I’ve always thought of Horse Jumper Of Love songs as charms. To the average person, they appear pretty but mundane; to someone who notices their hidden magic, they’re cosmic and one-of-a-kind. Since their beloved 2016 self-titled debut, the Boston group — made up of vocalist and guitarist Dimitri Giannopoulos, bassist John Margaris, and drummer James Doran — has been a reliable source of enchanting, idiosyncratic slowcore that’s distorted enough to be considered shoegaze. In the past few years, they’ve remained unstoppable; 2022 saw the release of their third studio album Natural Part, 2023 had the mini-album Heartbreak Rules, and now another album titled Disaster Trick is on its way.

Jeff Rosenstock never seems to stop moving. I don’t mean that he’s fidgety or distractable. In fact, he’s overwhelmingly present when you speak to him. He never gets sidetracked or checks his phone. He’s sincerely nice; the word undersells how welcoming his presence is, but it’s the right word.

Every artist has a set of recurring tropes, and for ML Buch it’s a few very specific images: a body falling apart then coming back together again; light bouncing from a reflective surface (particularly glints of sun on the sea). They are regular fixtures across her work, and possibly always will be. “It’s nice to have these eternally, some elements or props or fragments that keep being relevant to me,” she told me recently at a Cuban café in Los Angeles, though she has “no interest in understanding” why she keeps gravitating towards them. It’s been 10 months since she released Suntub, her masterpiece, and she has no interest in understanding that either. “I was singing about the ‘film of sky’, whatever that is,” she said.

Ben Seretan can’t just go around calling Allora his “insane Italy record” without elaborating on both the “insane” and “Italy” part. “It’s kind of a long story,” he sighs – not the “it’s kind of a long story” used as a deflection when the teller knows both they and the listener will be bored out of their minds if recall lasts more than 15 seconds. The earliest iteration of Allora’s electrifying krautrock freakout “New Air” dates back to 2012, when Seretan was just one of many “DIY idiots living in Bushwick” trying to make the scene at 285 Kent and Glasslands. In the time since, there has been unexpected indie fame in the Alpine region of Europe, scammy booking agents, life-altering breakups, devastating deaths, 24-hour ambient albums, a rousing breakthrough released into the gaping maw of early COVID, demolition derbies, dairy farm drag parties, outdoor raves and naked barn dances. Fittingly enough, the story ends in a place called Climax, New York.

When we last heard from Peel Dream Magazine, Joe Stevens had basically soft rebooted the project. During the group’s New York years, Peel Dream had been Stevens’ vehicle for exploring a host of moodier psychedelic traditions, from krautrock to shoegaze. During the pandemic, he decamped to Los Angeles, and in 2022 he re-emerged with Pad — a concept album about him getting kicked out of his own band, now set to jazz- and country-tinged baroque-pop fixated on ’60s harmonies and Beach Boys melodies. Now, another two years down the road, Stevens is set to return with Rose Main Reading Room. It’s his first release for Topshelf Records, and, once more, it’s a whole new Peel Dream Magazine.

Solid Sound is not like other festivals. It’s at an art museum: the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, MA. It’s relatively small, with a capacity of about 8,000 people per day. And it’s entirely centered around Wilco – not just as the headliners, but as hosts and curators. It’s a festival as a sonic dinner party, with the band giving its fans not just its own music but other artists its members want to share with everyone. This year that includes Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit as the second headliner, as well as such bands as Dry Cleaning, Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets, Ratboys, Iris Dement and Water From Your Eyes.

Water From Your Eyes look fried. Anyone who has been on tour knows this moment: Outfits become an array of whatever is vaguely clean, the van somehow looks increasingly like one of those old “battle-damaged” action figures, and time becomes both more tangible and completely meaningless, as your life is scheduled down to the minute but every day and every city bleed into one another. This is more or less the state I find Rachel Brown and Nate Amos in when we meet on a corner in Salt Lake City, on a bright Sunday following some long festival nights. By the end of our conversation I’ll ask them if we missed anything. Brown will drawl a joking reply: “If I said anything stupid I’d rather have it reflect on my lack of sleep than my intelligence.”

It’s not uncommon for musicians to use something — beers, booze, drug binges — to take the edge off before a performance. Those vices are well and good for Couch Slut’s Megan Osztrosits, but she prefers the all-encompassing numbness that only self-inflicted head trauma can provide. For her, this usually takes the form of repeatedly bashing herself in the skull with her microphone until blood drips down her face. “From the first note, I’m blacking out and going somewhere else,” she explained during our conversation at Roadburn, an annual festival celebrating heavy music in Tilburg, a Dutch city best known for its university and a beautifully weird Brothers Grimm-based amusement park. “It’s out of body.”

