Music Features

Who is Pictoria Vark? She’s the spoonerism who serves as a rock handle for rising songwriter Victoria Park. The 23-year-old Iowa City singer/bassist just made one of last year’s finest indie records with her breakthrough, The Parts I Dread. It’s a road trip of an album—it’s full of the places …

Before he was producing for some of the biggest names in the industry, Noah Goldstein got his start as a self-taught DJ in the Philadelphia suburbs. He’d set his sights on a career in the studio as a teenager after watching an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music that showed …

Mod Sun’s coming-of-age experience has been a prolonged one, mainly because growing up never appealed to him much. Many of the artists he idolized as a kid, like Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious, didn’t make it past 27 years old. To the musician born Derek Smith, they were his teachers, …

The Hold Steady celebrated their 20th anniversary on Saturday night with a hometown blowout in Brooklyn. It was a fittingly rowdy birthday bash for these guys. The Hold Steady might have started as Brooklyn’s finest bar band, dabbling in Last Waltz cosplay when they were barely into their thirties. But …

For Raye, there are no longer any ifs, ands, and buts to what she can and can’t do with her career. On Friday, the British Ghanian singer-songwriter will release My 21st Century Blues, a long-awaited debut from an artist who has co-written standout singles for the likes of Beyoncé, Little …

John Morrison was 10 years old when he started making beats on his Casio RZ-1, the same drum machine sampler that Prince Paul used to produce for De La Soul’s landmark 3 Feet High and Rising. Three years later, in 1993, Morrison heard Digable Planets‘ debut album, Reachin’ (A New …

The Brooklyn band Geese debuted in the fall of 2021 with a great album called Projector. These guys were barely out of high school, and yet they seemed to have prodigiously bit off huge hunks of the indie guitar canon. Their bracing zone-outs could bring to mind vintage wizards like …

One year ago, Tablo wasn’t sure if there would be another Epik High album. By that point, the Korean hip-hop trio – which also includes co-lyricist Mithra Jin and co-producer DJ Tukutz – had already been together for 21 years, and were concentrating on the release of Epik High Is …

Liv.e admits she’s a tad nervous about what comes next. “I might need to get a drink in me before we go ahead and get started,” she says, laughing as she scans the cocktail menu at a hotel bar on Wilshire Avenue in Los Angeles. In gold double-sun earrings and …

Chuck D is humble about his contributions to Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World — the expansive, four-part PBS and BBC series where he joins other hip-hop icons from Melle Mel to Eminem, as well as executives, journalists, and academics, in unspooling rap’s history as a social …