Imagine starting a new creative endeavor and then being mentored by your heroes right off the bat. This was pretty much the case for Rocket, the Los Angeles quartet of 20-somethings who began making amped-up guitar music together in 2021. In the two years between their formation and their debut EP Versions Of You, Rocket started regularly playing local gigs, sharing bills with their friends in bands like Milly and the now-defunct Regrettes. Before long, Rocket were opening for some of the very same bands they’d grown up worshipping: Sunny Day Real Estate, Ride, Smashing Pumpkins. They hadn’t even put out a full-length album yet.

Jeff Tweedy changed my life. Ever since 2002, when I fell hard for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot after reading all those rave reviews, Wilco have been one of the mainstays of my music fandom. I’ve probably seen them live more than any other band, always hoping to hear “Misunderstood.” I return to their canonical classics frequently, sometimes for comfort and sometimes to be thrilled by “Via Chicago” or “The Late Greats” all over again. I never miss a new Wilco or Tweedy release, nor do I miss a chance to argue about them online. (My “Ode To Joy is better than Sky Blue Sky” take will never die.) Wilco is always one of the names in rotation when people ask me about my favorite band. I’ve been in the tank for them for so long that, in a parasocial way, they feel like family.

I’m the narrator, and this is just the prologue, Brendon Urie sang in 2005. Here’s how the story goes: Four guys in Las Vegas got together and started playing music. First a Blink-182 cover band, they rehearsed in the drummer’s grandmother’s living room before making their own music. One member spammed the internet with their demos, and eventually Pete Wentz caved in and listened, prepared to tell these pests that the songs sucked. Instead, the Fall Out Boy bassist — in Los Angeles recording From Under The Cork Tree at the time — was in awe and drove down to Sin City to sign the group to his label. Thus began Panic! At The Disco, whose 19-year career had one of the bleakest arcs in recent history.

Stereogum reader, I am going to assume you are constantly hoping, wishing, praying for hypotheticals that allow you to take comment section chatter into the real world. And so let’s start: What’s your platonic ideal of an indie rock song? Not necessarily the best indie rock song or even your favorite. But let’s suppose you’re shooting the shit at work, the conversation turns to “what kind of music do you like,” and someone says “indie rock.” To be specific, a conceptualization of indie rock that clashes with your own. (Pulling from my own real life experience, they probably mean Djo or Still Woozy or Glass Animals.) When you say you’re into indie rock, what’s a song that explains what you mean by that?

The story goes that The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die’s band name was inspired by the repeated final lyrics to Neva Dinova’s 2005 song “I’ve Got A Feeling”: “The world’s a shitty place and I can’t wait to die.” Though the ever-changing Connecticut collective has regularly been lumped into the nebulous “emo revival” movement, their entire ethos — aside from, say, their shared admiration for Brand New or those shows they played with Algernon Cadwallader that one time — often seemed almost contradictory to what made emo “emo” in the first place. TWIABP, whether it came from a genuine place or they were just trying to convince themselves, evoked some sense of hope. Here’s the comically long-ass band name to prove it.

The most harrowing part of a breakup isn’t the moment it happens — it’s the disorienting calm that comes after. Left alone, orbiting oneself. Michelangelo Dying, Cate Le Bon’s seventh studio album, is suspended in this space: “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos.” Across these songs, the Welsh musician wades through the dissolution of a relationship using full psychedelic beams of sound not to make sense of the wreckage, but make room for it.

“Get in asshole, let’s drive.” Cameron Winter issues the invitation/command about two minutes into Geese’s new album, after he and guest vocalist JPEGMAFIA have already shouted, repeatedly, “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” It’s a refrain they’ll return to often on “Trinidad.” The music is as volatile as the subject matter demands, wah-wah guitar and minimal creeping bass giving way to explosive drum fills and bursts of jazz trumpet. By the end, Winter’s uncanny mewling on the verses has given way to something like a street-preacher rant; Geese meet the moment by evoking a funk band that’s gone all-in on noise rock, matching Winter’s screams blow for blow. As the tension ratchets tighter and the manic claustrophobia sets in, you get the sense that the fuse has been lit and it’s only a matter of time.

