Tom Breihan

Last year, the tough, hardbitten, consistently excellent Arkansas-born country star Ashley McBryde got a bunch of friends together and made Lindeville, a concept album about the residents of a fictional small town. That album was billed as being presented by Ashley McBryde, so it wasn’t a proper solo LP,  » Read More

Right now, Netflix is airing the fourth season of its social-experiment reality show Love Is Blind. There’s a moment on one of the episodes where one of the contestants, a criminal defense lawyer named Zack Goytowski, proposes to fellow contestant Irina Solomonova by singing to her. That moment has drawn a lot of attention,  » Read More

Paul Cattermole, a member of the late-’90s British teenpop group S Club 7, has died suddenly and unexpectedly. The BBC reports that Cattermole died yesterday, just a few weeks after S Club 7 announced a reunion tour. No cause of death has been reported. Cattermole was 46.  » Read More

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