The Marathon Petroleum refinery looms over the Boynton neighborhood of Detroit, MI like massive drill bits that cored through the center of the Earth. At night, when the lights on its dozens of towers light up, it resembles an alien electric grid, its red, blue, and white bulbs imprisoned like trapped Tinkerbells within steel beams. A few years ago, the plant was forced to pay an $80,000 fine, plus almost $300,000 in “community investments,” after a broken pipe leaked toxic gas into the lungs and waterways of local residents.

A Love You Cannot Shake, the sophomore album from Fashion Club, starts with a lumbering, stuttering synth impossible to place. Pascal Stevenson tells me the synth is a vocoded, time-stretched kick drum, manipulated and looped in Ableton. That’s just one of many instances I could ask about. Not a moment goes by without something distorted and alien; even the quieter songs feature mangled vocals, pitch shifted in the margins of the mix.

How did you spend your evenings during lockdown? Some people took up prodigious amounts of baking. Others caught up on TV shows they’d neglected or movies they’d missed. I trolled Bandcamp, doing everything I could to fill the void of nighttime DIY shows with discovery of new band after new band. I had a network of friends who did the same, and we’d exchange links to new favorites like hunting trophies.

Is playing a show to 13 people in a laundromat worth it? Do Mr. Krabs and Peter Griffin have more musical hot takes? Has the American contemporary experimental music scene lost its edge? Are glitchy hyperpop production, ubiquitous samples, and goofy ’90s pop-rock effective devices for rigorous, high-concept art, or do tongue-in-cheek, doomscroll-evoking sound collages now feel cynical or dated? Is subjecting yourself to the grueling life of a working independent musician a cry for help? A character flaw? A beautifully noble pursuit in this isolating, morally bankrupt world? These are just a handful of the questions raised by Callahan & Witscher’s audacious new LP, Think Differently.

Twangy indie rock is in full swing this year. Waxahatchee returned with her new album Tigers Blood in March; next month sees the release of Allegra Krieger’s Art Of The Unseen Infinity Machine and MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. Enter Merce Lemon, a Pittsburgh native whose third LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild also arrives in September. The sweeping second single “Backyard Lover” is a grief-stricken yet sunlit sprawl bursting with charged guitars and melancholy pedal steel, and lucky for us, the rest of the record is just as compelling.

Flower Face is more than just a musician. Montreal’s Ruby McKinnon has been building up the mythology around her upcoming album with Polaroids, drink recipes, a loveline, and poems. Girl Prometheus, the follow-up to her 2022 breakthrough The Shark In Your Water, is as intense and magical as its name suggests, containing 10 dynamic songs that explore the extremes of heartbreak and desire.

“Jesus Christ, I’m 26,” Dan Campbell screamed on the Wonder Years’ “Passing Through A Screen Door,” perhaps the earliest onset of midlife crisis ever captured in pop music. Dedicating one’s life to any kind of band certainly magnifies a sense of arrested development when friends are getting married, having kids, and owning homes, exponentially so when that band plays pop-punk. With COVID and social media accelerationism irrevocably warping our relationship with the passage of time, it’s unsurprising that someone in 2024 can feel like their life is already over by their junior year of college. Having spent nearly half his 20 years immersed in the depths of Wikipedia and Discogs, Holden Wolf admits, “I straight up don’t know how to be normal.” And that panic is the main driver of Combat’s Stay Golden, a classically bombastic pop-punk opus about the futility of existence.

In Cormac McCarthy’s 2017 essay “The Kekulé Problem,” the late novelist defines the subconscious as “a machine for operating an animal.” He goes into detail about the German organic chemist August Kekulé, who was puzzled over the molecular structure for benzene until Kekulé’s dreams solved it for him. In his sleep, a visual representation materialized: an ouroboros, a snake perpetually feeding on its own tail. According to McCarthy, the scientist awoke with a start, saying to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” It leads the author to wonder, “Why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us?” Broken down to its core components, the subconscious is pure impulse with no potential hindrances. It’s instinct. A pure gut feeling.

