In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about songs with a cappella interludes.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about songs with a cappella interludes.

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines a song that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Aerosmith’s Nine Lives, which went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 around its release in March…

It’s a testament to Madonna’s star power that every new album she releases is an event. However, the promotional cycle for Rebel Heart was provocative even by her standards: A hacker leaked demos from the album back in December, prompting the early release of six full songs just before Christmas (and an arrest several…

A month before releasing his new and first commercially available solo album, Himanshu Suri (Heems) tweeted his frustrations with the promotion process. “I made an album at the end of 2013 in one of the darkest periods of my life,” the former Das Racist rapper wrote, “and now I have to relive it through interviews for…

It’s next to impossible to evaluate Will Butler’s solo debut, Policy, on its own merits. The stadium-sized behemoth incarnate in the room is Arcade Fire, the band in which he plays an ancillary role as a keyboardist/synth player and occasional drummer, overshadowed by the husband/wife duo of his older brother Win and…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about songs with a cappella interludes.

Johnny Cash would’ve been a legend regardless, but 1994’s American Recordings brought the singer a late-career renaissance with a formula that many have since tried to emulate. With Rick Rubin on board as producer/guru, Cash turned in his most stripped-down, emotional set in decades, and the album—his 81st!—stands…

The singer born Madonna Louise Ciccone has had one of pop’s most fascinating careers from a theoretician’s point of view—and fairly often over the past 35-plus years, her music’s been almost peerless, too. Madonna has remained a reliable hit-maker from the early 1980s to now, and yet it’s not that difficult to reduce…

In theory, the collaboration between Björk and New York’s Museum Of Modern Art makes a lot of sense. MoMA, one of the most distinctive art museums in a city full of them, is concerned with creativity, expression, and uniqueness in art. And while the word “singular” is thrown around in press releases and reviews so…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about songs we’ve discovered via TV shows.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about songs we’ve discovered via TV shows.

In HateSong, we ask our favorite musicians, writers, comedians, actors, and so forth to expound on the one song they hate most in the world.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about songs we’ve discovered via TV shows.

Chasing Yesterday feels like an all-too-apt title for Noel Gallagher’s latest endeavor. The record gives off the vibe of being eager for days gone by; it has the spirit of a much older album, which makes listening to it feel a bit like stepping out of time. Noel Gallagher doesn’t give a fuck what contemporary music…

Of Montreal albums are as much mood pieces as they are music, aural reflections of whatever lightning bolt is currently coursing through Kevin Barnes, the outfit’s charismatic overseer and unabashed over-sharer. Aureate Gloom, the band’s 13th LP in 18 years, is no different, with Barnes himself describing the album…

Throughout her career, Kelly Clarkson has consistently received kudos for her commanding voice and ferocious declarations of self-empowerment. However, her versatility as a performer is far more intrinsic to her enduring success. In recent years, the native Texan has released a Christmas album, crossed over to…

Purity Ring’s rapid ascent over the last few years deserves its share of skepticism, as it would be easy to think that the success of the Edmonton-based duo is a mere apparition, the right combination of luck and skill and Internet hype. The group birthed a made-up genre—future pop—drawn from standalone singles that…

Swervedriver disappeared pretty quietly more than 15 years ago, which was an ill-fitting end for a group capable of being deliciously loud. As the most brazenly rock-leaning player in the shoegaze scene, the British band stuck out in all the right ways: Its guitars swirled, sure, but those early songs—“Son Of Mustang…

Permanent Records is an ongoing closer look at the records that matter most.