Believe It: The New Rolling Stones Album Is Good  The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood on May 5, 2026, in Brooklyn, NY. (Credit: Kevin Mazur / Getty Images for UMG) The Rolling Stones, down to two original members, have released their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, and most of it is […]

Play Time Play Hard Play Time. (Credit: Linnéa Gad) Upstate New York trio Play Time may be a new band, but its members hail from a wide swath of established underground scenes. Drummer Booker Stardrum sits behind the kit for rising jazz jammers SML, while Moog player Ben Vida co-founded the turn-of-the-century minimalist-ambient group Town […]

Beth Orton Demands Your Attention on ‘The Ground Above’ Beth Orton. (Credit: Kasia Wozniak) “What has kept me alive is feral invincibility,” Beth Orton wrote in an Instagram post announcing her new album The Ground Above, out June 26 on Partisan. “Grief had me say yes to life, to embrace and taste and devour,” Orton […]

Chris Stamey Flips the Radio Dial on ‘Modernism’ Chris Stamey (far left) on guitar with the rest of the dB’s, Peter Holsapple (vocals), Will Rigby (drums), Gene Holder (bass) and backing musician Brett Harris on keyboards performing at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City on June 15, 2012. (Credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns) Chris Stamey is […]

Styrofoam Winos Get Down by the River Styrofoam Winos. (Credit: Linda Parrott) The three members of Styrofoam Winos met on the job, while working at a café in Nashville. That establishment has since closed, but the Winos carry on, with the low-key workplace rapport that comes from daily contact and shared labor. Only now they’re […]

Fruit Bats Find New Routes On ‘The Landfill’ Fruit Bats’ Eric Johnson (photo: Kelsey Gallagher). Eric D. Johnson has one of those voices – distinctive yet endearing, and capable of elevating deceptively simple three-minute pop songs into brainworms whose melodies you can’t stop humming for days. He’s been steadily building an impressive indie canon as […]

Horse Lords’ Heaven Can’t Wait Horse Lords. (Credit: Kasia Zacharko) By the time of the release of Horse Lords’ last proper album, 2022’s Comradely Objects, three-fourths of the group—saxophonist Andrew Bernstein, bassist Max Eilbacher and guitarist Owen Gardner—had left their native Baltimore for Germany, leaving only drummer Sam Haberman in Charm City. Such a fracture […]

Nina Nastasia and Jim White Make Brittle Magic on ‘You Follow Me’ Nina Nastasia and Jim White Make Brittle Magic on ‘You Follow Me’ You Follow Me’s elusiveness for LP collectors feels appropriate. Released in 2007 by FatCat and featuring lithe production by Steve Albini, this collaboration saw a limited run on vinyl, making it […]

Go Back to the Beginning With The Smashing Pumpkins Smashing Pumpkins on May 10, 1991 in Chicago, Il. (Credit: Paul Natkin/WireImage) It’s hard to think of the Smashing Pumpkins in terms of smallness. There was a time before the cultural shakedown of Siamese Dream (1993) and the monolithic 28-track Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness […]

David Torn Rips It Up and Starts Again  David Torn. (Credit: Jon Slackman) Did David Torn steal Lou Reed’s band? Probably not—the members of Torn’s early 1980s fusion ensemble Everyman Band, who released two albums on the storied ECM label, have all played with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal during in the late ’70s, but […]