We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Back when Nation Of Language were releasing their 2020 debut album Introduction, Presence, frontman and songwriter Ian Devaney said he hoped the band’s music would create “a space in which to ache.” Since first naming them a Band To Watch in 2018, we witnessed NOL ascend from a local NYC act to, just recently, stepping onto arena stages opening for Death Cab For Cutie. Dance Called Memory — their Sub Pop debut, out this Friday — is their fourth album in five years. And as their stature has risen with each release, the space in which to ache has only grown larger.

The plan was to meet at Doug Dulgarian’s apartment. Turns out I’m at his second home. Expecting a far more residential locale, I check my phone to confirm I’m in the right place. ‘I too am almost there,’ reads the text.” I cup my hand above my brow and scan the sidewalk for a familiar face.

“How quickly we rot back into the earth and start over.” So go the final lines of Algernon Cadwallder’s 2008 debut album Some Kind Of Cadwallader. The Pennsylvania emo band would release just two studio albums before disbanding in 2012, a mere seven years after their formation. At least their initial run was longer than that of their primary influence, Cap’n Jazz, the Illinois punks who went uncelebrated until after their members earned later notoriety as members of American Football, the Promise Ring, and Joan Of Arc. Algernon’s members, too, would continue in various other projects, but internet word-of-mouth cemented their origin story. In 2018, Algernon Cadwallader reissued their catalog after years of it only being available on Bandcamp or niche corners of YouTube. Then, in 2022, the unimaginable happened: They went on a reunion tour. Call that aforementioned lyric a self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever, but judging by the way Peter Helmis speaks about his writing process now, he probably just thought those words sounded cool.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

“Let me know if it gets too windy!” says shame’s Charlie Steen, sitting in a park under a blue London sky on a fine late afternoon in August. “Are you hearing me okay?” Some gusts have kicked up during our hour-plus Zoom conversation, and there’s not much other than Mother Nature that could interfere with the booming baritone of one of modern rock’s most captivating frontmen. Whether he’s speaking, singing or a combination of the two – a frequent approach in shame songs – Steen is nearly always able to cut through, usually in a wry and engaging way.

Raekwon has a very specific recurring memory of riding his bike up Staten Island’s Todt Hill as a child. After 20 minutes or so, he’d end up at the illustrious Benedict Road neighbourhood, a place where many high-ranking members of the Mafia were based. Parked on the curb, he and his friends looked up in awe at the swanky four-story home of Paul Castellano, the former boss of the Gambino crime family.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

The Beths have written some of the best power-pop in recent years. The band from Auckland, New Zealand — consisting of Liz Stokes (vocals/guitar), Jonathan Pierce (guitar), Ben Sinclair (bass) and Tristan Deck (drums) — has so far put out three albums of perfectly crafted, insanely catchy guitar music, headed up by Stokes’ conversational and introspective lyricism. It’s been a pretty straightforward formula, and while they’ve gotten better and better, they’ve rarely strayed very far from it.

Next week David Byrne will release Who Is The Sky?, his first album since 2018’s American Utopia, which became a Tony Award-winning Broadway production. Produced by Kid Harpoon, the new LP features Hayley Williams, St. Vincent, Tom Skinner, and arrangements by Ghost Train Orchestra.

Speaking things into existence is a powerful tool, even if it’s just a casual comment to then-strangers on your first day at college orientation. It might initially seem insignificant, but when that comment becomes real years later, it feels like time folding in on itself – your future self catching up with your past self and vice versa. That’s the kind of spiritual déjà vu that comes to mind when I speak to Racing Mount Pleasant members Connor Hoyt, Kaysen Chown, Sam DuBose, and Sam Uribe about how their big-band folk rock project came together.

It can be so hard to succinctly pin down what goes into the “ecstatic black metal” of Los Angeles band Agriculture that sometimes that self-proclaimed label feels incomplete. At the very least, the band itself feels that way about their most recent work. “This record is not really a black metal record,” vocalist and guitarist Dan Meyer offers as a disclaimer about The Spiritual Sound, the group’s sophomore album. Sure, there are blast beats and thundering drop-tuned riffs aplenty, but there are just as many passages where the clouds suddenly part and the entire light of a song will shift. Touchpoints that call to mind black metal or thrash or doom take up just as much real estate as the stretches that feel right in line with shoegaze or post-rock. If The Spiritual Sound can be considered “a black metal record,” it plays pretty damn loose with what a black metal record can sound like.

Asher White thrives in contradictions. The Brooklyn-based artist’s music clearly draws on the pop canon, but her songs rarely unfurl with the expected linearity or instant accessibility associated with pop music. She has an affection for solitary home recording, clashing instrumental assemblage, and outré sonic experimentation, but she’s also able to tap into a reservoir of viscerally catchy melodies. She has over a dozen albums publicly available online, yet she feels like she’s still just scratching the surface of where her career could take her.

