A cult following is an extremely potent force in the music industry. Guaranteeing longevity, fan devotion and a consistent consumption of output, a dedicated following…
Going right back to the first throes of Bloc Party’s career, Kele Okereke has never been afraid to talk about big issues in his music.…
When listening to Greentea Peng for the first time, the correlation between her name and her sound is instantly noticeable. Like a late-night brew, her…
Warmduscher’s rather striking third studio album Tainted Lunch, begins at it means to go on: weirdly. Its opening track, ‘Rules Of The Game’, is less of a…
After the immense success he has faced with his first two albums Home Again and Love & Hate, Michael Kiwanuka is back with Kiwanuka, his…
Since 2018’s excellent EP with Iggy Pop titled Teatime Dub Encounters, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith have engaged in a year-long creative experiment titled Drift,…
Founded in the unassuming surroundings of the university town of Chapel Hill in North Carolina in 1989, Merge Records has proved to be one of…
October 2019 has at least offered us the smallest silver lining in the form of new music, despite the outside world seeming to be creeping…
As a new academic year begins and the outdoors becomes a little less welcoming, remember you can catch up with all the best new music…
Gigs & Festivals
In 2019, with five excellent albums in a row spanning a decade, Joe Mount’s Metronomy are now one of the biggest live draws on the…
Black Lips @ Brudenell Social Club, Sunday 10th November Marking the 20th anniversary of their formation in 2019, and with their ninth studio album Sing…
Honeyblood @ Brudenell Social Club, Saturday 2nd November Modern indie favourites Honeyblood – now technically consisting of frontwoman Stina Tweeddale by herself – released their…
2000s
Looking back on the decade that’s passed since the quiet release of The xx’s debut album, it’s slightly strange to think of xx as a…
Big voice, big presence and big sound – the grandeur of Florence Welch and her Machine is something anyone who’s ever had a glimpse of…
It was about Dirty Projectors’ incredible breakout album Bitte Orca that Time Magazine’s Josh Tyrangiel birthed the immortal critical phrase “making the critic’s job undoable”…
1990s
Weeks before the turn of the 21st century, L.A. revolutionaries Rage Against The Machine unleashed a new album, reminding the world once again of the…
There’s a line in ‘How Fucking Romantic’, halfway through the first disc in The Magnetic Fields’ massive triple-album 69 Love Songs, in which Dudley Klute,…
Who could’ve thought that an album that peaked well outside the Top 100 in the charts upon its release, regardless of the ‘underground’ following its…
1980s
1984 was a year of landmark underground albums in the American indie scene, with seminal records by Hüsker Dü, R.E.M. and Minutemen all released in…
In the aftermath of their legendary party-starting debut Licensed To Ill in 1986, Beastie Boys were in a curious place. They moved to the West…
Since their inception in the late ‘70s in the wake of punk, Robert Smith and the rotating cast of The Cure have become a globally…
1970s
A brief but hugely commercially successful and fondly remembered trend within British music at the end of the Seventies, a point at which the social…
It’s strange even now to conceive of an avowedly left-wing post-punk band, particularly one named after a particularly brutal political faction of communist China associated…
Synthesisers had been in use in popular music long before our collective consciousness normally recognises them as having appeared in the charts. Edgar Froese had…
1960s
Progressive rock, or ‘prog rock’, has consistently had something of a tainted reputation in the world of music criticism ever since the punk revolution in…
Not only is it one of the defining pop culture images of the 20th century, but, in retrospect, the iconic front cover of Abbey Road…
In contrast to the mythologising that often surrounds rock star deaths, the story of Nick Drake is not a remotely glamorous one. Instead, it is…
As a companion piece to our annual end-of-year albums list published earlier this month, The Student Playlist presents The Top 50 Tracks of 2018. You…
Although it’s been a year pock-marked with political and social uncertainty, that sense of upheaval and tension has resulted in some pretty fine art being…
Revisiting any period in popular music is always interesting, insofar as one’s memories of it change and evolve as time passes and the present gets…
Usually, when summarising the career of an artist in the wake of tragedy, there is a formality to the style, one filled with clichés like…
Lennon and McCartney; Morrissey and Marr; the Gallagher brothers. Some of the most iconic pop music ever made has been predicated by immense partnerships. Looking…
It’s been almost two decades since Pavement were active in any meaningful way, the group’s component parts quietly parting ways in the pursuit of solo…