“Never knew a different life/ Because no one was there to show her,” rapped North Carolina’s Rapsody with real purpose on the underrated 2012 song “In The Town.”

For someone renowned for delivering raps in a crackly purr, it feels kind of strange to hear Hempstead, Long Island’s Roc Marciano even slightly raise his voice.

Jane Schoenbrun has stated they wanted their new film I Saw The TV Glow, which gets a wide release May 17 through A24, to feel like the “memory of television.” Most literally, this refers to how a millennial might remember something like Buffy The Vampire Slayer 20 or 30 years later, but it’s tempting to see the statement in a more abstract way: if television was actually remembering things, if the life-force looming behind the screen in a film like Poltergeist or Videodrome developed a nostalgic streak and a sense of poetry.

With her deep knowledge of history and literature, combined with her vulnerable, evocative lyrics, Myriam Gendron has the power to open emotional portals. There is something intangible about the sound of her voice, the phrasing of her words, and the chords she chooses that unlocks something within me, like few other musicians can.

I’ve long thought that Jessica Pratt’s music is the closest we’ll get to hearing what sound was like when we were inside our mothers’ stomachs. Cooing, bubbling, gleaming: Hers is the music of the intrauterine. Pratt plays as though she’s house-training sound itself, singing somewhere in the phonic region where meaning delays itself. Untethered highs and skidding lows, it must have been what the world sounded like in utero.

Since their 2017 inception, it feels like the Bay Area’s AG Club have been through eons of trials and errors. The sprawling collective is spearheaded by the de facto leaders Jody Fontaine and Baby Boy and their videographers Manny Madrigal and Ivan Collaco. Everyone else caught in the colorful crossfire could become a member of the Club as well, as evident in the sprawling network of designers, collaborators, and friends that make up their growing universe.

What does faith sound like? How about respect, or trust? There Is A Garden, the new semi-improvised album from Brooklyn-based experimental supergroup Beings, answers these questions with scarcely a word spoken across its nine songs. Listen to the beginning of “Happy To Be,” one of two songs from the album released today, and hear percussionist Jim White find his footing in real time alongside saxophonist Zoh Amba: the crackling croon of her horn finds a gentle melody against which White builds his thundering drums. Then, Steve Gunn enters the scene, his reverating guitar adding texture as much as rhythm, freeing Amba to further explore the range of her instrument, introducing motifs that will appear, almost as if by magic, later in the song. Bassist, keyboardist, and producer Shahzad Ismaily, the musical polymath who has performed with everyone from Marc Ribot to Yoko Ono, is ineffably present in the delicate, almost imperceptible glimmer of a synth that undergirds the song and unites its disparate elements.

Brooklyn art-rockers Yeasayer have been broken up for nearly a half-decade now, and the band’s former members continue to branch out in its wake. Back in 2022, co-lead vocalist Anand Wilder released his first proper solo album under his own name, I Don’t Know My Words, and today his former co-frontman Chris Keating steps forth with his debut solo single, “Way I Know How.”

Last year, Guided By Voices celebrated their 40th anniversary as a band in a way many other groups might have: by playing two triumphant hometown shows opened by an array of beloved peers and disciples. They also marked their 40th year in a way not many other bands would ever attempt: by releasing three new full-length albums within the span of about 10 months. Such uncommonly prolific output has always been standard operating procedure for Robert Pollard and his band, and four decades in, they’re still going strong.

In 2022, Shabaka Hutchings began the process of unwinding an extraordinarily exciting career that he’d spent more than a decade building. As the leader of Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, as well as Shabaka And The Ancestors, he’d laid revolutionary poetry from Joshua Idehen, Kae Tempest, and others atop pounding acoustic and electronic grooves that borrowed from techno, Caribbean parade music, and more. He’d toured the world, slowly climbing from small clubs to massive festival stages, his high-energy saxophone style cutting through like a siren as the drums pounded.

It’s understandable if, in the fire hose of media attention paid last Friday to a certain superstar’s yee-haw turn, some less mainstream drops didn’t register on every radar. But in a very different, angstier, and frankly more XY-chromosome-dominated corner of the music universe, fans of the underground hip-hop collective Haunted Mound were tuned into the release of Bloody Angel, the latest project from the group’s fearless founder, leader, and provocateur, Sematary.

