El-P, our resident rap doomsayer, warned us that everything was going to shit long before it got there. As a solo artist, a producer, a member of the rap groups Company Flow and now Run the Jewels, and the former head of the venerable hip-hop label Def Jux, El-P, born Jaime Meline, built a sturdy […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„7161

Part rapper, part singer, and part heir to the throne of BET Uncut, Ontario hip-hop star Tory Lanez has carved out a unique path to fame that began as an overactive youth bouncing between family in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and Atlanta, then broke big thanks in part to Chixtape, a mixtape series on the […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„7812

Fiona Apple FaceTimes me on a recent Friday afternoon from a bright-pink futon inside her Venice Beach home, her hair in a long braid, wearing giant headphones, a cozy green sweatshirt, and no makeup. The first thing she says is that sheā€™s nervous. ā€œIā€™m like, Oh, shit,ā€ she says, laughing. Her nerves are understandable. Apple, […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„8680

In a certain world, you could sum up the mid-ā€™90s with Stephen Malkmus, crying while drinking a martini, singing Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. Malkmusā€™s group, Pavement, is still one of the great examples of what was thought possible with guitars and irony at the dawn of the internet. Decades later, we caught up with the joke, and […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„9331

Dave Burd is Ɯber-confident. And not like his satirical rapper alter ego Lil Dicky, whose constant garish flexing and bravado are so blatant it borders on the absurd. No, Burd is simply self-assured to an extreme degree. ā€œThese guys would be crazy not to green-light this,ā€ the curly ā€™froed rapper, who turns 32 later this […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„10633

Best Coastā€™s last album, 2015ā€™s California Nights, was the ultimate Best Coast album: crisp, guitar-driven music about love and getting high in California. But when a journalist recently asked front woman Bethany Cosentino how many songs on her bandā€™s new album, Always Tomorrow, were about California, she recalls having to break the news that, this […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„16709

Frances Quinlan is still getting used to performing with backing tracks. She didnā€™t want to take more than a guitar on tour, to make it easier to explore cities, but that means she has to keep up with the Macbook on stage next to her instead. ā€œItā€™s like playing with the most merciless band in […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„8246

I first spoke with Fiona Apple back in September, after she spontaneously emailed me and gave her first interview in seven years. She was in the midst of working on a new album, her first since 2012ā€™s The Idler Wheel, and had quite happily become the sort of homebody who rarely left her house except […]

MUSIC NEWS
šŸ”„5859