Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner walks us through her new album 'Jubilee' track-by-track.

Sometimes when you’re on, you’re really fucking on.

'Blue Rev' is the best that Alvvays have ever been.

Katie Crutchfield creates a new vocabulary when she sings. Her voice curls around words — she adds extra syllables to them and smushes them together, she fits them into places they cannot go. On...

Bethany Cosentino knew what was up. On “Everything Has Changed,” a song from Best Coast’s latest album Always Tomorrow, she looks back on her early career with a (literally) sobering eye. “I used to...

Krill, Krill, Krill forever! If someone you know was super into the Boston strain of indie rock that came up in the 2010s, you have probably had this refrain shouted at you, most likely brought on by...

SOPHIE treated music as an escape and she wanted everyone else to have that same escape as well.

Avril Lavigne is standing inside a Subway in Toronto ordering a six-inch veggie on wheat bread when the twangy guitars from “Complicated” start blaring out of the in-restaurant speakers. It’s been...

Music publications Spin and Stereogum will no longer be a part of Billboard-The Hollywood Reporter Media Group, parent company Valence Media announced today (Jan. 16). Spin has been acquired by Next...

Of all the big albums that came out in 2009, Bitte Orca might be the one that came the most out of left-field. The music that Dave Longstreth was making prior to Bitte Orca — which turns 10 this...

Treats was a game-changer. Sleigh Bells are the inflection point for the most exciting pop music of 2020. 100 gecs, Black Dresses, and the PC Music camp are still working from the blueprint that...

A couple years ago, a kid stopped Ezra Koenig in the street and said, “Oh, you’re the dude who made that album.” “Which album?” Koenig replied. “You know which album.” “Well, you know, maybe I’m...

Mark Zuckerberg walks out of a bar. He’s just been absolutely ethered in The Social Network’s infamous opening scene, but all that wordiness and vitriol dissipates into empty air. He takes off...

Discovery stories don’t get much more indicative of an artist’s talent than the one that producer Gordon Raphael tells about Regina Spektor. Raphael says he first heard Spektor play at a studio in...

Regina Spektor wanted to do it all. “The people I look up to are unattainable,” she admitted in an early New York Times interview, proceeding to list the artists she aspired to be like: the Beatles,...

The burned-down Dairy Queen. A living room acid trip that ends with a broken foot. Screen doors and quarter-mile trips to get the mail. These are the sorts of images that populate Wednesday’s new...

A look back at Lorde's debut album.

Katie Crutchfield decamped to her parents’ home in the dead of winter to record an album. It was 2011 and Crutchfield was nearing the end of P.S. Eliot, the band she had started with her twin sister...

'Body Talk': the pop album so good it had to be split into three parts.

Lindsey Jordan walks us through her new album 'Valentine' track-by-track.

On the eve of her 20th birthday, Ella Yelich-O’Connor excitedly wrote a note to her fans: “I was 16 when most of us met. Can you believe it? I laugh thinking about that me now — that glossy idiot...

Jake Ewald started Slaughter Beach, Dog as an outlet for characters. Feeling restless in his main band at the time, Modern Baseball — whose songs required visceral emotional transparency — he created...

The xx came out of nowhere, and suddenly they had been around forever. The band’s rise happened in a summer, when their debut album came out 10 years ago today. By the fall, they were playing packed...

Lorde has always expressed discomfort with the idea of being an avatar for anything. But her music invited that sort of projection. Her songs made teenage life sound like a communal experience; they...

By the time I started listening to Frankie Cosmos, she already had more than 30 albums. That was the case with most of the people who stumbled on the expansive songwriting world of Greta Kline, as I...

This is not who James Blake was supposed to be. Or rather, when Blake released his debut album 10 years ago today, it was not who James Blake was expected to be. For over a year, Blake had been...

Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. The album title is overly dramatic, a little funny, and also deeply serious. It’s everything that Mike Hadreas has built up Perfume Genius to be over the last...

“That’s just the way it goes — bands will have that record, and I’m glad we had one.”

In the pantheon of songs inspired by the Golden State, EMA’s “California” is one of the most bitter. Erika M. Anderson wrote it after finding herself unimpressed by her new surroundings upon moving...

Soccer Mommy’s music has a distinctive turn-of-the-millennium touch. Twenty-two-year-old bandleader Sophie Allison grew up listening to Avril Lavigne and Michelle Branch, pop artists whose clean...

It’s not that complicated. Three childhood friends — Henry Stoehr, Teddy Matthews, and Alex Leeds — grew up learning how to make music together and started a band. In college, they met Emily Massey,...

