The best albums of 2020 include Washed Out, the Mountain Goats, Ethan Gruska, Tom Petty, Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown, Logic, The Strokes, Moses Sumney, Fleet Foxes, Willie Nelson, Yves Tumor, Nicolas Jaar, Ed O’Brien, Charli XCX and Blackpink. After nearly a decade of living through 2020, we’re finally…

Illustration: Skott Bennett/STAFF. It’s been a year like no other. When the Bay Area shut down on March 11 and 12, RIFF had to quickly pivot away from concert reviews—a staple for us—to something else. We ramped up our news coverage, especially in terms of how the music industry…

Insert Foot vs. the COVID test and conspiracy theories. Smell that? We have to get the cat fixed. I don’t get where an animal not smart enough to wear clothes in November gets such a sense of entitlement. The cat just peed in a no-urine zone again, my daughter says.…

Insert Foot vs. the Best of 2020. We’re starting the process of creating our year-end best-of lists at RIFF, which, for concerts at least, should be the easiest year-end list in human history. The process for this one goes something like this: Did you go to a concert in…

By the logic of Machine Gun Kelly, this column will be a hit. Welcome to another installment of … what should we call this? Things I write about when my attention span equals a housefly on really good meth? Strike that. There’s no such thing as good meth, kids.…

Insert Foot calling for healing after the presidential election. When I went from writing about news to music, I had no idea what I was about to experience. And that was strange. I understood how much music meant to me and my crowd. Almost every memory for us was…

President Donald Trump, pictured here attacking the very concept of democracy at the White House on Nov. 6, 2020. Courtesy: Evan Vucci/Associated Press/Twitter. It’s been some week. We have to talk about the presidential election. As of this writing, former Vice President Joe Biden has won but nobody in…

Insert Foot ruminates on how Sean Connery’s James Bond would handle the 2020 election. You OK? I hope so. Halloween on a full moon was just the warm-up act, I’m afraid. That’s not just a cliché. I’m always afraid this time of year. But no one is saying I have…

Twenty years to the day that U2 released its landmark album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Roman Gokhman and I jumped on Zoom to talk about what the album means to us as fans, its cultural impact and legacy, and how it changed the course of U2’s music–for better or worse–in…

Chris Pappas of Elle Belle, Courtesy: Casey Curry. New-Hampshire-born Angeleno Chris Pappas didn’t set up to be a multi-media artist, but that’s where he’s landed. He’s written two TV pilots, has a horror film in development and has also written music for the soundtracks to two NASA documentaries. As…