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.

Music festivals ain’t what they used to be. Nearly a decade on from the bursting of the festival bubble, a few of the world’s grand-scale mega-fests continue to program incredible experiences. Barcelona’s Primavera Sound, which the Stereogum staff attended together this month, is very much among them. But financially, it’s getting harder to pull off a quality fest at scale. It’s why Pitchfork Music Festival, one of the best events of its kind, ceased to exist this year. The big ones that persist are mostly bleak. A quick survey of the posters for the biggest corporate fests in North America — stuff like Lollapalooza and its distant relatives Osheaga, Boston Calling, and Governors Ball — offers personality-devoid walls of text appealing to a common denominator so low it may actually be in the earth’s core. For people who actually care about music, large swaths of the festival scene are cooked.

What a festival. It’s not just the booking, even though the booking is cool as hell. The people who put together the Primavera Sound Festival know how to pull in huge stars and spiky critical-favorite types, and it might be the only fest where you can see Chappell Roan and Chat Pile within an hour of one another. You can wander into a club space next to one of the rows of food vendors and find people freaking out to a set from a Brazilian funk DJ. You can see tons of artists, from tons of different places and genres and sensibilities, having truly gratifying career moments. That’s amazing, but it’s not really what sets Primavera apart. There’s other stuff to consider, too.

Some of my best memories from my years going to shows in Washington, DC were made on the dancefloors of Black Cat and DC9 Nightclub. Last weekend, these DC indie music strongholds, located a few blocks from each other in the Shaw neighborhood, were home to more than their usual buzzy touring bands and scrappy local punk outfits. They hosted Liberation Weekend, a two-day festival dreamt up by DC punks Ekko Astral and a team of musicians and organizers. Billed as “two days of music & arts for trans liberty,” the fest’s net proceeds are going to Gender Liberation Movement to help fund future rallies and direct action.

The logistics of a stadium show are an absolute fucking nightmare. They’re obviously a nightmare for the vast production teams that must scramble to turn hulking concrete bowls into one-night fantasy lands; that’s why every stop on a stadium tour involves a small army of technicians putting in insane herculean efforts. But those logistics can also be a nightmare for the regular people who pay vast sums of money to get inside the stadiums. Football stadiums are the largest structures that can serve as readymade non-festival concert venues in the United States. If you’re among the tiny group of acts who can headline a stadium tour in 2025, you have ascended to the highest heights of the music business. But is the spectacle of the stadium show truly worth it? Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s Grand National tour got me thinking about that question — less because of the show itself, more because of the civic clusterfuck that surrounded it.

“You shake my hand! Say pleased to meet you! Look my in the eye! I don’t believe you!” That’s the part. That’s where I get stuck every time. Can’t get past it. I hear that, and I’m mentally headbutting a turret off a tank. For me, Trapped Under Ice’s “Pleased To Meet You,” from the 2011 album Big Kiss Goodnight, is an absolutely perfect piece of music. Justice Tripp shouts about being nothing like you, and then you want to yell along because you, too, are nothing like you. When TUI play in a big room, everyone in that room, including you, is nothing like you. If I could shoot 10 songs up into space to teach aliens that we’re nothing like you, that would be one of them. Last weekend, I saw a couple dozen hardcore bands at Richmond’s United Blood fest, and I enjoyed all of it. But in the back of my mind, I was really just waiting for the moment that Trapped Under Ice would play “Pleased To Meet You.”

We all grow up. In most respects, growing up is good and right. Still, sometimes it’s hard to believe this is the same guy.

At first it seemed completely random. A Tuesday in February, and Paul McCartney was, for some reason, playing a surprise show at the 575-capacity Manhattan venue Bowery Ballroom. Then there was a Wednesday show. And, finally, a Friday special edition, a Valentine’s Day finale to cap off a week of Macca taking over downtown Manhattan before joining in with this weekend’s SNL 50 festivities.

“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.”

