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

In Hear This, The A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, in honor of Car Seat Headrest’s new record: songs about cars.

Music is not like sports—artists don’t have to “defeat” each other in order to gain supremacy. And yet over the course of the 60 or so years that constitute the modern pop era, we as audience members have consistently pitted vaguely similar (though also discernibly not similar) artists against each other in order to…

In Hear This, The A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, in honor of Car Seat Headrest’s new record: songs about cars.

Trashcan Sinatras have a lot of road behind them—nearly 30 years’ worth—and on album number six, the melancholy Scots take a catchy, joyous look at their own mortality and decide it’s worth celebrating. Why shouldn’t they? It’s been a weird ride, with college-radio and 120 Minutes success—remember those?—out of the…

“I don’t make music for free, I make music for freedom,” Chance The Rapper boasts on Coloring Book, his third mixtape (or fourth, depending on how you classify Surf, his outstanding album last year with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment). From just about any other rapper, bragging about giving away music in 2016…

There are few artists out there who manage to be as self-conscious and self-reverential as Drake, let alone combine both qualities in a single bar. But the rapper and former Degrassi: The Next Generation student has made his bones off his heartbreak and ego; it’s a strategy that, while not innovative, has still proven…

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.

Bands with dual songwriters are a powder keg. Factor in ego, craft, and relationships, and it’s all but impossible to dovetail differing styles into something sonically, tonally, and thematically consistent. The boys of Philadelphia rock outfit Modern Baseball, however, make it look easy. Sure, Brendan Lukens’ voice…

Black metal is no damn fun, what with all the painted-on frowns, dudes mailing each other pieces of their dead bandmate’s brain, and a nasty habit of getting pigs’ blood all over your Vans. Thing is, Kvelertak, a bunch of ragers from the black-metal bloodlands of Norway, love fun and some of the frostier, more…

Twin Peaks’ 2014 sophomore effort, Wild Onion, was well received. Praised as an overall improvement over Sunken, their lauded, lo-fi debut, Wild Onion seemed to capture the Chicago four-piece making good on their early promise. With production that captured the band’s best qualities, not the least of which was its…

There’s artistic evolution, and then there’s artistic uncertainty. The two go hand in hand, to be sure. Any attempt to explore new territory is fraught with missteps and blind alleys, but that’s what the studio is for. Musicians often cycle through numerous efforts that never see the light of day, en route to a…

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was originally slated to sell about 7,000 copies. A master release from Merge Records penciled in 5,500 prospective units on CD and 1,600 more on vinyl. This wasn’t a burial; it was prudent. In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel was a mildly acclaimed indie-rock band propped up by a modest debut…

As we now exist in a world where festivals are so plentiful that it’s almost impossible to keep track of them, The A.V. Club elected to try to find the best one each state had to offer. Of course, some places had a bevy of great options. But for others, finding a fest with a notable component proved difficult. Below…

For a band that has so significantly reinvented its sound over nearly 25 years’ worth of recordings, the mood of Radiohead’s music has remained remarkably consistent—a mood that might best be described as “troubled.” A sense of unease and tension runs through nearly the entirety of the band’s catalog, from the jagged…

In Under The Influence, The A.V. Club asks a musician to pair three of their songs with a non-musical influence.

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.

Much like Migos before them, Portland’s long-standing indie-rockers The Thermals seemed like prime contestants for The A.V. Club‘s version of The Newlywed Game. With a slightly altered premise, the trio took on our harsh line of questioning, divulging which member smokes the most weed, which band from the Pacific…

If you’ve been lucky enough to see Cheap Trick within the past few years, at Riot Fest, or South By Southwest, or opening for the Foo Fighters, or even their recent sold-out show at Chicago’s legendary Metro, you have been greeted with a sultry yet robotic female voice who announces: “Please welcome the best fucking…

Over its three previous full-lengths—a pair for top-notch hardcore-punk label Deranged Records and 2014’s how-do-you-do Domino upgrade Deep Fantasy—Vancouver’s White Lung has stayed true to one of the most elemental traits of punk: Keep the rhythms relentless, like a boxer working a speed bag. While steady-and-true…