Tom Breihan

Philadelphia’s annual This Is Hardcore festival has nothing to do with Pulp. You won’t hear any Britpop at that fest. Instead, it’s just what it says on the label: Three straight days of murderous mosh music, with a pit that gets famously chaotic. Compared to other hardcore festivals,  » Read More

Gabby Smith is trying something. At the end of the year, Smith, the New York DIY musician who currently records under the name Gabby’s World, will release the new album Gabby Sword. Over the course of the year, Smith is releasing that album, one track at a time, with a new single arriving every month.  » Read More

Earlier this year, indie lifer Ted Leo reunited with his old ’90s band Chisel to play a bunch of shows for the first time since 1997. That’s the kind of thing that might put a man in a nostalgic mood, but Ted Leo’s not living in the past.  » Read More

Late last year, Billie Eilish played a series of hometown shows at the Forum in Los Angeles, and she brought out surprise guests like Phoebe Bridgers, Dave Grohl, and Childish Gambino. One of Eilish’s guests was Labrinth, the British singer and songwriter who’s probably most famous for scoring the HBO show Euphoria.  » Read More

The avant-garde pop genius Arthur Russell worked in obscurity for most of his too-short career. He died of complications from AIDS in 1992, at the age of 40. About a decade after his death, Russell’s music went through a huge reappraisal, and it remains tremendously influential now. Russell had left behind a vast trove of unreleased music,  » Read More

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.  » Read More

In the early ’80s, the rise of British synthpop groups like Depeche Mode and Tears For Fears suggested a future where traditional instruments could simply go extinct. Now that those groups have matured to legacy-act status, though, they’re now playing their old hits with the BBC Concert Orchestra behind them.  » Read More

The Police’s creepy-romantic stalker hymn “Every Breath You Take” was the biggest hit of 1983, and then it was also, after a fashion, the biggest it of 1997. Diddy, then known as Puff Daddy, heavily sampled “Every Breath You Take” on “I’ll Be Missing You,”  » Read More

At least for me, one of the most endearing things about Seth Meyers is his enduring devotion to the Hold Steady. Anytime there’s any excuse to put the Hold Steady, the great American rock band, on television, Meyers makes sure they get booked for Late Night. Six months ago,  » Read More