Tom Breihan

Quavo, once the most visible member of the Migos, has been through dark times in the past year, but it seems like he’s back to releasing party-ready trap music. Last month, Quavo reunited with his once-estranged Migos teammate Offset for a BET Awards performance that paid tribute to Takeoff, Quavo’s nephew and fellow Migo,  » Read More

Dan Auerbach is a busy man. His band the Black Keys released their album Dropout Boogie last year, and his other band the Arcs released their album Electrophonic Chronic earlier this year. But Auerbach hasn’t released a proper solo single since 2017, when he released his Waiting On A Song album.  » Read More

In November 2020, the Chicago rapper King Von was shot to death outside an Atlanta nightclub. He was 26, and his career was just taking off; his album Welcome To O’Block came out just one week before his death. Von had a fearsome reputation, and before his rap career took form,  » Read More

In a couple of months, Philadelphia-based sludge gods Baroness will release Stone, their first new album in four years. The band produced the LP themselves, and they recorded it while spending a month living together in a rented house in Barryville, New York. We’ve already posted first single “  » Read More

In the early ’90s, an unruly crew of dudes in army fatigues and Timberlands emerged from Brooklyn and made rap music a whole lot more exciting. The Boot Camp Clik was, and is, the collective of rappers from the groups Black Moon, Smif-N-Wessun, Heltah Skeltah, and OGC. Together, they made a whole lot of classics without ever fully crossing over to mainstream visibility,  » Read More

Jay-Z has a funny relationship with the written word. As a rapper, Jay famously never wrote anything down. Instead, he assembled entire verses in his head, going into his fabled rain-man state to fit all those interlocking pieces together. But writers have probably published millions of words about Jay, and Jay has published some words about himself,  » Read More

How do you write an 11-minute powerviolence song? How is that possible? As a genre, powerviolence is defined, at least in large part, by its brevity. Bands challenge themselves and each other to come up with short, disorienting bursts of anxiety. A song might be 45 seconds long, and it might switch riffs and tempos three times.  » Read More

The Richmond, Virginia bass-and-drums duo White Beast are a very new project; they just released their debut single “Fencewalker” a few months ago. If you’ve never heard of them, don’t feel bad; I didn’t know anything about the band until drummer Sam Roberts, also of the excellent metal-punk band Private Hell,  » 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. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.  » Read More