The plan was to meet at Doug Dulgarian’s apartment. Turns out I’m at his second home. Expecting a far more residential locale, I check my phone to confirm I’m in the right place. ‘I too am almost there,’ reads the text.” I cup my hand above my brow and scan the sidewalk for a familiar face.

“How quickly we rot back into the earth and start over.” So go the final lines of Algernon Cadwallder’s 2008 debut album Some Kind Of Cadwallader. The Pennsylvania emo band would release just two studio albums before disbanding in 2012, a mere seven years after their formation. At least their initial run was longer than that of their primary influence, Cap’n Jazz, the Illinois punks who went uncelebrated until after their members earned later notoriety as members of American Football, the Promise Ring, and Joan Of Arc. Algernon’s members, too, would continue in various other projects, but internet word-of-mouth cemented their origin story. In 2018, Algernon Cadwallader reissued their catalog after years of it only being available on Bandcamp or niche corners of YouTube. Then, in 2022, the unimaginable happened: They went on a reunion tour. Call that aforementioned lyric a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever, but judging by the way Peter Helmis speaks about his writing process now, he probably just thought those words sounded cool.

“Let me know if it gets too windy!” says shame’s Charlie Steen, sitting in a park under a blue London sky on a fine late afternoon in August. “Are you hearing me okay?” Some gusts have kicked up during our hour-plus Zoom conversation, and there’s not much other than Mother Nature that could interfere with the booming baritone of one of modern rock’s most captivating frontmen. Whether he’s speaking, singing or a combination of the two – a frequent approach in shame songs – Steen is nearly always able to cut through, usually in a wry and engaging way.

Raekwon has a very specific recurring memory of riding his bike up Staten Island’s Todt Hill as a child. After 20 minutes or so, he’d end up at the illustrious Benedict Road neighbourhood, a place where many high-ranking members of the Mafia were based. Parked on the curb, he and his friends looked up in awe at the swanky four-story home of Paul Castellano, the former boss of the Gambino crime family.

You have to live some life to write like Alexandra Levy. Some musicians come out with a new album because it’s been a few years since the last one, but the songs on when i paint my masterpiece — the multi-disciplinary artist’s new album as Ada Lea, out today — seem to have emerged out of necessity. The album strikes a difficult balance in that it feels like an outpouring of Levy’s heart and soul but is also carefully considered at every turn. Not that it’s a perfectionist project; the music is pleasingly loose and shaggy, and Levy sings like a real human being rather than a cursive-voiced machine. But you can tell how much thought went into the lyrics, the arrangements, the sequencing.

The Roadhouse Band is a relatively new entity, but Ryan Davis has been at this forever. The Louisville-area singer-songwriter spent over a decade making “punked-up country gunk” with State Champion, a band he formed with close friends, born out of youthful abandon. In 2007, to release State Champion’s earliest music, he launched the record label Sophomore Lounge, which has built up a fascinating, diverse catalog — “everything from Chicago footwork records to noise rock records to folk records,” he explains on a video chat from the front porch of his father’s countryside Kentucky home.

Cuntry, the sophomore album from New York-based multidisciplinary artist Cleo Reed, is a love letter to folk music — a borderless music rooted in memory and a call to action. Black, queer, and non-binary, Reed understands that folk traditions stretch across geographies and genres, collecting the voices of those simply trying to survive. Across Cuntry, they tap into the legacy of working-class soundtracks — blues, dembo, zydeco, house, country, go-go — music that’s long served as a rhythm of resistance.

Billie Marten was ready for something new. Since she was 17, the London-based singer-songwriter born Isabella Sophie Tweddle had been pouring her heart out into the sorts of gorgeous folk-pop songs that can take your breath away. With Dog Eared, out this Friday, Marten, now in her mid-twenties, sought to transform her creative process, to situate herself amidst a vibrant creative community and let inspiration strike. She wasn’t necessarily de-centering herself within her own music — these are still her songs, and that’s still her voice singing them — but she was leaving lots of room for her cast of collaborators to color around the edges and in some cases radically reshape her compositions.

Some of the considerable appeal of Pavements — the unconventional new movie about indie rock icons Pavement, now streaming on MUBI — is derived from how it sidesteps music documentary tropes in ways that mirror the band’s own subversion of rock stardom.