Since their formation in 2019, Scowl have been known for many things: a crazy show at a Sonic drive-thru, Post Malone donning their t-shirts, a Taco Bell ad campaign, a slot opening for Limp Bizkit, and the subsequent industry plant accusations. All of this talk, though, is nothing compared to the Santa Cruz band’s music. After two rowdy EPs, they shared their 2021 debut full-length How Flowers Grow, a visceral blast of vicious, rambunctious hardcore. Last year’s Psychic Dance Routine EP raised the volume even louder while also experimenting with poppier, more cinematic sounds. They have the energy, the attitude, and the infectiousness to justify all the noise surrounding it.

The best way to consume Claire Rousay’s discography is to dive into the dozens of one-offs, collaborations, and subscriber exclusives on her Bandcamp. There, you’ll find a treasure trove of irreverent and deeply personal music, from the unsparing text-to-speech self-interrogation “I’m not a bad person but…” to the iPhone sound-effect improvisation “swipe” to a three-minute recording of leaf blowers. Rousay’s music is candid about life in the digital age, and her release strategy could not exist at any other time; Bandcamp gives the LA-via-Texas artist the freedom to release low-stakes experiments with as much or as little ornamentation as she wants. And if you’re worried her recent signing to the vaunted Chicago label Thrill Jockey will slow this diaristic torrent of music, you can be assured the floodgates are not closing anytime soon.

“I’m really happy right now,” Domenic Palermo says, his voice quivering with joy. “I feel like I’m doing the right thing for once, and that’s not a normal thing for me.”

“Buffalo was a thriving community where you could lead a nice little middle-class life,” recalls Westside Gunn (real name Alvin Lamar Worthy), the city’s most influential living rap entrepreneur. “But once the crack era hit it fucked up everything, including my mother. Remember, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve seen it all!”

Perhaps the most damning indictment of American current affairs is calling 2018 the “good ol’ days.” Around this time, Stay Inside were starting to link up with the likes of Good Looking Friends, Answering Machine, and Cold Wrecks, building a “Brooklyn emo” scene in a city that has never been particularly welcoming to the genre. But that was before Biden vs. Trump II, Dobbs, the encroaching possibility of World War III, the dismantling of music media… and, of course, the pandemic.

One thing is for certain: Belfast rap trio Kneecap are made of strong stuff.

When Madi Diaz got the phone call that Harry Styles had handpicked her to open a string of his Love On Tour stadium shows, she really needed some good news. The Nashville singer-songwriter was stuck in traffic as it started to get dark on a 12-hour drive to Philly to begin tour. And at some point, she had noticed that the rental car she was driving had an ant infestation. Frazzled, ant-bitten, and decidedly not in a good mood, she put her manager on the Bluetooth.

“There’s so many conflicting thoughts going through your brain when you’re going through that situation,” explains Benny The Butcher. “There’s so much pressure.” The veteran rapper is commenting on a powerfully bleak bar from his long-awaited official debut album, Everybody Can’t Go, out today on Def Jam: “Stashing money in the bathroom ceiling, my mom’s bitching/ Cooking work, the microwave beeping sound like a bomb ticking.”

Suffering through shitty unpaid gigs doesn’t necessarily build character, but it can at least provide some perspective (or some enduring inside jokes) for bands who make it out of that phase. During Infant Island’s own infancy as a “DIY band of broke motherfuckers,” guitarist Alex Rudenshiold convinced his mates to participate in a University of Mary Washington talent show, eyes on the prize money that could finance their debut album. “It’s humiliating and embarrassing, but at least no one will be there,” he rationalized. This was a reasonable assumption given UMW’s smallish enrollment and marooned location in Fredericksburg, Virginia – almost exactly halfway between Richmond and Washington, DC. Yet, perhaps because of those qualities, a surprising portion of the student body came out to watch Infant Island play a thundering, metalgaze instrumental that failed to impress the judges more than “not one, but two yo-yo acts,” Rudenshiold laughs. “We ended up paying out of pocket. Didn’t win $500, didn’t even place, didn’t pass go.”

