Under the Radar

When Héloïse Letissier emerged on the international stage as Christine and the Queens, via a spell-binding dance routine to her breakthrough single “Titled,” she appeared like a pop-star from a bygone-era. Quiet, bookish, and altogether unassuming, t

Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth remember the moment they became pop songwriters. They were in Los Angeles with highly sought-after producer SOPHIE, playing one of their meticulously constructed demos. Built on a swirling chord sequence that repeat

LUMP’s conception barely involved any discussion: Laura Marling and Tunng’s frontman Mike Lindsay met at a Neil Young after party, and, after what Lindsay terms a “simple exchange of words,” LUMP was formed. The collaboration induced an unexpected cr

Stephen Malkmus begins his sixth album with The Jicks with a surprise. Having spent much of his post-Pavement career re-establishing the guitar solo at the center of his craft, the one-time golden boy of indie rock kicks off Sparkle Hard with a p

Brett Anderson has a piercing gaze that is very disarming, even if the Suede frontman doesn’t intentionally mean it to be, or maybe he does. It has been a quarter century since Anderson’s delicate features and unforgettable music made their indelible

As anyone who have ever experienced it knows, a Ryley Walker show is never just about the music. He also takes time to chat to the audience, mixing rambling stories in with profane jokes, and he doesn’t care what you think. “I guess some people might

To begin, a few things about mulberry trees. The mulberry has stood as a symbol of patience and wisdom throughout the ages, a symbol of calculated restraint. It is, by all present appearances, a necessary icon for our divided times, a present politic

If you’re looking for someone to congratulate (or blame), Alan Sparhawk points to Dave Fridmann. It was over a decade ago when Sparhawk and his wife Mimi Parker, the core members of Low, joined forces with Fridmann, the famed producer for The Flaming

On “Complications,” the second track from Interpol’s latest record, Marauder , frontman Paul Banks sings “dream of combinations/ all night long/round and round a rhythm escapes/I’m stuck without no answers.” It’s a line that sticks out as the most

If you were to make a word cloud representing Beach House vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Victoria Legrand describing the creative process she shares with multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally, the word “intuition” would be bold and about twice as big

We asked Anna Calvi to take a self- portrait. We also asked her to write a list of personal things—interesting facts that fans may perhaps not know about her. The singer/songwriter/guitarist was born in Twickenham, a suburban area southwest of cent

For a project borne in a Virginia Tech dorm room in 2009, Jack Tatum’s Wild Nothing has, at least from an audience’s point of view, seamlessly morphed into a product of post-collegiate self-awareness. Musically, personally, professionally, aesthetica

By the time the listener gets to “The Club,” the second track off Welsh singer/songwriter Gruff Rhys’ latest release, Babelsberg , they have already experienced a baroque country epic in the form of “Frontier Man” and now are hearing Rhys sing abo

“We’re both anxious, weird people,” actress Elsie Fisher says, when asked how she is like Kayla Day, the idealistic and socially awkward 13-year-old vlogger she plays in Eighth Grade , the feature film debut from comedian Bo Burnham as writer and

Hand-picked by Andy Warhol for her striking, Germanic beauty, newly-conscripted vocalist Nico—born Christa Päffgen—became part of one of rock and roll’s most important records as if by accident. The European fashion model sang lead on only three trac

Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell, and Danny Coughlan, who records as Crybaby, were set up on a blind date of sorts, by a manager and publisher who thought the two musicians’ guitar pop might make for a fruitful collaboration. After receiving a son

With her parents at work, Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan has the house to herself for the next several hours. Though she still lives at home, the 18-year-old’s time back in the Baltimore suburb of Ellicott City, Maryland is more or less a stopover betwe

Fran Keaney, Joe White, and Tom Russo, the songwriting, singing, and guitaring part of Melbourne five-piece Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, are late. Not for rock and roll reasons though. They’ve been at the dry cleaners because, according to their

The music of Toronto band Bernice (whose current line-up is Robin Dann, Thom Gill, Dan Fortin, Felicity Williams, and Phil Melanson) is a melange of sounds and textures. Their sophomore album, Puff LP: In the air without a shape , is a playful rec

“Even he would make fun of himself for being a grumpy old guy!” Hariette Pilbeam, the 25-year-old Brisbane-based dream pop songwriter known as Hatchie, is recalling how surprisingly down to earth and welcomingly ordinary she found Robin Guthrie, whos

I changed a Flasher lyric. No, really. When the Washington, D.C. trio first dropped their deterministic anthem “Skim Milk” back in March, the line “garment of vivid pink” sounded to me like “gone in a vivid pink . ” So I mentioned this mondegreen to

In a small cafe in roughly the center of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, serpentwithfeet’s fragrance arrives just a moment before he does. In the milliseconds before he appears sporting a beige bucket hat, off-gold tanktop, and baggy, mus

By November of 2016, Natalie Prass was prepared to take her next step. After her ornately baroque 2015 self-titled debut took her around the world and to the upper reaches of numerous album-of-the-year lists, she was ready to go back into the studio

With a career that spans three decades and four Academy Award nominations, Ethan Hawke is among the premiere names in film. First making his mark as a young actor in movies such as Dead Poet’s Society , Reality Bites , and Before Sunrise , H

Rickey Washington has told the story more times than he can count. He was a young college student, almost completely ignorant of the history and culture of West Africa, the first time he went to Ghana on a school-building mission in 1975. It was ther

Amber Arcades seemed to be on a trajectory to indie rock fame, building a reputation with a satisfying mix of dream pop and motor driven guitar pop over a couple of EPs and 2016’s LP Fading Lines. Less of a band and more of a solo project of Dutch si

Back when he was plain old J. Tillman, the man who reinvented himself as Father John Misty churned out records at quite a pace. The production line slowed since he dropped the earnest folk shtick and turned into cynical, satirical jokester Father Joh

UK modern soul collective Jungle make suspiciously uncontroversial music. On their self-titled debut, their brand of moody mid-tempo funk was meticulously-crafted to soundtrack festival coverage and sports montages. The group appeared so calculated i

Mitski Miyawaki has a hard task: She has to somehow produce a follow up to her 2016 album Puberty 2, a master-class of indie rock with punk and balladeer edges that touched on identity, love, and rage. Mitski’s new album, Be the Cowboy, doesn’t quite

Still Corners, the duo of Greg Hughes and vocalist Tessa Murray, have been honing their craft since they dropped their debut album Creatures of An Hour in 2011. Three albums later this sound has evolved into a marvelous mix of sublime dreaminess and

To conclude, we ask Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie (and also The Postal Service) some questions about endings and death. Death Cab for Cutie has been a pivotal act in bringing indie rock to the mainstream in the mid-to-late 2000s with seminal rel

My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For t

My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For t

Three years after 2015’s Kintsugi , Seattle’s Death Cab for Cutie are releasing their first album as a quintet, Thank You for Today . Founding guitarist/producer Chris Walla left the band following the recording of Kintsugi and didn’t tour

Four-time Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke’s latest venture behind the camera is Blaze , a freewheeling biopic of cult country musician Blaze Foley, who died of a gunshot wound under unclear circumstances in 1989. Hawke directed, produced, and co

On Chaleur Humaine , Christine and the Queens marked herself as an artist of unusual ambition. From bookish lyrical references to intricately choreographed live performances, Christine, real name Héloïse Letissier, was dreaming big on her debut al

To conclude, we ask Sam Genders of Tunng some questions about endings and death. Genders and Mike Lindsay formed the British folktronica band back in 2003, releasing their debut album, Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs in 2005. This year they hav