Elton John’s album Caribou turns 50 years old this summer. He’s celebrating with a deluxe reissue to be released this Saturday for Record Store Day, which will include the previously unreleased outtake “Ducktail Jiver.” As part of the rollout for that project, Sir Elton has released footage of his first live performance of Caribou hit “The Bitch Is Back ..read more

Conor Oberst has been taking a break from the Bright Eyes reunion lately to play star-studded weekly Thursday night residencies in LA and NYC. These shows are billed as Conor Oberst And Friends, and out West, those friends included his Better Oblivion Community Center bandmate Phoebe Bridgers among others like Oberst’s fellow Monster Of Folk M. Ward and Azure Ray’s Maria Taylor ..read more

The snake is eating its tail. On “Hard Times,” the opening track and lead single from their 2017 album After Laughter, Paramore adopted a plastic neon Afropop/new wave vibe seemingly influenced by Talking Heads. Recently, Hayley Williams and friends covered “Burning Down The House” for the forthcoming compilation Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute To Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. Now, as an extension of the Stop Making Sense festivities, lead Talking Head David Byrne has returned Paramore’s favor by covering “Hard Times.” It sounds like a David Byrne song, but then, it always has ..read more

This month marks the 25th anniversary of I Am Shelby Lynne, the great country-pop album that launched singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne to fame. Lynne famously won the Grammy for Best New Artist after that LP’s release, even though she was already ten years and six albums into her career. Lynne has been missing in action for a while. Her last album 2017’s Not Dark Yet, was a collaboration with her sister Alison Moorer, and it included their Nirvana cover. Today, Lynne is back with a new single ..read more

As you may have heard, today marks the release of Taylor Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department, which turned out to be a surprise double album called The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. She once again worked closely with Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, both of whom cowrote and produced extensively across the tracklist. Dessner, who entered the Swiftverse during early COVID days and has been a core contributor to her albums ever since, has chimed in this morning with a statement on the new project. Here’s what he has to say ..read more

Last week, Stereogum published Eli Enis’ thorough and depressing survey of the current state of big-room metal. Shit is bleak out there! In this corner of the internet, many of us have been pointedly ignoring this stuff for a long time, but it exists, and it’s more popular than some of us might want to admit. The same is true of Pierce The Veil, a San Diego trio who get a brief mention in Eli’s article. Pierce The Veil’s sound is a kind of adenoidal pop-punk/metalcore fusion, and they are fucking huge. Now, they’re out here covering Radiohead ..read more

Historically, Taylor Swift has not been big on proper nouns. She’ll throw the names of cities into her lyrics, and sometimes she’ll specify neighborhoods or parks or streets. Every once in a while, she’ll toss in a namecheck, like James Taylor on “Begin Again.” But most of her songs are about the relationships between an obvious “I” and an unspecified “you.” The identity of that “you” is rarely secret ..read more

A couple of months ago, Glixen shared the entrancing track “foreversoon.” The Phoenix band played Nothing’s Slide Away Fest, which officially solidified their spot in the blooming shoegaze scene. Today, they’re back with “lust ..read more

Couch Prints have impressed me with singles like “True Religion” and “Hours,” and new song “Colorado” is my favorite so far. It’s sort of a jumble of several hyper-online minimal pop trends from recent years — the bedroom-pop melancholia of Clairo, the pretty Y2K-revivalist guitars and skittering programmed drums of PinkPantheress — and the combination works wonders. It’s like getting trapped in a fog of sadness and somehow feeling good about it. Listen below ..read more

Last year, Mike Watt — of Minutemen fame, though he’s also a part of the reunited lineup of Porno For Pyros amongst other bands — has a “one-for-one” series, where he and a friend cover each other’s songs for a 7″. Last year he teamed up with the Big Boys guitarist Tim Kerr. Now, he’s joined forces with David Pajo, who’s best known for his roles in Slint and Tortoise ..read more