Where has Marika Hackman been my whole life? A quick run-down: After a handful of EPs, the English musician released her first full-length in 2015, We Slept At Last, a collection of elegiac ballads, released on the 1975’s label Dirty Hit. In 2017, she followed it with the more playful I’m Not Your Man on Seattle’s iconic Sub Pop, the gloom imbued with an acerbic attitude: “I’ve got your boyfriend on my mind/ I think he knows you stayed with me last night/ I held his world in my hands/ I threw it out to see where it would land,” she intoned on the opener “Boyfriend.” This flirty, more upbeat ambiance reached its peak on 2019’s Any Human Friend, a sultry pop masterpiece. After a covers LP in 2020 — on which she paid homage to Grimes, Elliott Smith, Radiohead, and more — Hackman is kicking off 2024 with Big Sigh, whose title kind of says it all.

Despite never hitting the charts, “Goodbye Horses” became the sleeper hit of the ‘90s after appearing in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs. Demme stumbled into a taxi driven by Diane Luckey during a mid-’80s NYC blizzard and became so smitten with her music that he included it in several of his films, most famously dropping the needle on “Goodbye Horses” for a scene featuring the androgynous serial-killer Buffalo Bill dancing naked with his genitalia tucked behind his crotch, caressing his nipple ring and applying makeup as his prisoner tries to escape. With its gentle coos and warm, echoing synth chords, “Goodbye Horses” became a symbol of counterculture.

“Everything is too pretty right now, so I am bringing back an ugly truth,” answers Bronx-born rap artist ScarLip (real name Sierra Lewis) when asked to describe her appeal and the role she feels she can potentially play within hip-hop culture across the 2020s.

When vaccines became available and the world began opening up again, many music fans wisely chose to play it safe by wearing masks to the live shows they had dearly missed. But Will Toledo, bandleader of Car Seat Headrest, took it one step further.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in late October in New York City, and the Grammy winning jazz pianist, producer, writer, and arranger Robert Glasper has a problem that has plagued bandleaders for generations: With little notice, a crucial piece of his ensemble has bailed on an upcoming gig, and he now needs to find a fill-in on the fly.

Most music fans who know Jon Brion’s name recognize him as one of the greats. It’s likely you’ve heard the composer, producer, and pop singer-songwriter’s work with Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Elliott Smith, and many others. Perhaps you’re aware he scored prestige art-film classics like Magnolia, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and Lady Bird. Maybe you’re even acquainted with his lone official solo album, 2001’s Meaningless (reissued last year), or his short-lived band the Grays with Jason Falkner. But real heads know there’s a goldmine of unreleased Brion music floating around that’s as good or better than what actually came out through official channels.

When all is said and done, Rob Harvilla will make at least 120 episodes of his podcast 60 Songs That Explain The ’90s. As you might’ve guessed from the title, this was not the plan. Rob’s show is my favorite music podcast in the world, and its willingness to veer outside its own bounds is one of the great things about it. The idea, at least as far as I can tell, was to use individual and iconic songs — the first three episodes were on Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” the Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy,” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” — to explore what was going on during this particular decade. But Rob’s explanations are never just explanations, and the show became another thing.

This past June was shaping up to be a typical month for Delaware metallic hardcore wreckers Year Of The Knife — which is to say it was busy as hell. They’d just returned home from a May weekender in New England supporting the Acacia Strain, which itself came on the heels of a month-long run in Europe with Unearth and Misery Index. Before that, they’d done a few stray headliners and a series of record release shows for Sanguisugabogg’s Homicidal Ecstasy. June began with a sold-out preshow for Detroit’s enormous Tied Down festival, and mid-month, they hit the road with Texas death metal rising stars Creeping Death and Fleshrot. According to setlist.fm data, Year Of The Knife were on pace to shatter their personal record for most shows in a year by July.

There aren’t many indie bands that can say they owe their existence to Ryan Gosling, but Austin’s Sun June is one that can. Lead vocalist Laura Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury, the project’s two songwriters, both arrived in the city looking for work as editors in the film industry. They ended up working together on the Terrence Malick movie Song To Song, which is about the interpersonal goings-on of a bunch of struggling musicians, one of whom is portrayed by Gosling. During long days with nothing to do in the production office, unsupervised while Malick was in LA finishing up production, Colwell and Salisbury started jamming on an acoustic guitar that Gosling had left in the office.

“That was a demo that I made in an hour. I submitted it as an assignment for a creative writing class. That’s how old this song is, I was still in school.”

Katie Dey calls in from her home studio in Melbourne, nestled between the various synthesizers and keyboards and computer monitors that make up a corner of her bedroom. “If I had the money to do it elsewhere,” she says about her creative process, “I would do it. But no, it’s all in my bedroom.”