Forty years ago, David Byrne danced with a lamp. In what might be the most memorable scene of Stop Making Sense, my pick for the best live-concert film ever made, Byrne picks up a regular floor lamp, previously a mere part of the stage setting, and pushes it back and forth, shimmying all around it — a classic subversion of pop-star gesturing that works as pop-star gesturing in its own right. On Friday night at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Mitski did Byrne one better: She danced with a beam of light.

It’s undeniable: Tyla is the face of amapiano. The 22-year-old Johannesburg singer established her pop-star status with last year’s “Water,” a Top 10 Billboard hit that brought the South African house subgenre to the masses. There are multiple reasons for its crossover success, not least of which is her unrelenting attitude towards becoming a household name. Concomitant to such strategizing is that her brand of amapiano is less concerned with winding, longform dance numbers — as is typical for her contemporaries — than bite-sized pop songs attuned to Western R&B.

Like much of downtown Portland, Project Pabst shuttered abruptly as the realities of COVID set in. Project Pabst launched as a fall festival in September 2014 before shifting to July in 2015. It remained a summer festival for the duration of its run, which was shorter than anyone anticipated. After expanding to Denver, Philadelphia, and Atlanta in 2017, the festival vanished, and a return to the old Portland-only format was planned for 2020.

Day 2 of Project Pabst — the resurrected Portland music festival where Stereogum was a media partner this year — began much like the previous day. The slightly overcast sky and pleasant breeze lasted for the first hour of the festival, giving way to relentless cheery sunshine. By 2:30PM on Sunday, the crowd was a bit thinner than Saturday but a little more lively. Saturday leaned toward black shirts and denim; Sunday was a more traditional mix of festival attire: colorful fits, glitter, dramatic sunglasses. Everyone was drifting, not in a rush to get anywhere. At the south end of the festival on the “Captain Pabst” stage, Kenny Mason did an admirable job of activating the small crowd that had filtered over. “Y’all probably only on your first or second beer,” he said between songs, “But my job is turn you the fuck up. We’re gonna work together.” And he really did get people moving. As I headed to the other stage, I heard him responding to an audience member: “I fuck with you too, thank you.”

Portland is less gray than people tend to expect; we don’t have the endless rainy gloom of Seattle, and in any case, the dark days are confined pretty neatly to the winter months. The summers here are the exact opposite — near endless unbroken sun that comes up before 6 AM and doesn’t disappear below the horizon until nearly 10 o’clock. If it gets hot, there’s not much rain to break up the heat, but you’re only suffering if you’re standing directly in the sun. When the sun slides behind a passing cloud, every breeze brings immediate relief.

“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.'”

She started the show with “Bad Idea Right?” I was not ready for that. In her short career, Olivia Rodrigo has released two albums, and both of them have near-perfect opening tracks. “Brutal” and “All-American Bitch” are both revved-up, energetic statement-of-intent ragers. Both would’ve made great openers for Rodrigo’s first-ever arena tour. But no, she went with her best song.

Is “Wilco (The Song)” off of Wilco: The Album a deep cut? Who cares — it was a perfect way for the band to end a fan-friendly Friday night set at Solid Sound 2024, because even when you’re playing nothing but (relative) obscurities and rarities, you still gotta finish with a statement.

It took less than one song to turn me into a full-fledged convert. Granted, it was probably 10 minutes long, and it shifted genre several times, so it felt like more than one song to an extent. But the length and breadth of it all was part of the appeal.

I always knew that the person whose name I’d call at the end of it all would be another Joanna Newsom superfan. Besides being into shit like elves and throwing ass once a year at a Ren Faire, what Newsom fans seem to have in common is a plant-like heart and an ability to see life from a falling pilot’s vantage point. In Newsom’s music, we hear someone prey to the most astounding human impulses. We hear someone so desperately trying to create something living, breathing, eternal from the inert universe. We hear someone throttling against death. We hear life sounded back to itself. I knew my future wife would get it.

