Has there ever been an album so widely remembered without a single track most people would recognize?

Sergio Pizzorno bounces around in a half-ruffled/half-tassled all-denim getup that makes him look like he escaped from a Scissor Man attack at a Primark factory. Whenever he’s not bouncing, he’s kneeling or leaning, peacocking with a ceaseless desire to see mosh pits erupt in front of him. The crowd, spilling far out of the packed Woodsey Tent at Glastonbury, are all too happy to oblige, a sea of hopping loons oftentimes obscured by flare smoke shouting back almost every single word of the 13-song surprise set like it’s Kasabian’s 2014 headline slot all over again.

Moon Unit Zappa is ready to share her story. The daughter of Frank Zappa, who appeared on his 1982 hit “Valley Girl,” has lived an eventful life from the very beginning. The weirdness is detailed in her new memoir, EARTH TO MOON, which is out Tuesday and follows her unconventional upbringing in 1970s Los Angeles all the way up to the death of her parents.

When asked how he would like to live his remaining years, Luis Buñuel once said: “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other 22 in dreams — provided I can remember them.” Who knows what the great Spanish filmmaker might’ve conceived had he been a raver rather than a Surrealist. A recent microgenre offers a clue: hit em, invented in a dream by Drew Daniel.

“I was like, ‘Damn, we comin’ up on being old heads. It’s about to be our 10th anniversary. I should probably go ahead and tap in and make sure I set something up.'”

Nothing could have prepared me for f(x)’s “NU ABO” at 13. The cover showed a young woman blindfolded, the title melting off the right side. The music video cast five young women in a tiny stage, changing outfits and dancing less in the cutesy pointing of Girls’ Generation’s smash hit “Gee” and more like the coordinated locking of SHINee’s “Lucifer.” And the music: bold, bratty, delightfully aggressive. What “NU ABO” meant, I didn’t know at the time. f(x) were befuddled by the lyrics too, it turns out. (I suspect no Australian was involved in the naming.) But it didn’t matter when the girls (one of which, Sulli, was the cover model) were this beautiful, the music was this good, and the music video this cool. It was all so well-executed, in fact, that it is difficult to think of K-Pop today without their contributions.

The Roots Picnic — the once Philly-centric Black music festival, which over 16 years has become a perennial soft launch for the summer concert season here in the Northeast — can now safely be thought of as a national event. Atlanta’s Gunna graces the same stage as North Carolina’s Fantasia Barrino. St. Louis natives Smino and current sex-rap queen Sexyy Red follow each other as gospel is performed on a stage within earshot. Redman and Method Man, Ghostface and Nas, all New Yorkers and occasional collaborators, hit the stage for separate sets. The headliner of the weekend was a kind of New Orleans review: Lil Wayne on stage with his Nola compatriot, the horn player Trombone Shorty.

Josh Anderson has been a Black Keys fan for over a decade. He fell in love with the band as a high schooler in 2007. But in April, when tickets for the blues-rock revivalists’ North American arena tour went on sale, Anderson realized he wouldn’t be attending. The prices were simply too high.

In the May issue of Music Inc. magazine, Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto — the new head of America’s largest brick-and-mortar instrument retail chain — said the following regarding the store’s new strategy:

The least-loved albums by veteran artists tend to find their way, in time, to critical rehabilitation. It’s practically an inevitability, particularly if the artist in question is deemed sufficiently historic. Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music was reviled on its release only to become recontextualized as the urtext of the harsh noise genre. What was once dismissed as kitschy and chintzy on Dylan’s ’80s records became a bedrock of the War On Drugs’ acclaimed sound. This website has mounted (partial) defenses of Metallica’s dire St. Anger and Lulu on recent anniversaries, and Pitchfork controversially rescored a bunch of reviews in 2021, elevating onetime duds by Wilco, Daft Punk, and Lana Del Rey to the canon. Stay in the conversation long enough and you might discover that you no longer have any bad albums.

Lenny Kravitz turned 60 on Sunday. He’s just released his twelfth studio album, Blue Electric Light, and announced a Las Vegas residency, which will take place at Park MGM in October.

Drake doesn’t sound like he’s having fun anymore. In a different world, Aubrey Drake Graham might come off as Keyser Söze on “The Heart Part 6,” the most recent volley (at least for now) in the extremely busy, extremely fun Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud. “The Heart Part 6” is the song where Drake says that he planted a fake story about having a secret 11-year-old daughter and says that Kendrick’s “Meet The Grahams” cover art was a setup, a way to reel Kendrick in. But Drake doesn’t sound like the master manipulator that he claims to be. Instead, he’s beat-up, surly, tired. “The Heart Part 6” is a Band-Aid, a chance for any remaining Drake partisans to claim that he’s really the winner of this past week’s events. We know better.

There’s no question that shoegaze is currently going through a revival. Even before kids on TikTok discovered it, the genre was resurgent thanks to a wave of exciting young bands and reunions by some of its pioneering legends. Luckily for shoegaze fans both new and old, some of the women from the original ’90s era are either still in active bands or making music on their own. We checked in with three of them.

