Music Features

Record label executives in the United States could be forgiven for treating themselves this month. For a while now, fears have existed that audio streaming growth would start to slow in the U.S. If this tipping point happens — when this tipping point happens — it will be a concrete …

They wanted to call it “Life,” and by the time Pearl Jam began recording their third album, their lives seemed pretty charmed. Despite ignoring nearly every dictate of the music business, they had sold millions of copies of Ten and Vs. Creatively, Pearl Jam were on such fire that they …

Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme led his first “Desert Session” in 1997, a year after he left stoner-metal firebrands Kyuss, when he invited members of Monster Magnet and Soundgarden, among others, together for an improvisational jam in Joshua Tree, California. After that, he regularly organized different groups …

Kim Gordon has been making music since the early Eighties, but somehow she just got around to making her first solo album. In her defense, she’s been pretty busy: since the 2011 break-up of Sonic Youth — the enormously influential band she co-founded, wrote, sang and played bass in — …

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 …

Twin-sister indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara tell their “origin story” in the upcoming memoir High School. The siblings wrote the book together, alternating chapters, and across more than 350 pages, they recount their formative years, and the beginnings of their musical collaboration. “High School provides a purview of the queer …

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 …

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 …

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks’ best song ever, “Ooh My Love.” It’s a buried treasure in her legendary career — never a hit, not even a single. She’s never sung it live. Just a deep cut from her most tragically underrated solo album, The Other Side of the Mirror, released …

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 …