Jenn Pelly

2 weeks ago | time.com | Jenn Pelly

The biggest music story of 2025 remains, as it has for many years, the very fact of how music is discovered, as streaming monoliths and social-media algorithms continually overtake what we hear and what it sounds like. When TikTok virality and playlist automation saturate listeners’ attention, artistic sameness threatens to rule the day—but independent artists on their own unique paths are still with us.

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Jenn Pelly

Imagine getting up on stage for a presentation that would have cost in the ballpark of $500,000, all to promote your new video game, and instead of …

1 month ago | shorturl.at | Jenn Pelly

Photograph by Molly Matalon Brother Bryan Park is a two-block stretch of grass and trees circling an abandoned pool on the southside of downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It’s more like a rough-edged town square or the set of a teen movie, seemingly designed for kids to skate in, to wreak secret havoc. When the songwriter Katie Crutchfield was in her early twenties, she penned a taut, suspended ballad called “Brother Bryan,” released in 2013, in memory of her close friend Tripp Norris.

Jan 23, 2025 | hearingthings.co | Jenn Pelly

There’s more action and ambition in the first seconds of Annette Peacock’s “I’m the One” than in many entire pop albums. A burst of crescendoing free-jazz orchestration sweeps us up to a realm between MGM grandeur and Sun Ra’s interstellar swing, as if sucking out the song’s gravity so it can float. Each millisecond of this seven-minute psychedelic pop prophecy is an opportunity for Peacock—intrepid jazz composer, Moog pioneer, vocal acrobat, mother—to go beyond.

Jan 16, 2025 | pitchfork.com | Jenn Pelly

From the second Timothée Chalamet gets spit out of a hitched ride at the edge of the George Washington Bridge in ragged clothes and a cabbie hat, clutching an acoustic guitar and a rucksack wandering the beat carnival on MacDougal Street, A Complete Unknown is, as the biopic form requires, a two-hour compression of music mythology that plays loose with facts. And every minute is a total blast.