Music Features

When Detroit techno producer Omar S thinks back on the early days of his label, FXHE, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, he sounds as down-to-earth as his inviting, party-oriented music suggests. “I was just working at my job and making tracks,” he recalls over Zoom. Before then, he’d …

Though R&B singer Miguel has been widely beloved in his genre since his major label debut thirteen years ago, the 37-year-old is besting himself in huge ways right now. “Sure Thing” — a contemporary classic that Miguel first wrote around 2007 and released as his first album’s second single in …

Brittney Spencer was stoned and chilling at home in Nashville the night her life changed. She had posted an acoustic cover of “Crowded Table,” a song of radical inclusion by the all-star country quartet the Highwomen, after seeing them sing it on TV. “It was so beautiful watching this supergroup …

Not too long ago, the British girl group FLO were a newly signed act trying to persuade their label to drop a song called “Cardboard Box” as their debut single. The label wanted to try other songs first, but Jorja Douglas, 21, Stella Quaresma, 21, and Renée Downer, 20, collectively …

Kyoto, Japan’s Otoboke Beaver are a force of nature onstage — four larger-than-life hardcore punks, blazing through sets with idiosyncratic wrath and sarcasm. But when they pop in for a translator-guided Zoom interview, they’re resting at their apartments between dates on a Japanese tour. Accorinrin, the band’s howling frontwoman, reclines …

If you’re looking for the future of music, you might want to check first in Sudan Archives’ L.A. basement. “I don’t really see myself being in anyone’s studio,” the singer says over Zoom while smoking on her living room couch. “You got to come to my house, you got to …

2023 is a great year to be an artist from India. There’s a new-music boom happening all over the country, led by a crop of young pop, rap, and R&B musicians with a hunger to leap into something greater — artists like the 22-year-old rapper, singer-songwriter, and producer Nathan Mendes, …

When the Puerto Rican singer Omar Courtz was a teenager, he spent some time working at a clothing store in the city of Carolina that became popular among reggaeton stars. He’d see some of his biggest inspirations coming in and out of the shop, which was called Change: people like …

Peso Pluma woke up one morning in April, still a little sleepy, and learned that “Ella Baila Sola” — the lovey-dovey sierreño collaboration he’d dropped with the Northern California band Eslabon Armado — was the biggest song in the world. The track shot up to the top of Spotify’s Global …

I n the short but exhilarating story of NewJeans, there’s one date that stands out above all the rest: July 22, 2022, the day they went from being unknown teens to one of the buzziest groups in the world. “I knew that it would be a date of excitement for …