Music Features

It’s a Tuesday in the Catskills, and Patton Magee and his bandmates in the Nude Party are making preparations for a weekly tradition: “Tiki Tuesday.” The garage-rock band, their producer Oakley Munson, and a few friends and girlfriends who’ve been quarantining with the group in their upstate New York home …

Although it’s sometimes forgotten, Kiss — and the band’s Gene Simmons in particular — played a key role in the early days of Van Halen. After seeing the then-unsigned band at an Los Angeles club in 1977, Simmons brought Van Halen to New York and produced their first demo. A …

Like many of Prince‘s former collaborators, Levi Seacer, Jr. still refers to his old boss in the present tense. Seacer joinedPrince’s post-Revolution touring band on bass not long before the release of 1987’s Sign O’ the Times, and stuck around as the band morphed into the New Power Generation, switching …

Sam Smith is reborn. At least that’s how it sounds on their new single “Diamonds” — three minutes and 34 seconds of catharsis. A little over a year ago, the London-bred singer/songwriter, whose pronouns are they/them, shared on Twitter that they’d spent the preceding year and a half in therapy, …

Earlier this month, Shannon Mingal, a digital marketer at Epic Records, received an unexpected text: A glossary of 40 to 50 phrases supposedly used by Gen Z, the sub-25, tech-savvy demographic whose preferences currently dictate the streaming charts, an all-important barometer of success in the music industry. The collection ranged …

Kesha had just finished previewing her new album, Rainbow, for industry types at a Los Angeles recording studio three years ago when she encountered a stout, bearded guy with a “friendly, happy” vibe in the hallway. “You must be an artist,” he said, referring to her bright-red Nudie suit festooned …

On a Friday evening this summer, a group of the most urgent voices in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, hip-hop scene took to a stage in the city’s Greenwood district to tell a story they felt the world needed to hear. “When [we] came out, the energy just shifted,” says St. Domonick, …

On the surface, AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s “Blinded by the Light,” and Tom Jones’ “Valerie” have nothing in common. They were recorded in different decades, targeted at different demographics, and they don’t sound even remotely alike. But they all feature the drumming of Chris Slade, a journeyman Welsh …

Bill Callahan begins his new song, “Pigeons,” with a greeting: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” He signs off, “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” Sandwiching his own work between the names of two musical luminaries might seem the height of hubris — if Callahan weren’t such a damn good songwriter himself. “Pigeons” is a …

Being Phoebe Bridgers is a pretty sweet gig. “I fucking love my life,” says the 25-year-old Californian. “My mom occasionally gets, ‘Are you related to Phoebe Bridgers?’ She fucking eats it up. And then she’ll be like, ‘I promised this couple that you would play their prom,’ and I’m like, …