It never rained on Lollapalooza, but that didn’t stop the fest’s organizers, C3, from both evacuating the whole fest Sunday afternoon under threat of thunderstorms and then, later that night, shutting down the festival’s closers 30 minutes early. That kind of rainy speculation put a damper on the annual event, which…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: For Pets Week, songs written about or inspired by pets.

Julie Thorsen is a pastry chef in Milwaukee, where we worked together at my grandparents’ spice shop from the time I was about 8 to last year when I moved away. So I started following her Instagram because we’re friends, but I’m recommending it here because it provides a really cool insight into bands and musicians…

Joywave has been cranking out dancefloor-ready indie rock for a few years now, but only just released its first full album, How Do You Feel Now?, this past spring. In support of its debut LP, the band has designed an exclusive skate deck featuring Sims-like depictions of its members on the bottom, which can be seen…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Our favorite songs under two minutes long.

When James Murphy first started getting offers to take his LCD Soundsystem project on tour, he had to cobble together an actual live act, and teach his bandmates and himself how to perform songs that were originally studio creations, constructed piece-by-piece. In the concert film Shut Up And Play The Hits, Murphy…

Being in The Strokes must be stressful. Even though 14 years have passed since Is This It sparked all that talk about the New York City quintet saving its city and rock ’n’ roll, some of the hype, backlash, and expectations linger. Julian Casablancas and company are no longer leather-clad scruffball messiahs, but each…

Given the band’s affinity for energy and explosions, Titus Andronicus is often compared to Hüsker Dü and The Clash, but a better corollary might be The Who. Both bands specialize in sudden tonal shifts from bombast to sensitive soul-searching, and like The Who, Titus Andronicus caters in collections of songs that work…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Our favorite songs under two minutes long.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Our favorite songs under two minutes long.

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.

The word “family” is ubiquitous at the Gathering Of The Juggalos, the infamous yearly festival of arts and culture thrown by Detroit’s notorious Insane Clown Posse. It is used by Juggalos only slightly less frequently than Smurfs use “smurf” and Jews employ “shalom,” and serves a similarly vast array of purposes.…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Our favorite songs under two minutes long.

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines a song that went to No. 1 on the 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 New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” which spent one week at No. 1 on the Canadian RPM singles chart on…

Twenty years ago the German research group Fraunhofer IIS conducted an internal poll to settle on the three-character suffix that would become the standard file name extension for digital audio coding format that engineers there had developed. A few months later Fraunhofer released WinPlay3, the first software…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Our favorite songs under two minutes long.

I’m a sucker for sad, simple music played from the heart. I’m adding Irish singer-songwriter Soak—a.k.a. 19-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson—to the section of my heart where I keep Cat Power and Julie Doiron. The songs on her debut, the perfectly titled Before We Forgot How To Dream, are dark and melancholy and kind of…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: In honor of Comics Week, we’re focusing on songs with “hero” in their titles.

The first cut on Ashley Monroe’s The Blade is far from its deepest: The poppy opener “On To Something Good” serves as a fleeting note of tentative optimism for everything that follows to reverberate out and away from. The majority of Monroe’s superb third album hunkers down with heartache and struggle.

After two albums of tensely abrasive, home-recorded lo-fi sludge, Grave Babies has polished up its act and ventured into the studio to go prospecting for new ideas. Documenting that exploration, Holographic Violence sifts through various ’80s dark-wave styles in the hunt for worthy concepts, finding serviceable…