Tagged: topstory

Last June, we published a feature called the Top 20 Albums We've Been Waiting For Forever , counting down a bunch of our favorite artists from whom a new full-length was: (A) long overdue; and (B) not totally unrealistic. Coming in at No. 19 on that list was Queens Of The Stone Age. As we wrote in that space : Read More...

Kanye West took the stage at Saturday Night Live last night to debut an aggressive new track, "Black Skinhead". He also performed "New Slaves", a song West debuted on Friday. The songs will appear on his next record , Yeezus . Dressed in a studded leather jacket, West's stage presence on SNL was full of rage. He performed in front of a projection flipping through images reading "Followers", "Special!" and "Discount Price" but always returning to the same statement: "Not For Sale." His new song begins with some screams. It [...]

Tonight Kanye West premiered "New Slaves," the first single from his forthcoming LP, by projecting a video on buildings across the world. His site includes a map of times and locations for those projections, 66 in all. It's the same song Hudson Mohawke spun in Poland recently. Earlier this month, the rapper previewed new material at the Met Ball and Adult Swim's upfront , but decent recordings from those events have been scarce. Tonight's launch was better documented. Watch the full video (as it appeared on a building in Brooklyn) and a Vine [...]

Sebadoh were something of the “Beautiful Losers” of the ’90s indie scene. Lou Barlow emerged from Northamption hardcore act Deep Wound, and later Dinosaur Jr., having famously been acrimoniously dismissed from the latter. He’d certainly borrow from J Mascis’s pop instincts, as well as Deep Wound’s wonton aggression, throughout Sebadoh’s existence, while perfecting the art of the sensitive yet self-deprecating indie ballad. Read More...

There were many strong music videos this week, and a couple that I loved, from actual adults. But no grown-up is going to beat a charged-up mob of Minneapolis children rapping about bikes and school uniforms. I'm sorry. It's just not ever going to happen. Our picks for the week are below. Read More...

Daft Punk's new album Random Access Memories is a lot of things: A masterful years-in-the-making publicity campaign set to music, a showcase of hellaciously expensive decades-old studio craftsmanship, a stunt-casted absurdist music event on the level of the Coachella Tupac hologram, a fascinating example of what happens when pop-star robots go to disco fantasy camp, a reminder that it's bee too long since you played Off The Wall front-to-back, an example of a hype-wave so deafening that you can almost forget there's an album behind it. But more than anything, it's a deeply silly piece of [...]

It's kind of a stretch to connect James Murphy's most recent dismissal of an LCD Soundsystem reunion with the release of “ Get Lucky ", which happened within a few days of each other, but it's still worth noting. After all, it has now been seven years since Murphy waited "seven years and fifteen days" (another reference from a self-consciously referential band, this time to German trance outfit Groove Coverage's "7 Years and 50 Days" from the year before) to play Daft Punk at his house party. Even if Murphy says, once and for all, that [...]

Back in 2011 Austra released Feel It Break - a wonderful bit of gothy electro-pop weirdness that would ultimately become one of that year’s most beloved releases (especially for those with a particular penchant for glitchy art pop and operatic vocals). Now, some two years and many, many tour dates later, the band returns with Olympia , which is slated for release early next month. According to vocalist Katie Stelmanis, Olympia is not only a much more collaborative effort, it’s also a much more personal one as well. I sat down with Stelmanis to discuss [...]

You haven't always been able to hear it in the actual music that comes out of the city, but Baltimore's DIY-heavy indie rock scene has always been a beautifully unsnobby and pop-happy sort of place. I haven't lived there in nearly eight years, and haven't spent nearly enough time there since I moved out, but I cherish memories of Baltimore as a place where you'd argue the merits of Three 6 Mafia deep cuts between bands at, like, an Out Hud show. When the rest of the indie world was still proudly ignorant about rap or pop music, Baltimore indie [...]

Everything feels heavier at night. Alone at home after dark, whatever solipsistic sentiment was developing by day takes on titanic proportions. All sense of perspective vanishes along with the sunlight. Melodrama is heightened. Longing feels more desperate, mistakes more extreme. Deep, dark brooding can take over in a way that usually doesn't happen at noon (unless you are Wayne Coyne ). In the quiet of "the Bible-black predawn," as Jeff Tweedy put it , any music can become more resonant, even the balls-out aggression of Ke$ha or Kvelertak. Call it the movie theater effect. But some [...]

