May 7, 2012 – Killer Mike has always been a passionate rapper, but with his sixth studio album, R.A.P. Music, he's gone next-level. "I put everything into this record. I said I was going to do everything I wanna do and say everything I wanna say," said Mike, as we chatted at a small Italian restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The album, produced entirely by noise-rap stalwart El-P, goes harder than hard with chest-caving 808s and fiery political rhetoric.

April 19, 2012 – When Brian Fallon is trying to concentrate, he doesn't want to see you. So when the frontman for New Jersey blue-collar punks Gaslight Anthem and his bandmates — guitarist Alex Rosamillia, bassist Alex Levin, and drummer Benny Horowitz — were set to record their fourth full-length album, Handwritten, due in June, they had to get out of the Garden State. As a result, they hightailed it to a city known for producing some pretty okay music. "We were just kinda like, 'Hey, anyone know anybody in Nashville?' " recounts Fallon. The answer was a resounding no. "It was literally that simple," says the raspy-voiced singer. Well, not quite. Unbeknownst to Gaslight, their producer, Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam) happened to have his own studio in Music City. "That worked out convenient," Fallon says with a chuckle.

March 20, 2012 – With thousands of bands packed into a mile radius in downtown Austin, South by Southwest is a living monument to absurdity and excess. And it would be hard to find an example more illustrative of either than a Snoop Dogg press junket at two in the morning, right after he performed inside a 56-foot-tall Doritos vending machine. The Austin skyline has never looked nacho-cheesier! Pouring himself red wine and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, possibly of the jazz variety, the Doggfather zig-zagged (weed reference!) from college b-ball to Nirvana to Hill Country's favorite son, Willie Nelson.

March 12, 2012 – As the E Street Band took the stage at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem Friday night, each member touched the venue's famed tree stump for good luck. Maybe they felt they needed a little extra boost — the show was Bruce Springsteen and Co.'s first show without beloved saxophonist Clarence Clemons, and their first with his replacement, the Big Man's nephew, Jake. Playing for SiriusXM’s 10th Anniversary Party, the band sounded enormous in the intimate (by their usual arena standards) Apollo setting, as Springsteen used the legendary theater as his playground, climbing rafters, sprinting through the crowd, and paying tribute to the soul artists who made the theater a crucial part of pop history. SPIN was there for this momentous night of firsts.

March 9, 2012 – L.A. power trio Beware of Darkness' frontman Kyle Nicolaides wants to make you ladies do one thing: howl. Which, appropriately, is the title of this Zeppelin-riffing, bluesy face-stomper off the group's forthcoming debut, Bleak. Think a more suped-up Black Keys concerned with pleasing the ladies with some fire-and-brimstone-y religious undertones for good measure. Party!

March 8, 2012 – This little slice of nostalgia is another taste from Vancouver doo-wop devotees Chains of Love's excellent debut EP, Strange Grey Days, released earlier this month via Manimal Vinyl. It's a bouncy, jouncy, Ronettes-inflected slab of popsmithery that sounds as though it was recorded in a bathtub with a Talkboy. Very 2009. Grab it here: DOWNLOAD

March 8, 2012 – The comforting slice of slow-churning introspection below comes straight off the ninth (!) album from Pennsylvanian singer-songwriter Denison Witmer. The Ones Who Wait is Witmer’s first record for Sufjan Stevens' label’s base, Asthamtic Kitty. "Life Before Aesthetics" follows in the same steady, supremely solid acoustic-based jams Witmer has always offered up, but the man tosses in some sad sack organ and gloomy horns to ratchet the track’s melancholy tone up to near tear-shedding levels. DOWNLOAD

February 16, 2012 – Spotted in the Staples Center at Sunday night’s 54th Annual Grammy Awards: Thomas Wesley Pentz, a.k.a. Diplo, Mad Decent kingpin and nascent hobnobber, waiting in an outrageously long line for some much-needed pre-televised ceremony grub from California Pizza Kitchen. No idea if he ever got that pizza. But tomorrow, Diplo (via Mad Decent imprint Jefrees) will drop “Express Yourself," an implacable, Howitzer-like monster that features New Orleans bounce-r Nicky Da B. Check it out below and get excited for the former’s forthcoming (and first) book 128 Beats Per Minutes. It’s due in April.

February 14, 2012 – New heat from one of the best rappers breathing: Black Hippy crew member Kendrick Lamar dropped a seven-minute brain melter today with help from hugely underutilized Maybach Music Group member Gunplay, who pops in with his usual, awesome shout raps and "BLAOW" gunfire sounds. He nearly steals this thing from Kendrick with his last breath exultation, "Momma, how much trauma can I sustain!?" Things get way more heavy and tear-stained than you'd expect from a song called "Cartoon & Cereal." The track flip-flops from an atmospheric, cartoon-sampled haze until ear-shattering bass and skittering hihats give the two MCs one of the weirdest, mid-'90s Organized Noize sounding beats in recent memory. More of this, please.

February 13, 2012 – While the music industry basked in Grammy afterglow today, Portland delivered three extremely Portland-y packages: Fresh off losing the Grammy for Best Rock Performance to the Foo Fighters, the Decemberists bounced back with their new song "One Engine," which will be included on the Hunger Games soundtrack, out March 20 (the film drops three days later). Listen below, via Consequence of Sound and Soundcloud. The Shins also dropped a track today, this one another from their Album You Gotta Hear Port of Morrow.