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1 week ago | 
nytimes.com | Kate LoPresti |Frannie Carr Toth |Rowan Niemisto |Shaad D’Souza
Earlier this year, Bruno Mars became the first artist ever to amass 150 million monthly listeners on Spotify. But unlike many of his peers, Mars has paved a path to pop stardom without cultivating a devoted fan base, maintaining a consistent aesthetic or building a world around his music. Instead, his career has been defined by his reliability as a chameleonic hitmaker.
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1 week ago | 
pitchfork.com | Shaad D’Souza
In one of the more damning passages of Liz Pelly’s new Spotify exposé, Mood Machine, Darius Van Arman—co-founder and co-owner of Secretly Group, an indie conglomerate that’s home to Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, and Bon Iver—says that, upon the advent of streaming in the United States, labels like his realized they had to sign acts that warranted “repeat listens in coffee shops.” Spare a thought, then, for Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, the seafaring married couple who make up the long-running...
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1 week ago | 
flipboard.com | Shaad D’Souza
4 hours agoJenny Hval: Iris Silver MistWho could forget the strained hope of post-vaccination social life? Masks in the park. Elbow bumps. Portable hand sanitizer. The irrational belief that plexiglass partitions could fend off the COVID-19 virus as we dined indoors, as if swirling, microscopic vapor particles would halt and retreat …NowThe best new albums out May 2It's Friday, and you need to pass the time until catching the latest (and apparently good!) Marvel movie.
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3 weeks ago | 
theface.com | Shaad D’Souza |Jazmin Garcia |Jazmín Giselle Félix García
“From the first listen, you can hear the sense of love and community in his music” “We were always just fucking around. Even if we were talking about more serious issues, he’d always be making us laugh as well”
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4 weeks ago | 
i-d.co | Shaad D’Souza
written by SHAAD D’SOUZAphotography JACKSON BOWLEYstyling LULU BULLOCKWhat’s your “tribe”? What an awful question to ask someone in this day and age. To quote Groucho Marx (via Woody Allen): “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”—words to live by in 2025.
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4 weeks ago | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Shaad D’Souza
Coachella is, undeniably, the single most important music festival in the world. Take “important” with a heavy side of scepticism: it is important as a mainstream pop cultural and public relations engine, an easy way to work out which stars of contemporary music are actually drawing crowds, who might be in a larger typeface size on the poster this time next year and who truly blew up in the six months between the festival’s line-up announcement and the event actually taking place.
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4 weeks ago | 
pitchfork.com | Shaad D’Souza
“Tell me I never knew that” is a digital anthem in Eden. English folk music has always been used to chart the slow trickle of societal change, tracing shifting norms, the rise and fall of new powers, and the modernisation of the landscape; this song, a collaboration with Caroline Polachek from the English band caroline’s forthcoming album, Caroline 2, feels like it might be one day used as evidence of a society undergoing a rapid flattening.
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1 month ago | 
i-d.co | Shaad D’Souza
You know what grinds my gears? Despite infinite advancements in digital distribution and recording, the making and releasing of music is basically the same now as it was 20 years ago. You make an album, you promote the album, you tour the album, then you do it all again. With a little ingenuity and gumption, though, you can do whatever the fuck you want.
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1 month ago | 
pitchfork.com | Shaad D’Souza
Bands will always sound like this: jangly and raw, infatuated with their own youth, terribly and vaguely romantic, tripping over themselves in their haste to convey a botanic garden’s worth of full-bloom feelings. Radio DDR, the second album by Sharp Pins (the solo project of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater) is a giddy blast of power pop that understands, deeply, that the genre’s only goal should be to make age-old feelings like love and longing sound thrilling and new.
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2 months ago | 
i-d.co | Morgan Maher |Shaad D’Souza
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