By: Josh Kitchen / July 23, 2026 "Second wind, fill my sails and carry me again into the night / I will not be giving up the fight," Dent May sings on "Second Wind," the latest single from his upcoming seventh album, The Big One. It's another superbly polished and expertly crafted pop tune ahead of the album's release on August 14, but its optimism isn't immediate. In the new video for "Second Wind," May quite literally dances his way to salvation. "The song itself takes you

By : Josh Kitchen / June 29, 2026 Photo Credit: Ryan Faist fans who've come to know you and enjoy how you think about—and share your love of pop music have been really blessed by this record. I think at my core, I'm always going to be a punk and hardcore kid, really. So I think, try as I might, that's always going to be there, and I'm happy about that. Finding that music when I was younger changed my life in a very positive way. I met my best friends and family that way, so t

By : Josh Kitchen / June 26, 2026 Photo Credit: Josh & Kathryn Brolin Atta Boy have been at this a while. The Los Angeles-based quintet consisting of Eden Brolin (guitar/vocals), Dashel Thompson (keyboards), Freddy Reish (guitar/bass), and Lewis Pullman (drums) met in middle school, bonding over the albums they were obsessed with before discovering they had something special when they started jamming together. On their fourth album, Silt, Atta Boy dig through a lifetime of sh

“This one really feels like the truest version of me.” By : Josh Kitchen / June 26, 2026 Photo Credit : Dana Trippe Susannah Joffe has been building toward this her whole life. Growing up in Texas, she spent weekends tagging along with her parents to folk and country open mic nights in the Hill Country, soaking up the sounds of singers belting Tammy Wynette and Willie Nelson covers before she was even in the first grade. But when she moved to New York to pursue music, she tri

By: Josh Kitchen / June 12, 2026 Photo Credit: Lucy Black “When we sort of unlocked that we could do it better together, and liked doing it together, that felt like discovering treasure for the first time,” Maia Ciambriello tells me of her and Sasha Goldberg's songwriting partnership. Ciambriello and Goldberg have known each other since childhood, but they've been writing music together since college under the name The Army, The Navy. Like members of a tactical unit, they've

By: Josh Kitchen / June 10, 2026 Photo Credit: Sandra Ebert On the title track of their debut album, Johnny's Dreamworld, Sophie Harris—lead singer and songwriter of London four-piece Modern Woman—draws listeners into a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Slippery, tense, and propelled by a hypnotic groove, the song unfolds with a slow-motion swagger that's mysterious as it is unsettling. Across the album's nine tracks and 33-minute runtime, frenetic guitar solos abo

By : Josh Kitchen / June 5, 2026 Photo Credit : Bảo Ngô I often liken artists with long careers and dozens of albums to the life of a tree—you get to watch them grow and change. Sometimes they lose a branch here and there, but the ones that stand the longest often bear the sweetest fruit. Today, of Montreal release their 20th album, Aethermead, and witnessing Kevin Barnes guide the band through enough transformations to fill several careers—while constantly reinventing both

By: Josh Kitchen / May 28, 2026 Photo Credit: Rachel Briggs “Simpleton is about attempting optimism in a world that feels increasingly hard to be optimistic about,” says Ryan Kaiser of Yot Club. But, he goes on to say, “No matter how soulless and bleak the modern world can feel, people still manage to carve out meaningful lives and create beautiful things.” That idea — a hopeful refusal to simply accept the world for what it is — sits at the core of Yot Club’s third, and fine

By: Josh Kitchen / May 15, 2026 “Guitar pick in my pocket at the marketing all-hands,” Nymphlord sings on “Garden,” the opening track on her debut album Shedding Velvet, out today on Lauren Records. Anyone who’s ever sat through one of those corporate “all-hands” meetings — the office colloquialism for a company-wide staff meeting — knows that if you’re in one too long, there comes a point where it can feel like your soul is slowly being vacuumed out of your body. It’s a line

By: Josh Kitchen / May 7, 2026 Photo Credit: Connie Swift “That became my mantra,” girli’s Milly Toomey told me earlier this spring ahead of the release of her new album It’s Just My Opinion, out tomorrow. girli has quietly become one of the most exciting alt-pop voices to emerge from the North London scene in years, crafting self-aware, genre-defying, in-your-face anthems packed with massive hooks, while never shying away from messages of advocacy, acceptance, and the transf

