As the planet reels in anxiety and grief, Matty Healy sounds surprisingly calm, almost as if he’d expected this, or certainly hadn’t been entirely surprised by it. “It is a very, very odd time,” he says over the phone from the recording studio in the English countryside where he’s been quarantining with the drummer-producer George […]
The rise of Instagram Live as a stopgap entertainment hub for people whose nighttime meeting grounds are shuttered indefinitely was the first sign that the quarantine couldn’t completely quash plans for spring music, even in the absence of live events in the traditional sense. Over the past month, Minecraft has hosted festivals featuring performances from […]
When Hayley Williams started the pop-punk group Paramore at 15, all she wanted was to be in a band with her best guy friends. And for a while, that’s what she did. But as she grew into an icon for emo kids, touring worldwide and releasing platinum albums with her band, Paramore was disintegrating. The […]
For years, CDs have arrived each week by the dozen, their styles, careers, and time periods all competing for my attention. I would get to them all eventually, I told myself — when I was idled or sick or housebound. But in these past weeks, I’ve found I have no appetite for exploration, no urge […]
Billie Eilish built a blockbuster in a bedroom, so it makes sense she’d record a Bond song on a tour bus. “We recorded the vocals in a bunk in the dark on the bus in a basement in Texas,” she recalls of the creation of “No Time to Die,” her song for the James Bond […]
Fame, at least lasting fame — the your-work-goes-down-in-history kind, often accompanied by fat royalty payments — is a club that thinks of itself as an unbiased meritocracy, blind to everything but aesthetic innovation and popular success. It’s never quite worked out that way. When we look at the past, we still see generations of great […]