“This is the first record I ever made as a person who gets depressed,” Katie Crutchfield said a couple years ago, as she prepared to play through Cerulean Salt in full for a pandemic-era livestream....

Stereogum's annual list of the best new bands.

“There’s backlash about everything I do. It’s nothing new.” That’s Lana Del Rey talking about her instantly infamous Saturday Night Live performance only a couple weeks after it happened. That she...

It’s exciting to hear a band figure it out in real-time. The building blocks were always there for Great Grandpa. “Mostly Here,” the song that closes out their new album Four Of Arrows, is originally...

As someone with such a deep reverence for Katie Crutchfield’s music, it has for some reason been difficult for me to find a way to actually write about Tigers Blood. It’s incredible, obviously, the...

“I feel like I can kind of do whatever I want.” That’s the reigning ethos of Sarah Tudzin, the sharp songwriter and studio wizard behind Illuminati Hotties. Between her auspicious 2018 debut Kiss Yr...

Justin Vernon was always a collaborator at heart. Though his debut album as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, was famously recorded all by his lonesome while nursing heartbreak in a remote Wisconsin...

Felix Walworth's distinctive caterwaul has served as the grounding force for Told Slant for almost a decade. That voice, which lands somewhere between a quiver and a wail, has been the vessel for the...

Katy Perry is wide-eyed and bedazzled. She tiptoes through Candy Land like Dorothy dropped into Oz. She waves to a pair of menacing anthropomorphic gummy bears, one of whom gives her the finger....

Emily Yacina has a new album, 'Remember The Silver,' out in December. Listen to its lead single "Gleaming."

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of books about women on the verge — Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater, Raymond Kennedy’s Ride A Cockhorse, D. G. Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (all...

The Chicago artist on her stellar new album 'Romantic Piano.'

Like so many of us, Lucy Dacus is wary of what comes next. “The future isn’t worth its weight in gold/ The future is a benevolent black hole,” she sings in the closing lines of “Cartwheel.” Dacus...

No Shape kicks off with a truly magical moment. Opening track “Otherside” begins with the steady plink of a piano as Mike Hadreas’ warm and familiar voice floats into frame. It sounds a lot like what...

“I don’t want to be a musician’s musician,” Mitski told me a few years ago. “I want to be an everyone’s musician.” Be careful what you wish for. In the interviews leading up to her new album Laurel...

Josiah Wise once described his religion as silence. In an interview with Afropunk last year, the musician known as serpentwithfeet talked about his “significant need for silence,” necessary for...

The buzzy, big-name albums from 2009 were artsy and ambitious. Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, and Grizzly Bear would dominate year-end lists, but at the same time those albums were blowing up,...

A look back at the Swedish duo's breakthrough 2003 album.

Laura Stevenson’s self-titled sixth album begins with one of the boldest moments in the songwriter’s decade-long discography. “State” is a seething glower: Muddy strums and Stevenson’s apocalyptic...

The rush is in the anticipation. The first time you hear “Night,” you don’t know it’s coming. After that, there can be no doubt. The drop that occurs halfway through Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song...

Exploring the influences behind the Asheville band's amazing new 'Rat Saw God.'

Let’s just take a second to marvel at the fact that, after eight years, having a new Brand New album out in the world feels like nothing short of a small miracle. There were times when it felt like...

Metric set out to be a band that could succeed in the mainstream on their own terms. Two decades on from their debut album, they’ve managed to become one of Canada’s last great alternative rock...

Cameron Crowe's iconic 'Almost Famous' is turning 20.

Listen to the full album: http://bit.ly/2ZzqhZ4"Drunk II" by Mannequin Pussy from the album 'Patience,' available nowOrder at https://mannequinpussy.ffm.to/p...

An Alex Giannascoli song can be anything. Ask someone what (Sandy) Alex G sounds like and you’re bound to get a different answer every time. That answer will probably depend on when one hopped aboard...

Creating art can be lonely. When Sarah Beth Tomberlin started writing the songs that would make up her debut album alone in her bedroom, she was trying to reach out to people who felt the same way...

“I’ve always wanted to write pop music. I never wanted to be cool.” Even early in her career, Charli XCX was dropping pull quote-ready aphorisms, the sort of declarations we might expect from an...

Crawlersout, belispeak, lofticries, obedear, grandloves, amenamy.

Every year for more than a decade now, we here at Stereogum have put our collective heads together to compile a list of artists that make us excited about where music is going. There is more music...