In 1987, David Bowie was feeling relaxed. In later years, he’d claim maybe less so, but doing the rounds of interviews to promote Never Let Me Down was old hat in terms of procedure, and so sitting down with Scott Isler for a feature that would be the cover story of a major US music monthly…

HomeEssaysCollectionsExploreShopSupport PDRAboutBlog Search The Public Domain Review Support PDR EssaysCollectionsExploreShopAboutBlog Give the gift of a PDR print this holiday seasonExplore Our PrintsSuperb archival quality. Framed or unframed. Free shipping. Essays Picturing a Voice Margaret Watts…

CHICAGO — Just days after Operation Midway Blitz began, an ICE agent fatally shot Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, a 38-year-old man, during a traffic stop in suburban Franklin Park. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed one agent was “seriously injured” after being dragged by Villegas…

It's human to want light and warmth. Our pagan ancestors had a calendar of fire festivals, and God's first recorded words, according to the Hebrew Bible, were: "Let there be light." Night belongs to the dark side, literally and metaphorically: ghosts, scary monsters, robbers, the unknown.…

I like year-end list season. I like an opportunity to remember and reflect on the records that stuck with me over the course of a year – especially when there is a chance to recommend something that others may have overlooked. I like looking through friends’ favourites for albums that I missed…

The episode always begins the same way. A body is found, detectives arrive, and the camera cuts to the courtroom. The doors swing open, mahogany gleams, the seal of the state hovers above the bench, and the audience instantly knows what kind of space this is—solemn, orderly, incontestable. Before a…

Ian Russell describes his life as being split into two parts: before and after 20 November 2017, the day his youngest daughter, Molly, took her own life as a result of depression and negative social media content. “Our life before Molly’s death was very ordinary. Unremarkable,” he says. He was a…

Like most of us over the past ten years, I am struggling with how to live my daily life against the backdrop of a global slide into genocide and fascism. Because this is a music publication, I will narrow that down a bit: since the decisive ascension of Trumpist politics in my country, I have…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. If you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species. Like honeybees and red wolves, the population of American readers, Lector americanus, has been declining for decades. The most…

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a…

About an 8 minute read. Published January 14 2026 By Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Twenty-five years after it was founded, Wikipedia stands as an unrivalled achievement. Not only is it the single largest collection of information in human history, it has also built a stellar reputation…

Every Saturday, we’re going deep on one song we’ve never reviewed before. This week, we look back at New Order’s miraculous 1981 single that marked the end of Joy Division and forecasted the sound of the future. Discussed: New York in the fall, Joy Division bootlegs, imperfection, the most liminal…

Photo by Pat Rainer Alex Chilton was born in 1950. Had he lived he’d have turned 75 years old yesterday. Here’s some thoughts I had about Alex that I wrote sometime back for Magnet. Tom Waits once described Alex Chilton as “the Thelonius Monk of the rhythm guitar”. That sounds about right. I heard…

When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn’t remember making them. When…

The interplay between repetition and variation is central to how we perceive structure, rhythm, and depth across mediums. By: Samuel Jay Keyser BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently. Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s…

“For Richard Kirk,” says Stephen Mallinder, as his first words of the evening on stage. A mighty roar erupts inside the former Victorian steel forge in tribute to the late founding member who passed away in 2021. It dissipates into the strange, eerie opening of 1980’s ‘The Voice of America/The…

In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.” She found the Old World lacking in civic maturity and commitment…

For this feature, we asked tQ’s esteemed contributors to select their favourite books about music. We’ve decided to omit straight-up memoirs (no Art Sex Music, unfortunately!) in favour of biographies, histories, compendiums and outsider explorations. In response, we received a hefty list of…

‘You guys would freak out if you drove down Grand Avenue now,” says Tortoise multi-instrumentalist Dan Bitney. These days, this major Chicago thoroughfare is looking pretty bougie. “Expensive flower stores, bakeries, cafes. Back when we were there, it was empty streets, motorcycle gangs.” He shakes…

Doors Closing With ridership lagging and a fiscal reckoning looming, the L is in trouble. Here’s why our train is worth saving. April 21, 2025, 6:00 am Graham Garfield gazes pridefully from the northernmost perch of the Belmont L station in Lake View. Officially, Garfield is the general manager of…