Few openers in recent memory set the tone of an album quite like Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals’ “The Iron Wall.” It’s immediately nerve-shredding, as producer Infinity Knives (né Tariq Ravelomanana) programs an atonal sequence and jittery drums that tumble over each other like a charging rock slide. When rapper Brian Ennals sneers “Yo” a second before his verse, it’s like he’s bumping boxing gloves together, but his first two lines land like a brass knuckles uppercut: “For four generations, your boots up on they neck/ October 7th happened, the fuck did you expect?”

There’s a scene in The Sopranos where Paulie Gualtieri is sharing recycled stories over dinner. Paulie cushions his punchlines with thick bursts of nervous laughter, the New Jersey mafia captain sounding a lot like a constipated hyena.

Pig Pen, the hardcore band fronted by acclaimed chef and The Bear actor Matty Matheson, wasn’t formally unveiled until earlier this year, just weeks before their sold-out debut gig in Toronto. But the seed for the project was planted decades earlier, in the fertile soil of the Niagara-area punk scene of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Back then, you could usually find Matheson and his Pig Pen bandmates – Alexisonfire’s Wade MacNeil, the prolific solo artist and former Attack In Black frontman Daniel Romano, Daniel’s brother and frequent collaborator Ian, and Young Guv’s Tommy Major – either onstage or in the pit at the punk squats and church basements of St. Catharine’s and Port Colborne, at clubs up in Hamilton and theaters down in Buffalo.

yeule is an eternal art student. Not necessarily in the literal sense (though the London-based artist studied fine art at Central Saint Martins College Of Art And Design) but in the devotional way they talk about an artist and the power of their frame. Over nearly two hours on a video call, that frame shifts from games like Final Fantasy or NieR: Automata to the harrowing works of Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, or Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger.

I became obsessed with Every Noise At Once, the Glenn McDonald-created, Spotify-associated genre database, back in 2022. While the best way to use the site might’ve been to meet new-to-you musical styles from all over the world, I immediately loaded up their playlist for lo-fi indie. I’ve been drawn to homespun, fuzzy, sentimental indie rock/pop since I was a teenager in the bedroom pop boom days, so I wanted to see what the tech world considered “lo-fi indie.” There were some big names like Mac DeMarco and Alex G mixed with unsung heroes of my ’10s youth like Hello Shark and Cyberbully Mom Club. The Microphones and Duster hits were interspersed between They Are Gutting A Body Of Water and Feeble Little Horse tracks. The playlist was an endearing, genre-agnostic tour of scratchy indie, ranging from bedroom pop to screamo, that felt like it had some kind of stylistic or spiritual connection even with its extensive differences.

When Alien Boy first started playing shows in 2018, venues had no idea how to handle their fearsome three-guitar setup. Seven years later, the Portland music scene is inundated with loud, young rock bands, some of whom (including Growing Pains and Rhododendron) had members mentored by singer Sonia Weber at Portland’s School Of Rock. Yet Alien Boy’s sound remains distinct, an impossibly lustrous wall of guitar noise that sounds like a waterfall of molten gold, already fully formed on 2018’s Sleeping Lessons and its epochal opener “Somewhere Without Me.”

Curren$y is tip-toeing around various luxury sports cars, gradually leading me over to something important in the distance. He’s rocking a mischievous smile that reminds me of a 1990s kid who just spent their hard-earned pocket money on water pistols at the local Toys “R” Us.

Bill Orcutt’s urgent, improvisational guitar music radiates inexplicability. Initially inspired by the blues, the Miami-born, San Francisco-based artist rose to cult legend status as a member of the noisy, experimental punk band Harry Pussy in the 1990s. After that act dissolved in 1997, following Orcutt’s divorce with romantic and creative partner Adris Hoyos, he moved to the Bay Area and shifted focus to filmmaking. Orcutt returned to music towards the end of the 2000s, rolling out dozens of confrontational instrumental solo records and collaborations at a steady clip, in addition to running the groundbreaking label Palilalia Records. He also designed the software Cracked, a live coding program that yields glitchy electronic textures. Across partnerships with the likes of Chris Corsano, Circuit des Yeux, and Okkyung Lee, Orcutt has emphasized an ability to straddle provocation and surrealism — his output is typically aurally demanding, while always evoking the beautiful chaos of flower petals blowing in spring wind.

The early 2000s were filled with supergroups, as veterans of the ’80s and ’90s tried to carry on after their iconic groups had ended, often linking together with some surprising allies. There was Audioslave, of course (RIP Chris), as well as Velvet Revolver (RIP Scott). There was also Eyes Adrift, though you can be forgiven if you forgot that one, as it stopped before it really started. However, that led to Volcano, which didn’t really get a chance to get heard…until now.

