Grace Robins-Somerville

3 weeks ago | pastemagazine.com | Grace Robins-Somerville

Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element. There’s a TikTok video in which writer, podcaster, and fashion designer Madeline Pendleton answers the question: “What’s the best show you’ve ever been to?” They preface their answer by rattling off the names of some all-time greats that they’ve had the privilege of seeing live: the B-52s, the Cure, the Violent Femmes, Patti Smith, Stone Temple Pilots, and Deftones, to name a few.

1 month ago | pitchfork.com | Grace Robins-Somerville

Star 99 are a punk band who make writing a great pop song look easy. If most West Coast pop-punk can be traced back to Jawbreaker, the San Jose quintet have inherited their knack for knowing which moments call for a sugary refrain and which call for a tortured shred.

2 months ago | pastemagazine.com | Grace Robins-Somerville

One of the greatest feats of songwriting—of any writing, really—is arranging words into combinations that no one else has ever constructed before. Contrarily, there’s also a challenge in taking a phrase or expression that’s been echoed a million times, and using it in a way that forces the audience to really think about these familiar words. The latter is where a record like Phonetics On and On, the sophomore effort from formerly-Chicago-now-New-York-based rock band Horsegirl, thrives.

Oct 30, 2024 | stereogum.com | Grace Robins-Somerville

I recently found myself in one of those “What’s the strangest thing you did for entertainment during early quarantine?” conversations that somehow, almost half a decade later, people still aren’t sick of having. The usual suspects popped up — sourdough starters and Tiger King and whatnot.

Sep 25, 2024 | pastemagazine.com | Grace Robins-Somerville

When you look at it for too long, your computer screen can start to feel like a funhouse mirror, absorbing reality and refracting it back to you in innocuous asides stretched into life-and-death extremes and incomprehensible tragedies chopped up into desensitizing bite-sized bits. The internet manufactures reactions at warp speed, feeding off of bright, shiny bait.