The mere existence of Hulu's High Fidelity remake is, on a level, perplexing. The 10-episode series developed by TV vets Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka (Hart Of Dixie, GCB) marks the third time that Nick Hornby's 1995 novel has been adapted for another medium. If you missed the 2006 Broadway musical's extremely short-lived run (13 performances and 18 previews in total), you're likely familiar with...
I was worried about this one. First came the waiting: Kevin Parker took half a decade to follow up Currents, the album that cemented Tame Impala as the biggest rock act on the modern festival scene. Then came the wincing: The first few songs Parker released from his new The Slow Rush did not connect in the same way Tame Impala's advance singles had in the past. He seemed to have pushed his world-conquering...
Billie Eilish has had a busy couple of weeks. She became just the second person ever to sweep all four major awards -- Album Of The Year, Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year, and Best New Artist -- at the Grammys, and she immediately followed that up with performing a cover of the Beatles' "Yesterday" during the Oscars' annual In Memoriam segment. And now she's adding another achievement to the list...
Young British rap troublemaker Slowthai won the fan-voted Hero Of The Year Award at the NME Awards tonight. He then spent the remainder of the evening making sure everyone immediately regretted voting for him. During his acceptance speech, Slowthai seemingly sexually harassed presenter Katherine Ryan. When an audience member called him out, he accused them of "ruining" his speech and threw his microphone...
Pop Smoke is 20 years old. He sounds like he's 60. He sounds like his vocal chords are made of scorched asphalt and ground-up glass. He sounds like he ate volcanic ash for breakfast. He sounds like his body has been possessed by an ancient Sumerian demon -- there is no Pop Smoke, only Zuul. New York has a long and proud tradition of rappers with grime-sautéed rasps like that. Most of them have been...
We're a little over a week out from the release of Grimes' new album Miss Anthropocene, the follow-up to 2015's Art Angels. We've heard a good chunk of songs from it already -- "Violence," "So Heavy I Fell Through The Earth," "My Name Is Dark," and " 4ÆM" -- and today we're getting another one, "Delete Forever." In a new interview with Beats 1's Zane Lowe, Grimes said that she wrote the song the night...
Goldenvoice are an empire in the live music industry -- they are the people behind Coachella -- and today they have added one more, slightly less expected event to their 2020 roster. Just announced via socials this afternoon, Cruel World is a new one-day festival that will take over the Grounds at Dignity Health Sports Park in LA on 5/2. But the thing that'll grab your attention is how idiosyncratic...
When was the last time a band switched lead singers without slowing down? Throughout rock history, there's plenty of precedent for this kind of thing. It's happened again and again: Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, AC/DC, Genesis, Van Halen, Iron Maiden. In each of those situations, the band became radically different after the big change-up. Plenty of those times, the band got shittier. Still, those bands...
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…
Britons have a complex relationship with the Monarchy. Though adored by older generations and millions around the world, the Royal Family are almost exclusively met with scorn and contempt from younger Brits, and especially those who are left-leaning and in the music community. That makes “Magic Of Meghan,” the debut single from southeast London four-piece…
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.…
