Charlotte Day Wilson was the satin surface in the “smooth-ass R&B” Toronto quartet The Wayo . Her low voice draped around their suave arrangements just like Sade ’s around her group of smooth operators. A smoldering guest spot on BADBADNOTGOOD ’s recent ’70s jukebox number “In Your Eyes” made her…

The Sharon Jones survivor story is well-known to her loving fans: Jones beat pancreatic cancer in 2013 and circumvented the music industry more than a dozen years earlier. She’s never been short on insight or frankness when confronting those matters, as seen at the 2014 EMP Pop Conference keynote…

It seems reasonable now to look back on late 2012 as the Time of Mac. That fall, independent music fans en masse embraced the twinkly delights of scrub hero Mac DeMarco ’s 2 , opening the door for legions of low-key fiends ready to peddle their slinky, ’70s AM radio-inspired songs. Folks like Travis…

Our interview series Icebreaker features artists talking about things—some strange, some amusing, some meaningful—that just might reveal their true selves. This edition features indie-rap vet Aesop Rock , whose latest album, The Impossible Kid , is out now on Rhymesayers. What’s the biggest musical…

Sometime in the spring of 2008, I was sitting under the bleachers of a high school track-and-field stadium in South St. Paul, Minnesota. There were still a few hours before I was scheduled to run the 3,200 meters, but my friend Dante was talking my ear off about Outkast . In particular, he was…

There’s this story in *The New York Times Magazine *where the writer asks his subject, Jerry Seinfeld, why he still spends months on the road. The comedian, worth nearly a billion dollars, could retire with his family to a private beach somewhere; if he wanted to chase some grand artistic dreams, he…

For nearly 20 years, the Minneapolis rapper-producer duo Atmosphere —Slug (Sean Daley) and Ant (Anthony Davis), respectively—have been trying to find a balance. The alt-sloping founders of the indie rap stable Rhymesayers have been teetering between identities as idols (to a cult-like following of…

Lance Washington was four years old when a heart attack killed his father. Raised in Chicago, Washington moved to Arizona for college, where he planned to study film. He developed a dependency on Adderall and dealt with depression during his freshman year, something he helped counter by writing…

In 1977, New York City was in turmoil: the crime rate was high, morale was low and a serial killer was on the loose . Yet, as the social fabric was disintegrating across the five boroughs, artistic creativity was thriving. Punk rock shows attracted crowds too large for even the scene’s most popular…

There is a ridiculous scene in the pilot of HBO’s “Vinyl” where Richie Finestra accidentally discovers hip-hop. A traffic jam has forced the burnt-out record executive, played by Bobby Cannavale, to detour through the Bronx. He makes his driver pull over when he hears music spilling out of a…

After a disastrous week of feuds and plummeting poll numbers, Republican leaders have concluded that Donald J. Trump is a threat to the party’s fortunes and have begun discussing how soon their endangered candidates should explicitly distance themselves from the presidential nominee. For Republicans…

If PJ Harvey had her way, she would have made her public debut on Slint ’s Spiderland . At age 20 or so, she answered the Kentucky five-piece’s call for a female backing vocalist, but never heard back. In one way, you can imagine it: both subtly violent acts from their respective south, with the…