No bad dream fucker’s gonna boss Momma around. The beloved alt-rock hook-slingers are riding high off the release of their recent Welcome To My Blue Sky, one of 2025’s very best albums so far. As the promo campaign rolls on, they’ve covered an Elliott Smith classic for Amazon Music.
Marissa Nadler has announced a new self-produced album called New Radiations to follow the 2022 EP The Wrath Of The Clouds. The goth-folk singer-songwriter is sharing a preview today with the haunting title track.
There are people who make a fine living by closely monitoring this nation’s youth sports leagues in hopes of finding players to replenish America’s college and professional teams. I wonder if Matador Records has a similar program, but for potential next-generation indie rock stars? The tastemaking institution established its rep by plucking Pavement, Guided by Voices, and Liz Phair from the tape-trading micro-release deep underground, and in the past decade or so it’s shown a keen interest in what the young people are getting up to, ushering young acts like Snail Mail, Car Seat Headrest, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus into the big leagues after they built up varying degrees of buzz. More recently, the “cool parents and after-school music programs to Matador Records” pipeline remained remarkably strong with the young Chicago trio Horsegirl, and now it’s given us the young Chicago trio Lifeguard, an outstanding coup by Matador’s perhaps apocryphal youth development division. Raises all around.
Bauhaus’ 2022 reunion was sadly and suddenly cut short when frontman Peter Murphy entered a rehabilitation facility. Things were looking up this year, though, as Murphy recently released his solo album Silver Shade in May and had announced a tour in support of it. Now, unfortunately, that tour isn’t happening either.
I tend to associate My Hair Is A Rat’s Nest, the one-person screamo operation out of Albuquerque with the extremely evocative name, with long songs. But “Throes,” our first taste of a new EP dropping next week, is short — as in 77 seconds total. The track makes great use of that minute and change, though, conjuring a triumphant bashed-out post-hardcore vibe before leveling out into low-key drama that reminds me of the more restrained moments on At The Drive-In’s Relationship Of Command. It’s cool shit, so check it out:
Alex Warren, a former influencer who was one of the founders of the TikTok content house known as the Hype House, is one of music’s rising stars at the moment. Rolling Stone noted that Warren is one of several ascendant male pop stars who basically sounds like a contestant on The Voice, while the Switched On Pop podcast designated him as part of a wave of worship-influenced artists peppering the charts right now. “Burning House,” Warren’s song about his negative experience at the Hype House, is all over pop radio. His power ballad “Ordinary” is even bigger. In fact, as of today it has become Warren’s first #1 hit.
Billy McFarland is back for one last job. Maybe?
Next month, the great Virginia Beach rap duo Clipse will finally release Let God Sort ‘Em Out, their first album in 16 years. The great lead single “Ace Trumpets” came out on Friday. They recorded it at Louis Vuitton headquarters in Paris, and their old associate Pharrell Williams produced the entire thing. People have been waiting on the Clipse reunion album for a long time, and it looks like label issues might’ve been one of the things that delayed the release. In a new GQ profile, Pusha T drops a bombshell: Def Jam, originally slated to release the album, didn’t want Kendrick Lamar’s feature to appear on one of the tracks. As a result, Clipse are no longer on Def Jam.
Unfortunately, despite today being the first day of Pride Month, there’s some transphobic bullshit going on in the UK right now. Six weeks ago, UK Supreme Court ruled that under the 2010 Equality Act, a person’s gender may be defined in law only by the sex they were assigned at birth. The Equality And Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the country’s independent body that advises organizations on how to comply with the Equality Act, has since issued some disappointing guidance on how that ruling should be interpreted in law, saying that “trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities, as this will mean that they are no longer single-sex facilities and must be open to all users of the opposite sex.” The guidance states that trans people “should not be put in a position where there are no facilities for them to use,” but their only real options are to use the bathroom corresponding with their sex assigned at birth, or use a lockable single-stall bathroom in the off-chance that one is available.
Tudum, Netflix’s annual global fan event, got a bit of an upgrade this year. For the first time since its first edition right before COVID-19, the event was broadcast as a special on Netflix, having previously been livestreamed on YouTube. And instead of it being formatted like a typical pop culture convention, Tudum 2025 was reimagined as a bit of a variety show, with upcoming Wednesday guest star Lady Gaga doing a brief Addams Family-themed performance.