Alexis Petridis

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Alexis Petridis

On Saturday, Sleep Token headlined Download festival in Leicestershire. Topping the bill at the festival is something of a rite of passage for artists of a certain musical bent, proof that you are now among the biggest bands in metal and hard rock: Metallica, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Guns N’ Roses are all former headliners. Last month, Sleep Token’s fourth album, Even in Arcadia, debuted at the top of both the British and American charts.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Alexis Petridis

Slick Rick is tucking into a late room-service breakfast in his Park Lane hotel room. He is back in London, the city his family emigrated from when he was a boy, because he’s launching a new album, Victory, his first since 1999’s The Art of Storytelling, which featured an array of guest artists – including Outkast, Nas and Snoop Dogg – paying homage to one of hip-hop’s legendary figures. Even today, he remains the rapper’s rapper, the most-sampled hip-hop artist in history.

2 weeks ago | freitag.de | Alexis Petridis

Pulp sind die wohl am besten gealterte Britpop-Legende. Umso riskanter ist es, nach 24 Jahren wieder ein Album zu veröffentlichen Von Die Zeit hat es mit Pulp ausgesprochen gut gemeint. Wie Jarvis Cocker in der neuen Single Spike Island betont, sorgte die Auflösung der Band 2002 für wenig Aufruhr; mit den Alben This Is Hardcore (1998) und We Love Live (2001) war es der Band bereits gelungen, ihr Publikum drastisch zu verkleinern.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Alexis Petridis

It’s fair to say that no one who bought the Beach Boys debut single in 1961 would have realised they were in the presence of genius. Surfin’ sounded exactly like what it was: one of dozens of cheap, hastily-recorded singles released on a tiny independent label to cash in on the burgeoning craze for surf music, albeit a regionally-successful example of type. You might easily have expected to never hear of the band who made it again.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Alexis Petridis

In 2013, there didn’t seem much point in requesting an interview with Sly Stone. It was 31 years since he had released an album of new material, Ain’t But the One Way, which he had abandoned midway through, vanishing completely from the studio and leaving the producer Stewart Levine to patch together what he could.