The Kansas City Chiefs got absolutely wrecked last night. In their quest for a record-setting Super Bowl three-peat, the Chiefs were hopelessly outclassed by a Philadelphia Eagles defense that wouldn’t let them do anything. Again and again, the Chiefs’ generational-genius quarterback Patrick Mahomes was sacked, stripped, intercepted, and humiliated. On commentary, Tom Brady did the professional work of refusing to show any glee over Mahomes’ plight, but you could just tell. Donald Trump, reportedly very popular in the Mahomes household, did not stick around to watch the full evisceration. The Eagles never even bothered to blitz Mahomes. The final score was 40-22, and as one-sided as that looks, it offers no real indication of how badly things went for Mahomes. This was an ass-kicking of historic proportions. But Patrick Mahomes had at least one thing going for him last night: He’s not Drake.

When Vacations first concocted their own festival MATES, it was a homecoming. In 2022, they hadn’t played their hometown of Newcastle, Australia for a minute, and they wanted to get back to their roots of booking events and throwing parties. So instead of a normal show, they gathered a bunch of Australian artists together for a blowout mini-fest. It was a success, and they immediately hit a ceiling. There wasn’t really any way they could scale MATES up to a larger event in Newcastle. So they started thinking bigger — and further.

A fun game to play at Best Friends Forever: Name bands that could potentially play next year’s festival, if the fest gets a chance to come back. Judging by T-shirts alone, Jawbreaker should be absolute locks for the headliner spot. Beyond that, the game turns into a delirious exercise of remembering some guys: Pretty Girls Make Graves! Rocket From The Crypt! Slint! Sebadoh! Texas Is The Reason! Slant 6! Touché Amoré! Scowl! An Elliott Smith hologram! Bring them all!

Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet Tour begins with a pre-filmed video of her in a bathtub, giggling as the narrator introduces the show. Wait, shit — it’s starting now?! The screen lifts to show an elaborate stage setup rivaling that of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie — there’s a bedroom, a bathroom, a fireplace, and two spiral staircases — and the real Sabrina frantically dashes out one of its many doors, wrapped in what appears to be nothing but a bath towel. She pulls the towel open to reveal that it’s lined entirely with gemstones, and one of her signature itty-bitty strapless getups has been hiding underneath. She flashes a smile through overlined lips as the opening guitar licks to “Taste” resound through Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Joke’s on you — she’s been ready to sing to you the whole time.

Forty years ago, David Byrne danced with a lamp. In what might be the most memorable scene of Stop Making Sense, my pick for the best live-concert film ever made, Byrne picks up a regular floor lamp, previously a mere part of the stage setting, and pushes it back and forth, shimmying all around it — a classic subversion of pop-star gesturing that works as pop-star gesturing in its own right. On Friday night at Merriweather Post Pavilion, Mitski did Byrne one better: She danced with a beam of light.

It’s undeniable: Tyla is the face of amapiano. The 22-year-old Johannesburg singer established her pop-star status with last year’s “Water,” a Top 10 Billboard hit that brought the South African house subgenre to the masses. There are multiple reasons for its crossover success, not least of which is her unrelenting attitude towards becoming a household name. Concomitant to such strategizing is that her brand of amapiano is less concerned with winding, longform dance numbers — as is typical for her contemporaries — than bite-sized pop songs attuned to Western R&B.

Like much of downtown Portland, Project Pabst shuttered abruptly as the realities of COVID set in. Project Pabst launched as a fall festival in September 2014 before shifting to July in 2015. It remained a summer festival for the duration of its run, which was shorter than anyone anticipated. After expanding to Denver, Philadelphia, and Atlanta in 2017, the festival vanished, and a return to the old Portland-only format was planned for 2020.

Day 2 of Project Pabst — the resurrected Portland music festival where Stereogum was a media partner this year — began much like the previous day. The slightly overcast sky and pleasant breeze lasted for the first hour of the festival, giving way to relentless cheery sunshine. By 2:30PM on Sunday, the crowd was a bit thinner than Saturday but a little more lively. Saturday leaned toward black shirts and denim; Sunday was a more traditional mix of festival attire: colorful fits, glitter, dramatic sunglasses. Everyone was drifting, not in a rush to get anywhere. At the south end of the festival on the “Captain Pabst” stage, Kenny Mason did an admirable job of activating the small crowd that had filtered over. “Y’all probably only on your first or second beer,” he said between songs, “But my job is turn you the fuck up. We’re gonna work together.” And he really did get people moving. As I headed to the other stage, I heard him responding to an audience member: “I fuck with you too, thank you.”

