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2 weeks ago | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Jillian Mapes
Back in October, the Nashville-based musician Sophie Allison—who makes beautiful and brooding indie rock as Soccer Mommy—became the envy of every Stardew Valley fan when she got her own avatar in the video game’s signature SNES style. It was a must if she was going to release “Abigail,” a writing-exercise-turned-single inspired by her preferred love interest—a purple-haired weeb hottie—in the wildly popular farm sim.
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3 weeks ago | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Jillian Mapes
A writer is a powerful thing for a woman to be. Like elephants, we are cursed with memories; no matter how much emotional progress is made, or how many drugs we may do, the details surrounding certain nights never leave us.
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1 month ago | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Jillian Mapes
If I tell you my earliest memory, you’ll understand the sort of man my dad is. I was 5 years old, in the living room of the ranch-style house my parents rented at the time, and Peter Gabriel’s 1992 song “Kiss That Frog” was playing loudly on the stereo.
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1 month ago | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Jillian Mapes
Credit History is an interview series where we ask our favorite artists to comb through their credit card statements and tell us about what they bought, from the necessary to the frivolous to the outlandish. Mike Hadreas has been working through something in therapy, and maybe—just maybe—he’s made a breakthrough.
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2 months ago | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Jillian Mapes
On the evening of Mayhem’s release last week, I walked into my local gay bar and prematurely ruined the bartender’s night. My friend and I, both millennial queers, were sharing our initial reactions to the album as we waited for drinks, when the nosey Gen Z butch tending bar interjected with an overblown “oh no.” A new Lady Gaga record, they explained, meant chaos for the night.
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2 months ago | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Julianne Escobedo Shepherd |Dylan Green |Jillian Mapes
Talking about music with your friends, trying to make them laugh, and playfully arguing about albums and songs—these are some of the best parts of working at a music website. With our podcast Waste or Taste, we capture that kind of unfiltered banter between longtime critics and friends, and invite you to listen along. The concept is simple: Every episode, three Hearing Things founders each bring a new song to the table and debate whether it’s Waste or Taste.
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2 months ago | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Jillian Mapes
Near the end of Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), the new Questlove-directed, Hulu-distributed documentary about Sly Stone, the R&B hermit D’Angelo muses on the difference between Black legacy artists and their white counterparts. “I hate to say it but these white rock’n’rollers, these motherfuckers go out in style, they go out paid, they go out with their kids around them, like the fucking Godfather movie.
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Feb 14, 2025 | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Jillian Mapes
It’s raining cats and dogs on the day I meet up with the members of Kassie Krut at a kitty cafe, and the animals are hiding. As we sip coffee and hit our vapes around a dinky table on the covered outdoor patio of the Cute Cat Cafe in Ridgewood, Queens, I start to wonder if there are, in fact, any cute cats roaming the premises. Eventually a calico emerges from the soggy backyard and saunters around the patio, catching the attention of a little girl through the window of the back door.
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Feb 11, 2025 | 
hearingthings.co | Andy Cush |Ryan Dombal |Jill Mapes |Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
As music writers, we often get asked by friends and family how we keep up with new music, especially if someone is trying to extract themselves from recommendation algorithms and get back to a more human approach. The answer may involve some combination of going to lots of shows, following labels we like, shopping at record stores, listening to local and internet radio, keeping an eye on who our favorite artists are collaborating with, and talking to friends.
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Feb 11, 2025 | 
hearingthings.co | Jill Mapes |Julianne Escobedo Shepherd |Andy Cush |Jillian Mapes
Talking about music with your friends, trying to make them laugh, and playfully arguing about albums and songs—these are some of the best parts of working at a music website. With our podcast Waste or Taste, we capture that kind of unfiltered banter between longtime critics and friends, and invite you to listen along. The concept is simple: Every episode, three Hearing Things founders each bring a new song to the table and debate whether it’s Waste or Taste.
