I started Stereogum in 2002 with a LiveJournal and a dream (to get free CDs). Seriously though, I started this site to discuss new music with strangers on the internet. Without all of you who comment thoughtfully on our features, send us hot tips, and aggressively point out our typos, this would be a really boring website. The Stereogum community is millions strong and I am confident in saying it's...
Filter bubbles are real. Particularly in the social media era, we are all trapped inside a likeminded feedback loop of our own making. I think we all recognize this on an intuitive level, but sometimes a reminder that you inhabit a bespoke cultural silo will come along and smack you in the face. Recently I had such an epiphany upon learning about the pervasive longterm success of Shinedown, a band...
Jessie Ware was in need of a rebirth. Her most recent album, 2017's Glasshouse, was a paradox -- her most personal songwriting in the wake of becoming a mother, but stylistically lost to sounds that didn't feel like her own. But beginning with “Adore You” way back in February of 2019 and continuing with a series of singles that would become the rollout for her fourth album, What's Your Pleasure?,...
"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash." These are the first words out of Bill Callahan's mouth on Gold Record, his newly announced follow-up to last year's Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest. We learned of this album's existence last week, which was surprising because last time Callahan took six years between albums, and now he's turned one around in just about 15 months. Upon announce, we also learned FKA Smog would...
Sacha Baron Cohen is at it again. The prankster crashed a far-right rally in Olympia, Washington over the weekend to sing a song about injecting liberals, Obama, Fauci, the World Health Organization, CNN, mask-wearers, and more with the "Wuhan flu." As The Daily Beast reports, event organizers say that Baron Cohen first pretended to be the leader of a political action committee from Southern California...
Beyoncé will release a new film project called Black Is King on 7/31, exclusively through Disney Plus. A trailer for the movie is out now. As Variety reports, Black Is King is a full-length visual album in the vein of 2016's Lemonade, based on the music of last year's The Lion King: The Gift. Beyoncé wrote, directed, and executive produced it. It's unclear whether the project includes last weekend's...
Nobody can take credit for "Down Down Baby." "Down Down Baby" is a part of American folkloric tradition, a clapping-game chant that goes back, at the very least, to the mid-20th century. It's tough to trace "Down Down Baby," a tune that children taught each other through the ages. It's a song that's passed from one kid to the next, usually in Black communities, and it's had a bunch of different lyrical...
While the United States is reopening but still very much in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Iceland has pretty much recovered. Public pools, restaurants, and gyms are all open again. And soon, Björk will be playing actual concerts in front of actual human beings. That's right: Björk has announced three special matinee performances in association with Iceland Airwaves to raise money for an Icelandic...
The last time the Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch released an album was in 2017, and chances are you could still be making sense of that music nearly three years later. The colossal, mind-expanding Mirror Reaper was one 83-minute song that completely warped your sense of time as it stretched everything out into a…
In 2017, Phoebe Bridgers released her debut Stranger In The Alps. With that album alone, she was already greeted as one of the most exciting, assured young songwriters newly on the scene. But in the ensuing years, Bridgers’ stature as a respected musician and generational voice has risen significantly, and quickly. The following year, she…
You could never question Jay Watson’s psych-rock bona fides. The man’s resume, of course, includes Tame Impala, the band that implausibly made the leap from being weirdo hallucinogenic rockers from western Australia to arena-conquerors worldwide. But all along the way, Watson also played in Pond, Tame’s sister band. And alongside that, he’s been putting out…
Aaron Dessner is always working on a ton of music. Quarantine has been no different. Recently, he’s had a couple projects germinating — one of which was a new song with none other than R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. It all sounds pretty idyllic in a way: If you’re going to have to be isolated from friends…
If you’re feeling any guilt about quarantine-induced creative inertia, take heart: Mark Duplass finds himself “weirdly thriving” at the moment and he feels kinda guilty about that too. “The inherent privilege of where I’m at is so obvious and ridiculous,” the wildly prolific 43-year old writer/actor/director says at the beginning of our Zoom call, “so…
Even after years of us knowing them, there is still something weird about Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. On the surface, they are a straightforward, classicist indie band — a group that seems easy enough to get on first listen, a sound that could approach comfort food. But there is something alchemical in their songwriting that,…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.
This summer, every festival is cancelled. Most of the cancellation announcements have been brief and businesslike, but one was emotional. In April, the…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.
There were all these other lives Jason Isbell could’ve led. He could’ve never left Drive-By Truckers, and spent a steady career as one…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.
Over the last decade, Mike Hadreas has steadily remade himself. Back in the beginning, with 2010’s Learning, there was no clear plan for…
If you sat down with any Dublin rock musician in the last year, it wouldn’t take long to pull some thoughts out of them about how their city’s music scene had suddenly become a point of fascination for the international press. There’s been a burgeoning moment, interesting young guitar bands coming out of the UK…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.
It’s hard to believe that Hayley Williams’ new album, Petals For Armor, will be her first solo effort. She’s been in spotlights of…
After spending his teenage years woodshedding on Bandcamp, Will Toledo and his DIY-project-turned-band Car Seat Headrest arrived in the middle of last decade with the one-two shot of 2015’s Teens Of Style (a rerecording of selections from his DIY days) and 2016’s instant classic Teens Of Denial, both released by the indie institution Matador Records.
If you’ve come into contact with Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” in the last decade or so, it’s likely been in meme form. Pizzas, leashes, Reese’s, Jesus — all things that have been cut into pieces as the deathless chorus to the Cali rockers’ hard-charging hit has, as with so much late-’90s and early-’00s pop cultural…
We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.…
The coronavirus pandemic has forced all of us to put just about everything on hold: No matter what you thought your big plans for life in 2020 were, they’re not happening anytime soon. That’s been felt in the music world, too, with festival and tour cancellations and postponements, and with artists delaying their albums to…
