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For a musician who is rightfully pegged as an innovator, Aphex Twin has cultivated a fairly consistent signature sound. Melodies shine with the whimsy and…

As a white guy in hip-hop--a once-marginalized demographic that is now bordering on omnipresent--Eminem has always been focused on earning respect from his peers and…

Playing sad is easy. Sadness in music can often be as much of an aesthetic choice as the display of some sort of real vulnerability.

Like most things mythic and unknowable, cowboys are a perennial fascination of singer-songwriters. In the ‘90s, Paula Cole ironically lamented the absence of the gallant…

Part of the experiment in considering Queen, Nicki Minaj's latest album and the follow-up to 2014's The Pinkprint, is ignoring the five-month promotional cycle that preceded it. In…

Of the many Kanye West clones in music, Travis Scott is the most actualized. This is a feat he has accomplished by replicating Kanye’s penchant…

Some rappers ride the beat. YG steps into DJ Mustard productions like Tony Stark getting into the Iron Man suit. Stay Dangerous, the…

Hive Mind suggests conformity and homogeneity, but the title of the Internet's latest album is more concerned with the emotional range of the musicians behind the moniker.

The following is a partial inventory of epithets assigned to the Bay Area metal band Deafheaven since their formation at the dawn of the decade:…

If not crazy in love, Dave Longstreth has been struck dumb: "She is so dreamy / That she got features on Fellini" and "Archimedes Palimpsest…

Three years after a debut of unusual density—a flowering plant with thorns—Years & Years feel confident enough to kick the blues away. It's a canny…

When 03 Greedo pled guilty to a drugs and weapons possession charge that led to a prison sentencing of 20 years with a…

Consciously or unconsciously, Body/Head’s latest is indisputably an album for or about summertime, a No Wave mirror held up to our present, perspiring moment. It…

Not until the last two years of his life did John Coltrane really stop performing jazz standards. He began to focus on ecstatic group improvisations (Ascension…

More Life, Drake’s last release, was billed not as an album or a mixtape but a "playlist," a nebulous designation that served in part…