“Worst song ever made.” Eight days ago, a guy in Seattle named Justin Boldaji tweeted those words along with video of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros performing “Home” in an NPR Tiny Desk concert. In the footage, Jade Castrinos (hair cropped short, wearing a T-shirt, her shoulders emphatically swaying) is locked into a loving gaze with Alex Ebert, whose appearance (long-haired, bearded, shirtless under a white suit jacket) was recently summed up by journalist Jeremy Gordon with the phrase “Father John Misty as a cult leader.” Most days, I feel like this song’s charms outweigh its hokey affectations, but both “Home” and this specific performance are shamelessly earnest in a way that might strike you as and cloying.

You have to live some life to write like Alexandra Levy. Some musicians come out with a new album because it’s been a few years since the last one, but the songs on when i paint my masterpiece — the multi-disciplinary artist’s new album as Ada Lea, out today — seem to have emerged out of necessity. The album strikes a difficult balance in that it feels like an outpouring of Levy’s heart and soul but is also carefully considered at every turn. Not that it’s a perfectionist project; the music is pleasingly loose and shaggy, and Levy sings like a real human being rather than a cursive-voiced machine. But you can tell how much thought went into the lyrics, the arrangements, the sequencing.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Despite the flash flood, Union Pool is packed on Thursday night for John Maus’ sold-out show. It’s his first New York performance in over five years. The experimental-pop musician always possessed reclusive tendencies, but that intensified when photos circulated of him and his longtime musical accomplice Ariel Pink standing outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the pro-Trump riots. Many assumed the pair attended in support of Trump; Pink worsened the situation with a self-pitying appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight in which he referred to Trump’s “unprecedented success as US president.” Maus, in his typical cryptic fashion, posted Mit Brennender Sorge, a 1937 encyclical by Pope Pius XI widely interpreted as a critique of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and then more or less disappeared. He was slated to play George Clanton’s Queens festival ElectroniCON in 2023 but was ultimately dropped from the lineup amid backlash.

The Roadhouse Band is a relatively new entity, but Ryan Davis has been at this forever. The Louisville-area singer-songwriter spent over a decade making “punked-up country gunk” with State Champion, a band he formed with close friends, born out of youthful abandon. In 2007, to release State Champion’s earliest music, he launched the record label Sophomore Lounge, which has built up a fascinating, diverse catalog — “everything from Chicago footwork records to noise rock records to folk records,” he explains on a video chat from the front porch of his father’s countryside Kentucky home.

Cuntry, the sophomore album from New York-based multidisciplinary artist Cleo Reed, is a love letter to folk music — a borderless music rooted in memory and a call to action. Black, queer, and non-binary, Reed understands that folk traditions stretch across geographies and genres, collecting the voices of those simply trying to survive. Across Cuntry, they tap into the legacy of working-class soundtracks — blues, dembo, zydeco, house, country, go-go — music that’s long served as a rhythm of resistance.

Billie Marten was ready for something new. Since she was 17, the London-based singer-songwriter born Isabella Sophie Tweddle had been pouring her heart out into the sorts of gorgeous folk-pop songs that can take your breath away. With Dog Eared, out this Friday, Marten, now in her mid-twenties, sought to transform her creative process, to situate herself amidst a vibrant creative community and let inspiration strike. She wasn’t necessarily de-centering herself within her own music — these are still her songs, and that’s still her voice singing them — but she was leaving lots of room for her cast of collaborators to color around the edges and in some cases radically reshape her compositions.

Some of the considerable appeal of Pavements — the unconventional new movie about indie rock icons Pavement, now streaming on MUBI — is derived from how it sidesteps music documentary tropes in ways that mirror the band’s own subversion of rock stardom.

Few openers in recent memory set the tone of an album quite like Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals’ “The Iron Wall.” It’s immediately nerve-shredding, as producer Infinity Knives (né Tariq Ravelomanana) programs an atonal sequence and jittery drums that tumble over each other like a charging rock slide. When rapper Brian Ennals sneers “Yo” a second before his verse, it’s like he’s bumping boxing gloves together, but his first two lines land like a brass knuckles uppercut: “For four generations, your boots up on they neck/ October 7th happened, the fuck did you expect?”

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

A man is convinced a gang of mischievous creatures is psychologically torturing him — messing with the temperature of his apartment, cooking food and playing vinyl, ransacking the pantry. But he’s gonna beat the little fuckers at their own game. He slips on his Crocs and, over a flurry of discordant guitars and bludgeoning drums, screams: “I’m going to smoke them out of my house/ They won’t go, so I’ll go, but I’ll take them with me.” This isn’t the plot to some sci-fi thriller, but the crux of “Neighbors,” the abrasive lead single and opening track of Glasgow five-piece Humour’s debut album Learning Greek.

There’s a scene in The Sopranos where Paulie Gualtieri is sharing recycled stories over dinner. Paulie cushions his punchlines with thick bursts of nervous laughter, the New Jersey mafia captain sounding a lot like a constipated hyena.

