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....
R&B has spent the last decade being absorbed by everything around it and still managing to remain itself. That’s not a small achievement. The genre has been dissolved...
Emo spent about fifteen years being embarrassed about itself. Then it spent the next fifteen years being reclaimed, reexamined, and quietly vindicated. At this point the argument is...
Free jazz has always had an image problem. The phrase itself does most of the work: “free” implies difficult, difficult implies inaccessible, inaccessible implies not for you. For...
Latin Alternative has spent thirty years refusing to be defined, and that refusal is precisely what makes it worth paying attention to right now. It is not reggaeton,...
Electronic music is the only genre that has no instrument of its own that is not already borrowed from something else. It uses the synthesizer, which was invented...
New Wave is a genre that has always meant more than it should be able to. That is a feature, not a bug. Born out of punk’s energy...
Alternative rock has always been a strange category. It started as a genuine descriptor, music that existed outside the mainstream rock infrastructure, and became the mainstream so thoroughly...
Indie rock is one of those terms that long ago stopped describing a sound and started describing an attitude. When it emerged in the early 1980s, the word...
Progressive rock made ambition the point. At a moment in the late 1960s when the rest of rock music was compressing itself into tighter and tighter pop formats,...
Psychedelic rock did not begin with drugs. It began with a question: what happens when you stop treating a song as a vehicle for the verse-chorus structure and...
Into The Music