Author: Press Room

Lido Pimienta has never settled for silence. Since her Polaris Prize–winning album La Papessa came out in 2016, she’s brought meditations on anti-racism, colonialism, and feminism to every medium she touches, whether it’s singing, sculpting, painting, or writing for television: ceramics and textiles that carry Afro-Colombian and Indigenous identity into gallery spaces, a television show that smuggles hard conversations into variety-show comedy, and a trailblazing compositional credit for the New York City Ballet—the first score in the company’s history by a woman of color, let alone one who makes no secret of where she stands. Comparisons to artists like Björk…

Surrounded by 10,000 of his closest friends, diamond* doesn’t say a damn thing until he has to. Maybe it’s wrong to describe the svelte twentysomething as “coy”–he raps about swinging his dick and flashing jewelry too much for that–but that’s how he seemed when I saw him at a show in Manhattan a couple weeks ago. When he didn’t have a mic in hand, he silently blended in with the loud, proud blazers of ØWay, Atlanta’s biggest new rap crew. diamond* and Tezzus, SoundCloud’s very own Tasmanian Devil, are the figureheads of the collective; they both signed to Young Thug’s…

When Tricky made his solo debut in 1995 with Maxinquaye, few people would have bet that this pained, perverse, and cantankerous figure would still be active three decades on. And yet 31 years later it is Tricky, of all the Bristol crew, who has kept the music coming: While Portishead fell silent after 2008’s Third and Massive Attack haven’t released a new album in 16 years, Different When It’s Silent is Tricky’s 15th longplayer, give or take: a record of pointed modern blues that suggests an artist still driven to create.The new album differs significantly from 2020’s Fall to Pieces,…

Eighteen years passed between the essential “A Bigger Bang” and “Hackney Diamonds” to complete a new album of unreleased songs, then less than three to get to “Foreign Tongues”. It's not just a question of third or fourth youth (for the Rolling Stones the second arrived a few decades ago…), Keith Richards clarifies it in a recent interview: “The only reason why 'Foreign Tongues' came out is that we did so much work on 'Hackney Diamonds' that Andrew (Watt, the producer, ed) we looked at each other and realized that, in practice, this was a double album, only that we…

“A fucking rock concert!”. This is the sentence pronounced in the final farewells by Piero Pelù, after two and a half hours of performance without any flaw, 64 years carried in a truly enviable manner. The triumphal tour with which Litfiba are taking one of their manifesto albums, “17 Re”, around the peninsula, is exactly this, there couldn't be a more apt summary: a fucking rock concert! A concert of guitars and energy, a profoundly anti-fascist concert full of meanings, both musical and extra-musical. And anything but nostalgic, because the vision of Litfiba – which we espouse – is to…

Brad Paisley shared a few details surrounding Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding held at Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan earlier this month. While the ceremony itself may have been massive in scale, the arena has a seating capacity of 20,000, the country star said that it was “one of the least pretentious weddings” he's ever attended. Paisley and his wife, actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley, were among the lucky guests invited to witness the nuptials, who were shrouded in mystery as even those attending were given little detail about the event. Swift opened for Paisley during her 2007 tour when…

Nineteenth album for the band Telescopes, a creation of Stephen Lawrie who has now defused the shoegaze and noise impulses in favor of a dark and narcotic psychedelic rock. The static charge (“Static Charge”) evoked by the title of the project is actually the main protagonist of a record which, compared to the controversial previous “Halo Moon”, offers a more solid backbone thanks to the contribution of the band, who recorded the entire project live in the studio.The cathartic black mass psych of the Telescopes offers more and more references to blues and gospel, and tries once again to capture…

Tributes have been paid following the death of soul singer Ray King, an influential artist who helped inspire the ska and 2 Tone movement. The artist was born Vibert Cornwall, and played a vital part of the music scene in Coventry having emerged in the ‘70s. News of his passing was confirmed over the weekend, and he was aged 87. Having moved from St Vincent in the 1960s, King helped form multiple groups over the years and had bandmates that would later go on to be a part of groups including The Specials and The Selecter. His first group was…

Violence! It fears the law which tries to contain it through punishment, it is the enemy of ethics and morality which relies on religions to keep consciences at bay, but can violence become an artistic language? Haven't cinematography and visual art been nourished by violence, even if by decontextualizing it and exalting its purely aesthetic charm? For Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Gustav Metzger or Marina Abramović, violence was part of art itself, but not even music remained immune to the ambiguous charm of violence. Punk, noise, brutal death metal, speedcore are just some of the most extreme and violent forms of…

Journey‘s Jonathan Cain has slammed Bruce Springsteen as “an annoying, bitter old man” who “should shut up” about politics. The multi-instrumentalist made the remarks to The Complete Disaster Network, where he spoke about the importance of keeping politics out of art. “Guys like Bruce Springsteen should shut up,” Cain told the podcast. “Honestly, shut up, Bruce. Who’s the other one? Robert De Niro. I mean, who cares, guys? Really? Do your art.” “I try to keep politics out of my music,” he continued, adding: “Now I’m releasing this patriotic song [‘The Winds Of Freedom: A Salute To America’ in celebration…