“Could you ever live anywhere but New York?” I am sometimes asked, by people who know that I have spent more than three decades in the city that may occasionally sleep but which never gets less expensive. My response is usually, “Probably, but I could live without a limb or two as well.” Being here is that important to me. I am a sucker for songs and videos that evoke the place: Interpol’s eternal “NYC” – “The subway is a porno, the pavements they are a mess” — or Vampire Weekend’s lyric video for “Step,” with its images of Astor Place and Washington Square Park, my college-days stomping grounds.

To borrow a tired refrain from the early COVID era, we’re now living through ~unprecedented times~. A former US president was convicted of 34 felonies. AI is ruining the internet. And a one-man slam-metal band influenced by avant-garde classical and free jazz, whose War On Terror-themed music has no lyrics and is sung by a drummer strapped with a headset microphone, are now the hottest new band in hardcore.

Baltimore’s hardcore scene, once the precocious little sibling of the one in DC, has become the spiritual capital of the genre in America. Maybe it’s just that punks will always chase cheaper rents, but the Maryland city just north of Minor Threat’s birthplace has produced a disproportionate number of the 21st century’s essential hardcore bands. The boom that arguably started with the founding of Trapped Under Ice in 2007 has continued unabated ever since, through feminist firebrands War On Women, TUI spinoffs Turnstile and Angel Du$t, and younger upstarts like End It, Jivebomb, and Sinister Feeling. The latest addition to that proud lineage is Doubt, whose first proper EP, Held In Contempt, is announced today alongside the release of “The Hard Way.” Like so many of their scenemates, they’re a band of Baltimore transplants who found themselves intoxicated by the energy of their adopted hometown.

When most 20-year-old kids start making music, they do something that all young men can justifiably understand: They play girls their new songs. Some do it to impress; some do it because they are eager to get a woman’s read on things. The Alabama rapper Yhapojj does it because he is in love with someone. He calls her his baby mama, even though they have no children together. And, if you’re wondering, she seems to love Yhapojj’s stuff as much as the underground does. “She damn near always listening to it,” Yhapojj says, smiling. “Everything about her makes me fall in love. It’s the connection. We’re like twins.”

Tyler Jordan learned a lot of hard lessons from 15 mostly futile years trying to make a go of this indie rock thing, but few were more valuable than “say what you actually mean.” “If I’m writing a song to someone or about someone, I’d like them to know that,” he explains. And as excited as we are about Lived Here For A While, I can think of a few people who would not call Good Looks’ sophomore album “highly anticipated” – Christian fundamentalists, Jordan’s ex-girlfriend, his ex-bandmate, and even his own mother are all put on notice, often by name. Yet, when we speak about a month prior to the album’s release — it’s out this Friday via Keeled Scales — Jordan only regrets his words towards his least sympathetic targets: the joggers and farmers market merchants and tech developers who turned Austin into a place he had to leave after spending nearly half of his 37 years there.

To echo one of the most contentiously discussed articles on this website, GIFT are a band. But that wasn’t as apparent on the New York outfit’s 2022 record, Momentary Presence, a solid debut that more or less functioned as a solo project for vocalist-guitarist TJ Freda. Not that Freda necessarily wanted to isolate himself to make that album, but it was more so born out of, to put it euphemistically, extenuating circumstances.

Brennan Wedl can’t stop bowling splits. Time and again, the musician and bowling enthusiast quietly but confidently palms a waxed bowling ball from the shelf, sizes up the alley stretched out before her, and releases in a fluid curved motion before backing away to evaluate her work. The ball travels straight down the center before inevitably tipping at the last second, taking down all but the two farthest pins. Never one to turn down a challenge, Wedl takes her best second shot, but in the end, at least one always remains standing, defiantly refusing her the spare.

