The road wasn’t easy for  Pennsylvania Grammy-winning hard rockers Halestorm as they entered the studio to begin writing and recording their fourth studio album. Unhappy with the initial direction of the material, frontwoman Lzzy Hale and co. scrapped everything, regrouped, refocused and returned with a different mindset. The result…

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…

While Meg Myers has been a part of the alternative music scene for almost a decade, this last year has proven the most transformative for the young singer-songwriter. Myers’ latest LP, Take Me To The Disco (300 Entertainment), is a 46-minute ode to love and heartbreak that gives listeners an authentic…

Ty Segall and White Fence, “Joy.” Musicians in the ‘60s were careful never to give their listeners too much to take in. Pink Floyd were genius arrangers, allowing even the most inebriated listener to enjoy the song and anticipate what would come next. On Joy, Laguna Beach’s “it boy” Ty…

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…

In the two years since their debut, Kelly Zutrau and Joe Valle of Wet have been hard at work on their sophomore album, Still Run. Following the departure of founding guitarist Marty Sulkow, Wet still created a collection of songs true to its indietronica roots. A menagerie of steel guitars, piano and…

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.…

Although Jim James may be best known as the frontman of the psychedelic rock quintet My Morning Jacket, he has also released four solo albums; 2013’s Regions of Light and the Sound of God, 2016’s Eternally Even, and two albums of covers he called Tribute To. His fifth solo effort,…

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…

Although the lineup of Panic! at the Disco of has been an endlessly changing whirlwind, frontman Brendon Urie has managed to keep what is uniquely his: punk spunk. Writing and recording without any of his former bandmates, Urie altered the direction of the “band’s” sound. Panic’s discography colors within…