Music Features

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 …

A few years ago, Jasmine Cruickshank found herself adrift. After coming out as trans, the English singer-songwriter got divorced and decamped from Bristol to Manchester, where she slept on floors and discovered a new wellspring of inspiration: her true self. “I really struggled, in the years leading up to my …

I t’s impossible to overstate Bootsy Collins’ influence. Since joining James Brown’s band 55 years ago this month, Collins has made sturdy, buoyant bass lines, which stretch out all over the place before returning to the one, the bedrock of funk. The recordings he cut with Brown, Parliament, Funkadelic, and …

When Jesse Colin Young’s death was announced on Monday, it was inevitable that “Get Together” — the peace-and-brotherhood anthem that he and the Youngbloods turned into a decades-long radio staple —would be mentioned first. Young neither wrote it nor was the first to record it. But even after it’s been …

Growing up in North Wales, electronic musician Kelly Lee Owens didn’t have a lot of immediate access to live music. “We had a community center, which was probably the closest that you would get to having some kind of stage,” she recalls, hours before playing the Cardiff date of her …

Rema closed out Rolling Stone’s Future of Music Showcase at SXSW last week with an electric performance of perfected charisma and rage. But, just last month, in a much quieter moment, Rema gave us an intimate look into his habits, tastes, goals, and history for his first Rolling Stone cover …

A new era of Beach Boys history will begin this summer when Al Jardine and the Pet Sounds Band launch what they hope will be their inaugural tour. The Pet Sounds Band is a new name for longtime members of Brian Wilson‘s backing group, who have been inactive since Wilson …