In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

At the climax of Jimmy And Stiggs, the latest 16mm-shot splatterfest from raconteur writer/director Joe Begos, a man’s head is split open by an alien parasite. The bug-eyed little monster crawls out of his skull and skitters across the floor, leaving behind a ruined corpse in a pool of blood. Seeing this carnage, the man’s still-living companion puts a pair of pliers in his mouth and tries to extract his own alien embryo implant before the same fate befalls him. The soundtrack to this gnarly bit of extraterrestrial Grand Guignol is “To Carry The Seeds Of Death Within Me,” the opening song from experimental doom duo the Body’s 2014 album I Shall Die Here, produced by the Haxan Cloak. There’s always been something otherworldly about the Body vocalist Chip King’s whistle-register death howls, so it was especially satisfying for Begos to make the connection explicit against a canvas of alien gore and strobe lights.

Following over a decade spent in the underground, james K is poised for a breakthrough. The artist born Jamie Krasner has worked with Yves Tumor and Beta Librae, in addition to holding down an NTS residency with the show Trip Lick. Previous records have landed on quiet institutions Incienso, Crude Tapes, and PAN’s influential Mono No Aware compilation. Her CV caters to avant-garde festival slots over streaming success, but suddenly she is experiencing both.

The thing about mythmaking is, it’s a lot cooler when other people do it for you. Except for maybe when it’s a state attorney aiming to send you to prison until Barron Trump’s re-elected president. Staring into the judge’s eyes during Young Thug’s RICO trial a few years ago, a Georgia state prosecutor was doing just that as he told a fantastical tale of Thugger’s crime boss alter ego. It was an opening statement fit for Spike Lee’s The Slimefather starring Denzel Washington: “This is the most of them. This is the one that you see the shadow in the back of the room. He’s the one directing traffic. He is the one that we’re all afraid of. He’s the one that’s King Slime.”

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Is Joni Mitchell a jazz artist? Short answer: No. Long answer: No, but…

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Listening to Chuquimamani-Condori bombard Faith Hill’s “Breathe” with kullawada drums and meteoric explosions, drowning that pleasant Y2K-era country-pop song in an apocalypse of supernova bursts and charred alien remnants falling to earth, a flood of memories came rushing back: standing in Target with my parents, watching dozens of identical Faith Hills mouth the words from the rack of TV displays. Yet, as all artists should, Chuquimamani-Condori has bigger fish to fry than whether or not you relate to them. It’s not a stretch to wonder if Alborada’s supremely cheesy pan-global New Age hit “Ananau,” which also gets its guts spilled on their recent 100-minute compilation Edits, triggers something in the Bolivian-American’s mind akin to how I feel hearing the Faith Hill song. But to generate emotion via the Barnum effect is child’s play. To make music that sounds like it was ripped straight out of your soul, to grab the listener by the collar and demand you feel exactly what you’re feeling right now — that takes work, and guts, and Chuqimamani-Condori has proven again and again that they have both.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

It’s all we have. The monoculture is gone. The American festival landscape is in steep decline. The pop charts are frozen in constant stasis, nothing moving anywhere until the next superstar album comes along and briefly mixes things up. Every piece of new music now exists in a state of competition with every piece of old music, and kids are more likely to stream music from past generations than anything made by their peers. The #1 song in America is by a fictional K-pop group from a Netflix cartoon. America continues to plunge toward a state of enshittified autocracy, and even the people in charge seem to be bored with the whole thing. Nobody likes Marvel movies anymore. The annual Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival is the only thing this side of Italian brainrot memes that can plausibly claim to unite large numbers of young people. God help us.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

A new month is upon us, and in pop in 2025 that means one thing: New sensitive dude just dropped. His name, unfortunately, is sombr. His aesthetic is part indie sleaze, part Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. Despite his stage name, his music is not really somber; it’s jaunty radio bait that, if not fully rock, is certainly rock-coded. His lyrics aren’t quite somber either, but they’re definitely pained: His album, I Barely Know Her, presents 10 angles on the girl who broke his heart. Unsurprisingly, he gets mobbed by girls both on stage — see last weekend’s VMA PDA — and in person; one imagines that at least some of his fast-growing fanbase was drawn by the seductive pull of “I can fix him.”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

In the FromSoftware action RPG Elden Ring, you play as an anonymous, mute character belonging to a caste known as the Tarnished. You’re set loose in the Lands Between, a blighted world that has fallen into chaos. Your mission is to restore the Golden Order and become Elden Lord. In the beginning, you’re a weakling, with poor stats and worse armaments. The first bosses you encounter exist primarily to beat you into the ground, to humble you. The low chime that accompanies FromSoft’s signature “YOU DIED” animation burrows its way into your head through constant repetition. At some point, you realize that you can go somewhere else on the game’s massive, open-world map, so you do. You strengthen yourself in encounters with lesser enemies, and eventually, you return to smash that boss that gave you so much trouble a few hours ago. Repeat that process ad infinitum. That’s Elden Ring.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

If you were looking for the exact opposite of a phrase like “Live Laugh Love,” it would be, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Released 10 and a half years ago, Earl Sweatshirt’s melancholic sophomore album title is the anti-Annie — a bleakly abrupt way of saying, the sun won’t come out tomorrow, and even if it does, I’ll be too busy brooding and watching The Wire Season 4 to notice. The tracks themselves are similarly dire, with singles like “Grief” sounding like a bottomless pit where you can barely hear yourself scream. His latest LP, Live Laugh Love, is the sound of someone who’s long since found the resolve — and the wisdom — to climb out of it.