It’s been more than seven years since Bronx rap phenom Cardi B released her blockbuster debut album Invasion Of Privacy, a truly great record. We’ve had two presidential elections, one global pandemic, and countless waves of rap and pop discourse in the time since Invasion Of Privacy came out. In that time, Cardi B has had three children, and it’s about to be four. She’s gone through one divorce. She’s released a great many absolute bangers — “Money,” “Press,” “Tomorrow 2” with GloRilla, “Put It On Da Floor Again” with Latto — that will seemingly never appear on a Cardi B album. Now, Cardi B has finally released Am I The Drama?, the sophomore LP that some of us thought would never arrive. It’s real. It exists. And people have their knives out for this one.

It’s almost uncannily fitting that Trish Keenan only exists now in memory, because Keenan was never too firmly tethered to the present. The British singer-songwriter was at a ’60s-themed psychedelic club, after all, when she met musician James Cargill in the mid-’90s, and for the next 20 years she’d excavate cultural and spiritual references of yore into the indietronica band they formed together. Broadcast were a singular group from the start, and it took them a while to find their niche: Their big break came shortly after their formation when their non-album song “The Book Lovers” was featured in Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery, a film that often dragged ’60s aesthetics and British humor into sheer mockery. Broadcast’s girl-group harmonies and tinny synths suited Mike Myers’ free-love, technicolored escapades, but Keenan never set out for mere nostalgia bait. She wanted her art to feel it existed outside of typical time and space. In that endeavor, she succeeded, right up until she died of pneumonia in 2011 at only 42 years old.

“I wanted it to feel like it was swallowing itself whole.” In a recent interview, Luna Kupper of the Nashville shoegaze duo Total Wife was explaining her approach to producing “rest,” a song from the band’s 2023 album in/out. Inspired by bandmate Ash Richter’s lyrics, Kupper attempted to make the song “a steady linear incline,” a procession toward the heavens in which the listener’s perspective gradually blurs together with their environment. On that track, Total Wife build a hypnotic foundation out of an acoustic guitar loop that sounds like the intro to “Cherub Rock” reframed as a Microphones track — a one-chord sonic mantra that slowly, and then quite suddenly, is consumed by a visceral inferno. It’s the kind of sequence that takes your breath away, inspires visions, adjusts the temperature in the room.

Sometimes it seems like the art form that captures reality in the most accurate way possible is collage. Other forms are too neat; the chaos of life can’t be communicated through organized paragraphs or a stylish painting. Every day is a mishmash, too messy to be a mosaic. Asheville indie rockers Wednesday have mastered the art of collage-like songs, of music that’s like a junkyard full of precious relics. You get the sense that leader Karly Hartzman is a true artist’s artist, subconsciously collecting fodder for her creations and allowing a project to form on its own volition. Bleeds, out Friday, is another triumph from an undeniable band.

Everyone’s got an airport story. A stop through an airport is a green light to act undignified: It might be the only place in the world where you can drink a cocktail with your breakfast and then nap on the floor afterwards with no repercussions. It’s both crowded and lonely, neither here nor there. You’re only at an airport because you’re trying to go somewhere else farther away.

Some bands would call this an EP. That would be stupid, of course, but a more sheepish bunch might use the short tracklist as a hedge. Shallowater, on the other hand, are rightly presenting these six songs as their next grand statement.

Big Thief has always been an intimate affair. A lot of the time, it seems like the band’s members — vocalist/guitarist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia, and, until his recent departure, bassist Max Oleartchik — can’t get close enough to one another. On stage, no matter how much space they’ve got, they’ll set up and play crammed close together in the center. In photos, they’re usually touching each other, and sometimes they’re on the floor draped over each other in a cuddle puddle. In one interview, Oleartchik said that he felt like the four of them had “melted into each other.” Incidentally, a Twitter search for Big Thief polycule is not short on results.

Bucket hats abounded. Adidas tracksuits, soccer jerseys, band merch old and new: Downtown Chicago was swarming with Oasis fans, looking the part. As the throngs spilled out of the pubs, pedicabs blasted the group’s music while whisking ticketholders toward Soldier Field, while most people made their way on foot across the city’s Museum Campus in the Lake Michigan breeze. It felt like a holiday, and in some way it was: The first Oasis show in the United States in nearly 17 years.