Portland is less gray than people tend to expect; we don’t have the endless rainy gloom of Seattle, and in any case, the dark days are confined pretty neatly to the winter months. The summers here are the exact opposite — near endless unbroken sun that comes up before 6 AM and doesn’t disappear below the horizon until nearly 10 o’clock. If it gets hot, there’s not much rain to break up the heat, but you’re only suffering if you’re standing directly in the sun. When the sun slides behind a passing cloud, every breeze brings immediate relief.

“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.'”

She started the show with “Bad Idea Right?” I was not ready for that. In her short career, Olivia Rodrigo has released two albums, and both of them have near-perfect opening tracks. “Brutal” and “All-American Bitch” are both revved-up, energetic statement-of-intent ragers. Both would’ve made great openers for Rodrigo’s first-ever arena tour. But no, she went with her best song.

Is “Wilco (The Song)” off of Wilco: The Album a deep cut? Who cares — it was a perfect way for the band to end a fan-friendly Friday night set at Solid Sound 2024, because even when you’re playing nothing but (relative) obscurities and rarities, you still gotta finish with a statement.

It took less than one song to turn me into a full-fledged convert. Granted, it was probably 10 minutes long, and it shifted genre several times, so it felt like more than one song to an extent. But the length and breadth of it all was part of the appeal.

I always knew that the person whose name I’d call at the end of it all would be another Joanna Newsom superfan. Besides being into shit like elves and throwing ass once a year at a Ren Faire, what Newsom fans seem to have in common is a plant-like heart and an ability to see life from a falling pilot’s vantage point. In Newsom’s music, we hear someone prey to the most astounding human impulses. We hear someone so desperately trying to create something living, breathing, eternal from the inert universe. We hear someone throttling against death. We hear life sounded back to itself. I knew my future wife would get it.

I don’t want to say “phenomenon.” If I say “phenomenon,” I have to immediately acknowledge that Chappell Roan has already twisted that word into something else. One of Roan’s best songs in called “Femininomenon.” It’s the first track on her debut album, 2023’s The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess, and it’s how she opens her live shows. It’s an anthem, and its existence means that I can’t say that Chappell Roan, whose career is currently skyrocketing so quickly that the artist herself can barely keep up, is a phenomenon. Unfortunately, there’s just no other word that accurately describes what’s happening right now. The Chappell Roan situation? The Chappell Roan sensation? The Chappell Roan anomaly? No. Thesaurus.com is no help right now. Chappell Roan is a phenomenon. Or a femininomenon. Whatever.

There was a moment this past Saturday afternoon, when the ascendant Brooklyn experimentalists Water From Your Eyes neared the end of their set. The band had just launched into “Track Five,” the gnarled, throbbing dance-inflected highlight from their 2021 album Structure. The sound of it was blistering, and the sun was blistering, and I turned to the side and heard their alternate universe beats and looked out at the snow-capped mountains flanking the horizon and for a moment questioned “Where the hell am I?”

In 2023, Four Tet unexpectedly transcended. The 40-something IDM veteran born Kieran Hebden kicked off the year appearing on Skrillex’s Quest For Fire, which found the superstar bass lord attempting a “serious” rebrand. Shortly after, the pair became publicly chummy with nerdy English DJ Fred again.., and the crew quickly headlined Times Square, Madison Square Garden, and Coachella in rapid succession. Hot on the heels of those packed dates, Hebden used his label Text to back Secret Life — a collaboration between Fred again.. and ambient innovator Brian Eno. After two decades spent crafting lullaby-like electronic music, Hebden was liaising with the mainstream elite.

Spoon were not supposed to play in Austin this past Saturday.

How do you take an album like Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois — concerned with the undead, first loves, impending heartbreak, field trips with stepmoms, and John Wayne Gacy — and adapt it into a stage show? For choreographer Justin Peck and playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, you set the music around a bonfire, turn these characters into ghost stories, and bring them to life through one of the oldest and most expressive art forms: dance. With Illinoise, they adapt the 2005 album into a play fit with live singing and dancing.

During the final day of music curated by German Music Export and Initiative Musik, the moderator made a joke that the day’s event was about expanding the notions of German music beyond known institutions like Kraftwerk or Berghain. By the end of the afternoon, that seemed like an understatement. The day party at Shangri-La was not only the longest of the events (with artists Meagre Martin, Willow Parlo, LIE NING, Orbit, and ÄTNA) but also the most musically diverse — with indie rock, country-folk, R&B and pop, dreamy electronica, and pure operatic dance-pop chaos. 