Charli XCX wants the club classics. She confirmed as much earlier this month when she officially dropped her single of the same title, the latest glimpse at her sixth studio album Brat. But for the charmed 400 who stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a nondescript Brooklyn warehouse in February when Charli debuted an edit of the song to kick off her sought-after PARTYGIRL DJ set with producers A.G. Cook, George Daniel, Easyfun, and Doss, that’s last season’s revelation. The TikTok-famous, drag royalty, New York it-people, critics for every culture mag left standing, and regular old Angels (Charli’s fandom name) packed the house not just to watch Charli perform. They showed up in droves to party with her.

Let’s just get this out of the way up top: No, metal isn’t dead. If you look around the underground today, there are plenty of thriving pockets: death metal, black metal, doom, thrash, sludge, etc. Metal as a holistic genre of music is alive and well. But as a cultural force that extends beyond small clubs, filling stadiums and festival grounds worldwide and provoking the uninitiated masses with its wicked sounds and filth-mongering imagery, metal — the sound, spirit, and culture — is in a precarious state. The genre’s longstanding A-listers feel less vital (and less cool) than ever, and the generation of bands who are slated to take their place are less metal (and arguably less cool) than at any previous era in the genre’s history.

I’ve tried convincing a lot of editors at a lot of different publications to let me write about Clutch over the years, mostly to no avail. They’re one of my favorite bands, and easily one of the bands I’ve seen play live the most. But the long-running Maryland quartet of Neil Fallon, Tim Sult, Jean-Paul Gaster, and Dan Maines remains resolutely critic-proof. I’ve never met a fellow music writer, much less an assigning editor, who’s as obsessed with them as I am. I think as much of that comes down to their intrinsic uncoolness as it does their eternal square-peggedness.

When Can’s original vocalist Malcolm Mooney left the band, they discovered Damo Suzuki by complete happenstance. The Japanese-born traveler was busking his way through Europe, and Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit witnessed one of his performances while in a cafe. Instantly captivated, they invited him to perform that night with Can. He was able to immediately lock into the band’s grooves with a similar feral intensity that Mooney brought to the table, but with a shamanistic energy that Mooney never had.

“Of course your voice is good. It’s yours. How could a natural voice be bad? Criticizing someone’s voice always appalls me because it’s like criticizing someone’s cheek.”

Taylor Swift is officially bigger than the Grammys. On the night when she won Album Of The Year for a record fourth time, Swift went out of her way to downplay the significance of the awards she’d just received — though the fact that she won them for Midnights, one of the weakest releases of her career, was already doing plenty to devalue those trophies. (Big wins for “Anti-Hero,” the album’s deeply memorable, massively successful hit single, would have made a lot more sense.)

I’ve been doing this for so long that I almost can’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing this. I’m lost in the sea of tiny-font band names. Somewhere amidst all that chaos, there must be a pattern. It must mean something. I close my eyes, and half-remembered band names dance across my mind. Eagulls. Raury. Dreamcar. Idris Elba. Were these people ever real? Did I just… imagine them? The universe is trying to tell us something. I just need to figure out what.

ML Buch’s second album Suntub somehow captures the feeling of the early internet era without any obvious signifiers. It’s all in the smooth surfaces, the curved lines, the sleek contours. Even its 55-minute length, nearly double that of the Danish artist’s explicitly “online” 2020 debut Skinned, conjures a faint memory of the CD era and its bloated runtimes. The guitars are impossibly lustrous, there is an alarming lack of bass, and the melodies must have been thought about long and hard by the classically trained Buch. Over this glistening, hyper-real music, the singer affects the monotone of someone in a state of stupefied awe. Her lyrics lean towards the visceral, sometimes even approaching body horror, and yet even nature seems to fold itself up to fit her 2D vision; on the haunting opening cut “Pan Over the Hill,” she sings of being “splattered on the film of sky.”

In early 2023, an 18-year-old college student decided to make her first-ever shoegaze song. Her friend sent her a “beat,” a grungy shoegaze instrumental crafted by the producer grayskies, and she spent two hours recording herself singing over it into her phone, using her everyday Apple earbuds as a microphone. No guitars were strummed, and no reverb pedals were stepped on. The next day, she titled the song “Your Face” and uploaded a snippet of it on TikTok, posting under the artist name Wisp. The video gained 100k views overnight, so she made another. That one got 600k views. She made another. That one quickly racked up 1 million views. Soon after, “Your Face” was being streamed millions of times on Spotify, and before Wisp even released a second song, she had signed a deal with Interscope Records.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in late October in New York City, and the Grammy winning jazz pianist, producer, writer, and arranger Robert Glasper has a problem that has plagued bandleaders for generations: With little notice, a crucial piece of his ensemble has bailed on an upcoming gig, and he now needs to find a fill-in on the fly.

Just before being sent into eternity, a chief villain of True Detective Season 1 annoyed stoic anti-hero Rust Cohle (Matthew McConnaughey) with a brief lesson in metaphysical philosophy. Resting his knees in the dirt below the gleaming Louisiana sun, Reginald Ledoux spoke at a tone just above a murmur as he issued a prophetic promise: “You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle.” It’s a Nietzsche reference, but it feels like the arbitrary rambling of a mad man. As it applies to the plot, though, it’s more like a premonition. By the end of the season, 17 years later, Rust and his partner Marty (Woody Harrelson) have overcome both an epic bro fight and systemic corruption to engage in a shootout with a familiar foe — moths to the flame of eternal recurrence.

