Pixies, “Doggerel.” It’s been 18 years since the Pixies reunited. That’s more than twice as many years as they spent gouging away as alt rock vanguards from 1986 ’til their sudden split in 1993. It’s hard to undersell their legacy. Kurt Cobain famously referred to his band as a…

Orville Peck, “Bronco.” Orville Peck rides back into town on Bronco and the way he tells it, the trail from his acclaimed 2019 debut was a bumpy ride. While challenged by both depression and struggles in his personal life, Peck’s skyrocketing career ran straight into COVID. In the void…

Wolf Alice, “Blue Weekend.” “I am what I am and I’m good at it/ And you don’t like me, well that isn’t fucking relevant.” Of all the moments of swagger on Blue Weekend by Wolf Alice–and there are quite a number those to choose from–singer Ellie Rowsell’s honest assessment…

History proves an airtight case could be made for escapist pop music during bleak times. Though songs like “Revolution” and “Sympathy For The Devil” are mainstays for archival footage of 1968, in reality, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” dwarfed both in terms of sales and airplay in…

By all rights, the third LP from Jungle, Loving in Stereo, should have been the soundtrack to the back half of summer 2021. The driving grooves, shout-along hooks, and joyful exuberance packed into these 45 minutes would undoubtedly be packing dance floors in clubs, backyard barbecues and block parties…

While London quartet Wolf Alice remains a bit of a secret here in the U.S., it’s a chart-topping cover star and festival main-stage mainstay across much of Europe. Blue Weekend Wolf Alice Dirty Hit, June 4 9/10 The band’s first two albums, 2015’s My Love is Cool and its 2018…

The Antlers releasing an album in the waning days of a global pandemic falls somewhere between way too on-the-nose and poetry writing itself. From their 2009 debut, Hospice, through 2014’s Familiars, The Antlers have built mythology and a near-perfect catalog centered on confronting mortality and grief. In the seven years…

Watching Tash Sultana on YouTube–which more than 100 million people have done at this point–it’s equal parts obvious and arcane why the Australian artist has made such a global impact over the last half decade. The guitar playing is at virtuosic levels but there are no guitar hero cliches…

The secret to the long run of success that Belle and Sebastian have enjoyed seems to be finding whatever band leader Stuart Murdoch never thought they’d do and doing precisely that thing remarkably well. What To Look for In Summer Belle and Sebastian Matador, Dec. 11 7/10 The band…

With so many storylines converging, Night Network, the new album by The Cribs, was destined to be a compelling album. It emerges after a rare 18-month period of relative silence from the band due to a protracted legal battle in which the band became self-managed and had to put…