The Body performs at the Echo in Los Angeles on July 31, 2018. Photos: Max Heilman. LOS ANGELES — Petrifying Portland sludge metal duo The Body brought its decimation to The Echo Tuesday. The performance came as a stark reminder of its primitive foundation, primally executed and terrifyingly brutal.…

Daryl Palumbo of Glassjaw in San Francisco. Photo: Joaquin Cabello It only made sense for Glassjaw and Quicksand to hop on the same wave of renewed attention for a U.S. tour. Both influential New York hardcore acts released long-awaited comeback albums last year. “It definitely was a match made in…

Birmingham’s Pram has held its ground within the most unfathomable regions of rock and pop music since its inception in 1988. Multi-instrumentalists Sam Owen, Rosie Cuckston, Matthew Eaton (not RIFF’s writer), Max Simpson and Harry Dawes road the creative waves of shoegaze, post-punk and krautrock, but ended up conjuring…

Melodic hardcore stems from hardcore’s expansion of emotion beyond its base in primitive anger. Birds In Row take full advantage of their impassioned spectrum of emotion and dynamics. The French trio’s 2012 debut full-length, You, Me & The Violence, channeled rabid aggression into Converge-esque noisecore to a gut-wrenching emotional sum…

Sunbather made Deafheaven the Metallica of post-black metal in 2013, bringing mainstream awareness to the trend of melding black metal, post-rock and shoegaze. The Bay Area quintet has found acclaim by assuaging strangled shrieks and wall-of-sound riffs with pleasant chord values and melancholy more akin to screamo and indie-rock.…

It’s been just under a week since Irish songwriter Eoin French dropped a video for the second half of the “Odyssey” story on his 2017 debut album, Wild Alee. While the song is spellbinding enough in its own right, French, who records and performs as Talos, was awestruck when he saw…

London’s self-proclaimed psychedelic sludge pop duo Let’s Eat Grandma has ridden a well-earned wave of success created by 2016 debut I, Gemini. Multi-instrumentalists Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, 17 then, revelled in their idiosyncratic synergy, throwing a robust array of sounds and feels into an admirable, albeit messy musical…

Kamasi Washington, “Heaven and Earth.” The impact of Kamasi Washington’s 2015 debut, The Epic, has been so great that his previous releases seem like they’re from an alternate reality. The three-hour magnum opus’ put the Los Angeles saxophonist and composer in a league of his own with cinematic grandiosity and…

Since releasing his breakout EP, Music For the Uninvited, in 2014, Leon Vynehall’s status within the deep house community has preceded him. The British producer and DJ took the hypnotic disco loops and synthetic textures with symphonic grandness and quirky jazz fusion and expanded the potential of house music beyond…

Vein, courtesy. Artists on platforms such as Spotify and Bandcamp are plentiful, and the radio offers a steady deluge of new singles, but who has time to sort through all that? RIFF does! We pooled our resources to find some of the best new singles from all genres and backgrounds, so you can…