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.

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.

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.

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.

Stereogum contributor Al Shipley has written his first book, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music, which will be published by Repeater Books on Aug. 19. Incorporating over 50 interviews conducted over the last 19 years, the book examines how Maryland’s biggest city became a hotbed for a unique fusion of house music and hip hop that’s influenced and been sampled by mainstream stars like Cardi B, Drake, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, and M.I.A.

People said they were Christians, but they were also freaks. They toured in a 42-foot 1976 MC8 Charter bus that ran on vegetable oil. They crashed on people’s floors and ate out of dumpsters. They performed regularly at Cornerstone (the Coachella of Christian rock), released music on Tooth & Nail Records (the Geffen Records of Christian rock), and their CDs were carried in evangelical Christian bookstores. But when I first saw mewithoutYou in the summer of 2008, the band was traveling with people that looked to me like hippies, men in long dresses and women with dreadlocks playing bagpipes and accordions, dancing around the stage like a circus, chanting praise to Allah. When I spoke with lead singer Aaron Weiss after the show, his massively oversized t-shirt with a daisy on it soaked with sweat, he told me that our bodies are like these T-shirts, just costumes that we put on, and if our spirits changed bodies, it would just be like if he and I traded T-shirts. I nodded, bewildered. This was a Christian band that made no sense to me as a teenager raised on Sunday sermons and Wednesday night youth group services. This was something else entirely.

Here’s a thought exercise: Try to imagine what your record collection would look like if Sly Stone had never lived.

Cameron Schaefer had big news. It was fall 2021, nearly a year after Schaefer took over as CEO of Vinyl Me, Please, the popular LP subscription club that by then had grown to become a veritable reissue label and respected music publication. Now, he claimed, the company was expanding into the record-pressing business, too.

Below is an excerpt from the upcoming book In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over The World by Matt Bobkin & Adam Feibel, 2025, published by House of Anansi Press. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

It’s a little bit shocking when the voices come in. Even if you already knew Opening Night was a record of a live performance inaugurating a new experimental theater space in LA, you didn’t expect the microphone to swoop so close to the action. Throughout the previous half-hour, the performance has remained at a professional remove from the audience, and yet as closing track “Opening Night” begins we’re greeted by a flood of personalities, their conviviality a contrast to the icy, creeping music surrounding them.

Last month, Chappell Roan’s femininomenal year was capped with a Grammy win for Best New Artist in an especially strong field. As she’s done before with issues like transphobia and violence against Palestinians, Roan used the stage to speak passionately to a pressing problem:

Authors Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour told the salacious story of ’80s hair metal in 2021’s acclaimed Nöthin’ But A Good Time: The Uncensored History Of The ’80s Hard Rock Explosion, which was recently adapted into a docuseries. Four years later, they’re back with another oral history offering a peek behind the scenes of Lollapalooza, the traveling festival that defined early ’90s alternative culture. Out next month, Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival features interviews with dozens of key players from Lolla’s heyday, all of whom offer candid takes on the backstage chaos, personal grievances, and industry politics that swirled around the era-defining road show.

“I’m known for one thing. I’ve only done one thing,” explains Sean Ingram, the vocalist behind pioneering mathcore outfit Coalesce. “I was ready for the past to be the past and to do something new, without fear.”

When Jesse Kahn imagined what it would be like to be a father, he thought about music. He imagined introducing his future daughter to his favorite records.

Weird time to have the Grammys, eh? Thirty-three days into a year that has already seen this country beset by terrorist attacks, harrowing wildfires, deadly plane crashes, a dumbass trade war, a hostile executive campaign against all kinds of vulnerable minorities, and the possible end of American democracy as we know it, the music industry’s power players gathered in a Los Angeles arena named after cryptocurrency platform to hold what has historically been a profoundly wack awards show.

If you’ve read a take on the upcoming 67th Grammy Awards, happening this weekend, it may have been something about what a great year it’s been “for women.” And while for me that has a whiff of knuckleheaded condescension about it – every year is a “great year for women” if you’re paying attention – it’s true that it’s been a huge belated breakthrough year for three brash women in pop. Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter brought a fresh, modern jolt to the landscape, and though the three have been in the game for a minute, at ages 32, 26 and 25 respectively, they’re still getting started. Along with fellow nominees Gracie Abrams (25), Ariana Grande (31), and Grammy darling Billie Eilish (still only 23, she has nine Grammys and 32 nominations to her name) – whoever wins on Sunday, in the pop categories, it’s likely that youth will be served.