In October 2007, after some gentle lobbying of Hyperdub boss Steve Goodman (Kode9), I had the incredible privilege of interviewing Burial. Back then, after his mesmerising first two EPs and self-titled debut album, his identity was known by just a handful of people. “Only five people know I make…

Whenever the story of shoegazing is told today – when Slowdive reform to headline festivals or Lush announce comeback dates – it typically reads like a story of betrayal. A wave of young bands in thrall to the sound of My Bloody Valentine come barrelling out of Southern England to wild media…

Music A new biography on the New Wave crew underlines their unsung importance—everyone from the Strokes to the Killers to Nirvana took lessons out of Ric Ocasek’s playbook. So why are the Cars rarely mentioned among the great American rock bands? MusicA new biography on the New Wave crew underlines…

On November 18, 1993, Nirvana performed a long-planned acoustic set in New York for the MTV Unplugged series. The show had been running since 1989 and had become something of an institution. The premise was pretty simple – big name pop and rock artists performed a set of their hits stripped down to…

Photo by Eugene Adebari There are many different strands to Soft Cell’s debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. The record filtered the faded seaside sleaze of Dave Ball and Marc Almond’s upbringings, in Blackpool and Southport respectively, through the bold electronic experimentation that brought them…

What does Carrier sound like? The answer to that question has so far proven to be rather elusive. Although music journalists and headsy listeners have enthusiastically embraced the project over the past two years, they routinely struggle to succinctly describe the music, probably because there’s…

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in cinemas in late 1975 with little fanfare, but the provocative musical, with its campy parody of sci-fi and horror B-movies, fabulous costumes and rollicking songs, dug its glittering heels in and refused to let go for the next 50 years. The film was an…

The Caretaker at the Barbican. Photo by Matt Colquhoun I’m fairly certain that, in talking about the prospect of Repeater Books’ since-published k-punk anthology, shortly after the death of Mark Fisher in 2017, it was Fisher’s friend and colleague Kodwo Eshun who suggested that a great name for the…

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in The Painter Of Modern Life, at once captivated and repulsed by the metamorphosis of Paris around him. Many artists since have tried to convey the spirit or pathology of modernity in specifically modern…

A new photography book, Drumz Of The South: The Dubstep Years 2004-2007 captures the early years of dubstep, depicting an important cultural moment in UK musical history. Charlie Bird talks to photographer Georgina Cook about the invention and excitement of the time, the influence of South London,…

10 Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit one of the manifestos of indie rock, a landmark 1992 album whose emotional peaks and diamond-sharp hooks are cloaked in fuzz, feedback, and…

The crowd at DMZ, one of the dubstep scene’s two most iconic club nights, along with FWD>> This article originally appeared on VICE UK. My relationship with dubstep dates back about a decade. I left school in Glasgow in 2005 and thought I’d go to university, but was too busy drinking cider in the…

Dominating the music news in 1984 was the early passing of one Black American master and the fullest arrival of another. On 1 April that year in Central Los Angeles, Marvin Gaye Jr was fatally shot following an altercation with his father, the highly complicated Christian pastor Marvin Gay Sr. The…

There’s no denying that Songs Of A Lost World was a monumental latter-day triumph. But let’s be honest for a minute: how many times have you re-listened to it since its release in November 2024? Be honest now and take into account how morbid it was, even by the standards of The Cure. For 50 minutes,…

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the…

2983 words | Dan Hollick From electron guns to tiny electric crystals - digital displays have always been the unsung hero of computing. ╌╌╌╌ I understand the irony of starting this book about software, talking about hardware. But there isn't a more under appreciated technology in modern computing…

Afterword For the Back Street Kids The voice of Ozzy Osbourne was unlike anything before it. It changed rock’n’roll, opened up the metal genre, and became the innate sound of alienation, darkness, and high gothic drama. John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats reflects on the loss of the singular…

THE HARDCORE CONTINUUM, or, (a)Theory and Its Discontents The text of a talk by Simon Reynolds delivered at FACT, Liverpool, Wednesday 11th February 2009. PLUS notes for points to be brought up during the dialogue segment with Mark Fisher but weren't owing to time running out PLUS afterthoughts on…

The last time I visited my father, I walked into his $11,000-a-month room in a posh assisted living residence and found him curled up on the floor. My sister Amy and I knelt down, touched him, and asked if he was okay. “I don’t know,” mumbled Dad, 96, a retired physician and lifelong outdoorsman. “I…