When we meet on a Manhattan Saturday, the East Coast is experiencing its first torrential spring downpour, drenching the concrete jungle in a quantity of water that should bring the city to a standstill. New Yorkers, however, don’t stand still. The sidewalks are just as packed with tourists and locals alike, sporting umbrellas in every hue. Owing to the crummy weather, we meet at Eataly, enticed by a coffee slushie that promises more than it ends up delivering. Al Nardo is all smiles and Bailey Wollowitz appears more stoic, but the duo’s shared enthusiasm is abundantly clear as we wander the store’s colorful departments, marveling at culinary finery that exceeds the luxury of our usual diets while discussing their emerging band, fantasy of a broken heart, and its first proper release, a full-length entitled Feats Of Engineering, announced today via Dots Per Inch.

Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego sound almost relieved to be playing in their new band, Deerlady. Though neither is a total stranger to the world of indie rock, they’ve both found success in recent years in other musical milieus. Obomsawin, a Berklee-trained bassist and composer, tours the jazz festival circuit as the leader of the Mali Obomsawin Sextet. In 2022, she released an acclaimed free jazz album called Sweet Tooth, which she sang entirely in the Abenaki language. Abrego also has a jazz background that runs through Berklee; she studied guitar performance there before moving on to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she’d eventually become a faculty member. On Greatest Hits, Deerlady’s winkingly titled debut album, those biographies dissolve, and Obomsawin and Abrego tap into something more instinctive.

Lip Critic understand the power of Wawa. Seated in a Park Slope bar a couple blocks away from their rehearsal space, the four-piece explain the magic of the luxury gas station. The broccoli mac and cheese is exceptional. According to Danny Eberle, one of multiple drummers in the band, the iced tea “is goated” — better than both Snapple and Arizona. And their sandwich size options are peerless. “Honestly, Subway are like cowards,” lead vocalist and lyricist Bret Kaser casually proclaims.

The Southern California emo band Boycomma formed when Brad Warriner approached a mysterious figure nicknamed Jimbo at a skate park to tell him that he looked like Rivers Cuomo from Weezer. After they formed a band, Jimbo had the title of their debut album Use Me tattooed on his chest, then quit around Christmas last year. “No one really knows why,” Warriner explains. “He just quit music.”

Liverpool quartet Courting are following up their 2022 debut album Guitar Music with another debut album. This backwards logic is par for the course for a Charli XCX-covering, hyperpop-loving group trying to prove they’re anything but a boring British post-punk band. Their first rejection of such project pigeon-holing was naming their first debut album Guitar Music, inspired by lazy media characterizations of them as a rock group. The eight-song album was a glorious, glitchy, and unexpecting rabbit hole. Alongside corroded guitar melodies and road-raging drums, frontman and self-proclaimed “creative director” Sean Murphy-O’Neill deadpanned reference-heavy lyrics, ranging from David Berman to A.I. influencer Lil Miquela. Behind his sometimes pointed, sometimes silly allusions, Murphy-O’Neill penned sentimental reflections about beauty standards, aging versus growing up, and the relationship between cityscapes and financial division. The, at times outrageous, album was meant to be a bit outrageous by design.

If you’re cynical, last summer’s parade of country chart-toppers was just culture-war bullshit, with nothing further to read into it. Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony at least partially scored their hits from an aggrieved conservative impulse to own the libs; to some extent, Morgan Wallen did, too. But something else was happening when Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves’ duet “I Remember Everything” reached #1 in September. The somber ballad casts Bryan and Musgraves as former lovers, now separated by an unbridgeable chasm of booze and disappointment. It’s a song powered not by opprobrium, but by an even mightier force: nostalgia. “Do I remind you of your daddy in my ’88 Ford?” Bryan, who was born in 1996, asks Musgraves. Against a bed of dusty acoustic guitar and fiddle, his deep voice crackles with borrowed authenticity.

