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

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: some great songs with prominent literary references.

Who doesn’t love anniversaries? The music industry sure does. So far this year, untold oodles of deluxe reissues have been released to celebrate milestones—that is, 10th, 20th, 25th, 30th, 40th, or 50th anniversaries—in an attempt to stir up nostalgia and critical reevaluation. Some of this year’s crop of deluxe…

The professor, the prankster, and the poet: It might be too pat of a way to classify Greg Graffin, Ian Svenonius, and Richard Hell, respectively, three legendary punk singers who happen to have new non-fiction books on the shelves. But the shoes fit. Population Wars: A New Perspective On Competition And Coexistence by…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: songs from classic movie and T.V. montages.

Over the past five years, hardly any other artist in music has weaved together a catalog of material as dark and danceable as that of Canadian singer and producer Grimes. By making the slick production style and staid framework of ’80s pop contemporary and marrying it with a wide range of dejected, unsettling, and…

Kurt Cobain was an unreliable narrator. He liked it that way. His self-mythologizing started years before he got famous—there’s those tall tales of living beneath Aberdeen’s Young Street Bridge, for example, or the stomach condition that he could only treat with hard drugs. But all the contradictions, in-jokes, and…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: Songs from classic movie and TV montages.

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 Ride’s Nowhere, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in October.

Independent record labels are often guided by a singular vision, but few instantly evoke a particular artist’s voice. It’s hard not to associate K Records, though, with the sly, sensual baritone of Calvin Johnson. Founded in 1982 while Johnson was a student at Evergreen State College in his hometown of Olympia,…

In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week: songs from classic movie and T.V. montages.

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album or single 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 Duran Duran’s “A View To A Kill,” which spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100…

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 March of 1956, Roy Orbison and his band The Teen Kings left their home in Odessa, Texas to record a session in Memphis for producer Sam Phillips, at Sun Studios. Over Orbison’s objection, Phillips had the band record “Ooby Dooby,” a novelty song that had raised The Teen Kings’ profile when they’d played it on local…

In 11 Questions, The A.V. Club asks interesting people 11 interesting questions—and then asks them to suggest one for our next interviewee.

“I’m listening to a lot of Supertramp and mid-period Christopher Cross,” my friend Mike Pace recently wrote in an email. Rather than sarcastically replying “There’s more than one period of Christopher Cross?”, I chose to read these listening habits into the tracks on Pace’s new digital single. Building on the sounds…

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.

Matt Berninger has been on a decade-long hot streak with his band of (literal) brothers, The National, so it was simultaneously worrisome and exciting when he announced he’d briefly step away and try something new. It turns out that the new something—EL VY—is more of a gentle pivot than a full-on reinvention, and that…

Car Seat Headrest (né Will Toledo) has been cranking out commendable, although not entirely memorable, lo-fi bedroom pop for the past five years at an alarming rate. Toledo’s prolific output (11 self-released Bandcamp albums) is enough to make Robert Pollard raise a salty salute, but with Headrest’s 2015 release How…

Beach Slang became an instant hit in 2014 with a pair of EPs that provided fairly instant gratification. It was easy to fall in love with melodic, rugged sing-alongs about young romance, alienation, and pure infatuation when they came packaged inside tunes that split the difference between Jawbreaker’s emotive rumble…