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Matt Kivel’s Fighting Spirit
Matt Kivel. Photo by Olivia Hemeratantorn. Matt Kivel’s been fighting his whole life. His pugilism first surfaced while he was growing up in Los Angeles, when he and his twin brother Jesse decided it...
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American Wrestlers on The “Rightness” of Youth and Finding Nirvana Funny
American Wrestlers. Photo by Evan Cuttler Wattles. Growing up in East Kilbride, Scotland—a working-class area just outside Glasgow—American Wrestlers’ Gary McClure had no shortage of musical exposure....
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Album of the Day: Casper Skulls, “Lips & Skulls”
Casper Skulls’ debut EP screams dystopia. The words “death” or “dying” appear in every song on the Toronto postpunk outfit’s Lips & Skulls—a feat generally reserved for the blackest of black metal...
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L.A. Is The Best Place For Devonwho’s Sunny Rap Beats
Devon Fox is Devonwho. Photo by Patti Miller. Last year, at the age of 31, Devon Fox moved back to Los Angeles after a short stint in San Francisco. For almost a decade, Fox had released...
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The Places That Inspired Planes Mistaken For Stars’ First Album in a Decade
Listening to their early material, it’s easy to see why Planes Mistaken for Stars were often lumped in with post-hardcore revival bands like The Used and Thrice. Like those bands, their songs were...
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The Necks Aren’t Throwing a 30th Anniversary Party (and They’re Not Breaking Up)
The Necks. Photo by Camille Walsh. Asked to describe The Necks, the Australian avant-garde trio for whom he has played drums for the last 30 years, Tony Buck opts for understatement. “We find ourselves...
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Donuts, Dudes & Devotion: A Day in The Life of Jeff Rosenstock
Jeff Rosenstock. Photo by Andy Johnson. Jeff Rosenstock is a contemporary cult icon, the kind of musician who goes unnoticed if you’re not actively looking for them. There’s a reason for this: his...
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Album of the Day: Blu and Union Analogtronics, “Cheetah in the City”
Los Angeles rapper Blu is known for both his prolific output and his tendency to work with a single producer for an entire project. And while that’s also the case for Cheetah in the City, a...
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Celebrating 20 Years of Suicide Squeeze’s Uncompromising Indie Rock
To loosely paraphrase one of the more well-known passages of the Bible, it is easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for an introvert to start a successful record label. That’s...
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Album of the Day: Frederic Robinson, “Flea Waltz”
Some albums seem to have more air in them than others—more space for sound to bounce around. Flea Waltz, the second album from German artist Frederic Robinson, is one of those records. It opens with...
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Big Ups: Sadie Dupuis of Sad13 and Speedy Ortiz Picks Her Favorite Bandcamp...
Photo by Shervin Lainez Full disclosure: Sadie Dupuis—poet, guitar hero, “frontdemon” for Speedy Ortiz, of the bent-pop solo project SAD13—has been a friend of mine for a handful of years, even more so...
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Terminal Consumption: The Best Punk on Bandcamp, November 2016
In this installment of Terminal Consumption, our monthly reviews column focused on the margins of punk and hardcore, Sam Lefebvre examines new releases by Iron Lung/Walls offshoot Private Room, Cult...
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Dark Blue Discover the “Start of the World” in the Dead of Night
Dark Blue. Photo by Autumn Spadaro. It’s a crowded Thursday evening at Murph’s in Fishtown, an eternally-gentrifying neighborhood in Northern Philadelphia. The bar and its patrons exude a certain...
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Album of the Day: Syrinx, “Tumblers From the Vault”
After a tumultuous decade of musical experimentation lead by Cage and Boulez in the concert hall and the Beatles on the radio, the ’70s lurched forward. Enter John Mills-Cockell, a Toronto-born synth...
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Peering Into the Shadows of the Projekt Records Catalog
For a man whose life’s work is often stereotyped as dark and gloomy, Projekt Records’ founder and mainstay Sam Rosenthal laughs easily. He did this early in our conversation, looking back over...
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Pianist Jean-Michel Blais on Making the Most of a Once In A Lifetime Opportunity
Jean-Michel Blais Often when people try to explain instrumental music, they end up describing a scene in a film that the composition might soundtrack. It’s a curious tendency; left without lyrics to...
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Daedelus’s New Album Was Inspired By Young Thug, Anaïs Nin, and The Percolator
Daedalus. Photo by Gari Askew. Alfred Darlington has made 17 albums since 1998, and has performed with some of music’s most talented electronic producers—Flying Lotus, DJ Rashad, and Teebs, among...
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Not Normal Tapes Illuminates, and Complicates, Hardcore
Those who have their fingers on the rapid pulse of hardcore already know about Not Normal Tapes. Those who don’t—but who find particular refuge in urgent noise—should. For nearly 10 years, Not Normal,...
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Swarvy Shares His Most Essential Bandcamp Releases
Swarvy. Photo by Theo Jemison. In June 2011, a group of beatmakers gathered in Philadelphia’s Little Bar to honor jazz legend Miles Davis’s landmark album Bitches Brew. The producers were tasked with...
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Unseen Worlds Releases Avant-Garde Music That’s Highly Accessible
The idiosyncratic label Unseen Worlds began as a reissue project, releasing an eclectic variety of “art music” that ranged from electronic to classical to pop. It was launched by Tommy McCutchon, who...
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