Lately when I go see my parents, I’ve started joking with my mom that the first thing she does is update me on all the devastating things that have happened to people she knows, knew, or thinks I might have known since the last time I saw her. Kids I sat next to in band class who were killed in motorcycle accidents, brothers of classmates of my mom and my aunt who had heart attacks, the son of a sister of her friend who has been diagnosed with cancer – these people a couple degrees of separation away from us who are experiencing a worst-case scenario. It’s more compassionate than gossipy, and it’s a window into the life my mom has lived outside of being my mom; she remembers members of family trees from her tiny hometown in a way I could only dream of remembering anybody I’ve ever known.

I have a memory of driving across a bridge last year, after impulsively moving to a new state, and bursting into tears when Forth Wanderers came on shuffle. I’d fallen in love with someone I just met, all of my friends were hours away, and my life was unrecognizable. I felt so many emotions that I felt nothing at all. The water was glimmering, and the guitars were reaching into my body and pulling something out of me, inflicting a simultaneous pain and release. The song was “Painting Of Blue.” I lost it at the end as Ava Trilling sang, “I’m just a painting of blue/ I’m just a painting to you/ You’re gonna paint me through.” I didn’t know why those words hit so hard; it could’ve been her resigned drawl that resonated, the way she sounds on the verge of giving up. The moment was a brief window into surrendering to the feelings that I’d been avoiding.

2024 has already been a pivotal year for Good Morning’s Stefan Blair and Liam Parson. The Australian “soft rock band” released their seventh project (an ambitious double LP aptly titled Good Morning Seven), opened for Waxahatchee and Frankie Cosmos in the US, and celebrated a decade together as a duo. Despite these career highs, in retrospect, there was an air of cynicism and practicality-induced worry underlying the album’s rollout.

Rap music is miraculous. You could be staring down what promises to be a lazy Friday afternoon, the week before a holiday, and then you could glance at your computer and realize that the world has changed. The album that you’ve been waiting on, the one that you didn’t want to presume to expect, could suddenly fall out of the sky — the whole thing just arriving on your phone all at once. Shit could get crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious. It’s that rarest of beasts: the good kind of emergency.

Mistyheads can exhale. The album we’ve been waiting for is here.

When Vacations first concocted their own festival MATES, it was a homecoming. In 2022, they hadn’t played their hometown of Newcastle, Australia for a minute, and they wanted to get back to their roots of booking events and throwing parties. So instead of a normal show, they gathered a bunch of Australian artists together for a blowout mini-fest. It was a success, and they immediately hit a ceiling. There wasn’t really any way they could scale MATES up to a larger event in Newcastle. So they started thinking bigger — and further.

A couple of weeks before Tyler, The Creator kicked off the abbreviated rollout for his new blockbuster Chromakopia, we got the throat-clearing. Tyler produced and rapped on “Cracc Era,” a single from the Houston underground rap fixture Maxo Kream. It wasn’t the first time that Tyler showed up on a Maxo record; he did the same on “Big Persona,” one of the singles from Maxo’s 2021 album The Weight Of The World. On paper, they make an odd pair — the eccentric Los Angeles superstar with the guttural, gang-affiliated Texan street storyteller. Chalk it up to real recognizing real. Whenever those two raspy-voiced rappers appear on a track together, they become a two-man whirlwind of shit-talk. They speak a common language, and they speak it better than almost anyone.

With two albums and a studio composition degree under her belt, Mitski Miyawaki decided it was about time she tried something new: the guitar. The singer-songwriter had just graduated from Purchase College’s Conservatory of Music, a school she attended largely due to its proximity to New York City. Mitski was born in Japan, but moved between numerous countries before spending the final portion of her teenage years in Turkey. One night when she was 18, spiritually lost, and very drunk, she wrote her first song. That was enough of a reason for her to follow her creative streak and move across the globe. Not even five years later, Mitski’s two first albums — 2012’s Lush and 2013’s Retired From Sad, New Career In Business — established her as a promising new force.

Have you ever crashed your car? I have, several times as a teenager. When I try to remember the moment of impact from any of those incidents — when I sideswiped a truck, or when I hit the brakes but still rear-ended a sedan on the highway — all I can recall is the blankness of my mind at the point of collision. I am reminded of this when I hear “Less Meaning” by the Body, a syncopated song that embodies the way disaster can induce the feeling of going in-and-out of consciousness.

