Austin’s ACL Live at the Moody Theater was once again where the stars of tomorrow came out, earlier this month, as Rolling Stone’s Future of Music Showcase at SXSW took over the famed Texas venue for the third straight year. For four nights, fans packed into the 2,750-capacity Moody to …
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Though Nigerian rapper Odumodublvck’s thunderous baritone sounds predestined for fame, he didn’t go looking for music at first. It found him. He had originally hoped to become a professional soccer player before a bad injury; after that, he pivoted to business and got a degree from University of Lagos. When …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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