Twenty years ago, nearly to the day — on Jan. 22, 2005, at 11:30 p.m. ET — the great Paul Giamatti was midtown hosting Saturday Night Live. The actor was there to do all the “normal” ostensibly fun shit a Saturday Night Live host is there to do: deliver a monologue, crack some jokes, introduce musical guest Ludacris, hang out with Fred Armisen in a catsuit, etc. But Giamatti was also present with an ulterior motive, one that has long been utilized by actors at this exact moment on the calendar in the midst of an SNL season. He was campaigning for an Oscar.

In the 2019 book To Feel The Music: A Songwriter’s Mission To Save High-Quality Audio, Neil Young describes an encounter he had with Elon Musk. This encounter took place around the time Pono, Young’s hi-fi digital music player and online store, was released 10 years ago this month, as Young was aggressively proselytizing about the importance of sound quality to anyone who would listen.

Last year, I fell victim to Instagram reels. I scrolled for hours in morbid fascination at people making cocktails in their washing machine, ordering Dunkin’ coffees with 20 spoonfuls of sugar and 15 pumps of caramel, sprinkling Sour Patch Kids in a bowl of spaghetti. I realized that the internet has become a parody of itself; I wondered if it was even possible to satirize the Web in art anymore when the absurdity is already so blatant.

Darius was a typical young music fan of the 1980s. He hit “record” on his tape deck when a song on the radio caught his fancy, took care to cut off the DJ’s announcements, and catalogued the mixtapes he made. He was from West Germany, but other kids doing exactly that could be found in any place where radio signals with rock and roll in them could be received.

The early 2000s were brimming with “it girls” on the covers of tabloids: Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and, of course, Lindsay Lohan.

Tim Heidecker had been releasing music for years before he had his musical breakthrough in 2016 with In Glendale, an album inspired by the birth of his daughter, a familial move to the LA suburbs, and the midlife mental adjustment that came with his 40th birthday. You’d be forgiven for thinking all of those experiences fit more naturally as material for a standup set, but the hugely successful comedian and writer wanted to use it to fuel his other artistic passion and to challenge his perception among audiences.

On Sunday, November 24, 1974, Nick Drake went to bed at 10:30 p.m., earlier than usual. It was a dreary day at Far Leys, the Drake family estate in Tanworth-in-Arden, England, a village in the Warwickshire countryside. Nick, who had suffered a mental breakdown in April 1972, mostly spent the day in silence, a familiar pattern, ambling in and out of the family music room.

It’s noise. It’s all noise. You can get lost in it. When you tune in, you might catch a few quick shards of something familiar and comforting. You might be like: “Oh, huh, Blonde Redhead, that’s cool. Did one of their songs blow up on TikTok or something?” Most of the time, though, it’s sheer roiling alien chaos. It’s here to overwhelm you. It’s here to fuck up your day.

When people ask me why I decided to become a therapist, my canned response is: “Well, I was turning 40 and I realized that it might no longer be feasible to write about Simple Plan professionally for the rest of my life.” This is not the full answer, but it is partially true. (No offense to Simple Plan, I just had to pick an early ’00s pop-punk band to put in that slot and they seemed to be the most inoffensive.)

I recently found myself in one of those “What’s the strangest thing you did for entertainment during early quarantine?” conversations that somehow, almost half a decade later, people still aren’t sick of having. The usual suspects popped up — sourdough starters and Tiger King and whatnot. When it was my turn to respond to the icebreaker, I shared that during one week towards the end of April 2020, I listened to every Car Seat Headrest album in chronological order — from the esoteric, near-indecipherable sandpapery pop-rock of the numbered albums, all the way up to the 2018 reimagining of Will Toledo’s tangled teen angst rock opera, Twin Fantasy. All of it was in preparation for the group’s most recent and in some ways most confusing LP to date, Making A Door Less Open, which dropped just days after I finished my mission of lockdown-induced Car Seat Headrest completism.

In 2022, we got a taste of Neneh Cherry’s eventful life in our career-spanning interview with the Swedish musician. She’s best known for her eclectic 1989 debut Raw Like Sushi, which earned her a Grammy nomination, but she also clocked time in the beloved punk group the Slits and gave an performance on the UK’s Top Of The Pops while pregnant.

Has there ever been an album so widely remembered without a single track most people would recognize?

