Is there a better opener than “Since I Left You”? The title track of The Avalanches debut album, released in Australia on November 27, 2000, and in the U.K. and U.S. the following year, fades in like a the...
“I always wanted to push Armenian sounds,” says Lara Sarkissian. “I always thought of the future and how I could push Armenian sounds into the future in very experimental and untraditional ways and how that can fit within this...
There’s this well-know story in the history of Pulp about the time they played Glastonbury as a replacement for The Stone Roses. It was June of 1995 and the band was still a few months away from the release...
There’s a tension in “Preach,” the latest single from Los Angeles-based post-punk band Agender, of the world at a turning point. While “Preach” was seemingly made for 2020, the song was actually written late last year. “It was written...
On Lundi Gras, New Orleans duo Quintron and Miss Pussycat held their annual bash marking the day before Fat Tuesday in the French Quarter. This year, the theme was a crawfish boil, with Quintron dressed as a chef and...
On Quaranmood, Boise, Idaho-based singer and musician Angel Abaya, who uses just her first name for her solo work, goes through the range of emotions triggered by this year’s COVID-19 pandemic, and the stay-at-home orders that came as a...
Maral Mahmoudi grew up with Iranian music. The DJ/producer, who uses just her first name professionally, was raised primarily in Virginia, near Washington D.C., but spent fifth and sixth grade, as well as childhood summers, in Iran. “I I...
More than a decade ago, Róisín Murphy had talked to Sheffield-based producer Richard Barratt (aka Crooked Man and DJ Parrot) about taking their collaborative work from her album Overpowered further. “It was intended to be a big project at...
Back in 2015, when New York-based duo Tempers (Jasmine Golestaneh and Eddie Cooper) originally released their debut album, Services, the vinyl was limited to 500 copies and released through the German label Aufnahme + Wiedergabe. For the fan base...
It opens with the woosh of a synth leading to a steady dance floor rhythm, albeit it one that, at 108 beats per minute, is slow enough for pensive swaying. Her voice rises, “It doesn’t hurt me/Do you want...
In her video for “The Pharmacy,” singer CrowJane appears as a demon with blank eyes and a mouth oozing black goo as she writhes in chains, her long, sharp fingernails nearly scratching herself as her shackled hands clench and...
Some of you may remember that first time you heard Peaches. Maybe it was on the dance floor near the start of the new century. Maybe you were taken aback at first by the sound, so bare and raw...
Two nights into her support slot for podcast Welcome to Night Vale‘s U.S. jaunt last March, Eliza Rickman was en route to JFK and preparing to head home to Los Angeles. The COVID-19 pandemic had hit the United States,...
Swedish electronic music-maker and multidisciplinary artist ionnalee had intended to tour this year in a globe-trotting celebration of her decade of sonic and visual experimentation. With the tour canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s bringing the show online...
Every Saturday, L.A.-based podcaster Nancy Diaz-Ibarra adopts the name Napalm Nanny and drops a bomb filled with classic tunes and trivia. On Napalm Nanny and the Shack, music is a tool to dig into facets of cultural history that...
Back in October of last year, Loretti played at Stories Books and Cafe in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood, finishing the set with “Los Feliz.” As the band played, animator Maggie Noble rode her skateboard through the alley behind...
New York-based singer-songwriter/guitarist R O N I was visiting Tel Aviv when a friend introduced her to producer FortyForty. It was a serendipitous encounter resulting in an impromptu recording that forms the basis of her new single “Stop Motion”...
On August 1, 1980, Siouxsie and the Banshees released Kaleidoscope, their third album in just as many years. The album would mark a creative shift, arguably the beginning of a golden age for a group that would go on...
The first single Bianca Oblivion owned was “Pump Up the Jam,” the 1989 techno-pop hit from Technotronic that would endure on club dance floors for decades to follow. “When I was a little kid, I made my parents go...
On June 26, Sofie Fatouretchi will release her debut album, Cult Survivor, on Stones Throw. For the Vienna-based musician, who performs under just her first name, it’s a bit of a reunion; early in her career, she had worked...
I can’t remember exactly when and where I first saw Party Girl, the 1995 indie flick starring Parker Posey as Mary, a New York party promoter-turned-library clerk. Over the course of the late ’90s and into the early ’00s,...
Twenty years ago, Saint Etienne released Sound of Water. It was the fifth full-length album for the British trio of Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs and it was an ever-so-slight departure for a band that had spent...
I have a duty as a human being and a white Jewish American feminist to educate myself, learn, listen and fight every day against systemic racism, white supremacy, police brutality and anti-Black violence with dollars, words and actions. Many...
In April, Ami Dang’s family held a gathering on Zoom as both an observance of the Sikh holiday Vaisakhi and a prayer session for her aunt and uncle, who had both contracted COVID-19. Dang’s mother requested that she sing...