In the rabble-rousing pantheon of UK girl groups, only the Spice Girls have had more domestic No. 1 singles (nine) than the Sugababes (six). The mutable British trio were a defining band of the 2000s—and yet this 20th anniversary reissue… Read More
Topdown Dialectic’s Vol. 3 begins with five minutes of primordial soup: undulating rhythms that feel like bubbling swamp water, dubby textures that make everything gauzy, and fizzy synths constantly on the verge of forming something concrete. Compared to the previous… Read More
In 1969, Dieter Moebius played a 12-hour gig at an art space above a Berlin shopping mall. Behind the drumkit of newly formed improvisational trio Kluster, he had the markings of an artist most at home when embracing the unknown.… Read More
Fun is a central tenet of Yana Kedrina’s music. Liminal Soul, the Moscow-based producer and vocalist’s third album as Kedr Livanskiy, is defined by a wide-eyed, magnanimous playfulness, an openness to quirk that doesn’t inhibit the seriousness of her message.… Read More
Near the beginning of the documentary SHAYA!, the filmmakers note that amapiano “was born in the soil of the streets of South Africa, therefore it belongs to all of us.” The sentiment reflects the organic, bottom-up growth of the genre;… Read More
“This music started around futurism,” Sherard Ingram told DJ Mag back in 2018. He was talking about the type of Detroit electro that Gerald Donald and the late, much-missed James Stinson had synthesized as Drexciya. But Ingram could also have… Read More
Take it as an auspicious omen when you have to google the instruments used on a recording. Many listeners may find that the case with Máscaras, the fourth album by Canadian-Nicaraguan musician Brandon Valdivia, aka Toronto-based Mas Aya. A deft… Read More
quinn cares deeply about how she is seen. Few photos or interviews with the 16-year-old rapper and producer from Virginia exist online. Her body of work lives on the digital fringes, sprawled across alt accounts and aliases. Explore her SoundCloud… Read More
Shackleton’s work is so diffuse and so challenging that finding an entry point can be like feeling out a foothold in a sheer granite wall. His last solo full-length, 2012’s Music for the Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ EPs, sprawled to… Read More
Alexis Taylor’s voice makes you root for him. It’s high-pitched and delicate, yet also scrappy: the sound of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks learning that he can finally show his sensitivity, having outgrown his bullies. The… Read More