The only time I’ve been to Vermont I was only passing through on a road trip, cruising through sprawling green landscapes in a rental car with my friend. In the middle of nowhere, we pulled over to enter an abandoned 20th-century three-story manor on the brink of collapse. I’m reminded of this when I prepare to interview Burlington-based musician Greg Freeman, whose twangy, fuzzed-out indie rock epics evoke the same feeling as that experience. His music, like the dilapidated building, feels like residue of a distant era, misplaced and captivating in current time. It’s true of his striking 2022 album I Looked Out, and it’s also true of its follow-up, Burnover, which he’s announcing today.

After the abrupt retirement of beloved drum rocktopus Tim “Herb” Alexander, veteran alt-metal oddballs Primus held open auditions for a new sticksman, combing through more than 6,000 videos and an untold number of dudes attempting the triple-bounce kick pattern from “John The Fisherman.” In February, the winner of the “Interstellar Drum Derby” was revealed to be 45-year-old John Hoffman, a tall, skinny, affable, preternaturally chill dude from Shreveport, Louisiana who just happens to plays drums like a circus wagon tumbling down a steep incline.

With each decade, musicians who’ve been in the game since they were a kid get to add a little flair to their performance style, like badges on a Boy Scouts sash. John Dwyer and David Barbarossa are such unshakeable giants at this point that listeners tend to associate them with a specific sound: garage rock for the Osees singer-guitarist, new wave for the Adam & The Ants drummer. But listen to all of their other bands — because, boy, do they both have a lengthy scroll of projects — and the compulsive, unstoppable creativity that’s coursing through the two of them on the regular is unmistakable.

For years, Greet Death’s music got better as their personal lives became more hopeless. The “suicide summer” incantations of their 2017 doomgaze debut, Dixieland, were downright cheery compared to the existential crises lining New Hell, the Michigan band’s heavier, more poignantly pretty 2019 follow-up, which situated them at the forefront of the nascent shoegaze renaissance.

In the big book of songs about the profession of being a songwriter, few are more candidly bleak than Molly Burch’s “Baby Watch My Tears Dry.” In the track from her 2023 album, Daydreamer, Burch croons, “I overthink like it’s my job/ Trying to please everyone/ So many times I feel I’ve failed to/ Create the things I’m told I’m meant to.” The chorus picks up, but the mood doesn’t, with Burch begging helplessly for “a little reassurance” to keep her from crying an ocean’s worth of tears.

Eem Triplin is Gen Z. And he’s a rapper. But he’s not a “Gen Z rapper.”

“Open Sky”, the opening track from the Ophelias’ new album Spring Grove, is addressed to an estranged friend who just got out of a bad relationship. Lead vocalist Spencer Peppet sings, “I don’t see you anymore/ It’s been three years, I’m better off/ But I had heard what’s going on/ And I have got a single thought/ It’s: Good for you/ I’m really happy for you.”

There’s a moment about eight minutes into Dan’s Boogie, the expansive 14th studio album by Destroyer, when Dan Bejar drops the niceties and gives into his Freudian id: “Women fill out, men crumble inwards,” he pontificates with an audible smirk. “There, I didn’t want to say it but I did!” The lyric came to mind as I watched Destroyer perform at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre in late February. Bejar, dressed in denim and a tweed blazer with his all-access pass dangling from his neck, hunched over the microphone stand, which he had lowered to waist height in such a way that it resembled a cane. Was this his version of crumbling inwards?

“I used to think life is suffering,” Haley Fohr began to say. “But now I think life is change.” It’s a powerful statement coming from Fohr, whose music as Circuit Des Yeux has often leaned into distress: Her transcendent 2017 record Reaching For Indigo was inspired by a spiritual exorcism of sorts; 2021’s -io was a response to the reverberating trauma of experiencing a global pandemic. But her rapturous seventh Circuit Des Yeux record Halo On The Inside, out today via Matador, is different. Gone, largely, is her distinctive 12-string guitar; in its place, a thumping four-on-the-floor heartbeat and towering synths; it might be the first time Circuit Des Yeux sounds as at home on the dance floor as in a cemetery. Calling in from the UK while on tour supporting Low’s Alan Sparhawk, the chameleonic musician spoke to Stereogum about her existential approach to songwriting, her love affair with Ableton, and why she loves Scott Walker’s fart jokes.

Todd Fink basically invented Indie Sleaze and all he got was a public nudity charge.

There’s something in the water in Marquette, Michigan.