Industrial music is amazing. Think of it: Back in the ’80s, a bunch of fucking psychos were like, “Maybe we could make something that’s thrash metal but also disco,” and then the whole world changed. I know that’s not really how it went. I know that’s not what Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle or Einstürzende Neubauten had in mind. I know that you could come up with all sorts of reasons why Nine Inch Nails, the subject of this particular concert review, aren’t really industrial music at all. But when NIN’s Peel It Back tour came to Baltimore on Tuesday, that’s how it felt — as if the entire histories of KMFDM and Skinny Puppy and Front 242 unfolded to take us to the point where 60-year-old Trent Reznor could punctuate his electro ooze-throb with jagged guitar eruptions and make a whole arena levitate.

You don’t want to be outside the venue when the End It set starts. Finish that cigarette quick. If you need to take a shit, take a shit early. Make sure you’re in the room when the Baltimore hardcore band first steps onstage, or else you’ll miss my favorite part of the show: Frontman Akil Godsey belting the hell out of seemingly whatever song is stuck in his head at that exact moment. The first time I saw End It, it was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” A couple of times, he did Smiths songs. One glorious occasion, it was “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.” The last time I saw End It, Godsey sang “Pieces Of Me” — not the Ashlee Simpson original but the Rare Essence go-go cover that was all over DC rap and R&B radio in the mid-’00s. (The intonations are just slightly different.) For a brief moment, Godsey gets to show the world that he can sing, an act that he doesn’t often get a chance to do on actual End It songs. The song is always different, but the ritual is the same. Godsey gets as far as the first chorus, and then the first riff kicks in and the mayhem begins. It’s so much fun.

Blood Orange should be the last artist to get the TikTok bump — not because Dev Hynes doesn’t deserve it but because the music that he makes under his Blood Orange alter-ego is so heady and immersive that it’s hard to imagine it making sense in 20-second chunks. Blood Orange has hooks, but they’re the kind of hooks that feel like crawling into a warm bath. You want to luxuriate inside those hooks, not to encounter them in barrages of distracting media blips. But the TikTok effect has come for Dev Hynes. A couple of weeks ago, Blood Orange’s 2011 song “Champagne Coast” went platinum, while 2018’s “Charcoal Baby” went gold. Those late-breaking successes feel utterly random, but they make their own kind of sense. If you’re a kid in search of a hazy, indolent late-summer vibe, you won’t find a better supplier of that feeling than Dev Hynes. Just wait until all those kids hear Essex Honey.

Carl Newman was on an unstoppable tear — an all-time NBA Jam “HE’S ON FIRE” power-pop onslaught. His band the New Pornographers had exploded out of Vancouver with their high-powered, ultra-catchy 2000 debut album Mass Romantic, becoming an underground sensation and somewhat of a supergroup in reverse (as the New Pornos further bolstered Neko Case’s already ascendant alt-country career, shined a much brighter spotlight on oblique poet-crank Dan Bejar’s eternally evolving Destroyer project, and confirmed Newman as a generational talent in his own right). The band’s second album, 2003’s Electric Version, kept that momentum going with another set of turbo-charged pop-rock tracks that made impressive use of the group’s multi-vocalist arsenal. And with The Slow Wonder, his 2004 solo debut album as A.C. Newman, he’d delivered some of the finest songs of his career, tunes that proved he could thrive both inside and outside the New Pornographers’ blown-out template.

Thirty-seven years since their first jam sesh, Deftones are as popular as ever. In 2023, they were rocking Jersey’s 4,500-cap Stone Pony Summer Stage; this April, they sold out Madison Square Garden. There was no new album announced, not even new music. What happened?

The University Of North Texas is a huge public research school that has a funny way of feeling like a small liberal arts college sometimes. When people ask me what it was like being a student there 10 years ago, I tend to tell them one of two stories: the time I wrote about a block-wide house show “festival” for the school paper, or the time I drunkenly scaled a fence to flee a DIY steel drum ensemble gig as the cops shut it down. Denton, Texas is close enough to Dallas that you can forge the hour-long drive to catch a touring band coming through Deep Ellum if you really want to, but I certainly didn’t need to in order to get my live music fix. Everybody was either in a band or knew somebody in one. There wasn’t exactly a revolution happening in Denton in the mid-2010s, but when I was 19, that understated counterculture felt as close as I could get to being in DC in 1986 or Olympia in 1991.

Hayden Anhedönia is an artist through and through. The 27-year-old visionary has written at length about the frustration of having everything she does turned into a joke on the internet for the sake of a meme. She’s taken accountability for a problematic past while recognizing that the majority of the people attacking her are not doing it in good faith. She stood her ground when Republicans tried to take her down after she called for the assassination of more CEOs. She dropped a 90-minute ambient EP and a 55-minute meditation within weeks of each other. Now she’s back with her second official album as Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.

