January 30, 2013 – Fueled by the success of Frank Ocean and Miguel, the most critically contested ground in pop music over the past year has been the evolution of R&B via digital recording technology and the Internet. A lot of two-dollar terms have been tossed around — "hipster R&B," "PBR&B," "Indie R&B," and by SPIN, "Alt R&B" — to describe a so-called new generation of self-sufficient and individualistic artists, terms that have been met by noisy protest from longtime devotees and artists themselves who feel the genre is being colonized by trendy newbies or limited by buzzwords. Regardless, everyone can agree that there are indeed a multitude of fresh, exciting new voices who deserve to be heard and even celebrated.

January 30, 2013 – Moombahton, the pitched-down SoundCloud sensation we profiled back in 2011 continues its high-energy, mid-tempo rampage with a fantastic new compilation from moomba breeding ground T&A Records. The comp proves the internet sub-genre has long legs, is growing angrier and more festival-ready by the minute, and is ready to pretty much rule our summers for at least another year.Says Puja Patel in our SPIN Essential review: "There's plenty of meat for the modern festival-circuit masses. Dillon Francis, the guy partially responsible for the in-your-face Maluca banger "Que Que," turns toward peaceable, sunshine-kissed glory with "Beautician," light waves of psyched-out trance synths washing over a shower of laser-show melodies that bounce around a syncopated bass line, the huge, trance-y builds dissolving into a laid-back groove rather than a wall of wailing synths.

January 28, 2013 – The lineup that made the Breeders' beloved 1993 abum Last Splash — Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs and Jim Macpherson — will be celebrating the album's 20th anniversary in Brooklyn, New York, on March 29 by playing the album in full, front to back. The show at the Bell House will mark the lineup's first concert in nearly two decades. Up until now, the band had only announced shows overseas, starting with a May 24 date at Barcelona's Primavera fest and wrapping on June 21 at the U.K.'s All Tomorrow's Parties curated by Deerhunter's Bradford Cox.According to the band's rep, this is the first show on a Last Splash anniversary tour, so more U.S. dates may be on the way. Tickets go on sale January 30 at 12 p.m. ET (more info will be available on the band's official website).

January 25, 2013 – Today, the Strokes dropped "One Way Trigger," their first music since their 2011 album Angles. Here, six SPIN editors give their hasty and completely impulsive opinions...Charles Aaron "Take on Me" + "Axel F" + keening falsetto boy-ache warble, which means it a sounds a little more like a Julian '80s-baby solo record than a Strokes full-band record, even with the super-snazzy guitar solo (which sorta sound like a keytar, to be honest). Dig the pre-chorus bass drop (ha!) Whole thing is way more genuinely playful and productively weird than we probably had a right to expect. And it's got the necessary, Strokes-playbook, mumbling-in-the-shower romantic couplet that cracks your thin veneer of emotional fascism: "You asked me to stay / But there's a million reasons to leave." Now, all they gotta do is get Steve Barron for the video (especially after that whole Choking Man).

January 23, 2013 – Pearl Jam will finally be consummating Eddie Vedder's lifelong love affair with the Chicago Cubs' Wrigley Field, announcing a special show at the Illinois stadium on July 19 (a second concert at London, Ontario's Budweiser Gardens that's not quite as stocked with symbolism will happen three days prior). Tickets go on sale February 9 at 10 a.m. CT; there is no opener, and the shows are being billed as "An Evening With Pearl Jam."The Cubs had a little fun with the announcement, tweeting "Ten" as well as a link to a photo of a Ron Santo Cubs jersey (No.

January 22, 2013 – Today, Paramore leaked their first music in three years, "Now," the first single from their self-titled, long-in-the-works fourth album. Here, seven SPIN editors give their hasty and completely impulsive opinions...Charles Aaron Devolving to evolve, it's the #90s career plan, and we at SPIN are certainly complicit in the process, consistently amusing ourselves to death with once-perky emo bands who adopt ye olde loud-soft, "dynamic range" compression/production, and overly literal lyrics about how the world is weighing heavily on the lead singer's tiny shoulders. Paramore are more compelling than 99 percent of the abovementioned once-perky emo bands, mainly because of Hayley Williams' ability to invest her vocals with the love-is-an-operatically-blessed-and-cursed-battlefield feistiness of, say, Billie Joe or Pat Benatar.

January 17, 2013 – "Skrillex Sets Hair on Fire In Birthday Candle Disaster" shouts TMZ this morning in one of the gossip site's typically hysterical headlines, so of course our curiosity (and concern — we're not monsters!) was piqued. Fortunately in this potentially dangerous case, the hyperbole was just that: but if you'd like to see a 42-second clip of Sonny Moore perched over a cake shaped like a massive turntable in Hollywood, leaning his famous locks into a comically huge number of candles, briefly igniting, and then putting himself out, we can provide that for you: 

January 16, 2013 – Most bands don't get the chance to go for it 18 years into their career. Most bands also don't have a combined 36 years of experience in the music biz when two of their members are 32 years old. If Tegan and Sara's gambit pays off on Heartthrob, their seventh album (due January 29), the duo will be able to claim one of the most unusual journeys to pop stardom in recent memory.SPIN takes a closer look at the Canadian sisters' big leap in our January cover story, which arrives tomorrow online ahead of our digital magazine's release. (How significantly has their sound evolved? In a short piece praising 2004's So Jealous, our writer happily reported the group was no longer a "Wicca-folk nightmare," a jab the band has playfully rehashed from the stage on several occasions.

January 16, 2013 – The epic third track from epic alterna-metal band Baroness' epic Yellow & Green, SPIN's favorite metal album of 2012, finally gets an epic video. Filmed before the horrific bus crash that sidelined the band (don't worry, they're OK and coming back soon), "March to the Sea" is collection of "Wanted Dead or Alive"-style tour footage, gear-loading, steel-horse-riding, and generally backstage tomfoolery. Plus these dudes are regular Lionel Messis with a soccer ball. 

January 14, 2013 – Dave Grohl turns 44 today, and we're celebrating with four Foo Fighters cover stories from the SPIN archives. Read 'em all for an illuminating look at the nicest dude in rock's evolution from giddy Nirvana grad to a defiant bandleader in his own right:July 1997: So Happy Together "Nirvana was nuts, it was crazy. I made my way through all of that other bullshit, and now I'm back to square one. That feels nice." Bonus: SPIN goes to the Playboy Mansion with Pat Smear!November 2002: The Good Fight"Shit, it could have been better [without me]. What happened in Nirvana happened because of timing.