Music Features

Phoebe Bridgers has a remarkable ability to invest seemingly banal scenes with profound emotion. On this year’s Punisher, she showed she could makea bored visit to an overseas 7/11 or an argument at a Whole Foods feel as deep and meaningful as the funeral on her first album. In moments …

It’s time to make “Y.M.C.A.” great again. People in the streets of Philadelphia are dancing to “Y.M.C.A.” in celebration of the news that Joe Biden has taken the lead in Pennsylvania. That means he’s nearly clinched the presidential race — hopefully to be called tonight. The Village People’s Seventies disco …

Earlier this summer, Rufus Wainwright released Unfollow the Rules, his first full-on pop album since 2012’s Out of the Game, after a three-month delay due to the Covid-19 shutdown. Although he hasn’t been able to go out on the road to share his songs with fans on a tour as …

In 1969, Jeff Wolfram was carried into the Red Chimney — a Los Angeles restaurant his father had bought two years earlier — and placed on the bar. He was two days old. His father Horst had arrived in America from Germany in the 1960s. Horst wasn’t planning on staying …

U2 had a lot to prove when they started work on 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The electronic experimentation of 1997’s Pop turned off many longtime fans, and the album failed to generate any genuine hits. The PopMart stadium tour may have been a technical triumph, but there …

Bartees Strange has ignored musical boundaries his whole life, without even thinking about it. “When I played in hardcore bands, I remember writing songs and throwing in these R&B sections, or a melodic guitar section, and people would be like, ‘Bro, what are you doing? This is a hardcore band,’” …

As part of our newly updated survey of the500 Greatest Albums of All Time, we’re publishing a series of pieces on the making and impact of key records from the list. The Beatles‘ Abbey Road came in at number five. The following piece originally appeared in a Beatles special issue …

During the past few years, William Shatner has tackled everything from progressive rock and country to classic rock and even Christmas songs on his eclectic spoken-word/music albums for Cleopatra Records. But when the label approached him with the idea of a blues record, he was slightly taken aback. “A white …

Jvanz is a 20 year-old aspiring artist from St. Catherines, Ontario with a flexible voice and a lancing falsetto. He released his first EP in 2019, but like thousands of artists who upload their music to Spotify daily, no one cared. “There’s a lot of competition,” Jvanz says. “You can’t …

Taylor Swift hopped on Twitter on Thursday morning to announce that she had recorded an entire new album in secret over the last few months. “I’ve poured all my whims, dreams, fears, and musings into [it],” she wrote. The news of Folklore was a surprise, the release date even more …