Let’s not go overboard. It’s so tempting! You want to go overboard in a situation like this! A great legacy act returns with its first album in a long time, one that explicitly calls back to thing things that made the group so beloved in the first place? That’s what we want! Given our reunion-friendly touring climate, it’s something that happens more often than you might expect! When it happens, fans and critics have a tendency to get too excited, to praise the new record in ways that almost diminish the old ones. It’s a shortcut to living in the past, insisting that yesterday’s trailblazers are superior to today’s. It’s the line of thinking that leads Time Out Of Mind to defeat OK Computer, both at the Grammys and on the 1997 Pazz & Jop poll. So let’s not do that to the Cure. Let’s take a breath.

Winter in Northwest Washington’s temperate San Juan Islands may not be the freezing, brutal onslaught faced by comparable latitudes further inland, but four months of uninterrupted wind, rain, and minimal daylight can be a taxing monotony. Locals yearn for the summer, whose balmy lack of rain remains a well-kept secret. For tourists, the region may as well not exist from October to June.

Sometimes you just have to get out of your hometown. For Taylor Swift, that reckoning came when she was merely 14. The burgeoning singer-songwriter, her parents, and her younger brother packed up and relocated from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, to the Nashville suburbs so she could pursue a career in country music. As you know, that all worked out for her. But when that seminal, life-changing move happens when you’ve barely started high school, how do you reinvent yourself later on? Well, you could move to New York.

“You don’t meet your brother 35 years into your life, usually. I didn’t have a brother when I grew up. And I feel like I got one now. And that’s a fact.”

Mystery has kept a hold on many of history’s most lauded electronic musicians. Producers ranging from Burial to Aphex Twin to Vegyn have employed varying degrees of elusiveness to their advantage, cultivating hushed personas that stir rumors and generate theories among fans. More recently, in the style of a Zoomer-friendly Daft Punk, Two Shell have become internet favorites without anyone knowing their identities. The UK duo emerged on Peverelist’s no frills left-field label, Livity Sound, with the dubstep EP Access in 2019. After creating the imprint Mainframe Audio, Two Shell distanced themselves from the austerity of their avant-techno peers. They’ve embraced gleeful hooks, launched a cryptic website, sold $1,298 “boring rocks” on Bandcamp, and disguised themselves with cartoony costumes. These impish bits quickly led some of Two Shell’s influential forebears to take notice, and they began cropping up in mixes from Ben UFO, Jamie xx, and Four Tet.

There is no satisfying way to write about Elliott Smith because everything he did defied resolution. He played in deliberately ambiguous scales. His songs had no prevailing mood. He made music not to impart knowledge but to stoke a sense of constant questioning.

“Well early in the morning/ At the break of day/ I ain’t got no God/ To whom I pray/ No lord above/ To set me free/ I keep my burdens/ Right here with me.” So began A New Testament, the great 2014 solo album from former Girls frontman Christopher Owens. As someone who famously grew up in the Children Of God cult, spirituality has always been a looming subject in Owens’ music, sometimes as explicit context, sometimes as an ambient presence. Even when he was embracing humanism and aligning himself with the New Atheists, religion lingered in his songs as an adversary, the foil in his secular gospel-rock.

A fun game to play at Best Friends Forever: Name bands that could potentially play next year’s festival, if the fest gets a chance to come back. Judging by T-shirts alone, Jawbreaker should be absolute locks for the headliner spot. Beyond that, the game turns into a delirious exercise of remembering some guys: Pretty Girls Make Graves! Rocket From The Crypt! Slint! Sebadoh! Texas Is The Reason! Slant 6! Touché Amoré! Scowl! An Elliott Smith hologram! Bring them all!

A man calls his mom and pretends to be held hostage so he can get money to spend on drugs. A man is haunted by a bulletin board of missing kids in a Walmart. A man watches videos of dogs working and feels envious of their sense of purpose. A man gets shot trying to rob a liquor store. A man scoffs at the freaks surrounding him at a bus station, telling himself he’s nothing like them. Welcome to the world of Drug Church’s new album Prude.

Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet Tour begins with a pre-filmed video of her in a bathtub, giggling as the narrator introduces the show. Wait, shit — it’s starting now?! The screen lifts to show an elaborate stage setup rivaling that of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie — there’s a bedroom, a bathroom, a fireplace, and two spiral staircases — and the real Sabrina frantically dashes out one of its many doors, wrapped in what appears to be nothing but a bath towel. She pulls the towel open to reveal that it’s lined entirely with gemstones, and one of her signature itty-bitty strapless getups has been hiding underneath. She flashes a smile through overlined lips as the opening guitar licks to “Taste” resound through Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Joke’s on you — she’s been ready to sing to you the whole time.

