Essays/Retrospectives

My hometown is always on the precipice of completion, and the people there hold their cards quite close to their chest. I went home for the holidays this past winter, and as I passed by the remnants of the now defunct Sam Ash I grew up across the street from—the one that Mike Kinsella recalls to have purchased his first guitar at—I thought of how many remarkable things come from being surrounded by what feels inherently unremarkable. The town in question—Buffalo Grove, Illinois—is a part of a ha...

Radiohead as it exists today is not simply the band composed of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and co., but instead the bands that have started and thrived from their influence. Yorke and Greenwood continue to make music together as The Smile, but the output of that band has proven that the two are a bit past their prime. Their music as The Smile still has that Radiohead je ne sais quoi, but they have certainly lost much of their edge with age. That being said, there is still a reason why Radiohead...

It takes a certain je ne sais quoi to be the driving force of a cultural moment and having your album cycle’s visuals co-opted by every brand, organization and Trader Joe’s chalk art in the West. The age of monoculture has become fleeting over the past 10 years, as state-of-the-art social media algorithms have turned the wet dreams of shareholders into reality. Not only does this reality incentivize artists to extract their niche from the context of elemental consumer culture they feel would bes...

Mitski’s meteoric rise over the past year of her career has been nothing short of an anomaly. Last September, the former indie darling garnered her first Billboard-charting single with “My Love Mine All Mine,” peaking at #26. It doesn’t seem like Mitski (or her team) did anything in pursuit of this song becoming the hit that it is—it just sort of happened, which is even more confounding, considering that “My Love Mine All Mine” wasn’t even one of the album’s three pre-release singles (“Bug Like...