In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: For Horrors Week, we’re once again talking about songs with the word “ghost” in the title.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: For Horrors Week, we’re once again talking about songs with the word “ghost” in the title.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: For Horrors Week, we’re once again talking about songs with the word “ghost” in the title.

Harry Potter fans will love this one; have you ever wished those vile jellybeans from that Hogsmeade shop were real? Leave it to the Jelly Belly people to make it so. They’ve already come out with a collection of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, which combines regular flavors with the gruesome ones made famous in…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs that feature twisted takes on the family unit for Unconventional Families Week.

Elvis Costello’s new memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, is a whirlwind tour of Costello’s life as a rock musician, son, father, television host, and songwriting collaborator with Paul McCartney and Burt Bacharach. Like his music, Costello’s book is equal parts acerbic and heartfelt, giving scope to the many…

Listening to Joanna Newsom’s newest record, Divers, feels like taking a wistful stroll through a field overrun with vibrantly colored wildflowers. The overwhelming sense of beauty that surrounds you as you take in song after song is both real and palpable. With so many different sonic textures working against and in…

Pop-punk is a slippery categorization. There’s no real consensus on which bands qualify as pop-punk and which ones don’t, or exactly what separates the genre from straightforward punk or straight-up pop. This imprecision is often maddening to purists, especially when a line-blurring band such as 5 Seconds Of…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs that feature twisted takes on the family unit for Unconventional Families Week.

For about 20 years—from roughly 1955 to 1975—James Brown stayed ahead of the curve by stripping down. While other rock and R&B acts courted favor with mainstream audiences by moving toward softer sounds, lavish orchestrations, and sophisticated concept albums, Brown tried to see how far he could get on groove alone.…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs that feature twisted takes on the family unit for Unconventional Families Week.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs that feature twisted takes on the family unit for Unconventional Families Week.

Version Tracker examines how different artists have performed the same song over the years, adapting it to suit their own needs and times.

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album 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 Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness,” which spent a week at No. 1 on the…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs that feature twisted takes on the family unit for Unconventional Families Week.

Welcome to the Music Roundtable, a blatant rip-off of TV Club’s TV Roundtable feature. Here, music writers and fans discuss recent reissues, hot new releases, or just records we like. For this installment, we’re talking about No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this month.

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Some of our all-time favorite covers.

In the late ’00s, as a consolation for the disappearance of the monoculture, sentimental indie fans old enough to remember the ’80s got chillwave. Codified and vilified in roughly the same internet moment, it was atmospheric electronic music meant to evoke rec-room sleepovers, rented Nintendo cartridges, cheesy sci-fi…

Watching Demi Lovato slowly but surely wrest control of her career away from the Disney machine has been a joy to behold. After her 2008 debut, the Jonas Brothers-dominated Don’t Forget, each subsequent album has found her pushing more of her personal musical agenda and preferences, whether it was writing songs with…

In 2013, Atlanta-based indie-rock act Deerhunter released its sixth studio album, Monomania, a work that left many scratching their heads. In ways both sonic and thematic, it was a significant and ragged left turn away from the shimmering, frizzy sounds that marked the group’s masterful mid-career releases Microcastle…