These days, it’s possible for a pop star to move like an indie band. Whereas someone like Carly Rae Jepsen might’ve been written off as a one-hit wonder a generation or two ago, she’s spent her post-hit career touring clubs and festivals, playing to audiences who aren’t just there to hear her one hit. Last year, the critic Shaad D’Souza wrote a New York Times piece about the middle-class pop star, a category that seems to grow more crowded every day. The term fits avant-pop critical sensations like Caroline Polachek and Rina Sawayama, but it applies just as easily to singers like Rita Ora and Ava Max — permanent also-rans whose down-the-middle dance-pop never quite broke through but who have nurtured culty fanbases of their own anyway.

In his first meeting with Interpol, Matador Records co-founder Chris Lombardi likened them to “four businessmen who happened to be in the business of making music.” He was referring more to their industrious hustle than their suits; though Interpol were deadly serious about proving they were as tight of a brand as they were a band, the fact that they happened to dress like they arrived straight from Wall Street brokerage firms was a coincidence. From the severe typeface and color scheme to the beautifully bleak sound itself, Turn On The Bright Lights presented a unified front, an aesthetic so fully formed that copycats would inevitably soon dilute the brand and cut into market share. And so Interpol wisely got back down to business on Antics, proving that there was no suitable substitute for Interpol, except for more Interpol.

There was no tour. When Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan released their collaborative mixtape Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1 — its 10th anniversary is Saturday — they also announced a haphazardly routed set of shows that would supposedly take them across the basketball arenas of the Southeastern United States. One problem: Those tour dates were not real. In between tracks on Tha Tour Pt. 1, DJ Swamp Izzo shouts that “the dates are locked in.” The dates were not locked in. None of the venues had even been contacted. The tour of Tha Tour was pure fantasy.

“Hey man, slow down!” Thom Yorke exclaimed in the waning moments of arguably his greatest album. The music for “The Tourist,” which closes out Radiohead’s OK Computer at an appropriately unhurried pace, was composed by Yorke’s bandmate Jonny Greenwood after seeing out-of-towners obliviously blazing through a town in France. If the song begins as a friendly reminder, it quickly evolves into a pointed rebuke: “Idiot, slow down!” It is a tune about stopping to smell the roses rather than racing from one checkpoint to the next — good advice for those seeking to get the most out of life. Maybe, if released today, it would have a lyric about putting your phone down.

It feels like treading water. Like you’re at the starting line of a marathon, already out of breath. Like spiraling, but you can’t tell if you’re headed up or down. Like all your stupid little songs are all starting to sound the same.

When Perfume Genius released “Queen” and “Grid” as the leadoff singles for 2014’s Too Bright — which turns 10 today — Mike Hadreas’ metamorphosis into a pop star was well underway. Rock was mired in a general embarrassment about its domination by straight white dudes with guitars during pop’s post-“Blurred Lines” moral reckoning, and the indie world needed something fierce, fun, and challenging. Hadreas, a gay 30-something from Seattle who’d released two albums of painfully fragile piano ballads under a name taken from the grisly and voluptuous 2006 thriller Perfume: Story Of A Murderer, was in the position to give that to the world. Working with Portishead’s Adrian Utley to push his sound into the post-Yeezus zeitgeist of serrated minimalism, Hadreas seemed ready to complete the transition towards a more pop and extroverted mode, which is often the extra push a rising artist needs to vault to the highest echelons of indie acclaim.

Imagine a scenario where you’re just two months out from a presidential election where it feels like the fate of the country, and even the free world as a concept, is on the line. The previous years have been full of tragedy, protest, fear, media distrust and paranoia. Unprecedented societal shifts introduce “new normals” and generations of kids are marked by the conditions they’re born into. The stakes have never been, nor could they be, any higher.

When Richard D. James is mentioned, there’s a good chance the first thing that comes to mind is his Selected Ambient Works series. Comprising two of the most iconic (and meme’d) electronic records ever, it helped draw a throughline between party culture and erudite left-field sounds. The first installment, in 1992, served as James’ full-length debut under the moniker Aphex Twin. Establishing a foundation for intelligent dance music (commonly abbreviated as IDM), it thrust him out of the metaphorical hacker’s den and onto the festival stage. Its 1994 companion was comparably cerebral and synesthetic, asserting that James’ talents as a mad scientist producer were just as remarkable when stripped of pulse.

