Lists

Best Albums   /   Best New Artists   /   Year-End Lists

On Sunday, the legendary Chicago label Drag City released the large majority of its catalog on Spotify and Tidal for the first time, ending its run…

In some parts of Sweden, and Scandinavia at large, the summer sun blazes down from the small hours of the morning until 10 at night.

There's a good reason why the Grammy Awards coined the term "Grammy Moments" to describe the one-of-a-kind collaborations and elaborate performances that take place during…

Rap music felt as vital as ever in 2017, regaining its dominance on the charts and securing its stranglehold on the pop cultural zeitgeist. As such,…

When the Smiths broke up in 1987, Morrissey wasted no time going solo—or finally achieving global fame. The Manchester icon became a superstar by amplifying…

Thrash wasn’t initially a genre: it was what a band did. And in the ’80s it swarmed across the globe like a plague…

In 2017, Spin writers visited the streets of Donald Trump's presidential inauguration, hung out with Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew in L.A., traveled to Gary, Indiana to profile footwork pioneer Jlin, chatted with Venezuelan…

Tuning into the media often felt nightmarish this year, whether you got your news from the morning paper or the sleepless churn of Facebook and…

Tuning into the media often felt nightmarish this year, whether you got your news from the morning paper or the sleepless churn of Facebook and…

Few musicians have captured the emotional complexity of being an American in the 20th and 21st centuries with as much elegance and nuance as Tom…

Metal has always thrived by  extremes—despair, triumph, destruction, rebirth. But even in this traditionally aggressive art form, the genre has evolved to acknowledge an emotional…

In 2017, there was more media than ever before in human history, and what felt like painfully little attention left to devote to it all. Even as…

Being in a band can be hard. There’s all the travel and accommodation spent in close, smelly quarters, the jockeying to get more (or less)…

One of the most authoritative and forward-thinking metal bands of the ’80s, Metallica helped make thrash a worldwide phenomenon. By blending the fast tempos and…

R.E.M.’s eighth album came out 25 years ago, and was given a deluxe anniversary reissue last week. Often considered the Georgia quartet's masterpiece, Automatic for…