“Shadow Of A Doubt,” the new song by Sprints out today, was a bold choice for a single: the rawest, most desperate track on the Dublin post-punk band’s debut album Letter To Self. A song about begging for reprieve from all-encompassing mental anguish, it builds slowly from a guitar-picked intro to the powerful end, by which point vocalist Karla Chubb lets out an agonized howl. “We recorded the vocal in like, three takes only. You can hear me hyperventilating and catching my breath in between crying, which we decided to leave in,” Chubb says, on a call alongside bassist Sam McCann and drummer Jack Callan (guitarist Colm O’Reilly couldn’t make it). “That’s gonna be a scary one to release.”

When Heriot put out the EP Profound Morality last year, they went from an anonymous part of the glut of metal bands populating UK scenes like the one in their hometown of Swindon, to one of the country’s most hyped heavy exports. Kerrang! called them the best new metal band in Britain, while NME named them one of the reasons there’s “never been a better time to be a UK metalhead.”

When Daneshevskaya announced her debut full-length Long Is The Tunnel at the end of August, she shared the sweeping single “Big Bird.” At two and a half minutes, it goes farther than most indie songs can reach. Anna Beckerman’s silky soprano leads fluttering synthesizers and fuzzy guitars: “For the last time/ I am whole,” she croons, the instrumentation capricious yet calculated, building until the euphoric end, marked by the squawking of seagulls. It’s as if she’s pondering her life while looking at the water, which is a motif on the record; on the sprawling opener “Challenger Deep,” she sings, “There’s a place where oceans meet/ And a darkness underneath/ Things I’m not meant to see.” Long Is The Tunnel plunges straight into those depths, finding beauty and peace even in the murk.

If there is one thing Twitter is good for, it’s galvanization. Even as it creeps closer and closer to the sweet embrace of death, the site now known as X (ugh) is still capable of having moments where the most random shit spreads like wildfire.

You won’t find any evidence of them online, but there are four or five Vyva Melinkolya albums that predate the project’s 2017 “debut,” Ms. Menthol. Angel Diaz started recording lo-fi music under the Vyva Melinkolya name when she was just 16, precocious but not yet in the full command of her powers.

Harlem rapper Bobby TooTact doesn’t like Eric Adams, New York’s mayor and top cop, as a person or a mayor. When given the chance, TooTact is willing to shout this out, to absolutely everyone and absolutely nobody, outside his housing project on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. Here, in this recreational alley behind the building entrance, is where TooTact and his neighborhood friends congregate every single day to playfully roughhouse with one another, tease each other, and even sometimes shoot music videos. They also seemingly have no problem expressing their views on the mayor. These Black boys are relentlessly outspoken. Even if he showed up smiling and politicking in this basketball-court-sized expanse, they’d have no problem telling Mayor Adams how much they dislike him to his face.

Under the moniker yunè pinku, Asha Yunè creates music where nirvana meets the netherworld. Her latest project BABYLON IX — a combination of halo-glowing synths, spritely break-beats, scythe-cutting hi-hats, submarine bleeps, and cryptic lyricism — is “based definitely in a cyberpunk-ish digital realm,” the Irish-Malaysian producer explains. “I pictured it halfway between a Babylonian garden slash heaven and then a cyberpunk wasteland.” Melancholic and celestial, her music conjures visions of neon-lit hovercrafts, mysterious ruins, and magnificent grottos where fantastic creatures lurk.

“Maybe the fuss was worth it in the end.”

Pupil Slicer’s Mirrors was one of 2021’s finest (and most chaotic) metal albums. The London trio’s debut leapt from idea to idea with casual abandon, sweeping up frenzied mathcore, menacing grind, swelling emotive hardcore, bludgeoning death metal, and twinkling post-metal in its wake. The album housed both the bloodcurdling 47-second paroxysm “Stabbing Spiders” and the shoegazing epic “Collective Unconscious,” and the band sounded equally convincing operating in both modes. The follow-up to Mirrors, the sci-fi concept album Blossom, may seem at first blush like a more accessible point of entry into Slice World. The band members themselves reject this premise.

