When The Tragically Hip vocalist Gord Downie announced in May that he had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, the news hit Canada like the ice storm of 1998.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Ryan Adams and Butch Walker would eventually cross paths and strike up a creative partnership. Both men are prolific road warriors and musical chameleons, and each also successfully navigates the tightrope between songwriting and production. In fact, Walker’s Adams-produced 2015 solo…

De La Soul’s contributions to hip-hop over the past three decades are mighty, but the Long Island trio has often been challenged by its own creativity. In an era where music is becoming increasingly accessible, De La’s catalogue has been noticeably absent from iTunes, Spotify, and other free and subscription-based…

“The last time I saw Eddie, he was lying on his face…” It’s the summer of 1995 and Neil Young is standing in front of a crowd of 50,000 frothing Pearl Jam fans at San Francisco’s Polo Fields attempting to head off a riot with only his guitar “Old Black” and a few limp boomer-isms at his disposal. So far, it’s a…

When MTV launched a second, all-videos channel called M2 on August 1, 1996, it had lofty ambitions for the new endeavor. “This is a channel like MTV was in 1981,” Tom Freston, the chairman of MTV Networks, told The New York Times. “The audience we’re going for with M2 doesn’t watch a lot of MTV. They find it a bit too…

For all of the immersive experiences surrounding a new Frank Ocean record—make that two new Frank Ocean records—the end product is surprisingly singular. In his visual album, Endless, stark black and white footage shows three different versions of him simultaneously constructing something in a warehouse. None of the…

Josh Modell: So Sean, as I think I told you once or twice—maybe by saying “really?!”—I was surprised when you asked if you could be my date to one of the Pearl Jam shows at Wrigley Field. I feel like I know your current musical tastes fairly well, and that it consists of ambient instrumentals, not mega-’90s alt-rock…

Pearl Jam: As a Kurt Cobain acolyte, 17-year-old me was sort of automatically anti-Pearl Jam. They were pretenders: Kurt said so at first, and of course you could hear it in the music, which was so much less threatening than Nirvana’s. (Or so it seemed.) But they won me over with a pair of live performances in 1995. I…

Slow Club’s latest album, One Day All Of This Won’t Matter Any More, languishes instead of soars. That’s partly by design: The album is filled with dark, midtempo tunes that veer between sleepy and ponderous, an unusual path for a group that, despite its name, has written some exuberant music. Most of the album’s…

I never had a hatred for disco the way so many older folks seemed to. Maybe it’s just a generational thing—processed electronic beats are the defining quality of the pop music landscape and have been for a long time now—and that explains why such a visceral dislike of one kind of music never made sense to me. Still,…

The evolution that brought cult folk-punk favorites Andrew Jackson Jihad to the bigger, weirder, and more powerful AJJ was well underway by 2014’s Christmas Island. On The Bible 2, the seeds that singer-guitarist Sean Bonnette and bassist Ben Gallaty planted more than a decade ago have sprouted in even more unexpected…

Lydia Loveless specializes in what’s best described as Rust Belt alt-country. The Columbus, Ohio, musician and her band rough up twang-bent guitars, mewling pedal steel, and lilting vocals with scruffy classic rock signifiers. As a result, Loveless’ music (especially on her 2014 breakthrough album, Somewhere Else)…

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

In Expert Witness, The A.V. Club talks to industry insiders about the actual business of entertainment in hopes of shedding some light on how the pop-culture sausage gets made.

Kumail Nanjiani: Remember when I said I was going to keep most of my stand-up? I lied. This package is thick, and room is at a premium. Not that Kumail Nanjiani isn’t amazingly funny—he is. Purging one.

In the past, when The A.V. Club has asked artists to play our pop-culture version of Concentration, it’s involved a single person trying to name songs by a specific artist. When Speedy Ortiz and Hop Along rolled through town earlier this year, we thought it’d be good to put everyone in the band to the test, coming up…

I first downloaded the Animoog app several years ago, and I’ve since derived hours of enjoyment and annoying my wife by playing with this tiny approximation of a Moog synthesizer on my phone. More recently, I’ve discovered that it also works excellently as a way of keeping my kids occupied, while also putting them in…

In Hear This, The A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re picking some of our favorite songs from 1996.

To understand the worldview of Atmosphere’s Fishing Blues, look no further than the title; piscine imagery pops up several times throughout the album. In “Besos,” a cokehead earns the nickname “Blowfish” because his drug habit keeps him from getting it up. Three songs later in “Seismic Waves,” a school of salmon tries…

Kevin Barnes’ success as Of Montreal’s figurehead and frontman has depended on his ability to balance extremes; funk and balladry, chaos and order, abstraction and focus. Like his stylistic predecessor David Bowie, Barnes usually threads this needle with ease and efficiency, but when that tension breaks to the…