New Jersey native Nicole Atkins has a sound that’s rooted in classic pop music, but it never sounds like pastiche because she brings so much charisma and vitality to it. She knows how to write and deliver a hook, too. Atkins has been putting out records for more than 20 years now, and she has made records with people like …

Uh Huh Her, the duo of LA synth-rockers Camila Grey and Leisha Hailey, named themselves after PJ Harvey’s 2004 album, and they started releasing their own music just three years after that LP came out. Uh Huh Her have been on an extended hiatus for more than a decade, ever since the release of their 2014 album Future Souls. Maybe …

“We’re gonna try to open the pit at the Olivia Rodrigo show,” Kate Halter grins. A month earlier, this would’ve been an insane thing to say. For one thing, Olivia Rodrigo shows don’t have pits. Rodrigo plays arenas, and those arenas are full of seats — seats that are now going for four-figure prices on the secondary market. Nobody moshes …

The deathlessly cool underground figure Jennifer Herrema was half of the notorious noise-rock duo Royal Trux, which means she’s been kicking around the weird-ass music universe for decades. Her music isn’t getting any less weird. Herrema got back together with her Royal Trux bandmate Neil Hagerty in 2015, and they released the album White Stuff in 2019, but that reunion …

How timely to be releasing a song called “Blue Vs. Pinkerton” this week! Just a few days ago Olivia Rodrigo sat down with YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano and named Weezer’s blown-out sophomore LP as one of her all-time favorites. Now Johanna Samuels has used the eternal debate between the band’s first two albums to illustrate the teenage search for …

More than 20 years ago, the instrumental trio Russian Circles came together in Chicago, and they’ve been making vast, searching post-metal ever since. These days, the three band members all live in different parts of the country, and they’ve got other things going on. Bassist/keyboardist Brian Cook, for instance, recently took part in the Botch reunion, and he’s in SUMAC …

I Know What I Saw, the debut album from Nashville heavy shoegazers Lockstep, is out exactly one month from today. The group shared lead single “Ash In The Water” in the spring, and this week they’re back with a video for “Dog In The House Of Plenty.” It’s an exquisite slow-creep that made me forget I’m sick of heavy shoegaze. …

Here’s a weird one! Mark Lee, a former member of the successful K-pop idol groups NCT 127 and NCT Dream, recently announced that he was going solo and splitting away from SM Entertainment, the South Korean talent-agency conglomerate behind the the various NCT sub-groupings, to launch his own label Upper Room. A few weeks later, Upper Room posted photos of …

Gordi, a 2016 Stereogum Artist To Watch, debuted new songs at shows in her native Australia this past autumn — Australian autumn, meaning March through May — and sold them as a tour-exclusive EP titled Nylon. The copies sold out entirely, and the strength of those sales on that five-week tour led the EP’s #3 debut on AIR’s 100% Independent …

The difficult-to-Google electronic folk band @ have not let search engine optimization stop their inexorable rise through the indie music world. In October, the duo of Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak will follow up their 2021 debut Mind Palace Music and 2024’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, @ EP with Autosmile, their first album for the storied 4AD label. …