Tag Archives: music-features

Last week, New York instrumental metal trio Behold the Arctopus announced their upcoming album with a question. “Is anyone else tired of how painfully slow metal has evolved recently,” a press release began, “compared to how quickly innovations occurred at the end of the last century?” Unless you’re a die-hard …

The Puerto Rican rapper-singer Bad Bunny became a star thanks to a torrent of singles: He earned more than two-dozen hits, including billion-view smashes like “Te Boté” and “Mayores,” before he even bothered to release a full-length. That thoroughly modern path to streaming ubiquity made an album seem like an …

This article was originally published March 28th, 2014. It’s being republished in honor of what would have been Bob Marley‘s 75th birthday, February 6th, 2020. Bob Marley’s legend just keeps growing, but his sons and daughters are the ones who live with it most closely. It’s a big family – …

Jason Segel has always portrayed Rush fanboys. On 1999’s Freaks and Geeks, he played Nick, an aspiring rock drummer growing up in suburban Michigan in 1980. For Nick, there was no greater musician than Rush’s Neil Peart. With the devastating news of the drummer’s death on Friday, we look back …

“I love talking about lyrics,” says Rapsody. “I don’t get to talk about it enough.” The North Carolina rapper is sitting in a spacious lounge at Roc Nation’s office, staring up at a giant screen projecting the lyrics to her latest album, Eve. The 16-track album is packed with historical …

Since its arrival in 2000, “Stan” never really left. Stubborn, persistent, and culturally malleable, the song’s name, concept, and story structure took on a life of their own. Almost two decades later, the word is so ubiquitous there are likely millions of modern stans that have never listened to “Stan.” …

For the cover of her debut album, Cheap Queen, Mikaela Straus embraced a “drag persona,” with hyper-stylized makeup. “[It’s] this feminized version of myself,” says the 20-year-old, who performs under the name King Princess. “And I love that, because that’s something I was terrified of until, maybe, last year.” Inventing …

In 1993, the members of Weezer traveled to New York to meet Ric Ocasek, who was slated to produce their debut album. “He was one of the most significant icons of our childhood,” says bassist Matt Sharp, who had grown up seeing Ocasek’s hits in rotation on MTV. “I can’t …

Depending on how you do the math, Joan Shelley has made around 10 LPs with various collaborators, including the trio Maiden Radio. She was a shared secret until 2015, when she released the evanescent Over and Even under her own name, but her most recent LP — a self-titled set …

In the summer of ’89, Bon Jovi were riding high on so much Garden State gratitude after the success of Slippery When Wet that they named their follow-up LP after their home state. The New Jersey tour would, appropriately, give a leg up to their local friends in the warm-up …