What if slugging a Monster was as refined a tradition as afternoon tea? Welding techno, bass, IDM, and dembow, JP López’s hotwired output presents an answer. The Colombian producer grew up in Medellín and began making music as a teenager. In 2017, he settled on the moniker Verraco — a localized slang word that expresses anger, praise, and difficulty interchangeably. Around the same time, he founded the rebellious label Insurgentes to challenge preconceptions of Latinx music. López now co-manages the imprint TraTraTrax with DJ Lomalinda and Nyksan — a vital resource for everyone from Nick León to Doctor Jeep to Ezmeralda.

Almost 30 years ago, a new sound began bubbling up in small venues around Chicago — jazz clubs sometimes, but punk clubs and arts centers and other less defined spaces too. Cornet player Rob Mazurek was one of a small coterie of players, some of whom were members of the dubby “post-rock” (remember when that was a thing to aspire to be?) group Tortoise, and others who were experimenting in other ways, but all of whose music was blurring and erasing the boundaries between jazz, rock, electronic music, modern composition and improvisation.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Is anybody media trained anymore? Do a YouTube search for your favorite pop star of the decade, and there’s a decent chance you’ll get an exhaustive 30-minute video of every chaotic, unfiltered thing they’ve said or done on camera — at least, unfiltered in the eyes of the person painstakingly compiling the clips. The idea that an artist might engage in a little recreational reputation-torching and blurt out whatever shit at whatever time is becoming less of a professional liability than a status symbol, an aspirational messiness: As media trainer Bill McGowan told The New York Times, “unhinged has become the new authentic.” And just like “authenticity,” it’s a performance and a fantasy; one wonders how it is that, if so many artists are unafraid to ruin their reputations, so few of their reputations seem noticeably ruined.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

The godfathers of American thrash have had a rough go of it in the 21st century. The Big Four – that’s Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax, if you’re new here – have released a cumulative 20 studio albums since 2000. What’s the best of those records? It certainly isn’t any of Metallica’s limp, post-St. Anger nostalgia trips. Megadeth buried a handful of great tunes on The World Needs A Hero and The System Has Failed, but they’re both too filler-heavy to recommend without reservation. Slayer’s God Hates Us All has its share of defenders, and I’ll at least entertain the idea that its nü-isms are successful on their own terms. Personally, I hear a band who was afraid of aging out of the arena circuit trying desperately to impress the Slipknot set. I think the answer might be Anthrax’s 2011 album Worship Music, which found them reuniting with their classic-era vocalist Joey Belladonna. When’s the last time you listened to Worship Music? Have you even heard it?

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

For the members of Fugazi, getting together to reminisce is no big deal. They stay in touch. Some of them play together in other bands like the Messthetics and Coriky. And in 2018, bassist Joe Lally revealed that all four Fugazi members still get together to play music in private. But for Fugazi fans, listening in on an interaction between these four people is a monumental occasion. The DC punk band — a hallowed fixture of underground music since the late 1980s, beloved worldwide for their bracingly dynamic records and their pointedly ethical approach to their career — has done basically nothing together in public as a foursome since playing their final shows in 2002. So getting all four of them all on mic simultaneously for a podcast is somewhat of a coup.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

The Annoying Thing. That was its original name. Crazy Frog, the noisy little animated character that has delighted and irritated millions around the world, was annoying by design. In late 2003, Swedish animator Erik Wernquist made a 43-second video featuring a goofy little frog wearing a vest and a helmet with goggles (and no pants) making noises as he revs up an imaginary vehicle – and then speeds off, leaving a trail of exhaust fumes.

Nicole Glover is always thinking. The 36-year-old saxophonist, who grew up in Portland, OR, speaks the way she plays: with confidence and without hesitation. Every question I asked when we spoke by phone earlier this month generated a thoughtful, multi-paragraph response, and her approach to her music is as considered as her solos.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Oscar Henson’s early material as Facta orbited the post-dubstep diaspora of the 2010s, landing on venerated UK labels including Livity Sound and Idle Hands. An East London native, Henson lived in Bristol during a formative era for the city’s electronic underground. He picked the moniker Facta at random from a history textbook — an obscure reference to Italian politician Luigi Facta. “I thought it just looked like a dubstep DJ’s name because it had the ‘a’ at the end — like Hatcha and Youngsta,” he tells me over Zoom, chuckling. “It turns out that he’s, like, probably the most pointless character in all of Italian critical history. I go to Italy and say, ‘I’m named after this prime minister Facta’ and get laughed at massively.” European bureaucracy aside, Henson’s output is no joke.

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

At some point years after folks like Q-Tip, Pharrell, and André 3000 first embodied it, the term “genre-blending” became the most annoyingly vapid descriptor in my inbox. Gradually, a compound adjective that had once been reserved for people like Lauryn Hill or Kanye became lifeless boilerplate copy for any shitty artist who listened to Nirvana once and decided they were “more than just a rapper.” For every Doja Cat or Trippie Redd, there’s 10 or 11 who are a few flops away from becoming either an IG model or a morally ambiguous streamer. The thing is, “blending” suggests control, and you can’t control something you never really grasped in the first place. But sounds are a lot easier to corral when you create them yourself. As his own primary producer, Jim Legxacy flaunts the deft, improvisational control of Jérémy Doku. The producer-rapper swirled disparate sonic elements for his breakout 2023 album, homeless nigga pop music, and he makes the mix even more seamless — and more expansive — black british music, a mixtape that oscillates between textures and feelings with an impressive dexterity that defines the best artists.