Sergio Pizzorno bounces around in a half-ruffled/half-tassled all-denim getup that makes him look like he escaped from a Scissor Man attack at a Primark factory. Whenever he’s not bouncing, he’s kneeling or leaning, peacocking with a ceaseless desire to see mosh pits erupt in front of him. The crowd, spilling far out of the packed Woodsey Tent at Glastonbury, are all too happy to oblige, a sea of hopping loons oftentimes obscured by flare smoke shouting back almost every single word of the 13-song surprise set like it’s Kasabian’s 2014 headline slot all over again.

Moon Unit Zappa is ready to share her story. The daughter of Frank Zappa, who appeared on his 1982 hit “Valley Girl,” has lived an eventful life from the very beginning. The weirdness is detailed in her new memoir, EARTH TO MOON, which is out Tuesday and follows her unconventional upbringing in 1970s Los Angeles all the way up to the death of her parents.

When asked how he would like to live his remaining years, Luis Buñuel once said: “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other 22 in dreams — provided I can remember them.” Who knows what the great Spanish filmmaker might’ve conceived had he been a raver rather than a Surrealist. A recent microgenre offers a clue: hit em, invented in a dream by Drew Daniel.

“I was like, ‘Damn, we comin’ up on being old heads. It’s about to be our 10th anniversary. I should probably go ahead and tap in and make sure I set something up.'”

Nothing could have prepared me for f(x)’s “NU ABO” at 13. The cover showed a young woman blindfolded, the title melting off the right side. The music video cast five young women in a tiny stage, changing outfits and dancing less in the cutesy pointing of Girls’ Generation’s smash hit “Gee” and more like the coordinated locking of SHINee’s “Lucifer.” And the music: bold, bratty, delightfully aggressive. What “NU ABO” meant, I didn’t know at the time. f(x) were befuddled by the lyrics too, it turns out. (I suspect no Australian was involved in the naming.) But it didn’t matter when the girls (one of which, Sulli, was the cover model) were this beautiful, the music was this good, and the music video this cool. It was all so well-executed, in fact, that it is difficult to think of K-Pop today without their contributions.

The Roots Picnic — the once Philly-centric Black music festival, which over 16 years has become a perennial soft launch for the summer concert season here in the Northeast — can now safely be thought of as a national event. Atlanta’s Gunna graces the same stage as North Carolina’s Fantasia Barrino. St. Louis natives Smino and current sex-rap queen Sexyy Red follow each other as gospel is performed on a stage within earshot. Redman and Method Man, Ghostface and Nas, all New Yorkers and occasional collaborators, hit the stage for separate sets. The headliner of the weekend was a kind of New Orleans review: Lil Wayne on stage with his Nola compatriot, the horn player Trombone Shorty.

Josh Anderson has been a Black Keys fan for over a decade. He fell in love with the band as a high schooler in 2007. But in April, when tickets for the blues-rock revivalists’ North American arena tour went on sale, Anderson realized he wouldn’t be attending. The prices were simply too high.

In the May issue of Music Inc. magazine, Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto — the new head of America’s largest brick-and-mortar instrument retail chain — said the following regarding the store’s new strategy:

The least-loved albums by veteran artists tend to find their way, in time, to critical rehabilitation. It’s practically an inevitability, particularly if the artist in question is deemed sufficiently historic. Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music was reviled on its release only to become recontextualized as the urtext of the harsh noise genre. What was once dismissed as kitschy and chintzy on Dylan’s ’80s records became a bedrock of the War On Drugs’ acclaimed sound. This website has mounted (partial) defenses of Metallica’s dire St. Anger and Lulu on recent anniversaries, and Pitchfork controversially rescored a bunch of reviews in 2021, elevating onetime duds by Wilco, Daft Punk, and Lana Del Rey to the canon. Stay in the conversation long enough and you might discover that you no longer have any bad albums.

Lenny Kravitz turned 60 on Sunday. He’s just released his twelfth studio album, Blue Electric Light, and announced a Las Vegas residency, which will take place at Park MGM in October.

Drake doesn’t sound like he’s having fun anymore. In a different world, Aubrey Drake Graham might come off as Keyser Söze on “The Heart Part 6,” the most recent volley (at least for now) in the extremely busy, extremely fun Drake/Kendrick Lamar feud. “The Heart Part 6” is the song where Drake says that he planted a fake story about having a secret 11-year-old daughter and says that Kendrick’s “Meet The Grahams” cover art was a setup, a way to reel Kendrick in. But Drake doesn’t sound like the master manipulator that he claims to be. Instead, he’s beat-up, surly, tired. “The Heart Part 6” is a Band-Aid, a chance for any remaining Drake partisans to claim that he’s really the winner of this past week’s events. We know better.