Sometimes, the story is bigger than the music. In the case of Regional Justice Center, the story starts like this: In 2016, 18-year-old Max Hellesto was sent to prison for six years for first degree assault. Whenever someone goes to prison, that person’s entire family suffers. Hellesto’s brother Ian Shelton, already playing in Seattle-area hardcore bands, needed some way to cope with what was happening, so he started Regional Justice Center, a band named after the jail where his brother was locked up.

“We are like the Gallagher brothers, but in the Canadian sense,” Tegan Quin told The Age in 2003. Along with her identical twin sister, Sara, she had just finished promoting their album from the previous year, If It Was You, and in interviews, the pair joked that it sent them into therapy. That record, whose cover literally featured the pair yelling in perpendicular directions, rumbled with a palpable if unfocused angst, its strongest ideas buckling under the unbearable weight of being 19 years old in the public eye. By the end of that tour, perhaps to prevent an Oasis-sized meltdown, the two had moved to opposite sides of the country, Sara in Montreal and Tegan in Vancouver. Once tourmates and roommates, they began to repair their fractured relationship as penpals, sending demo CDs through the Canadian postal service.

School, career, friendships, family, romance, politics, sports: In the fall of 2004, these were trivialities, minor disturbances that kept me from my life’s true purpose at the time. Which was listening to Arcade Fire’s Funeral. This was a rare, yet familiar feeling, one I also experienced with Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — albums that somehow outshined their blinding comet trail of purely online advance hype, rendering the print world of circumspect four-star reviews obsolete, incapable of recognizing the canon being assembled in real time.

In recent years, plenty of shoegaze songs became unlikely viral sensations: Wisp’s “Your face,” Flyingfish’s “wonder if you care,” quannnic’s “life imitates life.” Before any of them, there was julie’s 2020 single “flutter,” a frantic and fuzzed-out whirlwind, reminiscent of Swirlies, sweeping the listener into its mess of caustic guitars and hypnotic dual vocals. Since its release, it’s accumulated 36 million streams on Spotify and almost 3 million watches on YouTube. The tune is a sonic triptych — two outbursts of chaos separated by a meandering interlude. “flutter” isn’t afraid to wander; it’s confident that it can keep the listener hooked until the very end, and it succeeds.

Forty years ago, David Byrne danced with a lamp. In what might be the most memorable scene of Stop Making Sense, my pick for the best live-concert film ever made, Byrne picks up a regular floor lamp, previously a mere part of the stage setting, and pushes it back and forth, shimmying all around it — a classic subversion of pop-star gesturing that works as pop-star gesturing in its own right. On Friday night at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Mitski did Byrne one better: She danced with a beam of light.

It’s a bit like naming your band Illmatic, isn’t it? “Dummy” is a great word with lots of fun uses, but if you bring it up in a music-nerd context, people’s brains will all wander to the same lonely, desolate, beautiful Portishead album. The members of Dummy absolutely belong to the music-nerd community, and they know that better than most.

In June 2013, the professor and programmer Mark Sample debuted the Twitter bot @mobydickatsea. Every two hours, the account would tweet a randomly selected fragment of text from Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, without context and in no predetermined order. Entries could be humorously elliptical (“swallowed down and thrown up by a whale”) or rich with accidental meaning (“the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.”). The decontextualization of Melville inspired a bigger project that Sample unveiled in 2019, called An End Of Tarred Twine, for a line in Moby-Dick about a shipowner saving every scrap of sail material for future use. Like that frugal captain, Sample took every scrap of the novel and created “a procedurally generated hypertext version of Moby-Dick,” one that unfolds differently every time you read it. “Very quickly, you’re lost, reading Moby-Dick one passage at a time, out of order, with no map to guide you,” Sample wrote on his blog in 2020. “Or as Ishmael says about the birthplace of Queequeg, the location ‘is not down in any map; true places never are.'” Sample’s original bot still posts as @mobydickatsea, but in protest of Twitter’s Muskification, he’s moved it to a different platform. The fragmented Moby-Dick now appears exclusively on Mastodon.

Once a perfect little baby/ Who’s now a jerk/ Standing close to the pyre manning fireworks. These are the last words on the sparse opener and title track of MJ Lenderman’s new album Manning Fireworks. It almost sounds like an elegy, grieving the loss of innocence, wondering how he ended up there. But as usual, it’s too irreverent and funny to be a requiem.

“I’ve seen so many shit bands throughout the year and often have found myself saying, ‘I can do better than that.’ So that’s what I’m doing. There’s a lot of bands that are almost there or just have no idea how to make something cohesive, or with swag, or literally anything that elevates the experience of just being people with instruments. So I gotta have a vision that’s better than the competition.”