It was never about the gimmicks. The spectacle, maybe — it’s hard to imagine seeing the Armed in concert and not being blown away by the overwhelming audacity of their live show, in which an army of wild-looking people team up to bombard you with sonic violence. But before I’d witnessed a performance by the band, before I’d wrapped my head about their reality-blurring lore, the first thing that drew me to the Detroit experimental hardcore collective was the sheer blitzkrieg of their records.

Patrick Stickles was onstage, every fiber of his being soaked through with sweat, wearing nothing but black underpants, while his band played “Freebird.” To the uninitiated, the premise would be absurd: a punk band wrapping up a five-night residency at the (now-dearly-departed) Brooklyn DIY institution Shea Stadium with a slew of classic rock covers. To anyone familiar with Titus Andronicus, there was no better culmination. Shea was a tiny room hidden on a dark industrial street in the no man’s land between Williamsburg and Bushwick, and the residency had been a feverish, oppressively hot week leading up to Patrick Stickles’ 30th birthday, the day Titus Andronicus released their fourth album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy. He turns 40 today, and the album turns 10.

Hayley Williams was merely 14 years old when she inked her first major label record deal. She’d recently relocated from her native Mississippi with her mother to Franklin, Tennessee, an aftereffect of her parents’ divorce. Now just a half-hour drive away from Nashville, the aspiring singer had access to the city’s premiere songwriters and vocal coaches. She began recording her first demos, which, through that web of songwriters, eventually caught the ear of Atlantic Records. The label’s plan was to make her the next big pop princess. There was just one problem: Some of Williams’ friends at her new school had already asked her to join their rock band. “I don’t see myself being the next Madonna,” she told her manager at the time. What she really wanted to be was more like the next Jim Adkins or Jeremy Enigk — just with her disarming, four-octave-spanning soprano.

Last time he checked, he was the man on these streets. He used to hit the kitchen lights — cockroaches everywhere. He hits the kitchen lights now — marble floors everywhere. Once upon a time, he used to grind all night with that residue that was iPod white. He’s tryna get Boston George and Diego money and stack it all up like it’s Lego money. He’s emotional; he hugs the block. You ain’t never seen them pies; he’s talking so much white it’ll hurt your eyes. He really lived it, man, counting so much paper it’ll hurt your hands.

Nihilistic Easyrider. The moniker Jacob Duarte chose for his solo project is almost a disclaimer in itself: Don’t read too far into this. “Easyrider” invokes a multitude of definitions, most of a titillating, opportunistic, or otherwise anti-status quo nature — interpretations that pique questions about morality. “Nihilistic,” however, suggests that Duarte, our unreliable narrator, isn’t too concerned with the distinction between right and wrong. Maybe you could uncover some sort of meaningful philosophy about that combination of words if you smoked enough weed — and our narrator will confess shortly to having smoked a lot — the Narrow Head frontman probably just thought the combination of two antithetical, multisyllabic words together would be funny to tell your buddies next time they ask what you’ve been listening to lately.

We’re in the middle of the dog days. As brutal heatwaves and endless thunderstorms alternate their grip on our throats, we keep pressing play on track after track, hoping what comes from the speakers justifies the sweat pouring off our bodies. Debate rages on social media about the “Song Of The Summer”: Who’s made it? Who needs to make it? Does it even exist? When the country had a more unified pop culture that revolved around radio countdowns and 5 o’clock traffic jams, the answers to those questions came more easily. Decisions were made for us. Now, in the fractured attention span landscape, too many bangers appear for us to process adequately. Perhaps we’ve moved on from needing an anthem for the season. It stays warmer later in the year, after all.

At first, Kevin Parker seemed to have emerged from another era. On Tame Impala’s earliest recordings, Parker expertly evoked the sound of soaring ‘60s psychedelic rock. He leaned into a vintage aesthetic and somehow made it feel fresh — fresher, even, than some of the more forward-thinking music that was being served up by their psychedelic peers at the time. On Tame’s 2010 debut InnerSpeaker, the Perth-area studio rat and his bandmates — this was before he started calling Tame Impala his solo project — were a traditionalist’s dream, channeling Hendrix, Blue Cheer, and the Beatles in kaleidoscopic pop songs that never forgot to rock.

