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 — …
Read More »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 …
Read More »Tegan and Sara's 'High School' Memoir: Inside One of the Duo's Earliest Songs
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 …
Read More »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 …
Read More »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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