A Gorillaz live show has never, strictly speaking, made any sense. The band’s musicians have always had an uneasy relationship with the gang of cartoon characters that portray them. In the early days, the cartoon was the band and that was it; they did their own Cribs episode, for example, and toured with a massive…

Welcome back to AVC Sessions, our new series where we bring in an artist, band, musician, singer, rapper, etc. to perform three of their own tracks. This week, Australian indie rock group Gang Of Youths visits The A.V. Club studio to play a couple songs for us. In the first performance from their Session, the band…

Much to the chagrin of anyone who believes that guitars equal real music, the artificial divisions that once kept pop and rock acts in separate corners have collapsed through gradual erosion. Music genres have been so thoroughly blurred together and amalgamated that calling something “pop” or “rock” today is almost as…

Toro Y Moi, Boo Boo
Grade: B+

JAY-Z sounds old. More than that, he sounds tired. On 4:44’s title track and centerpiece, he sounds like he’s rapping into a cellphone; there’s a tinny, 8-track immediacy as the rapper disembowels himself over his much-publicized infidelities. By the third verse, he’s picturing his kids hearing the song, barely even…

It’s become slightly easier to predict what a new Liars album will sound like. I say “slightly” only in the sense that, after evolving from herky-jerky dance-punk to haunted drones to tense dark-wave across one of the most stylistically diverse bodies of work in modern art, the group’s sound is nevertheless united by…

If 2017 is a sort of class reunion for 2000s indie rock—with new albums from Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Spoon, Phoenix, Fleet Foxes, The National, Grizzly Bear, and Dirty Projectors all appearing in the same calendar year—then the members of Broken Social Scene are the clique that breaks off from the main…

Every Friday, dozens of new records are released into the wild. Some make big splashes, and others sink almost immediately. For most music consumers, it’s almost too much information, and save for those precious few who spend their hours glued to review sites and release calendars, it’s hard to know what’s coming out…

Every JAY-Z album since 2003 has been an event. There was the retirement saga of The Black Album, then the comeback of Kingdom Come; the surprise film-inspired return to form of American Gangster and then the overwrought, trilogy-concluding Blueprint 3. Watch The Throne and Magna Carta Holy Grail both felt like…

[Stones Throw]

Even at just over six months old, 2017 has already given us more than enough good music to fill playlists from here until December—enough that it would be fine, really, if everyone just took a knee until next year. It’s also been an unusually busy year for comebacks: High-profile returns from the ’00s indie-rock class…

Latasha Alcindor describes her music as “for the weirdos who grew up in the hood.” Blending her art-school training with her experience coming up in pre-gentrification Brooklyn, the young Afro-Latina MC spits razor-sharp verses with a disarming sense of ease, calling to mind fellow East Coasters Lil’ Kim, Latifah, and…

Welcome back to AVC Sessions, our new series where we bring in an artist, band, musician, singer, rapper, etc. to perform three of their own tracks. This week, we welcome psychedelic rock band The Black Angels into the studio. In the final video from their Session, the band performs “I’d Kill For Her,” a track from…

Welcome back to AVC Sessions, our new series where we bring in an artist, band, musician, singer, rapper, etc. to perform three of their own tracks. This week, we welcome psychedelic rock band The Black Angels into the studio. In the latest video from its Session, the band performs “Half Believing” from the new album D…

Welcome back to AVC Sessions, our new series where we bring in an artist, band, musician, singer, rapper, etc. to perform three of their own tracks. This week, we welcome psychedelic rock band The Black Angels into the studio. In the first video from its Session, the band performs “The Boat Song,” a track from 2011’s P…

“She’s so melodramatic.” It’s an insult nearly every young woman has had lobbed at her, anytime she’s dared cross the heavily policed gates of emotional regulation. Many times it’s even directed to women by other women as a way to devalue feelings, which should always be minimized and neatly packaged when expressed,…

For the latest installment in our Pickathon video series, we’ve got a clip of Ultimate Painting, featuring Jack Cooper (Mazes) and James Hoare (Veronica Falls). The mellow British rockers brought their wry, literate lyrics to the Mt. Hood Stage with “Talking Central Park Blues.”

You don’t want to write about Vince Staples. Few modern musicians have made playing with the press such an essential part of their appeal. There is, on the one hand, his endless trolling: sardonic tweets about American Apparel and 3 Ninjas; his sarcastic sponsorship of Sprite, which is almost long-form performance art…

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, a landmark album that has already been feted with an expansive new reissue, as well as numerous new articles about the album’s lingering impact—particularly its prescient vision of a modern society ruled by fascistic corporatocracy and defined by…

[Epic]