Music Features

Last October, toward the end of recording his band’s new album, Car Seat Headrest frontman Will Toledo found himself in the middle of a terrifying panic attack. “I don’t like being in the studio without ideas,” he says. “It was really stressing me out.” The next day, instead of going …

On Monday, Travis Scott ruined my life. That was the day the rapper announced he would be holding a concert in Fortnite, the wildly popular battle royale game, and my editor informed me that I would be covering it. My response was immediate. “Not going to lie, this is my …

Pretty much every singer-songwriter who achieves any kind of success on their own eventually struggles with the same question: Keep things spare, or scale up, trying out a lusher sonic palette? Some who take the latter route stumble, but Elliott Smith soared. Figure 8 — the final album he released …

When Adam Schlesinger developed symptoms of the coronavirus in mid-March, his friends thought he would pull through. A healthy 52-year-old, he’d been blessed all his life with both talent and luck. He was the most boundlessly energetic person any of them knew, with a career unlike any other indie songwriter’s …

Fifty years on from the birth of heavy metal, it’s worth taking a minute to reflect on just how far the genre has come since then. Or maybe just eight and a half minutes, the running time of “Stare Into Death and Be Still,” a titanic and transporting new song …

Mandy Moore is more famous these days as an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated actress on the hugely popular family drama This Is Us, but she’s never stopped thinking about the music that came first. Moore, now 35, became a TRL-era superstar at 15 with the bubblegum-pop hit “Candy,” and made …

Some pop stars might go through a few different versions of the video for their first solo hit; Normani went through about 50. Written with Max Martin and Normani’s tourmate Ariana Grande, “Motivation” was a blast of airy, sexy, rhythmically savvy pop. In the video, released last summer, Normani romps …

Robbie Robertson’s plaintive “Once Were Brothers,” from his Sinematicalbum, shares its title withOnce Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, a documentary about Robertson’s life and often wild times with the group that made him famous. The film opens in New York and L.A. on February 21 and nationally on …

In 2017, when Rolling Stone counted down the top 100 metal albums of all time, Human, a 1991 LP by Florida outfit Death, landed at number 70. Death are widely credited with helping to launch the death-metal subgenre with their grisly, unrelenting 1987 debut Scream Bloody Gore, but by 1991, …

Over the decades, Browne has found himself in some unusual situations linked to his music: singing in a jail cell after being arrested while protesting the opening of a nuclear power plant, or recording an album (Running on Empty) on tour buses and in hotel rooms. To that list, Browne …