“Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty,” a 21-year-old former Nickelodeon actor told the New York Times in a 2014 profile. But what, to Ariana Grande, did forgivable naughtiness entail? She may have risen to the public eye thanks to a role on children’s television – in her case, as a supporting player on Nick’s tween sitcom Victorious – but don’t be fooled: She’s no Miley Cyrus. She’s no Britney Spears. She’s a good girl, and she’ll blow your mind.

In Víctor Erice’s 1973 coming-of-age film The Spirit Of The Beehive, a young girl and her sister growing up in 1940s Spain see a mobile cinema’s screening of Frankenstein. “The film’s producers do not wish to present it without a preliminary word of caution,” goes the presenter’s spoken introduction. “But I would encourage you to not take it so seriously.” Six-year-old Ana takes it as gospel. Plagued by unanswerable questions – how could Frankenstein’s monster accidentally kill someone, and why would the villagers murder him in retaliation? – she sets out in search of unknowable answers. The real world’s monsters, she soon discovers, tend to hide in plain sight.

On the first song from Fontaines D.C.’s debut album Dogrel, Grian Chatten proclaimed: “My childhood was small/ But I’m gonna be big.” It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That 2019 record from the Dublin band — who’ve since relocated to London — instantly set them apart from the slew of other groups overpopulating the post-punk genre. That year, we named them a Band To Watch; the year after, they unveiled its follow-up, A Hero’s Death, which was honored as our Album Of The Week. Their third LP, Skinty Fia, was predictably extraordinary as well, but now, with Romance, Fontaines D.C. leveled up in ways that couldn’t have been expected.

When Garden State debuted in 2004, it felt like it was a movie made for me — a hopeless romantic millennial teen girl from New Jersey grappling with loneliness who had a fascination with pop culture and a burgeoning interest in music discovery thanks to my dad’s Sirius (not XM quite yet) account. The movie, which follows actor/waiter Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) as he returns home to New Jersey where he unpacks a lifetime of trauma after his mother dies and decides to go off of his antidepressants, felt like a love letter to my home state (and Braff’s).

The first album from FKA Twigs would be her final release without a proper title. Perhaps the naming scheme — starting with EP1’s eerie minimalism in 2012 and followed by the elegant R&B of 2013’s EP2 — was an attempt to keep some distance between Twigs, born Tahliah Barnett, and her listeners. As a professional back-up dancer, she was already far too aware of the foibles of visibility — she was beginning to get recognized in public for her dancing, but nothing beyond, “Hey, aren’t you that girl from that video?” LP1, released 10 years ago today, is, fittingly, a debut about the dance of perception: the power of delayed gratification, the intimacy of the slow reveal, the ultimate vulnerability of “do[ing] it” (you know what) with the lights on. In the dark, after all, it’s much harder to ask, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

The story of Oso Oso’s new album life till bones begins with tragedy: A month after recording the demos to what would become his 2022 LP sore thumb, emo-pop dignitary Jade Lilitri’s cousin and creative partner Tavish Maloney died suddenly at 24. Lilitri isn’t necessarily known for bringing collaborators into the studio – he’s admitted to being a bit controlling, playing most, if not all instruments himself – but Maloney had been there for the entire recording process. Lilitri wasn’t planning on releasing the demos as-is, but he decided the world had to hear those songs the same way Maloney last heard them. With a touch of minimal final mixing, Lilitri let sore thumb into the world. There was no other way to do it while keeping a quiet conscience.

It’s undeniable: Tyla is the face of amapiano. The 22-year-old Johannesburg singer established her pop-star status with last year’s “Water,” a Top 10 Billboard hit that brought the South African house subgenre to the masses. There are multiple reasons for its crossover success, not least of which is her unrelenting attitude towards becoming a household name. Concomitant to such strategizing is that her brand of amapiano is less concerned with winding, longform dance numbers — as is typical for her contemporaries — than bite-sized pop songs attuned to Western R&B.

