“My grandfather was a hairdresser and he always cut my hair,” reveals Thomas Mars, of French indie rock stalwarts, Phoenix. “And when he died I wouldn't let anyone else cut my hair so I've been doing it myself since.” This tidbit is significant not o

Shirtless, bespectacled, and from a hotel room bed, Charlie Steen from UK band Shame is looking a little worse for wear. “I don't regret it but it's not sustainable,” he says, clearing the frog in his throat. He isn't referring to his current hungove

The phrase “you can't go home again” is an indelible one stamped upon the American psyche. Whether taken literally in the physical sense or viewed as a reflection on the effect the passage of time has on earlier memories, Black Belt Eagle Scout's Kat

“It really felt like, ‘Whatever, the world's fucked, it's ending. We're all going to become zombies or die of COVID,’” says The WAEVE's Graham Coxon. “And so [I thought] I've got to get this out of my system, really, for once in my life, and try and

By all accounts Washington, D.C.'s Bartees Strange (birth name Bartees Leon Cox Jr.) has accomplished amazing things in the last year. Aside from releasing his sophomore album, Farm to Table (on 4AD), Strange has appeared on late night and early morn

To conclude, we ask Duncan Wallis and Robin Richards of Dutch Uncles some questions about endings and death. Dutch Uncles formed in 2008 in Marple, England, in the Greater Manchester area, releasing their self-titled debut album in 2009 on Tapete. Fr

10,000 gecs (DOG SHOW/ATLANTIC) What if a TIE Fighter blew up a gas station McDonald's? What if Cotton-Eye Joe had an amphibian friend with equally ambiguous comings and goings? What if dental woes necessitated a soul-ska ballad-anthem? These are but

Back in early 2020, Caroline Rose (who uses they/them pronouns) was gearing up to release their fourth album, Superstar. The concept album featured Rose as a larger-than-life pop singer, and Rose the real singer had spent months and months constructi

Here's a funny hypothesis for you: what if you could travel back to the late ‘60s or early ‘70s and hand someone like Jim Morrison or Karen Carpenter a Weyes Blood record? Would they be able to distinguish-just by listening to the songs-that this ind

Talking to Angel Olsen, certain associations, many of them emotional, come up. There's the soul-wrenching, heart-ripping music, languid at times, intimate, or, to borrow an oft-used, perhaps overused word, “raw.” At other times, the music swells and

If Lael Neale's second album, 2021 ‘s Acquainted with Night, was an attempt to find space and calm whilst surrounded by the neon and noise of Los Angeles, then her follow-up, Star Eaters Delight, is about reaching out from isolation and looking to re

Native to Australia, satin bowerbirds are a unique kind of avian species, largely due the complex mating ritual males undergo to attract a mate. In addition to building specialized stick structures that give the bird its namesake, the small creature

When talking to Emily Sprague about her gorgeously quiet self-titled and full band centered album, it takes a minute to wrap your head around the fact that she is speaking of an album that was almost fully recorded over three years ago. And most of t

It's 93° outside and tens of thousands of people are packed into Zilker Park in Austin, Texas for Austin City Limits Music Festival to see a laundry list of artists perform in and in spite of the heat. Samia Finnerty (who just goes by her first name)

My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For t

For the rising British indie outfit Wings of Desire, creation is a process of rebirth and reinvention. The band itself was born from the wreckage of another, with bandmates James Taylor and Chloe Little first beginning their creative partnership with

Joined by a star-studded cast of Welsh musicians (Gruff Rhys, Cate Le Bon, James Dean Bradfield of Manic Street Preachers) who count themselves as his musical offspring, John Cale celebrated his 80th birthday in October of 2022 with a headlining perf

Xiu Xiu's latest album, Ignore Grief, falls in line with the experimental facet's proclivity for arranging harrowing and sonically intense songs. Jamie Stewart has stood as the group's epicenter for the last two decades and has never taken that respo

In the summer of 2018, when live clips started circulating of an impossibly young London quartet performing unimaginably complicated arrangements with an equally unimaginable precision, they looked more like a viral marketing deepfake than a real ban

Before Weather Alive, Beth Orton's eighth studio album, the critically acclaimed singer/songwriter—who has three decades of releasing music in her rearview—was thinking, “It probably was time to gracefully bow out,” It was a combination of life event

Carl Newman (aka A. C. Newman) thinks he's cracked the code to the secret to a long, successful career in the music biz. You may have a hatful of great songs and musical chops galore, but if you aren't prepared to put the work in and power through th

Bleed Out begins with a training montage: a viscerally detailed scene, complete with dripping pipes and sweat. The chorus drops and John Darnielle screams, “I'm doing this for revenge!” This is The Mountain Goats’ 21st studio album, but in typical Da

2022 was an odd year for Black Country, New Road. The British rock band released their second studio album, Ants from Up There, in February, to immediate critical acclaim. Ants’ tracks such as “Chaos Space Marine” and “The Place Where He Inserted the

If there's a list of aspiring artists that skipped high school graduation in favor of performing at their debut Matador album release event, add Horsegirl's Penelope Lowenstein to it. The Chicago originated trio also includes Nora Cheng and Gigi Reec

Shook (MATADOR) No one could ever accuse soul-punk group Algiers of lacking passion. For 10 years now, the Atlanta quartet-centered on the baritone roar of vocalist Franklin James Fisher-have fired off stern polemics against societal injustices and t

Photos by James Loveday Stumpwork is a form of embroidery where stitched patterns and figures are raised, creating a 3D effect. It was used a lot in tapestry design, but you can still see the technique today, in baseball hats and other sports merchan

If Canadian art-punk collective Crack Cloud prove one thing on their latest LP, Tough Baby, it's that both nostalgia and upheaval can work constructively in tandem. Even more so than their forward-thinking predecessor, 2020's Pain Olympics, they opt