Balance and Sleazy were one of music’s great romances. In the early 1980s, Geoff Burton, aka John Balance, utilized fan letters and zines to will himself from a troubled childhood of precocious homosexuality and occult aspirations into the arms of… Read More
In the remarkably unsexy year of 2020, you wouldn’t expect an artist to evoke the glowing grime of a club so exactly, but Shygirl manages to do it with her latest EP, ALIAS. Similar to 2018’s Cruel Practice, ALIAS finds… Read More
Cakes da Killa knows there’s nothing more lethal than a deep cut swiftly dealt. The Brooklyn rapper is a master of unrelenting flows and skewering affronts, made all the more ruthless by his razor’s-edge humor. On the new EP Muvaland,… Read More
In Emily A. Sprague’s indie-folk project Florist—sometimes accompanied by her bandmates, sometimes solo—the Catskill, New York native makes music of startling intimacy. Her last album, the self-explanatory Emily Alone, was as unadorned as a Shaker chair, stripped down to mostly… Read More
Pylon didn’t really want to be a rock band. When art-school classmates Michael Lachowski and Randy Bewley started banging on cheap instruments in their Athens, Georgia, apartment in the late 1970s, they were more into performance art than music. “We… Read More
In his shattering memoir Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours, Erwin Mortier charts his family’s struggles to care for his mother (and each other, and themselves) as Alzheimer’s takes her from them. “I can no longer hear the music… Read More
For fans mapping the output British-born, Berlin-based producer Joe Seaton, his Call Super handle was slotted for his pummeling house and techno output, while the Ondo Fudd alias was reserved for his weirder excursions into electro or ambient. But the… Read More
Machines don’t care. Self-driving cars, data-harvesting algorithms, Boston Dynamics’ hideous quadrupeds—all these things unnerve us in part because we know that they can’t be trusted. They are indifferent to us by design. Autechre have long played to this unease, channeling… Read More
Loraine James’ music often feels like it’s on the verge of tipping into chaos. Competing rhythms run out of sync, throwing sparks as they scrape. Straight lines bend without warning, and smooth surfaces splinter. Rather than conform to a flawlessly… Read More
In 1962, an American ad man named Martin Speckter proposed a new punctuation mark. The sublimely named “interrobang” combined question and exclamation into a single expression of quizzical incredulity: “What are those‽‽‽” This space-age innovation sadly didn’t catch on, but… Read More