“How do you feel when you’ve felt it all now? How do you see when you’ve seen it all?” Those are the last words Jack White sings on No Name, the rad new album he’s officially releasing today after slipping white label copies to unsuspecting Third Man Records customers two weeks ago. (The properly labeled album went on sale at Third Man shops today, and tomorrow it hits the internet and select indie record stores.)

Navy Blue’s new album is called Memoirs In Armour, but it’s more like memories in mist. Over the course of about 27 minutes, the Brooklyn-based spitter shrouds fractured recollections in floral, imagistic poetry, leaving listeners to sift through the dense metaphors to find the trauma and catharsis at the center. With its blend of hazily soulful production and esoteric self-created truisms, the LP plays out like an audio cipher; he unspools personal vignettes in layers of thoughts and sensations he leaves you to peel back. Like the best riddles, it’s all as tedious as it is engrossing, further evidence of the rhyme prowess that’s made him a face of New York’s underground vanguard.

Like much of downtown Portland, Project Pabst shuttered abruptly as the realities of COVID set in. Project Pabst launched as a fall festival in September 2014 before shifting to July in 2015. It remained a summer festival for the duration of its run, which was shorter than anyone anticipated. After expanding to Denver, Philadelphia, and Atlanta in 2017, the festival vanished, and a return to the old Portland-only format was planned for 2020.

Day 2 of Project Pabst — the resurrected Portland music festival where Stereogum was a media partner this year — began much like the previous day. The slightly overcast sky and pleasant breeze lasted for the first hour of the festival, giving way to relentless cheery sunshine. By 2:30PM on Sunday, the crowd was a bit thinner than Saturday but a little more lively. Saturday leaned toward black shirts and denim; Sunday was a more traditional mix of festival attire: colorful fits, glitter, dramatic sunglasses. Everyone was drifting, not in a rush to get anywhere. At the south end of the festival on the “Captain Pabst” stage, Kenny Mason did an admirable job of activating the small crowd that had filtered over. “Y’all probably only on your first or second beer,” he said between songs, “But my job is turn you the fuck up. We’re gonna work together.” And he really did get people moving. As I headed to the other stage, I heard him responding to an audience member: “I fuck with you too, thank you.”

Portland is less gray than people tend to expect; we don’t have the endless rainy gloom of Seattle, and in any case, the dark days are confined pretty neatly to the winter months. The summers here are the exact opposite — near endless unbroken sun that comes up before 6 AM and doesn’t disappear below the horizon until nearly 10 o’clock. If it gets hot, there’s not much rain to break up the heat, but you’re only suffering if you’re standing directly in the sun. When the sun slides behind a passing cloud, every breeze brings immediate relief.

“I was like, ‘Damn, we comin’ up on being old heads. It’s about to be our 10th anniversary. I should probably go ahead and tap in and make sure I set something up.'”

She started the show with “Bad Idea Right?” I was not ready for that. In her short career, Olivia Rodrigo has released two albums, and both of them have near-perfect opening tracks. “Brutal” and “All-American Bitch” are both revved-up, energetic statement-of-intent ragers. Both would’ve made great openers for Rodrigo’s first-ever arena tour. But no, she went with her best song.

The best possible outcome for a piece of art to have, I think, is to inspire its observers to make art themselves. When I first heard “Falling In Love Again” by Joyce Manor, a surge of excitement shot through me and I was gripped by a desire to create something as warm and evocative as that song. I grabbed my laptop and typed away, birthing my own little universe in the form of a short story. It wasn’t good, but I felt an inexplicable, intoxicating sense of connectedness, which only expanded once I heard the rest of the album it was from: Never Hungover Again by Joyce Manor, which turns 10 today.

There wasn’t supposed to be another album. According to the man himself, 2021’s The Ballad Of Dood And Juanita was to be the last Sturgill Simpson record. There would only be five. He’d said it time and time again, but how many musicians play this game of peekaboo? When cash stops flowing as heavily as it used to, a farewell tour can be the tempting financial diuretic for a band that needs to pay the bills. Fans will pony up, only to feel duped a handful of years later when the reunion tour is announced. Simpson always seemed too noble for that, so we took him at his word. With his vocal hemorrhage in 2021, it seemed like his retirement was a done deal.