It's finally here! Daft Punk's long, long-awaited Random Access Memories is finally streaming online. Up until now, the great " Get Lucky " has been the only song we've gotten to hear, but now, the whole gleaming precision-engineered LP is streaming at iTunes . Listen to it and let us know what you think below.

Of all the UK bands to make it big throughout the '80s and early '90s, Primal Scream may very well be remembered as one of the weirdest - and the most doggedly persistent. It's easy to forget that the band had been together for the better part of a decade before 19912s acid rock masterpiece Screamadelica made them legit rock stars, or that frontman Bobby Gillespie did double duty as the drummer in the Jesus and Mary Chain until Primal Scream gained enough steam to become his full-time pursuit. In the years since Screamadelica , Primal Scream [...]

In the 2005 film Junebug , Will Oldham's character works for a Chicago curator, on the lookout for "outsider artists" in the backwoods of North Carolina for a big city gallery. It's not a bad metaphor for Oldham's musical career. He's spent much of the past two decades exploring the fringes of Southern musical traditions and giving voice to the raw, primal spirit of Appalachia. His artistic trajectory has been as gnarled and twisted as his mountain-man beard, traveling in and out of one quintessential American genre after another, noisy and raw one [...]

At this point, six albums in, the National are practically a genre unto themselves. On Alligator , the first album that many of us noticed, they had a dark and driving intensity that didn't seem too far removed from, say, Interpol. As little as two albums ago, they seemed to share a lot of musical ideas with the Walkmen. These days, though, they've followed their inward journey, building on the things that made them special in the first place, turning their hungover throb into an intricate, debonair form of chamber-rock that ebbs and swells on its own tidal swagger. [...]

It’s hard to imagine that anyone will release an album this year as lovely - or as harrowingly intimate - as Majical Cloudz's soon-to-be-released debut, Impersonator . Building on the successes of last year’s Turns Turns Turns EP, the duo - vocalist Devon Welsh and musician Matthew Otto - have perfected their very own style of what might be best described as confessional balladry: sparsely arranged, incredibly restrained piano- and synth-based tracks that play up Welsh’s powerhouse voice and capacity to write songs that are equal parts heart-wrenching and deeply unnerving. “I wanted to make music that [...]

Have you watched the 15-minute Red Bull Music Academy documentary about DFA ? Or the hour-long Savages Ministry Of Sound show ? No? You should do those things. As ever, there was plenty of amazing music-related video on the internet this past week, and not all of it took the form of actual music videos. Some of it, however, did, and we've got five very good music videos below. Read More...

Last summer, when Blur were reuniting to record a couple new tracks and play the closing ceremonies of the 2013 Olympics, I wrote here about the great English band's 10 best songs. I opened that post by trying to answer in earnest a semi-rhetorical question posed on Twitter by Spin 's Chris Weingarten. Asked Weingarten: Serious question of the day for Americans: When exactly did Blur turn from enjoyable/ignorable singles band into OMG IMPORTANT ARTISTES - Chris Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) August 1, 2012 [...]

“I want to be the Patti Smith of now, with something like ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger’ blaring out of kids’ speakers. I fantasize about that, but I’m not going to be that. I’m just not that dangerous,” Bradford Cox told me in an interview for The Big Takeover back in 2008. While it’s defeatist to live in a world measuring yourself to your idols, Cox has carved out an idiosyncratic, challenging, and even dangerous milieu for himself making great records, from the rather underwhelming Turn It Up Faggot in 2005, on through his newest, released this [...]

The title of Modern Vampires Of The City , the third album from Vampire Weekend, seems like it riffs on the band's name and on its members' status as sharp and witty New York men-about-town, guys who play punny word-games on their Twitter accounts and make cameo appearances on Girls and maintain none-too-serious Soundcloud side projects. If that were the case, it'd be perfectly in keeping with the band's beautifully manicured persona; no other band has come anywhere near their grasp of the Whit Stillman/Noah Baumbach universe of idle and well-heeled and overeducated young [...]

The music made by Savages, the four-piece London band who released their debut album Silence Yourself today, is a direct and linear thing. It's easy to get the sense that the band plots out its arrangements on graph paper, figuring out the intricacies of guitar/bass interplay with mathematical precision, or that its reduced every element of its music down to the skeletons, the way Spoon might do. But Savages' music has a chaos to it, too - a messy straining to create a system of beliefs, to resonate as something more than music to soundtrack your internet browsing [...]