“Best thing I ever did was fall out of love,” Future says near the end of DS2. It’s a quintessential Future line, plainspoken but subliminal, steely but wounded, a flex that’s obviously spin — especially in the context of the bitter and addled music that precedes it. Falling out of love isn’t a choice; like an actual fall, it happens to you, the decision-making taking place after the plummet is underway. But in the topsy-turvy world of DS2, which turns 10 today, everything gets screwy: cause and effect, joy and pain.

In November last year, I meditated on the persistent beauty of Forth Wanderers’ debut full-length Tough Love for its 10 year anniversary. This week, the band is releasing their first album in seven years. The Longer This Goes On picks up right where the phenomenal indie outfit left off.

Alex Giannascoli has had a career so prodigious it could serve as the basis of a mockumentary in the vein of Christopher Guest or the Lonely Island. Over a decade after he began staking his claim in Bandcamp real estate as a teenager under the moniker Alex G, the Pennsylvania native and DIY enthusiast announced in early 2024 that he’d signed to RCA. The major-label jump was surprising, but there were indicators pointing in that direction: We already knew he’d be opening for stadium mainstays and RCA recording artists Foo Fighters later that summer. The year prior, he’d notched a co-writing credit on the UMG-signed Lil Yachty’s rock crossover Let’s Start Here. He was booking late night shows while still looking like the kind of guy who records at home. He was TikTok-beloved, he was working on his second feature film score, and he was hitting up the studio with at least one pop star. You know that was him playing on Blonde, right?

Justin Bieber is a dad. He’s a husband. You’re not getting it. It’s not clocking to you. It’s not clocking to you that he’s standing on business, is it? He doesn’t give a fuck if you’re on the sidewalk! He’s a human fucking being! You’re standing around his car! At the beach! You know what Justin Bieber is saying? You don’t think he’s a real fucking guy, do you? You’re going to take this video out of context. You’re going to say he’s mad. Justin Bieber doesn’t know who the fuck is paying you to provoke him, but he’s not the fucking one, OK? Stop provoking him. He’s a real dad, a real husband, a real man, so don’t fucking do this shit to him, OK? He’s not to be fucked with. He doesn’t know who’s paying you to provoke him, but he’s not the one. He doesn’t care that you’re on the sidewalk. He doesn’t care what kind of dirty work, what kind of nasty shit — you’re getting paid in the background to provoke him, bro, but he’s really not the fucking one. He’s not the one. He doesn’t care that you’re on the sidewalk, bro.

Kenny Becker had an idea. Goon, his LA-based psych-pop quartet, had just released 2022’s Hour Of Green Evening, a lush live-band affair tracked together in the studio. That album was a work of placid splendor, achingly pretty but with a vaguely unsettled undercurrent, like a darker, more lysergic update on Real Estate’s pastoral sighs. It was a real achievement, one that elevated Goon’s standing within the independent music world, but Becker was feeling the urge to mess with the band’s approach next time around. He wanted to merge the pristine, straightforward, live-in-the-room qualities of Green Evening with “more of the haphazard, intuitive, 4-track cassette, homemade style” that had previously characterized the band when he began it as a home recording project a decade ago.

It’s a tale as old as indie rock itself: Wet Leg didn’t think anyone would hear “Chaise Longue.” Barely two years after college friends Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers decided to write music together on a whim, their deadpan, Mean Girls-quoting debut single made them international stars. In the short time that followed, they opened for Harry Styles, rock veterans like Dave Grohl and Iggy Pop became fans, and their self-titled LP won them multiple Grammys. Beyond their relatively simple, hook-based post-punk, there was also something endearing about Teasdale and Chambers, two conventionally attractive, deliberately softspoken, undoubtedly cool young women from the sleepy Isle Of Wight who dressed like they had eBay alerts set up for Gunne Sax skirts and wielded kitschy props like lobster claws in their music videos. To the uninitiated, it was sometimes hard to discern if Wet Leg were taking themselves overly seriously or not seriously enough. Time spent with the music suggested the circumstances were more aligned with the latter.

“There were days when I had no sense of time or reality, and I wasn’t functioning on a practical level, a day-to-day, matter-of-fact level. I was functioning on a supernatural level, in my mind, in my imagination. That was sustained for days and weeks, and sometimes months. It was really exciting. To be in that space that is so personal yet so epic, as well, and so supernatural, I don’t think it’s really healthy for people for long periods of time. It’s very self-consumed. And also self-consuming. But it’s very enjoyable.”