For a brief and spectacular moment two decades years ago, it seemed like every band could be the Fiery Furnaces. Every band could make music bursting with ideas, suffused with charm, willing to try almost anything to give its listeners a thrill. Blueberry Boat, released 20 years ago this Saturday, was a double album whose signature tracks stretched past seven minutes in multi-part suites — not a rock opera (though it was fun to pretend that it was) so much as a masterful short story collection about the burning, globalized world. Today it stands as a pinnacle of indie’s artistic ambition, and a dense universe still open to exploration and discovery.

Is “Wilco (The Song)” off of Wilco: The Album a deep cut? Who cares — it was a perfect way for the band to end a fan-friendly Friday night set at Solid Sound 2024, because even when you’re playing nothing but (relative) obscurities and rarities, you still gotta finish with a statement.

The history of DIY punk rock in Washington, DC spans something like 45 years. In that time, DC punk has nurtured all sorts of vocalists: growlers, howlers, barkers, snarkers, whiners, moaners, yappers, zappers, preachers, screechers, gurglers, motormouths, dreamy waifs, deadpan wraiths, mock-operatic divas, whatever you want to call Ian Svenonius. For the life of me, however, I cannot remember a DC punk singer who delivers lyrics with Broadway-style flair. I’m not talking about the Broadway of generations past; I bet Shudder To Think’s Craig Wedren could’ve found a place there. I’m talking about recent Broadway — the precise, crystalline, self-aware diction that seems to thrive in movie-adaptation musicals like Mean Girls or Heathers. If you threw Ian MacKaye or HR or Mary Timony or Travis Morrison or Jael Holzman into one of those shows, bad things would happen. But Katie McD would be right at home.

“Best rapper alive since the best rapper retired.” I laughed out loud. Did he really say that? On a single? Lil Wayne? It seemed so far-fetched. Jay-Z’s fake retirement had only officially begun a few months earlier, and now this onetime bounce-rap child star was coming for Jay’s crown. I couldn’t believe the sheer moxie. Shows what I knew. Within a couple of years, Lil Wayne was almost indisputably the best rapper alive. When Jay-Z came out of retirement, Wayne was operating at peak power, and Jay looked lost and sauceless in comparison. If anything, Wayne’s boast didn’t go far enough.

It took less than one song to turn me into a full-fledged convert. Granted, it was probably 10 minutes long, and it shifted genre several times, so it felt like more than one song to an extent. But the length and breadth of it all was part of the appeal.

Let’s start at the top: I fell desperately in love with someone I knew was bound to fuck me up. So begins “Horny Hangover,” the second track and second single of Queen Of Jeans’ third album All Again. “We’re trying to tell the story of when you look back at an important relationship,” guitarist and pianist Matheson Glass explained about the LP. “Years go by, and the more you reflect on it, it becomes more warped and the facts become a little bit more murky.”

Before signing to a major label, working with Frank Ocean, writing scores for A24 movies, and going on network television, there was Tumblr. Alex Giannascoli is, first and foremost, an internet darling — a bedroom pop legend with the likes of Sam Ray, bulldog eyes, Elvis Depressedly, and salvia palth. From 2010 to 2012, RACE, WINNER, RULES, AND TRICK soundtracked the ennui and exasperation that proliferated on Tumblr, his simple yet piercing lyrics and uncanny ear for melody attracting a legion of fans.

If Water From Your Eyes take an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to making music, Nate Amos’ solo work as This Is Lorelei tosses in the whole damn kitchen. Referring to This Is Lorelei as Amos’ “side project” would be inaccurate. While the New York-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist is best known as half of the Matador-signed duo making anarchic, mechanical stoner pop, he’s been releasing an honestly intimidating amount of music under the This Is Lorelei moniker for the past decade, averaging at least one album every year, often an EP or two as well. Over the course of his discography, Amos has ricocheted between glitchy bedroom pop, soft folk balladry, rambly slacker rock, and noisy garage grunge. On Box For Buddy, Box For Star, he streamlines his focus without sacrificing his omnivorous sonic appetite.

