May 24, 2012 – Leading "independent as fuck" space-junkmen Company Flow, managing the mighty Definitive Jux label, and releasing three bloodletting solo records, producer-MC El-P has remained underground hip-hop's premier monopoly buster and chaos technician. His latest, Cancer for Cure (Fat Possum), is his most intense album yet, matching stuttering drum pileups and polysyllabic cluster bombs against Reznor-ready confessionals and humid droid noise. So, after nearly 20 years in the indie-rap hustle, he surely has some words of wisdom, right? He laughs, "You might as well hang up the phone right now, buddy." I think it's important to let yourself be fucked up. It's important in art to let yourself be wrong and to let yourself be confused and not even apologize for it. I'm wrong on every record that I make. But I'm wrong in life.

May 23, 2012 – Hopsin: I love animals. My aggressive side [in my lyrics] is toward the government and people who made society so robotic and materialistic. But I like nature, I like realness, so I have a big heart for dogs. I always wanted a pug. After seeing Men in Black, the little pug in that, I had to get one. I got her in 2008 — she was only seven or eight weeks, the size of a little hamburger. I was afraid I was gonna squish her when I was sleeping. I just needed to be around her all the time. Her little face was all wrinkled and she didn't know anything about life at all. Usually her daily routine is she'll wake up in the morning and jump in the window areas where she can stand in the sun. She likes waiting outside of the bathroom when people take showers because the heat comes from under the door. She's very picky about what she eats.

May 22, 2012 – Versions, the second album by San Augustin dream-droner David Daniell and Tortoise plucker Douglas McCombs has been a favorite for SPIN office chill-out seshes for a minute now — a two-guitar drift suite featuring a solid 80 minutes of ebowed ripples, post-folk circular spirals, ecstatic-jazz drumming, and space-vaccuum woosh. Hand-plucked from seven hours of heady improv (the same seven hours that made up their debut, Sycamore), Versions turns the guitar inside out, somewhere between Fennesz and Fahey. The 15-minute "Ley Lines" mixes their astro-gloop with some dubby drums that slowly groove and bubble and implode. And if that's not enough, you can watch the video to the album's "30265," wherein floaty little goo balls float and act gooey. Pick this thing up on CD or double vinyl via Thrill Jockey right now.

May 22, 2012 – On Sunday night, Lupe Fiasco dropped "Around My Way (Freedom Isn't Free)" from his long-anticipated, improbably titled Food & Liquor 2: The Great American Rap Album. Any rap fan worth their salt should immediately recognize the saxophone riff and bass line lazily lifted from Tom Scott's "Today", as sampled in one of the most iconic rap songs in the history of time, Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's 1992 "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)." We're not one to fault a good hip-hop nerd-out, but Lupe's use of the track — originally cast to mourn the death of Heavy D's dancer, Trouble T-Roy — seemed a little crass so soon after the death of Heavy D himself. Pete Rock was not pleased and fired off a Twitter rant, aiming for the heads of Lupe Fiasco's label.

May 14, 2012 – Confrontationally drifty Chicago troupe Chord has been banging out long, meditative, powerful washes of guitar drone for almost a solid decade — and only now do they get a drummer! Their upcoming Gmaj7 (limited to 300 vinyl copies via England's Mie Music is their first to feature percussion of any kind (relax, they're keeping their name), a swinging jazz-splurt from former U.S. Maple drummer Pat Samson. Fans of last weeks Horseback stream can rejoice in the Chatham-gone-splattum vibes of this "powerambient" gem, just glorious six minutes of its expansive 20-minute B-side.

May 8, 2012 – As we enthusiastically tweet-reviewed earlier today, the fourth album from North Carolina dream warriors Horseback is "A Rhys Chatham guitar army eaten by black metal wolves; victorious Fuck Button drones burned at the stake." In other words, it's a hypnotic, triumphant exploration of grisly textures and endlessly looping rhythms that we would gladly get lost in. The brainchild of Chapel Hill guitarist Jenks Miller, Horseback is ostensibly a metal band (the album comes out on Relapse today), but there's enough to love here if you're a fan of Slint, Ennio Morricone, Glenn Branca, Tortoise or recent, piano-dropping Tim Hecker. The final track is something between the electronic hyper-minimalism of Gas and the cheery gloomgaze of Jesu. We don't really know what the hell this all is, but we wouldn't want to run into it in a dark forest.

May 7, 2012 – After more than 350 releases, tireless noise label Hospital Records are releasing their very first visual-only release. Changeless Blue Flame is a collage zine by power-electronics over-sharer and coldwave void-barer Dominick Fernow (Prurient, Cold Cave, Ash Pool, et al), presented as a split between his Prurient and Vatican Shadow monikers. The Vatican Shadow half is two separate 60-page magazines (ed. 50 copies); the Prurient half is thicker (80 pages each!) and comparatively more widely distributed (ed. 100 copies). We'd love to include an MP3, but it would just be the sound of us gently turning pages. Download a full pdf excerpt HERE.

May 7, 2012 – As we explored in our long and probing Q&A with the Melvins' sludgemaster general King Buzzo, Melvins Lite is a unique detour for the long-running band, paring down their double-drummer cockfight into a quieter, mellower, moodier rumble-tumble. Teaming with bassist Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, various Zorny freak-jazz massacres), one of the loudest bands on earth has perfectly siphoned their gloomy energy into evil cocktail jazz, Ponty-styled combat skronk and the world's weirdest Wings cover. SPIN is proud to give you the first taste, "Leon Vs. the Revolution," a 2:49 house-party blast that echoes the lean rock of their Atlantic years. Fight! Fight! Fight!

May 4, 2012 – After a long battle with cancer, pioneering rapper Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys has passed away at the age of 47. Alongside Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys were responsible for rap's first big move from the New York streets to the manicured lawns of American suburbs, due in no small part to Yauch's swarthy, punk-centric raps. Shouting Schoolly-schooled swagger over rock riffs through a mouth of Olde English brew, Yauch's iconic rasp helped launch their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill to sell more than 9 million copies — the first rap group to top the Billboard charts and, in 1987, the first rap group to appear on the cover of SPIN.

April 27, 2012 – "There was something a bit wrong about the bands we were playing with," says Jimmy Lee, guitarist for Trailer Trash Tracys, four hazy London dream-catchers who felt suffocated by the fashion-first factions of U.K. dance-punk. "I think those bands were too shy or too afraid to be slightly romantic or talk about love. We wanted to be unashamed about all those concepts. We're suckers for ballads." In turn, the Tracys' breakthrough 2009 single, "Candy Girl," was a soft bomb of slow-motion, slow-dance swoon, sharing no small patch of moonlight with Julee Cruise's sensual "Falling," from her 1989 album Floating Into the Night, repurposed as an instrumental the following year for the iconic Twin Peaks theme.