I don’t want to say “phenomenon.” If I say “phenomenon,” I have to immediately acknowledge that Chappell Roan has already twisted that word into something else. One of Roan’s best songs in called “Femininomenon.” It’s the first track on her debut album, 2023’s The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess, and it’s how she opens her live shows. It’s an anthem, and its existence means that I can’t say that Chappell Roan, whose career is currently skyrocketing so quickly that the artist herself can barely keep up, is a phenomenon. Unfortunately, there’s just no other word that accurately describes what’s happening right now. The Chappell Roan situation? The Chappell Roan sensation? The Chappell Roan anomaly? No. Thesaurus.com is no help right now. Chappell Roan is a phenomenon. Or a femininomenon. Whatever.

There was a moment this past Saturday afternoon, when the ascendant Brooklyn experimentalists Water From Your Eyes neared the end of their set. The band had just launched into “Track Five,” the gnarled, throbbing dance-inflected highlight from their 2021 album Structure. The sound of it was blistering, and the sun was blistering, and I turned to the side and heard their alternate universe beats and looked out at the snow-capped mountains flanking the horizon and for a moment questioned “Where the hell am I?”

In 2023, Four Tet unexpectedly transcended. The 40-something IDM veteran born Kieran Hebden kicked off the year appearing on Skrillex’s Quest For Fire, which found the superstar bass lord attempting a “serious” rebrand. Shortly after, the pair became publicly chummy with nerdy English DJ Fred again.., and the crew quickly headlined Times Square, Madison Square Garden, and Coachella in rapid succession. Hot on the heels of those packed dates, Hebden used his label Text to back Secret Life — a collaboration between Fred again.. and ambient innovator Brian Eno. After two decades spent crafting lullaby-like electronic music, Hebden was liaising with the mainstream elite.

Spoon were not supposed to play in Austin this past Saturday.

How do you take an album like Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois — concerned with the undead, first loves, impending heartbreak, field trips with stepmoms, and John Wayne Gacy — and adapt it into a stage show? For choreographer Justin Peck and playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, you set the music around a bonfire, turn these characters into ghost stories, and bring them to life through one of the oldest and most expressive art forms: dance. With Illinoise, they adapt the 2005 album into a play fit with live singing and dancing.

During the final day of music curated by German Music Export and Initiative Musik, the moderator made a joke that the day’s event was about expanding the notions of German music beyond known institutions like Kraftwerk or Berghain. By the end of the afternoon, that seemed like an understatement. The day party at Shangri-La was not only the longest of the events (with artists Meagre Martin, Willow Parlo, LIE NING, Orbit, and ÄTNA) but also the most musically diverse — with indie rock, country-folk, R&B and pop, dreamy electronica, and pure operatic dance-pop chaos. 

Fat Dog have what is, at this point, a familiar backstory. The South London band cut their teeth playing shows at The Windmill in Brixton, the incubator for many of the UK’s most exciting, autre rock projects nowadays. They play a hard-hitting, technically impressive blur that’s kind of post-punk but as filtered through a kitchen sink of influences — see the dancey, old-timey folk stomp of their debut single “King Of The Slugs,” which dropped last fall after the band spent a year-plus getting hyped up by the British press before they had even put out a song thanks to their frenzied live shows.

There was a soft humid breeze, neon lights blazed in every color of rainbow sherbet, and shiny industrial skyscrapers framed the second evening celebrating German music at SXSW 2024. This night was dedicated to electronic music, and on the main screen at the Coconut Club where German Music Export and Initiative Musik beamed their names, there were shifting thermographic-colored images of melting neon bunny faces, a floating grinning mouth, a kneeling couple facing each other. Though the crowd came and went, the dance floor was always full. “They’re German,” a lanky baseball-capped man screamed to his friend as the opening duo Session Victim played. It was the complete opposite vibe to yesterday’s solemn, harrowing, and downright majestic event spotlighting classical music — think Matrix versus Spring Breakers.

It was way more physical than I realized it would be. I’ve been thinking of Montréal’s Corridor primarily as a psych band ever since they returned from a long absence to announce new album Mimi. Lead single “Mourir Demain” was dreamy and expansive despite its rushing-river flow, and “Mon Argent” had a similar hypnotic momentum, like Grizzly Bear with a groove. The Francophone band has talked about how they moved away from thinking of themselves as a guitar-centric band on the new album, too. I guess I was expecting a lesson in tone and texture.