Let’s call it right now: “Mr. Brightside” is the white “Back That Azz Up,” the white “Gasolina.” If you play “Mr. Brightside” at a sufficiently loud volume around a crowd of sufficiently drunk white people, bedlam will ensue. The song is a shared experience, a cultural staple. It’s still in the British charts after 20 years, making it the longest-running chart hit in UK history. Over there, it recently replaced “Wonderwall” as the biggest hit that never went to #1. “Mr. Brightside” will never go away. Every day, it’s a little harder to remember a world without that song. That world once existed. If you’re old enough, you might even vaguely recall a moment when “Mr. Brightside” was the flop-sweaty second single from one more fresh-faced band attempting to cash in on the return-of-the-rock hype.

Beyond their deft noise manipulations and how they stumbled into being expert songwriters, Sonic Youth distinguished themselves from their peers by loving Mariah Carey. On “Kim Gordon And The Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” bassist-guitarist Kim Gordon screeches a combination of fan letter and statement of support to the pop singer, then at the nadir of her career after her 2001 film debut Glitter bombed, taking 2002’s Charmbracelet down with it. The atonal boings and peels have as much to do with Carey’s ebullient bounce-to-the-ounce R&B readymades as Lydia Lunch does with Ashanti, but since 1990s “Tunic (Song For Karen)” Gordon had shown a touristic curiosity about female idols on whose shoulders the machista star-making machinery rests: a curiosity that deepened as Sonic Youth got acquainted with the David Geffens of the biz. A pro at chorus writing by 2004 when she felt like it, Gordon wrote one in the argot of conventional pop songs but without noblesse oblige: “Hey, hey little baby, get down/ Before you fall and hurt someone.”

When My Chemical Romance announced their breakup in March 2013, vocalist Gerard Way posted a letter to Twitter, where he said, “it is not a band – it is an idea.” The phrase captured the essence of My Chemical Romance. Their music came complete with plot and characters and world-building. Their videos were like movies, their albums so immersive they provided escape.

In 2010, when she was “Charli XCX” only on flyers for underground London raves, Charlotte Aitchison sang Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” as a performance art piece while studying at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art. It’s hard not to view the school project as a prophecy. Britney’s impact is woven throughout Charli’s career, culminating in a scrapped songwriting collaboration and a classically Britney Instagram diss: “They keep saying I’m turning to random people to do a new album … I will never return to the music industry !!!”

I always knew that the person whose name I’d call at the end of it all would be another Joanna Newsom superfan. Besides being into shit like elves and throwing ass once a year at a Ren Faire, what Newsom fans seem to have in common is a plant-like heart and an ability to see life from a falling pilot’s vantage point. In Newsom’s music, we hear someone prey to the most astounding human impulses. We hear someone so desperately trying to create something living, breathing, eternal from the inert universe. We hear someone throttling against death. We hear life sounded back to itself. I knew my future wife would get it.

Last year, Peggy Gou made a worldwide hit. Up until the moment that it happened, this didn’t seem especially likely. Gou was a well-known figure in the dance-music intelligentsia, the type of ultra-cool DJ who hangs out with Four Tet and plays terrifyingly fashionable European clubs. She was hugely successful in her universe, jetting all over the planet and maintaining a record label and clothing line as well as managing her own career. But her music — sparse, textured, perfectly manicured, in touch with its place in dance history — didn’t exactly seem likely to break out of its bubble and into the larger world. A track like 2019’s “Starry Night,” Gou’s biggest single until last year, is catchy and slinky and hypnotic, but it’s defined, at least in part, by its chilliness. That was not the case with “(It Goes Like) Nanana.”