. If you can, forget Moin, Midori Takada, Steve Reich, Nicolas Jaar, Miles Davis, Shackleton, or any other past collaborator or influence you might hear flashes of within its eight songs. Don’t think of its backstory: how it formed out of a commission by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and what that setting might say about the music.
Just listen. It’s a record full of life, texture and…