There’s no shortage of problems on Earth, but, when Heidi Alexander conceived of an EP named for our planet, she looked to the issues lying beneath the surface. Earth, the sixth installment from Earth Girl Helen Brown‘s series of...
Rachael Margaret Kime, vocalist for L.A.-based band Glaare, hadn’t seen Hellraiser until recently. But, she had been watching and re-watching a lot of ’80s movies when her husband and bandmate, Brandon Pierce, suggested naming Glaare’s second album after The...
When she first wrote “Perfect Love,” Dorothea Paas and her friends jokingly referred to it as a Phil Collins song. “I could just imagine the song being arranged with the full Phil Collins treatment – chorus, guitar, big reverb...
The video for “Refraction Overdrive,” from Japanese duo Crystal’s latest album, Reflection Overdrive, is so unabashedly ’80s that you might, for a second, think that you’ve been transported to a wood paneled living room, where you’re drinking wine coolers...
“Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been writing this book all my life,” says Daphne A. Brooks, author of the recently released Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Brooks, a Yale professor who previously...
It began with upbeat demos recorded in his parents’ dining room, Robert Smith recalled in a 2004 Rolling Stone interview, but the sound of The Cure’s third album would change a couple weeks later when he wrote “The Funeral...
In the fall of 2019, Elizabeth Hart, best known as bassist for the band Psychic Ills, was pregnant and looking for a project that reflected this moment in her life. “I was interested in finding some way of collaborating...
In the video for “Hématome,” released on March 11 by French six-piece disco group L’Impératrice, a gorilla tries to fit into the human world and is broken-hearted when she can’t do that. It’s a devastating and beautiful animated sci-fi...
Carlyn Bezic had a demo on her computer labeled Gem simply because she wrote the chord changes on a GEM keyboard. It had a disco vibe and Bezic, best known as one half of Canadian duo Ice Cream, is...
Nearly an hour into a 2015 Red Bull Academy interview, singer Laetitia Sadier discusses the lyrics for the beloved Stereolab song “Ping Pong.” It is, she explained, about the “cycle of destruction” within capitalist societies. “Repair, rebuild and then...
If you were to ask me what was the song of 2001 was, I would answer “One More Time” by Daft Punk. I would tell you this without a moment of thought, because, in my own memory, it was. ...
In 1996, Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson of Lush appeared on MTV’s 120 Minutes answering a question about the themes behind their album, Lovelife. “A lot of people have accused us of being man-haters,” said Anderson, before countering that...
When we met on a recent video call, Simon Raymonde was in the studio he built in his garden just a few years ago. “It’s my happy place, really,” he says. “It’s a real treat to me to have...
In Armenian, yeraz means “dream.” It’s a fitting title for the first compilation from Los Angeles-based record label and artist management company Critique. Yeraz is a ten-track album, out digitally on February 19 and on vinyl in May, that...
By 2001, I had already fallen in love with an innumerable amount of albums. Some became fleeting moments of obsession. Others evolved into long-term relationships. None would resonate with me quite like the debut full-length from British electronic pop...
It was around the release of Midnight Sister’s 2017 debut album, Saturn Over Sunset, that Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian began working on the follow-up. They wrote and demoed material on their own time before heading into the studio...
Often, Jill Tracy’s music is rooted in a place. For half-a-decade, she has performed at the annual festival Flower Piano in Golden Gate Park’s San Francisco Botanical Garden. Her concerts, known as “sonic séances” would take place amongst the...
“Swim Test” – the latest single from Cassandra Violet Wolken McGrath (the L.A.-based singer-songwriter better known simply as Cassandra Violet) – was inspired by her father, but as the COVID-19 pandemic took a deadly turn in Los Angeles, the...
Have you ever wanted to borrow a synthesizer for a few weeks, just to see if it’s the right one for you? In Los Angeles, FeM Synth Lab offers just that, with a focus on making otherwise prohibitively expensive...
Over the past four years, I have grown to hate Twitter and its seemingly endless feed of bickering and bad news; since the pandemic started, that disdain has grown tenfold. However, on a Wednesday in late May, I watched...
I don’t think I’ve ever listened to as much disco as I have in 2020. That’s saying a lot for someone whose regular listening habits include a decent dose of the dance floor singles of the 1970s and the...
On Wednesday, March 18, Adriana A. Roberts, best known in nightclub circles and amongst mashup fans as Adriana A., launched her weekly “Mashup Listening Party” on Twitch with an iTunes playlist loaded with Fleetwood Mac. “I needed the comfort...
In the ’00s, Los Angeles-based band Lavender Diamond earned fans and critical acclaim for their folk-tinged indie pop. They toured with The Decembrists and played events like ArthurFest in Los Angeles and SirenFest in New York. On December 4,...
In a year without dance clubs or music festivals, New York-based DJ and producer Julia Govor wanted to do something to bring together her colleagues. Indefinite Uncertainty, which dropped November 27, is the result of that mission. A 10-track...