A hip-hop album for old heads and connoisseurs, made by two guys who grew up in the golden age of rap and love it too…
The leanest and meanest country record of 2020, Tami Neilson’s CHICKABOOM! is the dynamic singer-songwriter’s fourth straight career-best album. Over a breakneck set of country…
If those films inextricably linked to childhood experience — those movies, in Serge Daney’s words, “that watched us grow up and saw us… already entangled…
To delve into the world of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU. is to forgo the comfortable spectatorial positions of detachment and objectivity, and submit to its fantastical reconstruction of…
“The Seattle Mariners are eminently lovable, profoundly human, and stunningly, outrageously weird.” These words come courtesy of Jon Bois, writer, editor, animator, producer, and director…
What would it look like to adapt The Communist Manifesto to film? Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? Industrial Society and Its Future? These texts have no main characters to follow,…
Hook begins Crashed My Car, her first of two mixtapes from 2020, in hysterics, detailing how she, yes, crashed her car. While the Riverside rapper…
The first 30 minutes of CoroNation, Ai Weiwei’s comprehensive snapshot of Wuhan, China in the earliest days of COVID-19’s global devastation, are among the most compelling…
Bad Bunny’s YHLQMDLG provides both an entry point to modern urbano and a crash course in the traditions that built it. The rapper hardly cares…
Simply reading about Horse Lords could never do their music justice. Given their unusual tuning systems, 20th-century classical reference points, and their band members’ assorted…
If there is any affinity to be found between Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, it’s in their shared ability to turn the economics of filmmaking…
Kate NV, ever-chameleonic and relentlessly curious, released one of the most dazzling pop albums in recent memory this year with Room for the Moon. While…
The relationship between hip hop and punk rock is a long and complex one, evident since the early ‘80s and built upon a shared willingness…
All hail Taylor Swift: Our most productive quarantiner, our most essential pop star, and the redeeming poet laureate of 2020’s malaise. The two albums she…
The second solo album from the prolific singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers is, in both its aesthetic and lyrical clarity of expression, a total triumph. From the…
Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters has already endured a predictable backlash to its initial rapturous reception — a backlash led by a loud and…
Imagine that your cousin steals your laptop (the dirty motherfucker), finds a rough draft of a project you’ve long given up on, and submits it…
To call Bladee a rapper would be a bit misleading — sure, he sorta sings in a cadence and manner one could associate with “rapping,”…
2020 wasn’t exactly overflowing with significant (pop) rap releases, some of the genre’s biggest stars putting out absolute duds (Donald Glover, Drake), while others hyped…
If you listened to and believed the hip-hop gatekeepers, influencers, and bloggers (whose reviews read like thinly disguised PR campaigns) from the past few months,…
For nearly two decades now, The Avalanches have repurposed pillaged sounds of yesteryear in order to locate a current emotional resonance, to connect the past…