Fat Dog have what is, at this point, a familiar backstory. The South London band cut their teeth playing shows at The Windmill in Brixton, the incubator for many of the UK’s most exciting, autre rock projects nowadays. They play a hard-hitting, technically impressive blur that’s kind of post-punk but as filtered through a kitchen sink of influences — see the dancey, old-timey folk stomp of their debut single “King Of The Slugs,” which dropped last fall after the band spent a year-plus getting hyped up by the British press before they had even put out a song thanks to their frenzied live shows.

There was a soft humid breeze, neon lights blazed in every color of rainbow sherbet, and shiny industrial skyscrapers framed the second evening celebrating German music at SXSW 2024. This night was dedicated to electronic music, and on the main screen at the Coconut Club where German Music Export and Initiative Musik beamed their names, there were shifting thermographic-colored images of melting neon bunny faces, a floating grinning mouth, a kneeling couple facing each other. Though the crowd came and went, the dance floor was always full. “They’re German,” a lanky baseball-capped man screamed to his friend as the opening duo Session Victim played. It was the complete opposite vibe to yesterday’s solemn, harrowing, and downright majestic event spotlighting classical music — think Matrix versus Spring Breakers.

It was way more physical than I realized it would be. I’ve been thinking of Montréal’s Corridor primarily as a psych band ever since they returned from a long absence to announce new album Mimi. Lead single “Mourir Demain” was dreamy and expansive despite its rushing-river flow, and “Mon Argent” had a similar hypnotic momentum, like Grizzly Bear with a groove. The Francophone band has talked about how they moved away from thinking of themselves as a guitar-centric band on the new album, too. I guess I was expecting a lesson in tone and texture.

A church’s acoustics can make a concert feel grander or more sacred. And last night for the first event of German Music @ SXSW 2024 — a series put together by the German Music Export and Initiative Musik — Austin’s Central Presbyterian Church was an ideal venue for taking modern classical German music to new heights. The diverse lineup featured musicians breaking boundaries of classical music with their modern compositions, starting with Costa Rican-born pianist Sofi Paez’s delicate, haunting compositions that grew more surreal with Lisa Morgenstern’s stilling vocal acrobatics and ending with a mad scientist-esque set from Grandbrothers’ Erol Sarp and Lukas Vogel. The whole night felt charged in the high-beamed conservative setting.

“I’m really happy right now,” Domenic Palermo says, his voice quivering with joy. “I feel like I’m doing the right thing for once, and that’s not a normal thing for me.”

“Shout out to Biggie Smalls! It’s Biggie Smalls Day in Brooklyn!” 51-year-old Patrick Earl Houston screams, to my great relief, as he stalks the stage in front of a capacity crowd at Elsewhere in the northeast corner of Brooklyn. It’s March 9, at one time the equivalent of a bank holiday in New York — 27 years to the day the city lost Christopher Wallace, its greatest native son — and yet we’re hours into a rap show before Project Pat, the North Memphis Tennessee legend, acknowledges the gravity of the evening.

It was Valentine’s Day in New York City, and everyone had a manic energy as they went about their everyday tasks. Shopping for groceries, catching the express bus, eating slices of pizza, they clung to a sisyphean hope, often literally manifested in some bouquet or heart shaped balloon. For some, the night held promises of candlelit dinners; for the hundreds of flannel-clad bodies packed into a sold out Music Hall Of Williamsburg, it foretold an evening of R.E.M. covers led by Revolutionary Road and Boardwalk Empire star Michael Shannon.

Here’s how much of a professional Usher is: When he played last night’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, he didn’t sing any new songs. Not one. Not even a snippet. The temptation must’ve been overwhelming. Last night was the culmination of an Usher comeback that’s been building for a long moment. Usher, one of the biggest stars of the ’00s, hasn’t been a commercially dominant force for more than a decade, but he’s spent the past few years laying the groundwork for his legacy: a wildly successful Las Vegas residency, a viral Tiny Desk Concert, a pretty big hit with Summer Walker and 21 Savage. Two days before the Super Bowl, Usher released Coming Home, his first new album in seven and a half years. And then he didn’t sing any of those songs. Instead, Usher gave the world what it wanted from him.