By: Josh Kitchen / May 1, 2026 Photo by: Simone Niamani Thompson Larena and Elysse Winn are no strangers to the act of radical reclamation—whether it be of their identities, their psyches, their physical bodies, their sexuality, their shame, or their very conception of reality and truth. Growing up as the youngest of eleven children, identical twins Larena and Elysse had each other within their strict Mormon family. Raised in Missoula, Montana, the Winn sisters learned early

By: Josh Kitchen / April 23, 2026 Photo Credit: Charlie Weinmann On White Denim’s 13th studio album, simply titled 13, James Petralli is reflecting on this crazy thing called life. I’m talking to Petralli over Zoom, and while I’m cooped up in my apartment, he’s in a comfy lounge chair in his backyard, his pup Sergio by his side. It’s beautiful in LA—I can see it out my window—but Petralli is the luckier one of us right now. And if he looks lucky, you can rest assured there’s

By: Josh Kitchen / March 27, 2026 Photo Credit: Rosie Sco Sitting across from Felix Mackenzie-Barrow and Tiger Cohen-Towell of Nottingham band Divorce, you wouldn’t know they had just wrapped an interview with Sir Elton John, who told them their debut record, Drive to Goldenhammer , currently sits as Disc 1 in his five-disc CD player at home. The band is about to play the first Los Angeles show of their career, fresh off support dates with Sam Smith in San Francisco — a city

By: Josh Kitchen / March 20, 2026 Photo Credit : Studio Förgätmigej It’s rare that a debut record sounds like a band already a few albums in, but that’s what Girl Scout’s Brink feels like. Across the record, from the three-piece Swedish act—comprised of Emma Jansson (guitar, vocals), Per Lindberg (drums), and Kevin Hamring (guitar/bass)—there’s a real sense of confidence in how it’s contained, from the way it opens (literally with a track called “Intro”) to the way it closes.

By: Josh Kitchen / March 11, 2026 Photo Credit: Dean Chalkley “Trixies was our gold bar that we found in a rubbish tip,” Squeeze founding member Glenn Tilbrook told me, rediscovering his and fellow Squeeze founding member Chris Difford’s first songwriting venture together — the rock opera Trixies . In it, each song tells a different story set in a fictional, but not too distantly recognizable nightclub — one that could exist in any big city, with rainy puddles reflecting neon

By: Josh Kitchen / March 5, 2026 Photo Credit: Raz Azraai // @dancefloormurder On their new album, Reality Star — their best one yet — Surfbort want you to have a good time. They also want you to throw fists and middle fingers up to the government. They want you to eat a hot dog. They want you to dance, make out with someone, touch some grass, or even bake a pie. What all these things have in common is the revolutionary ideas behind them. In our current barrage of fascist Tru

By: Josh Kitchen / February 26, 2026 Photo Credit: Sam Angeletti Jack Rutter, aka Ritt Momney, hasn’t released new music since 2021’s excellent Sunny Boy — that is, until he surprise-dropped the chill and vibey, “GUNNA” at the end of January this year. The five-year gap isn’t due to not wanting to create, however. Disillusioned by the capitalistic and oppressive demands of the modern record industry, Momney fell out of love with making music. It started to feel more like a j

By: Josh Kitchen / February 24, 2026 Photo Credit: Logan White “ I’m drastic / I’m magic / You know this / You see it / I move you ,” Bella Litsa sings on “My Blue Eyes,” a centerpiece off her aptly titled debut album Drasticism . The track builds slowly, Litsa pondering the mysteries of love, her voice rich and cloaked in a masterful Auto-Tune glow reminiscent of Caroline Polachek. At the midpoint, the song transforms into something else entirely, abruptly erupting into a f

By: Josh Kitchen / February 19, 2026 Photo Credit: El Hardwick “I love you, I love you, I’ve known you forever / Your fire was and always will be / I learned your name but missed its meaning / When I didn’t know how to feel / Can’t wait to meet you for the first time again,” Rhode Island–born singer-songwriter Tyler Ballgame croons on the title track that opens his debut album of the same name, For the First Time, Again. It’s a tender ballad that gives the listener the first

By: Josh Kitchen with camera assistance from: Giselle Libby / February 10, 2025 I’m sitting across from absurdist singer-songwriter Dev Lemons in one of the newest smash burger restaurants in Los Angeles — the futuristic, alien UFO–styled Burger 3000. Lemons is wearing a meat suit and meat beret — literally a full-body costume resembling a human muscular system, her eyes and mouth only visible through cut holes in the face. Sitting next to her is Abby Kenna, a fellow singer-