Some things about Golomb feel preordained — as if their backstory was dictated by fate, as if their music has always existed. Not that they stumbled into their current upward trajectory. The Columbus power trio, who’ll make their debut on Philly’s esteemed No Quarter Records next month with sophomore album The Beat Goes On, have worked their asses off to write songs this potent and broadcast them to an audience far beyond their local scene. But from the origins to the output, it all seems meant to be.

Pig Pen, the hardcore band fronted by acclaimed chef and The Bear actor Matty Matheson, wasn’t formally unveiled until earlier this year, just weeks before their sold-out debut gig in Toronto. But the seed for the project was planted decades earlier, in the fertile soil of the Niagara-area punk scene of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Back then, you could usually find Matheson and his Pig Pen bandmates – Alexisonfire’s Wade MacNeil, the prolific solo artist and former Attack In Black frontman Daniel Romano, Daniel’s brother and frequent collaborator Ian, and Young Guv’s Tommy Major – either onstage or in the pit at the punk squats and church basements of St. Catharine’s and Port Colborne, at clubs up in Hamilton and theaters down in Buffalo.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

People keep giving McKinley Dixon Lego sets for some reason.

yeule is an eternal art student. Not necessarily in the literal sense (though the London-based artist studied fine art at Central Saint Martins College Of Art And Design) but in the devotional way they talk about an artist and the power of their frame. Over nearly two hours on a video call, that frame shifts from games like Final Fantasy or NieR: Automata to the harrowing works of Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, or Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger.

Possession is billed as Ty Segall’s sixteenth album, but that feels about as underreported as the tip jar at an anarchist cafe. You have to factor in the slew of side projects as well, like Fuzz, GØGGS, and Freckle, the last of which being a new band with Color Green’s Corey Madden, which put out an unreasonably slept-on self-titled debut just a few months ago. It’s an old cliche at this point that Segall never slows down, but part of why it’s been easy to keep up is because he insists on slicing through fresh terrain, often with new people holding on for dear life alongside him.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

I became obsessed with Every Noise At Once, the Glenn McDonald-created, Spotify-associated genre database, back in 2022. While the best way to use the site might’ve been to meet new-to-you musical styles from all over the world, I immediately loaded up their playlist for lo-fi indie. I’ve been drawn to homespun, fuzzy, sentimental indie rock/pop since I was a teenager in the bedroom pop boom days, so I wanted to see what the tech world considered “lo-fi indie.” There were some big names like Mac DeMarco and Alex G mixed with unsung heroes of my ’10s youth like Hello Shark and Cyberbully Mom Club. The Microphones and Duster hits were interspersed between They Are Gutting A Body Of Water and Feeble Little Horse tracks. The playlist was an endearing, genre-agnostic tour of scratchy indie, ranging from bedroom pop to screamo, that felt like it had some kind of stylistic or spiritual connection even with its extensive differences.

When Alien Boy first started playing shows in 2018, venues had no idea how to handle their fearsome three-guitar setup. Seven years later, the Portland music scene is inundated with loud, young rock bands, some of whom (including Growing Pains and Rhododendron) had members mentored by singer Sonia Weber at Portland’s School Of Rock. Yet Alien Boy’s sound remains distinct, an impossibly lustrous wall of guitar noise that sounds like a waterfall of molten gold, already fully formed on 2018’s Sleeping Lessons and its epochal opener “Somewhere Without Me.”

Curren$y is tip-toeing around various luxury sports cars, gradually leading me over to something important in the distance. He’s rocking a mischievous smile that reminds me of a 1990s kid who just spent their hard-earned pocket money on water pistols at the local Toys “R” Us.

When I get a hold of Kassi Valazza at her New Orleans apartment, she’s only been home for about 12 hours. She just flew in from Portland, where she lived for most of the past decade, to play a homecoming gig at the famed Laurelthirst Pub. Before that, she was in Australia for three weeks, opening for the folksinger John Craigie. (Valazza didn’t get to meet a koala, like every other band on your Instagram feed seems to when they tour Australia, but she did meet a quokka: “They come right up to you, and you can pet them, and they’re very cute.”) She’s exhausted. That’s the gig.

Bill Orcutt’s urgent, improvisational guitar music radiates inexplicability. Initially inspired by the blues, the Miami-born, San Francisco-based artist rose to cult legend status as a member of the noisy, experimental punk band Harry Pussy in the 1990s. After that act dissolved in 1997, following Orcutt’s divorce with romantic and creative partner Adris Hoyos, he moved to the Bay Area and shifted focus to filmmaking. Orcutt returned to music towards the end of the 2000s, rolling out dozens of confrontational instrumental solo records and collaborations at a steady clip, in addition to running the groundbreaking label Palilalia Records. He also designed the software Cracked, a live coding program that yields glitchy electronic textures. Across partnerships with the likes of Chris Corsano, Circuit des Yeux, and Okkyung Lee, Orcutt has emphasized an ability to straddle provocation and surrealism — his output is typically aurally demanding, while always evoking the beautiful chaos of flower petals blowing in spring wind.