Music Features

The world first met gyrofield because of a joke. It was 2019, and Kiana Li was a teenage music producer making beats on her computer from her bedroom in Hong Kong. She had 2,000 Soundcloud followers. “That was a good time,” she says with a smile. “I was feeling like …

Laila! has flourished more in the year leading up to her 19th birthday than some artists do in decades. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and producer first broke through on TikTok with spacey viral ditties “Like That” and “Not My Problem,” showing her intrinsic ear for R&B’s current wave and its off-center …

Egyptian artist TUL8TE doesn’t want you to know anything personal about him. He is here to make you listen — not to his story, but to his music. We spoke over a camera-less Zoom call in December, around 4 p.m. Jordan time, while he was mid-tour. Any question that veered …

When Fcukers booked their debut concert at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn in March 2023, they had understandably low expectations for the evening. The electronic act had uploaded their first two songs literally hours before they took the stage, and they’d already logged many frustrating years in separate indie-rock bands …

Last December, Nick Carpenter had an existential experience onstage. He was standing with the band Dawes, screaming along as they performed their signature song, 2009’s “When My Time Comes.” The moment made Carpenter, who sings and writes songs under the name Medium Build, think about his deepest fears and goals …

Stephen Wilson Jr. was racing home to Indiana to see his dying father when his sister called to tell him he was running out of time. Partway there from Nashville, he pulled over to have one more conversation with the man he was named after. “I said goodbye to my …

Growing up with a dad in the Army, Samara Cyn moved around a lot, living in at least six different states by age 20. At the time, she hated it — like most teenagers, she just wanted to belong. But those experiences ended up fueling her 2024 EP, The Drive …

Not long ago, Timbaland thought he was tapped out. Since the mid-Nineties, he’s repeatedly reinvented R&B, hip-hop, and pop, lacing classics by the likes of Aaliyah, Justin Timberlake, and Jay-Z with skittering beats, future-shock synths, and his outrageous ear for samples and hooks. At age 53, though, the producer worried …

At the core of Jim Legxacy’s music is a potent clarity of emotion. The London-based musician’s 2023 mixtape Homeless N**ga Pop Music deployed samples like globs of glitter spread across a posterboard: a Miley Cyrus song, the watermark for a Nigerian MP3 website, a snippet from the U.K. grime classic …

Wunderhorse frontman Jacob Slater’s Wi-Fi is spotty— “Fucking nightmare on my end,” he says. He’s taking this Zoom call from the south of Morocco, where he’s spent the last four Januarys “surfing and doing nothing else.” The 28-year-old U.K. musician has grown accustomed to this kind of reset every so …