I'm resilient. I've been through lots of highs and lows including a health battle with cancer and I'm still here, still standing, still singing.
There's a particular way artists talk about San Francisco when the city has truly mattered to them-not as scenery, but as a place where something shifted. For Cate Le Bon, the Bay Area lives in that register, folded into memory, music, and a formative period that still resonates beneath the surface of the Welsh singer-songwriter's work. "I've spent a lot of time in San Francisco," she says, simply.
At the time, she told US Weekly, "I loved the idea of how all these guys always are stealing other guys' girls and I was like, 'There's no female anthem for a girl stealing another guy's girl,' so she went ahead and made one. The single's visuals brought a story to that idea, following suburban teen friends Coley and Sonya as they realize they have deeper feelings for each other, despite the fact that the latter has a boyfriend."
I didn't hear Deceptacon by Le Tigre when it was released in 1999, but I was at a friend's house while he was out, going through all his records, and played it by random. It shook me to the core and I think I played it 100 times in on repeat, dancing around, completely excited. I had never heard something so angry and feminine.
When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche's avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn't coexist with a campaigner's political urgency on environmental and social issues.
Boston screamo/post-hardcore band The Saddest Landscape are back with their first new album in a decade. Alone With Heaven is due out April 24 via Iodine, and produced in part by the late Steve Albini, one of the last projects he worked on before his death in 2024. They also recorded it with Jack Shirley, and it features appearances from Touché Amoré's Jeremy Bolm, Into It. Over It.'s Evan Weiss, and Julien Baker. We have an exclusive "Where Angels Ascend" cloudy vinyl variant, limited to 100 copies. Pre-order yours in the BV shop.
As a teenager, your biggest concerns may include embarrassment in front of peers, family structural stability, and romantic relationships. As an adult, your biggest concerns are likely similar. Another teenage fear might be someone finding your journal, reading your deepest joys and terrors of personhood. The second album from Portland's Nonbinary Girlfriend realizes that fear, listening like an evolutionary confessional of what it is to be a human in the 21st century.
"(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses," the new single from Davis' forthcoming Graceland Way, is a freewheeling girls' trip (with Tim Heidecker) that coasts into "Wide Open Spaces"-level jubilation. Recorded just a 20-minute drive from Laurel Canyon, these tight chorus harmonies and sun-kissed pedal steel wear their Californian influence like a bedazzled Stetson.
With so much good music being released all the time, it can be hard to determine what to listen to first. Every week, Pitchfork offers a run-down of significant new releases available on streaming services. This week's batch includes new albums from Ari Lennox, Lucinda Williams, and Cat Power. Subscribe to Pitchfork's New Music Friday newsletter to get our recommendations in your inbox every week.
The 24-year-old Queens rapper spent the 10 hours before her sixth LP dropped walking on a giant self-propelled wheel on view in a gallery in Lower Manhattan, staring ahead and staying quiet as the record played on a loop. The exhibit streamed live on Twitch; inside the gallery, fellow streamers and a smattering of real fans with signs and bouquets watched, too.
What if the next No. 1 album didn't come from the industry? What if it came from all of us? Unfortunately, 'all of us' is never as simple as it sounds, and the crowdsourced Everybody's Album—which did not chart, because of a technicality—was not simple in the slightest. Somewhere in this bloated, gestating glut was a topography of internet music, all bitcrushed MIDI and fried Focusrites.
Raised in Scotland's remote and sparsely populated Outer Hebrides, folk singer Jule Fowlis was immersed in Scottish Gaelic language and traditions.
Over the years, Andrews has garnered comparisons to fellow Arizona native Linda Ronstadt for her rich, clear tone, which can modulate from quivering vibrato to crystalline belt on a dime. From the first piercing high of opening track "Pendulum Swing," Andrews commands her dynamic voice across Valentine, swinging into phrases with the grace and gravity of a trapeze artist.