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...
Indie pop has always had an identity problem, and that is entirely the point. The genre that defined itself by refusing definition has spent four decades proving that...
Post-rock doesn’t have a verse-chorus-bridge. It doesn’t have hooks in the traditional sense. It rarely has lyrics, and when it does, they tend to be treated more as...
Reggae is one of the few genres that managed to export an entire worldview alongside its music. Other styles travel in sound. Reggae traveled in sound, philosophy, spirituality,...
Neo-soul came into the world with a borrowed name and ended up building one of the most influential sounds of the last thirty years. The term was coined...
Metal has a gatekeeping problem that it refuses to solve, and that refusal is actually part of what makes the genre interesting. No other style of music argues...
UK garage arrived in the mid-1990s without permission and refused to leave. It borrowed the skeleton of American house and R&B, rebuilt it with British swing, compressed it...
Dream pop does not announce itself. It arrives the way that certain feelings do, as an ambient pressure, a gradual shift in light rather than a sudden intrusion....
Jazz is one of the few genres in popular music that has successfully convinced people it requires a special kind of listening. That reputation has done it both...
House music was born in a specific time and place, Chicago in the early 1980s, in the clubs that formed after disco’s commercial collapse left a hole in...
Country music has been having an identity crisis for so long that the crisis has become the identity. The debates about what qualifies as country, who belongs in...
Into The Music