It still sounds preposterous: a ragged New Jersey band, with a name taken from Shakespeare and a debut album citing one of the most famous Seinfeld episodes, returning with a sophomore effort that featured epic, multi-part songs loosely aligning Civil War imagery with personal anguish and generational ennui, which then turned out to be one of the great rock records of this century. It sounds like something...
Pearl Jam's career neatly divides into three distinct eras. There are the early days, the grunge boom and their ascension and self-willed implosion as one of the defining artists of the '90s with Ten, Vs., and Vitalogy. No Code kicked off the searching middle years, during which Pearl Jam dismantled their own fame and made a series of slightly more restless, slightly more experimental, and certainly...
Quibi -- it's not just a nonsensical word! It's also an upcoming streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg focused on short-form video content. You see, Quibi is short for "quick bites," and it'll have short segments of 10 minutes or less designed to be watched on small screens (i.e. your phone). Quibi launches on 4/6, and The New York Times reports that the plan is to release 8500 "quick bites...
Twenty years on, the existence of Gorillaz still seems somewhat implausible. Throughout pop history, there have been plenty of drastic reinventions -- artists who, rather than just adopting a new identity to explore a new sound, reemerged with a completely different set of thematic concerns, a completely altered ethos. Still: Damon Albarn went from being one of the foremost artists of the '90s Britpop...
Fiona Apple does not work quickly. It's been nearly eight years since Apple released The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than The Driver Of The Screw, And Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, her fourth album. In most of the time since then, Apple has been in a state of relative seclusion, only playing occasional shows and mostly staying out of the public eye. But in the past few months,...
The Weeknd is releasing a new album, After Hours, in a couple of weeks, and last night he was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. All of his live performances and music videos from this album era so far have been tied together by the same outfit (a red suit jacket) and the same facial injuries (bandaged nose, bloody face), and SNL was no exception. Abel Tesfaye did his previously released single,...
Some of Nick Cave's old lyrics haven't aged particularly well. And in the latest issue of his Red Hand Files newsletter, which he's been using to answer questions from his fans for a while now, he addresses the question of what to do with problematic old lyrics. These latest musings are the result of a question from an Irish fan named Gavin. "Do you ever feel the need to change lyrics, when performing...
Record Store Day is rolling around once again, and today, the full list of releases hitting stores on 4/18 has been announced. As always, RSD is coming with a whole slew of exclusives and special releases; check out a few of the highlights (and lowlights?) below. A 12" single of RSD 2020 Ambassador Brandi Carlile covering Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and "Searching With My Good Eye Closed" Post Malone's...
It’s after midnight in the early days of the new millennium and Chris Carrabba is wide the fuck awake. He hasn’t been getting much sleep lately — especially not at nighttime.
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.…
