Fifty years ago, in a true-life science-fiction story wilder than anything concocted by an Area…
Moses Sumney’s græ: Unpacked
Moses Sumney is the kind of artist who delights in confounding categories. As the California-bred,…
Living Room Swinging: Guaranteed Home Dance-Party Starters
Fancy-pants scientist types with glasses and clipboards have been telling us this for years: Dancing…
Tame Impala’s Road to The Slow Rush
Even though five years separated Tame Impala’s surprise commercial juggernaut Currents and the arrival of…
2010s: How The Swedes Dominated Another Decade
There are a variety of theories as to how a Nordic nation of 10 million…
70 for Tom Waits at 70
There’s a kid inside of us, no matter how decrepit we get, and the kid…
Hard Rock Holidays
Santa Claus is a proudly blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy who never leaves the house…
Christmas Can Break Your Heart
It’s that time of year again when shop windows fill with red-and-green dioramas, city sidewalks…
The Kracker Barrel: The Conquest of the Country-Rap-Rock Crossover
The borders around whatever constitutes country music were awfully loosey-goosey long before hick-hop was a…
Sylvester’s Mighty Realness
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
Revolution, With Bongos: The Indie Disco Explosion
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
The Foreigner Strut: Mick Jones and Lou Gramm’s Sweet Science of Swagger
There’s something uniquely satisfying and majestically meta about a hard rock classic whose core subject…
The Influence of The Lizard King: Great Artists Who Loved the Doors Madly
Of all the many artists and songwriters who cited the Doors’ mercurial frontman as an…
Brian Eno, The Art-Rock Freakazoid
Despite his later reputation as rock’s preeminent egghead, Brian Eno clearly delighted in his showman…
Brian Eno’s Best Production Work
What can you say? Brian Eno is a people person. Even before his tenure with…
How MGMT Predicted Everything
Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser weren’t so obviously ahead of the curve when the duo’s…
The Death of Boogie and Birth of House: Disco’s ’80s Mutations
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
The Year of Cerebral R&B
Moses Sumney had a certain feeling he wanted to capture when he recorded Aromanticism, 2017’s…
Disco’s Golden Years
This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at…
What Makes Fever Ray So Freaky
What with all the costumes, masks, and other visage-obscuring efforts that have contributed to the…
Into the Nite: Synth-Funk Fantasias
As music scholar Tim Lawrence brilliantly makes the case in his recent book, Life and…