Ethan Gruska spent his teen years as one half of The Belle Brigade. After that he built an impressive reservoir of behind-the-scenes work. Oh, and his grandfather is the John Williams. Since then, Gruska’s been bulking up his solo discography, first with 2017 album Slowmotionary, and now with its follow-up. En Garde…

In the classic 1980 film “The Blues Brothers,” musician Elwood Blues inquires of a bartender, “What kind of music do you usually have here?” and the bartender responds, “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and Western.” Of course there are lots of other kinds of music, and…

Pet Shop Boys sounded futuristic when they broke onto the music scene in 1984 with their first single, “West End Girls.” The London duo used a relatively simple synthesizer, a Korg MS-10, to craft lush and sophisticated soundscapes, which singer Neil Tennant populated with the silky razor blade of…

Pennsylvania rockers Breaking Benjamin looked to flip the script ahead of the release of their seventh album, Aurora. The band tapped into its ample back catalog to rework nine prior tracks, as well as penning one new tune, for an all-acoustic release. Ben Burnley and company also recruited the help…

Arguably the first post-punk band, England’s arty export Wire has sowed its reputation for intelligent songwriting far and wide. Over a 43-year career and a slew of notable albums, the band explored avant-garde song structures, big-beat synth-pop, and a compositional approach that falls somewhere between a musical blueprint and…

In many ways, Ashley Frangipane—much better known as Halsey—has come a long way from her days of posting videos to Tumblr under the username se7enteenblack. After her song “Ghost” caught the ears of not only listeners but of record labels in 2014, Halsey has steadily been climbing into higher…

To be fair, a band name like …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead could only have worked during the post-hardcore scene of the late ‘90s. The band proved a precocious contender within punk-rock intelligentsia, most notably on 2002’s Source Tags & Codes. These guys had…

After two decades of highs, lows and heartbreak, Nashville quartet Little Big Town has seen both the best and the worst of what music industries has to offer. With experience under their belts, the band turned inward for its eighth studio album, Nightfall, which the members produced independently. Nightfall…

After living much of the early part of her career in the spotlight, Selena Gomez was forced to take a step away after she received a kidney transplant as a result of complications with lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes harm to organs and tissues. She had an additional…

Patience pays off for Southern California indie pop trio Echosmith. Seven years following breakout debut Talking Dreams, the Sierota siblings return with sophomore LP Lonely Generation. The passing years weren’t spent idly. An attempt at a full-length follow-up turned into 2017 EP Inside a Dream. Echosmith has also found success collaborating…