The Recording Academy are a predictable lot. We’re reminded of this every autumn when a similar cross-section of ultra-popular and comfortably respectable musical artists are anointed as Grammy nominees. Still, there are some storylines emerging from today’s nominations. Let’s have a look at some of them.

On May 19, Paul Terzulli, a retired DJ with an enviably rare vinyl collection, made a surprising announcement: He planned to stop selling his records on Discogs. For more than a decade, Terzulli relied on the online marketplace to supplement his income. But it no longer felt worth it.

Today is Halloween, which means only one thing: It’s time for Stereogum to once more confront the terrifying spectacle of holiday music already being out, in some cases for several weeks. If you think it’s terrifying to listen to Christmas music during an October month that’s actually been rather sweltering at times, imagine how the artists feel recording them during actual summer! But just trust the music industry that it has to be this way. As the director of Craft Recordings (of A Charlie Brown Christmas fame) told The Daily Beast: “We want to make sure that if somebody is going on [Apple TV+] and watching A Charlie Brown Christmas in September because they want to start feeling in the Christmas spirit, that we have an album available for them to go buy.”

While the internet perverts our sense of nostalgia on an hourly basis, Daniel Clowes has already done so in print for 30-odd years. The artist has devoted his life to tapping into the subconscious of mass consumerism, filling his books with brightly-colored mascots, haunted humans, and weird sex.

For years, Wiki and MIKE have blazed their own unique paths as stalwarts of New York’s expansive rap underground. Wiki’s scrappy everyman lyricism catapulted him to the status of local favorite, while MIKE’s morose flows, drowsy production, and wounded optimism earned him descriptors like “wunderkind.” Among other things, both are masters of ornate melancholy. It’s an aesthetic they jointly explore on Faith Is A Rock, an Alchemist-produced LP that generally maximizes the strengths of everyone involved.

“Don’t you like rock music?” That was Jeff Tweedy’s answer to a quip about the band Jet during an interview with writer Chuck Klosterman, who was trying to goad Tweedy into bemoaning how lame the Aussie rockers were. Tweedy didn’t take the bait, not because he knows better than to talk shit about other musicians, but because he understands that a world without bands who make dumb rock music like Jet would be so boring.

The beard has been inescapable. If you’re on Twitter with any regularity, you’ve probably seen the scrunched-up face of Oliver Anthony, his cheeks blanketed in fuzzy bright red hair. The image is from a professionally filmed performance clip that originated on the YouTube channel radiowv. It finds the former factory worker Anthony clutching his acoustic guitar, performing a solemn country ballad called “Rich Men North Of Richmond” on his plot of land in rural Farmville, Virginia.

The charts have been lacking something lately. A certain pizzazz? The spark of excitement that accompanies big-tent pop music at its best? As we reach the midpoint of 2023, it’s hard to remember a time when mainstream pop has been so bereft of zeitgeist-seizing giddiness — certainly not during the hottest months of the year, when big-name stars traditionally vie for Song Of The Summer status.

The third season of Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave includes a sketch where two men wear the same shirt to a fourth-grade choir concert. The men, played by series co-creator Tim Robinson and scene-stealing guest star Biff Wiff, laugh off the minor awkwardness when Wiff calls Robinson his “shirt brother.” In typical ITYSL fashion, things go off the rails from there. Wiff stares at Robinson with a demented grin during the recital, then disappears. When he returns, it’s to ask his shirt brother for help: “I’m in deep fuckin’ trouble here,” he says, the desperation written in the creases on his forehead. The trouble is he’s trashed a classroom while in a kind of pop-punk-induced trance. “I’ve been listening to this new song by this band I’d never heard before, and they’re saying there’s no rules,” Wiff explains. “Do you think that’s true?”

Odesza are big. You know it. I know it. Even your mom might know it, assuming she spends any time perusing festival lineups. It has become one of life’s universal truths: Name any random big-tent festival, and there’s a solid chance Odesza are headlining it. Seldom have I seen artists include a “Festivals” section as a part of their website’s tour itinerary, but Odesza have one. Until reporting this article, I don’t think I’d ever met a single Odesza fan, nor had I heard a single Odesza song, and I write about music professionally (on the side, but still). If two random dudes passed by on the street, and you told me convincingly enough that they were Odesza, I’d maybe believe you.

“Attn Talent Agents, Promoters, Venues, Clubs, and fans: Devotional Dave is no longer with Strangelove The Depeche Mode experience as of Feb 2018 – Any promotional audio-video recording or photographs promoting my image is not permitted and no longer affiliated with the band or brand of STRANGELOVE.”

“Those weren’t real headlines,” a beaming Harvey Mason Jr. announced. “But they could be.”

[Extremely Twin Peaks voice] It is happening again. [From here, you can choose to read the rest of the article in Twin Peaks voice or not, depending on how disturbing you find the subject matter.]