A church’s acoustics can make a concert feel grander or more sacred. And last night for the first event of German Music @ SXSW 2024 — a series put together by the German Music Export and Initiative Musik — Austin’s Central Presbyterian Church was an ideal venue for taking modern classical German music to new heights. The diverse lineup featured musicians breaking boundaries of classical music with their modern compositions, starting with Costa Rican-born pianist Sofi Paez’s delicate, haunting compositions that grew more surreal with Lisa Morgenstern’s stilling vocal acrobatics and ending with a mad scientist-esque set from Grandbrothers’ Erol Sarp and Lukas Vogel. The whole night felt charged in the high-beamed conservative setting.

“I’m really happy right now,” Domenic Palermo says, his voice quivering with joy. “I feel like I’m doing the right thing for once, and that’s not a normal thing for me.”

“Shout out to Biggie Smalls! It’s Biggie Smalls Day in Brooklyn!” 51-year-old Patrick Earl Houston screams, to my great relief, as he stalks the stage in front of a capacity crowd at Elsewhere in the northeast corner of Brooklyn. It’s March 9, at one time the equivalent of a bank holiday in New York — 27 years to the day the city lost Christopher Wallace, its greatest native son — and yet we’re hours into a rap show before Project Pat, the North Memphis Tennessee legend, acknowledges the gravity of the evening.

It was Valentine’s Day in New York City, and everyone had a manic energy as they went about their everyday tasks. Shopping for groceries, catching the express bus, eating slices of pizza, they clung to a sisyphean hope, often literally manifested in some bouquet or heart shaped balloon. For some, the night held promises of candlelit dinners; for the hundreds of flannel-clad bodies packed into a sold out Music Hall Of Williamsburg, it foretold an evening of R.E.M. covers led by Revolutionary Road and Boardwalk Empire star Michael Shannon.

Here’s how much of a professional Usher is: When he played last night’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, he didn’t sing any new songs. Not one. Not even a snippet. The temptation must’ve been overwhelming. Last night was the culmination of an Usher comeback that’s been building for a long moment. Usher, one of the biggest stars of the ’00s, hasn’t been a commercially dominant force for more than a decade, but he’s spent the past few years laying the groundwork for his legacy: a wildly successful Las Vegas residency, a viral Tiny Desk Concert, a pretty big hit with Summer Walker and 21 Savage. Two days before the Super Bowl, Usher released Coming Home, his first new album in seven and a half years. And then he didn’t sing any of those songs. Instead, Usher gave the world what it wanted from him.

“I guess I’m blessed with being oblivious.”

It was an especially fruitful year for Jack Antonoff. He released new Bleachers music, notched two #1 singles alongside Taylor Swift, and got nominated for six Grammys including for “A&W,” the Lana Del Rey collaboration that was Stereogum readers’ favorite song of 2023. (He also got married.) But as he’s done every year since 2014, Antonoff set aside a night in December to present a Talent Show concert benefitting the Ally Coalition (TAC). The non-profit Antonoff founded with his fashion designer sister Rachel has raised millions of dollars for organizations supporting unhoused and at-risk LGBTQ+ youth.

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.

Over the last several years, you may have noticed a proliferation of nostalgia-driven package festivals, the likes of When We Were Young and Just Like Heaven, which curate lineups derived from specific eras and genres. Back in June, Darker Waves was one of the new names to enter the fray. Similar to Cruel World, Darker Waves is a new wave and goth festival that takes place a little outside of LA. (Darker Waves’ inaugural lineup actually shared many names with Cruel World’s original outing last year.) You could be cynical about these things — another instance of corporate cash-ins on constant retro cycles, the theoretically expansive and exploratory nature of festivals narrowed for the era of algorithmic fandom silos. But if a specific festival of this ilk happens to tap into your favorite music — as Darker Waves does for mine — it can provide a unique chance to see a bunch of artists you may have never seen before, and may never see again.