“I’m a pretty soft person,” Lady Gaga muses. “But my music’s not.” Indeed, for an artist who has come to represent all that is maximalist, fantastical, prurient, and potent about celebrity, Lady Gaga seems, smiling in a black beanie and twin blonde braids, almost disarmingly warm. “I don’t really know where it comes from,” the artist born Stefani Germanotta tells Stereogum of her imminent seventh album, Mayhem. “I often ask myself, ‘Why?'” Why — when she has found success beyond most musicians’ wildest dreams; established herself not just as a pop princess, but as a jazz crooner who can keep up with the likes of Tony Bennett; when she has found the love of her life, the tech entrepreneur (and Mayhem co-producer) Michael Polansky — did she want to write an album seeped in chaos, madness, heartbreak, and, well, mayhem? “I thrive in intensity,” she answers. “That’s a big part of what this album is all about — vulnerability and aggression at the same time. That’s where I live.”

After half a decade spent voraciously writing about left-field music, it takes a lot to get me antsy before an interview. Nonetheless, there are butterflies walloping in my stomach as I admit Tim Hecker to my Zoom meeting. The Montréal-based composer is calling in from his studio, and inaugurates our chat with a quick virtual tour of the purple lit room. A humble rack of modular synthesizers is perched alongside a mixing console, which sits parallel to an understated computer monitor. A few keyboards are stacked in a corner, and Hecker tells me there are some guitars hiding offscreen. His setup isn’t slipshod by any means. Even still, it’s difficult not to be surprised that one of the most confounding experimentalists ever keeps his arsenal of sonic tools relatively slim.

“This is the best album ever made.” “This album has made me fall in love and break my heart.” “I can’t listen to this album without feeling like crying.” “This album is so peak bro.”

It’s 26 degrees with a gale warning in Brooklyn the evening I’m planning to meet Grumpy frontperson Heaven Schmitt. We’re going to Singers, the Bed-Stuy queer bar that looks convincingly unassuming from the outside. Besides its comically brash social media presence, it’s known for hosting an annual trans Olympics, for sometimes serving complimentary guacamole to bisexual people, and for being the place where Addison Rae once arrived unannounced and danced with strangers to her own song. Its main room is outfitted with red lights, mod furniture, and numerous vintage TVs screening films that are just as old. In short: Schmitt fits in here perfectly.

Honestly, who isn’t war ready, at this point? Or maybe you’re war weary. All things considered, with recent events and the State Of Things, I don’t blame anyone for being on the verge of either strapping up or checking out. But in the case of Rich Amiri, the 20-year-old rapper with the deep and distinctive flow, the timely title of his upcoming fourth album War Ready, out this Friday, is more personal than socio-political. It came to him as his biggest hit to date, last fall’s “One Call,” was blowing up, propelled by the rocket fuel that is TikTok traction.

“No days off,” 03 Greedo says definitively, hopping into a car in Philadelphia. He’s almost at the midpoint of a massive, month-and-a-half-long tour, and I’ve managed to get him on the phone on a day without a show. There’s a lot of noise in the background: the chatter of his team, the low hum of nearby traffic, the beeps of a backup guidance system. “If we don’t got a show, we’re shooting videos and shit. I got a lot of artists, so I don’t waste no time. Every day.” When I ask how he maintains that energy, he explains, “Music is what I do for fun. The work is never work.”

Chuck Cleaver says that when all the members of the Cincinnati band Wussy get together for what’s supposed to be two hours of practice, it ends up being an hour and 45 minutes of just shooting the shit, and then 15 of actual playing.

I ran out of plays. Bandcamp wouldn’t let me listen to Shop Regulars’ self-titled debut LP anymore without buying it, and the album isn’t available to stream on the usual DSPs. Fortunately for cheapskates, there’s a band-approved YouTube upload of the whole inspired half-hour, but Shop Regulars is $7 well spent, especially if you’re acquainted with the joys of repetition. I’m not sure I’ve listened to anything more since I first encountered the album a month or two after its June release.

For over 30 years now, Ghostface Killah has rapped each whirlwind verse like a bomb was ticking down and he needed to empty his cranium of all transgressive thoughts before gloriously exploding into a thousand pieces at the end of the song.

Next month, Australian indie rockers Vacations are bringing their very own festival MATES to the Bellwether in Los Angeles. Devised and curated by the band’s frontman Campbell Burns, MATES features acts from Australia and America (and one from the UK), intended as a showcase and a conversation between acts Burns has long admired.