Last night, after a social media blackout that eerily coincided with the eclipse, then a bunch of cryptic posts of snakes, and finally, the unveiling of her “graphically designed” album cover, Taylor Swift released her new single, “Look What You Made Me Do.” It’s a song that is, almost entirely and exclusively, about…

Over the last three years, The War On Drugs became one of our biggest rock ’n’ roll bands—mostly while nobody was looking. On 2014’s Lost In The Dream, the group delivered a confident statement of intent that found it plumbing the depths of AOR radio for nostalgic sounds to weave together and drown in reverb. It was…

EMA began writing her dark but ultimately hopeful new album, Exile In The Outer Ring, before the presidential election, but it can’t help but feel like a reaction to the Trump era. It even has a song called “Aryan Nation”—“Go back home to below your station / Like a refugee from the Aryan nation”—but Exile In The…

Perhaps time passes differently for John Dwyer. The Oh Sees frontman has always seemed to operate as though his days are hurtling ahead faster than for the rest of us. In 2013, he announced an indefinite hiatus for his band, only to return a year later, releasing four more studio albums in three years under the…

The first line of Twin Peaks: The Return, after a quarter-century hiatus and endless speculation and several minutes of dreamlike preamble, is this: “Listen to the sounds.” It’s The Giant speaking, or at least the huge guy we used to call The Giant, sitting in a grayscale corner of The Black Lodge with a docile Agent…

English singer-songwriter Nadine Shah’s Holiday Destination is a churning, post-punk lament to which anyone struggling to adapt in this tumultuous new world order can relate. On her third LP, Shah displays the patience to let an idea stew. And she’s not moving on until she’s sufficiently chewed it over, swished it…

The trajectory of Iron & Wine’s sound has been, generally speaking, from simple to complex. People fell in love with Sam Beam’s earliest recordings because they were almost frighteningly intimate: 2002’s debut The Creek Drank The Cradle consisted of home recordings on which Beam’s breath was sometimes loud enough to…

Supergroups always seem like a good idea, but seldom do they amount to anything other than the sum of their parts. And Filthy Friends have a lot of parts: Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney; Peter Buck of R.E.M.; Kurt Bloch of The Fastbacks; Bill Rieflin of Ministry, King Crimson, and R.E.M.; and Scott McCaughey of Young…

Next year will mark 20 years since the first Queens Of The Stone Age album. The success it’s garnered over that time places the band into an esteemed category, where festival headlining slots and radio spins are a given with each new album cycle. But it’s worth remembering that this wasn’t always the case. Queens was…

The lone violet lava lamp on the cover of Widowspeak’s fourth full-length, Expect The Best, is a fitting analog to the nine-song collection within: mesmerizingly introspective, nakedly nostalgic. Here Widowspeak continues its exploration of dreamy, ’90s-indebted “cowboy grunge,” à la Opal or Mazzy Star, leaning a bit…

The defining quality of the A$AP Mob, the Harlem-based crew of rap-world stylists, is a sort of louche effervescence. This year’s debut by A$AP associate Playboi Carti is the perfect example, breezy and insubstantive and just swelteringly hot. The new A$AP Ferg mixtape Still Striving operates on the same principles,…

The entirety of Brand New’s career feels like a coup. In 2001, it was impossible to predict that the band known for writing buzzy pop-punk songs and feuding with Taking Back Sunday (which Brand New’s Jesse Lacey once played bass for) would become a serious concern. But as the years unfolded and Brand New moved away…

You’ve probably seen news coverage about Monday’s solar eclipse, and the corresponding places across the United States that find themselves destinations for viewing the eclipse in its totality. That means the moon will completely cover the sun—and its tenuous atmosphere (the corona)—and will be a totally fucking…

Grizzly Bear’s new album, Painted Ruins, is—like all Grizzly Bear albums—a gorgeous piece of work. Since debuting as a full band with 2006’s Yellow House, the group composed of Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, Chris Taylor, and Chris Bear has developed a reputation for this remarkable consistency, for being unusually…

Painted Ruins, Grizzly Bear’s fifth record and first in five years, sounds completely at ease with itself. The first few tracks teem with pastoral beauty; check the swooning, 70mm composition of “Three Rings” or the early-morning birdsong guitars of “Four Cypresses.” This has been a natural growth: The almost…

For reasons that don’t really go beyond pure serendipity, I’ve been spending a lot of time back inside Two Steps From The Blues, the essential debut album of legendary bluesman Bobby Bland. Like a lot of records from that period, it’s basically a collection of singles, and every track is an absolute belter, showcasing…