Unbroken titled their posthumous collection of rarities It’s Getting Tougher To Say The Right Things, and I assume they knew it’d be harder and harder to convey exactly how their 2023 reunion shows felt. The band didn’t play a show for almost a decade until they reunited earlier this year for Indecision Records’ 30th anniversary shows in Garden Grove, CA. Next year, their seminal album life. love. regret. will also turn 30, and with it we can reexamine the highs and lows of the scene, where the album’s nuanced fusion of crushing riffs and lyrical turmoil made it kosher for hardcore guys to wear their hearts on their sleeves, a little above where they marked X’s on their hands.

In a world of desensitization and saturation, it’s genuinely hard to be properly speechless anymore. All it takes, apparently, is a sweary rap single by three retired teachers from the north of England. “Don’t wanna fall in love, I just wanna get fucked,” Norman Pain of the Northern Boys raps to open debut single “Party Time,” a song which went viral on YouTube and TikTok last year and has launched the most unlikely of careers. Ray, alongside Patrick Karneigh Jr (AKA PKJ) and a man simply known as Kev, rap about taking unholy amounts of drugs, shagging, and their aging bodies.

The scream-along singalong has come for Lana Del Rey, and that’s how you know that the scream-along singalong has permeated just about every corner of the big-deal live-music business. The scream-along singalong is not a new phenomenon, but it’s distinct from the simple, regular singalong that’s been a staple of stadium-rock shows since before I was born. In the scream-along singalong, audiences don’t just sing the words of the song. They howl those words at top volume, giving little mind to melody or modulation or anything else that might temper the purgative force of their collective voice. I’ve always associated the scream-along singalong with hardcore and emo; Dashboard Confessional is still the artist I most associate with the phenomenon. But those days are over. These days, everyone is Dashboard Confessional. Even Lana Del Rey is Dashboard Confessional.

For over 20 years, Pop Montréal has taken over venues across the city for a festival that balances beloved local acts with international names, all fueled by a spirit of discovery. Before my first time here, I thought of it as more of a SXSW-style affair, with its gigantic lineup spread out over town. But now that we’ve come to the end of Pop Montréal 2023, it reminds me more of events like Iceland Airwaves. When people talk about Montréal’s European flair, they aren’t lying, and the festival’s booking often skews more adventurous. Everything might still be loosely in the “pop” sphere, but it’s all weirdo left-of-center takes, deconstructions, new adventures.

“Hey dudes, have you stepped into your brand new life yet?” That was Robin Dann, vocalist of Bernice, relaying an email a friend had sent her some time ago to the crowd crammed in a tiny room to see her band on what was effectively the grand finale night of this year’s Pop Montréal. But she put the question to the audience, too, and spoke broadly about how there seemed to be something in the air, big changes afoot. By the time you get to the fourth night of a festival, you start to feel as if you’re existing in some alternate reality so that, sure, Dann might’ve had a point.

It was bound to happen eventually: As we got deeper into Pop Montréal, the conflicts got worse. On Friday night, there was a ton to choose from, including a mind-blowing performance from Shabazz Palaces and the last minute addition of Backxwash when Junglepussy couldn’t make it anymore. Part of me wanted to go zone out to the ambient psychedelia of TENGGER. Unfortunately, they were on at the exact same time as Ratboys, and even with everything else going on across Friday night, it felt like Ratboys were the can’t-miss option.

Ever since 2002, Pop Montréal has taken over venues across town one week a year for a far-ranging festival that balances established names and emerging acts. With some of the locals describing this year as feeling like the first “true” iteration of the festival since COVID, the excitement feels particularly palpable; there’s an electricity in the air while you drop in on wildly different artists just a few blocks away from each other.

1. Pavement should not open for the National. This was my steadfast conviction going into Saturday night. The first time the National held their Homecoming festival on the Cincinnati riverfront five years ago, I fully embraced my identity as a National Dad. I loved it. I love them. But still. Pavement are deities. The thought of them opening for anybody feels weird and wrong, and the thought of them opening for a band as earnest as the National felt even more bizarre.

Last night at the Toronto International Film Festival, the four core members of the Talking Heads — David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Cris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison — were back onstage together for the first time since their 2002 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. After decades of public feuding, they came together at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre to mark the premiere of Stop Making Sense, restored and enhanced from its original negatives and playing on IMAX for the first time.