Songhoy Blues, Courtesy. At one point a decade ago, the members of Malian rock band Songhoy Blues weren’t allowed to play shows. The ban had nothing to do with pandemic shelter-in-place orders and everything with an Islamist group that had taken over northern parts of the country and imposed sharia law,…

Marking the inexorable shift into a post-1990s phase of rock heroism, New York City’s The Strokes may be the most recent guitar band that was able to have its cake and eat it, too. Artistically singular, wildly popular and championed by the press, it came to epitomize the hipster…

Photos: Chloe Catajan SAN FRANCISCO — Experimental rock group The Voidz sold out The Chapel for two nights in a row. The side project of The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas concluded its mini residency Friday with a late set that rung in the weekend with radioactive energy. The Voidz perform at The…

Every week there’s a plethora of new music at our fingertips. Artists on platforms like 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’ve pooled our resources to find some of…