Jacknife Lee’s discography has historically moved in two very different directions. His production credits for acts like U2 and Snow Patrol display a penchant for self-serious adult-contemporary rock; like the nu-metal mashups of Missy Elliott and Eminem that brought him… Read More
Things change slowly at Cat’s Cradle, the storied North Carolina rock club that turned 50 last year. It took half that time to meander from a basement in Chapel Hill through several nearby locations to its current home in a… Read More
Ernest Greene seemed like he was finally about to turn a corner on 2017’s Mister Mellow. He switched labels, moving from the long-running Seattle indie Sub Pop to the more beat-oriented label Stones Throw, and shapeshifted samples from crate-digger classics,… Read More
Pontiac Streator’s music seems deliberately engineered to confuse; it arrives without any real clues as to how it’s meant to be parsed. The pseudonymous Streator is based in Philadelphia, but his releases are conceptually detached from place. They don’t belong… Read More
First arriving on the UK scene in 2009, Al Wootton notched up a number of underground hits under his Deadboy alias on labels including Numbers and Well Rounded. His floor-focused verve and deft application of cute, catchy R&B samples sounded… Read More
Katie Dey’s best music has long fixated on the ways humans fail to connect. On the handful of records she’s released over the past half decade, the Australian singer-songwriter has meditated on fear, loss, heartbreak, and the deep loneliness of… Read More
Swedish label YEAR0001 originally made a name for itself with rap-adjacent acts like Sad Boys and Drain Gang, but as its presence has expanded, the experimental Swedish music hub has increasingly bent toward electronic music. The RIFT One compilation—the first… Read More
A folktronica artist who pivoted to mainstream pop, Ellie Goulding stumbled upon longevity in the 2010s with one fluke hit after another. Both “Lights” and “Burn” began as bonus tracks from modestly performing albums (2010’s Lights and 2012’s underrated Halcyon,… Read More
In dance music, anonymity used to be a currency as stable as gold. To be a “mysterious techno artist” was to present an alpha confidence about the only thing that mattered: the music. For some, it was an anti-commercial gesture.… Read More
Nicolás Jaar’s 2020 output so far amounts to three albums which, at first glance, have little to do with one another. First, he released a new collection under the alias Against All Logic, his Beyoncé-and-Kanye-sampling dance project, which clanged into… Read More