Music Features

Ginger Baker's Wild Rhythms

When Ginger Baker was a teenager, his life was transformed in two lasting ways. While at a party around age 15, he was encouraged to sit down at a drum kit and play; classmates had noticed he would drum on his desktop and thought he’d be good at it. Before …

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Halsey: A Rebel at Peace

T his may come as a surprise to no one, but Halsey is pretty good with a knife. Today she is wielding it against a cucumber, which would seem like a joke or a meme — given her man-eater rep in the pop-star pantheon — were it not for the …

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Song You Need to Know: Jay Som, “Superbike”

Everybody Works, the 2017 debut album from Jay Som (a.k.a. singer-songwriter Melina Mae Duterte) was “bedroom-pop” that made her own private world seem like a expansive biosphere, fusing influences from Ariel Pink-style L.A. chillwave to Carly Rae Jepsen-aware Eighties-loving bubblegum, confessional indie-rock to yacht-y Eighties R&B. The songs were immediately …

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Priests Are Not a Punk Band

Backstage at a club in Sheffield, England, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer and guitarist G.L. Jaguar were arguing at the top of their lungs about the future of their band. It was the fall of 2017, and they had just started a European tour that was rapidly unraveling. “Gideon and …

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Melvins' Buzz Osborne: My Favorite Grunge Albums

Melvins formed a few years before anyone used the word “grunge” as the name of a genre, but they embodied the term perfectly with their deep, sludgy riffs and left-of-center songwriting. Since 1984, they’ve released dozens of albums of uncompromising and sometimes experimental music, and constantly challenged rock norms. When …

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