Music Features

Last summer, Wenfei Xie, a doctor from Kansas City, Missouri, went to see Taylor Swift in her hometown. She met a fellow Swiftie at the show who had reached out to Paris La Défense Arena in France to purchase tickets to Swift’s four-night stand. The fan had been shocked to …

Owen Elliot-Kugell was just seven years old when her mother, “Mama” Cass Elliot, died of a heart attack in 1974. Since then, she’s tried to untangle the myth of the hippie icon — especially the insensitive rumor that she died choking on a ham sandwich — and discover who she …

There are two halves of this street. Friisgatan, in the center of Malmö — the coastal Swedish town that is hosting the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest — has been designated as the “Eurovision street.” It’s pedestrianized, with bars and restaurants spilling out onto the street and numerous “selfie spots” for …

Welcome to our weekly rundown of the best new music — featuring big singles, key tracks from our favorite albums, and more. This week, Megan Thee Stallion hisses back at her haters, Charli XCX teams up with some cool girls for her latest hyper pop moment, and Ice Spice puts …

The week Sturgill Simpson’s breakthrough, generation-defining second album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, was released, the Number One song on country radio was Brantley Gilbert’s Nickelback-ified ode to women in short shorts and the boys who bring them to the tailgate. It was called “Bottoms Up,” and it wasn’t an …

If all Steve Albini ever did with music was complain about it, he still would have reigned as one of its most brilliant provocateurs. But Albini came to make noise — as a punk guitarist, as a producer, as a writer —with rock’s most notoriously savage sense of humor. “I …

James Dupré was just as surprised as everyone when he heard Randy Travis’s AI-assisted vocal on “Where That Came From” for the first time a few weeks ago, but not just because it was the country legend’s first new song since suffering a 2013 stroke that robbed him of his …

When Washed Out frontman Ernest Greene agreed to collaborate with filmmaker Paul Trillo on the world’s first music video to be made entirely using OpenAI‘s video-generation tool Sora, he didn’t quite know what he was getting himself into. “To me, this is just a brand-new tool to explore,” Greene tells …

Starting in the Eighties, Butch Vig and Steve Albini, who died Tuesday at 61, had one of the most interesting symbiotic relationships in indie rock. Both were recording bands in their studios, in Milwaukee and Chicago, respectively. Both played in bands. “Neither of us went to recording school,” Vig says. …

If this story were a hard-boiled detective novel, the title might be The Case of the Mysteriously Shrinking Album. Over the past few weeks, both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift unveiled projects that seemed to include every piece of music they had ever recorded for their respective albums: Cowboy Carter stretched …