Music Features

It took Bella Poarch and Grimes five days before they were ready — really, 100% ready — to slap the shit out of each other. (Well, at least on camera.) “I was scared of getting hit in the face,” says Poarch, the social media queen and rising pop star. Then …

When Dave Mustaine looks back on making Countdown to Extinction, the 1992 album that propelled Megadeth into the mainstream, he’s thankful for his clarity of mind at the time. After years of alcohol and drug abuse, the eternally redheaded singer, guitarist, and songwriter had gotten sober before the making of …

All humans are comprised of contradictions, and multimedia artist Dirty Bird is self-aware of his. He’s a Twitter-famous internet personality who doesn’t want to be known for his online persona. He’s a jazz-laden dance music producer who wouldn’t describe his own music as jazz. He’s a capital-A Artist who’s frighteningly …

As soon as Alex Guerra and Ramon Ruiz discovered 15-year-old Yahritza Martinez on TikTok, they knew she was going to be huge. The high schooler from Yakima, Washington, had been courting a massive following on social media with her shockingly powerful voice, and Ruiz and Guerra — both artists from …

In late 1971, when Curtis Mayfield began writing Super Fly — the 1972 film soundtrack that would turn out to be his magnum opus — he should have been burned out. He had spent a decade with the Impressions, becoming one of pop music’s de facto voices of the civil …

Released ten years ago today, Frank Ocean’s debut, Channel Orange, stands as a singular achievement in popular culture and a touchstone for a cohort born into the ethics of social media. Frank exhibits the kind of radical openness that would come to define a generation of young people who, like …

Sharing an intro of similarly dreamy, plucked guitar, SiR’s latest single “Life is Good” initially feels reminiscent of his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmate SZA’s smash “Good Days.” Yet, whereas SZA tussled with stressors on her track, SiR sounds truly carefree. “Everything but the weather, girl, I got under control,” he …

Warren Ellis didn’t know what to do with himself at first when Covid shut the world down. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the group he joined in the late Nineties, had just released a new album, Ghosteen, in late 2019 and were hoping to go on tour. But as …

It begins with a crystalline, whistling melody. It’s sweetly seductive as it crests and dips, beckoning you closer. All of a sudden, NCT 127’s “Favorite (Vampire)” plummets into a quirky, hip-trap groove, where the rappers spit about a dangerous love that hurts so good. But this stark departure from its …

“I would like to apologize in advance for the person I’m gonna become once this album drops,” reads a billboard in New York’s Times Square. Plastered at the bottom is the single word Wasteland —the title to Brent Fayiaz’s long-awaited new album. If you think the statement on the billboard …