Deep dives into the sounds that define us.
Footwork did not ask to be discovered. It emerged from Chicago’s South Side in the late 1990s as an evolution of ghetto house, built for battle: two dancers...
There’s been a quiet but unmistakable shift happening in pop music. Call it the return of the low-key. After years of maximalism, hyperpop production, and the relentless sonic...
UK garage is one of the rare genres where you can trace a direct and unbroken line from a specific scene, in specific clubs, in a specific city,...
New wave is one of those genre labels that has been used to describe so many different things it should have collapsed under its own contradictions decades ago....
Reggae came out of Jamaica in the late 1960s, grew from ska and rocksteady, and within a decade had made its way into virtually every corner of the...
Afrobeats is everywhere now, which is both obvious and worth sitting with for a moment. It is in the Beyonce catalogue, it is on pop radio, it has...
There is a story that gets told about neo-soul where it begins in the mid-1990s and ends sometime around 2006 when D’Angelo disappeared and nobody knew if he...
Drill started in Chicago around 2011 and 2012, in the South Side neighborhoods where Chief Keef and a loose network of teenage rappers were making music that sounded...
Post-rock is a terrible name for a great idea. The genre label implies a departure from something, a genre that exists in the aftermath of rock, which makes...
Noise pop is not a contradiction in terms. It is a philosophy. Take the sweetest melodic instincts you have, the ones that want to write a hook you...
Jangle pop is not a genre that announces itself. It arrives on a wave of chiming, open-tuned guitar, a melody that lifts slightly more than it needs to,...
Funk is the genre that gave music its hips. Before funk, rhythm was something that supported the melody. After funk, rhythm was the point. The groove was not...
Into The Music