Deep dives into the sounds that define us.
Jazz fusion is the genre that got away with everything. It took jazz’s harmonic language, rock’s volume and rhythmic aggression, funk’s groove, and in some iterations, electronic music’s...
Arlo Parks made a dance record. More precisely, she made an album soaked in UK garage, 2-step, and house music, and it sounds like a completely natural evolution....
Lo-fi hip hop is a genre that has become more famous for its context than its content, which is either a criticism or a description depending on how...
Chillwave is a genre that had a brief, specific moment of cultural prominence and then retreated into a kind of wistful afterlife, which is appropriate for a genre...
Math rock is a genre defined primarily by its rhythmic complexity, and it is a genre that produces passionate arguments about what actually belongs in it. The name...
Post-punk is one of those genre names that explains itself and then immediately fails to explain anything. The “post” part tells you it came after punk. The “punk”...
Bluegrass is a precisely defined American music genre with a debated origin story and a devoted community that polices its boundaries more actively than almost any other genre...
Noise rock occupies a position in the taxonomy of music that is simultaneously clear and contested. The clarity: it is guitar-based rock music that incorporates noise, dissonance, and...
Twee pop is a genre defined almost entirely by attitude rather than sound, which makes it one of the more contested categories in the taxonomy of music. The...
Trap is a production style before it is a genre, and the distinction matters because it explains why so much music that does not share obvious aesthetic sensibilities...
Alternative rock is a category that described a commercial position before it described a sound, and the confusion between those two definitions runs through every argument about what...
Indie rock is not a sound. It never was. The term described a distribution model before it described a genre, and the confusion between those two definitions has...
Into The Music