Into The Music
Why Musicians Keep Going Back to Tape
King Tuff went back to Vermont and used the same Tascam 388 tape machine he made his debut on. Adele recorded 30 using analog equipment as a deliberate...
Deep Dives
Long-form essays on the albums, artists, and moments that shaped music history.
The Song Nobody Promoted: How Dennis Wilson\s Rainbows Found Its Moment Fifty Years Later
A song called “Rainbows” was not a single. It was not the reason anyone bought Pacific Ocean Blue when Dennis Wilson released his sole solo album in August...
The New Pornographers and the Art of Pop Under Pressure
The New Pornographers have been making pop music with too many moving parts for twenty-five years now, and they have always sounded like a band that could not...
American Football and the Art of Coming Back Without Faking It
When American Football reunited in 2014, fourteen years after they had quietly dissolved without ever having reached a wide audience, the reaction was bigger than anything the band...
The Cost of the Signature: What Musicians Putting Their Names on Causes Actually Risks
Musicians have always signed petitions. They’ve always lent their names to causes, stood behind podiums at benefits, played the occasional arena show for disaster relief. That’s not activism,...
Denzel Curry and The Scythe Are Building a Southern Hip-Hop Family
Supergroups are usually a bad idea. The logic seems sound, take five excellent musicians and put them in a room, and then the result arrives and it turns...
Future Islands Are Touring All of North Carolina and That Is Not an Accident
Future Islands announced a tour this week. The tour is of North Carolina. Only North Carolina. Ten dates in ten cities, every city in the state, booked with...
Angelique Kidjo and the End of the Permission Structure
There is a conversation happening in global music right now that the Western press has not quite caught up with. It concerns Angélique Kidjo, who at 64 is...
Thirty Years Later, Sublime Announce a New Album. What Does That Actually Mean?
Sublime announced their first new album in thirty years this week. It is called Until the Sun Explodes, it features Jakob Nowell, the late Bradley Nowell’s son, on...
Suno V5.5 and the Question Nobody Wants to Answer About AI Music
Suno just made the question harder. With the release of Version 5.5 last week, the AI music generation platform introduced three features that collectively shift the terms of...