After a half century of rock musicians questioning what do DJs actually do, it’s only fair that Avalon Emerson returns the favor. “I’m sure you’ve talked to a bunch of artists who’ve said, ‘oh, it was crazy, this muse came down and took control of my hands and we wrote the song in 30 minutes and that’s just how it is!'” she jokes. “I always thought that was pretty bullshit, I still kinda think it largely is for some people. It’s too good of a mythology to be totally true.”

A YouTube upload of a Poison Ruïn live set in Queens describes the band as “sound[ing] like they reside and rehearse in a dark medieval dungeon.” Not quite — the band was born in a Philadelphia warehouse basement rehearsal space — but that sound is very deliberate. Frontman Mac Kennedy, who initially conceived the band as his own recording project, is something of a history and fantasy genre enthusiast. Across their discography, including on their new sophomore album Härvest, the band pairs the imagery of that world with murky, dirty anarcho-punk. It’s not escapism, but the opposite — laying bare the throughline of brutality and oppression from the Dark Ages to our modern life.

Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn are sitting on the floor of their hotel. The Canada-born twin siblings, who lead the post-punk/dream-pop/shoegaze project Softcult, are in a sleepy state of post-show bliss, having played a date last night the End — a venue on Nashville’s famed “Rock Block.” Today is a day off before heading to Memphis, and then, SXSW. How are they planning to spend the next 12 hours before hopping back on the road?

The first official Lamp Of Murmuur show took place on October 30, 2021, at LA’s First Street Pool & Billiard Parlor. It sold out well in advance. Honestly, it was probably oversold, as black metal fans stood shoulder to shoulder alongside awkwardly placed pool tables, unable to move an inch, even as seemingly half the people in attendance were in the venue’s backyard merch area. I remember thinking this, surely, was how I would finally get COVID. (I didn’t.)

In Hebrew, “Shalom” has three meanings, one of which is “peace.” Shalom Obisie-Orlu is still looking for hers, but the singer/songwriter is getting closer every day to finding it. It’s been a journey, though, and not one that most Americans can understand. Born in Maryland, raised in South Africa, and currently based in Brooklyn, Shalom has moved twice in the last three months after living in a “racially hostile” apartment where a white roommate repeatedly sang a song containing a racial slur. “She just kept using the ‘N’ word after I talked to her about it,” Shalom says, visibly exhausted. “And she was like, ‘I’m Jewish. I didn’t write the song.’ It was so absurd.”

Eva Liu, the London singer-songwriter behind mui zyu, has been spending a lot of time with Stray lately — a video game where you play as an adorable cat trapped in a dystopian, abandoned city. She mentions it because that element of duality — the familiar and comforting clashing with the unknown and unnerving — is constantly present in her own work. “I don’t know why, but I always naturally gravitate towards sounds that don’t necessarily go together, and I think I reach for that aesthetically as well,” she says. “Playing with chords that aren’t necessarily part of the same key, things that sound unsettling but there’s a sweet undertone… I think I like a listener to be a bit confused and a bit unsettled.”

“It’s so goofy to me. I feel like a jester up there, watching people fucking spinkick each other to our music. I’m still learning how to front a band for these hardcore crowds. For me, thinking about where that type of aggression comes from, it evokes this critique of self and critique of where you put your energy — real deep thought shit, y’know? That’s at the center of a lot of our songs.” —

In one sense, the Tubs are not a new band. All four members of the London-based Welsh rock group were in Joanna Gruesome, the incendiary noise-pop act that has since splintered into a sprawling network of interconnected projects. But anyone expecting a reprise of Joanna Gruesome’s distortion-blanketed indie should look elsewhere — say, to Ex-Vöid, a band that contains three out of four Tubs plus Joanna Gruesome singer Lan McArdle. Three-fourths of the band are also in the chaotically noisy punk band Sniffany & The Nits. But as the Tubs, they’re following a janglier, more jittery path — one that traces across the decades, from Britain to Oceania and back.