Tag Archives: song-to-know

D.C. born, New York-based underground rapper billy woods specializes in music about poor city dwellers, sadistic police, and conniving landlords. Woods, who prefers his name to be all lowercase and his face never shown, raps like he’s omnipresent, watching an unlivable society from the sky; his music vividly evokes the …

Mustafa is a secondary character in the short series of cover art he’s debuted since emerging as a solo artist a year ago — if he’s a character at all. His first single, “Stay Alive,”is visualized with a photo of the Toronto singer and poet surrounded by a troop of …

Los Angeles songwriter Coco Reilly explores our sometimes-faulty understanding of self in the new song “Oh Oh My My,” from her upcoming self-titled debut album. The project, recorded at Nashville’s Battle Tapes studio with Jeremy Ferguson and guitar player Jerry Bernhardt, also includes contributions from singer-songwriter Erin Rae. “Oh Oh …

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 …

Every musician who worked steadily with John Coltrane in the Sixties achieved a certain kind of immortality. But drummer Rashied Ali earned a special distinction thanks to a February 1967 duo recording date with the legendary horn player, five months before Coltrane’s death. Released seven years later as Interstellar Space, …

It’s been nearly 20 years since Nada Surf‘s wonderful alt-rock one-hit-by-design “Popular,” a song that perfectly embodied/parodied the underdog ambivalence of the post-Nirvana era. They’ve been making excellent music ever since, years and years after so many other alt-rock one-hits don’t even exist as trivia questions. The run of albums …

There it was. After two years, the voice we loved — that garbled, processed, quivering, mush-mouthed voice singing nigh-unintelligible nonsense — was back. Jahron Anthony Brathwaite, better known as PartyNextDoor, had unfortunately been in the wilderness for a while. Sincebecoming a micro-icon to a generation of bloggers and Drake stans …

Roddy Ricch is a simple man with simple pleasures. He loves: Forgiatos, Pateks, feeding the streets, bloody bottoms, ballin’ (preferably every season), and racks (preferably in the middle). In short, he’s a titan of industry — if said industry is rising post-regional West Coast rappers who spend the bulk of …

Philly-raised songwriter Dave Hause blends the power-pop hook of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” with a punk-rock sneer on “The Ditch,” a scorching take on present-day political anxiety and the first track off his upcoming album, Kick. The former leader of alt-rock band the Loved Ones and frequent tourmate of …

Country and folk storytellers have never had any problem portraying the rush of instant love or the devastation of heartbreak. Writing about the rich complexity of long-lasting love has generally proved much more difficult. Nashville singer-songwriter Caroline Spence does just that on “Mint Condition,” the title ballad to her upcoming …