Hayley Williams was supposed to head on her first solo tour back in 2020, and you can guess how that played out. Now the Paramore leader is finally hitting the road on her own following the release of Ego Death At The Bachelorette Party, according to the 20 dates she leaked herself.
Radiohead! You remember those guys, right? They’re playing shows again! Crazy! Earlier this week, Radiohead kicked off their first tour since 2018. They’re playing four-night stands in five major European cities, and they’re now three quarters of the way through their opening set of shows in Madrid. People were very excited to learn what they played at their first show back. At night two, they played some songs they hadn’t done in 16 years. The third show went down earlier tonight, and they dusted off “Just.”
The Grammys are just around the corner, on Sunday, Feb. 1, and now we know who’ll be competing for the awards. The Recording Academy announced the nominees in a livestream this morning. We’ll update this post as we go.
We made Chicago rockers Twin Peaks a Band To Watch back in 2014, when they were a bunch of precocious teenagers. They went on to become one of the most consistently rewarding bands of their era, kicking out a rich discography and helping to foster the scene that yielded artists like Sharp Pins/Lifeguard’s Kai Slater and Stranger Things actor-musicians Joe Keery and Finn Wolfhard. (Wolfhard recently told us he met Slater, who produced his recent solo album, through Twin Peaks’ Cadien Lake James.) We haven’t heard anything from the band (no relation to the David Lynch TV series) since 2020, when they contributed to our own Save Stereogum compilation. But it seems like they might be swinging back into action.
LUX — the fourth studio album from brazen pop star Rosalía — is a spiritual opera that dares to see how many more genres, doors, realms the Spanish auteur can break through. From its outset, she is caught somewhere between life and death. In the overture “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas,” she imagines an existence ascending to heaven and then back to earth. “How nice it’d be to live between them both/ First I’ll love the world then I’ll love God,” the Spanish pop star sings, her spiritual dreams fortified by a magnolious choir. With piano trickles that fall like teardrops and somber strings, we’re already miles away from (or in this case above) the skid-marked revelry of 2022’s MOTOMAMI. On that album’s closer “Sakura,” she compared the glamorous lifestyle to the fleeting life of the Japanese flower: “Being a pop star never lasts.” Over shrieks of fans, her live vocal delivery presented a chilling parable that she was reaching for more than swerving around fame’s potholes. LUX does more than take Rosalía to transcendent new heights. If MOTOMAMI was the sound of a pop star rejecting calcified fame, LUX is that star diffusing into myth.
Last year, Ogbert The Nerd frontman Madison James locked down the URL for taylorswift.bandcamp.com and used to release the kind of thrashy, discordant music that one does not necessarily associate with the name Taylor Swift. It makes sense to me! “Taylor” and “swift” are both words in the English language. (Well, “tailor” is a word. I guess “Taylor” is just a name.) If the other Taylor Swift isn’t going to release music on Bandcamp, then why shouldn’t someone else employ that name?
Back in July, Paramore leader Hayley Williams dropped 17 new tracks on her website. In August, she organized all those tracks into the excellent solo album Ego Death At The Bachelorette Party and added one more song, “Parachute.” In October, Williams added another song, “Good Ol’ Days,” to Ego Death. Physical editions of Ego Death are out today, and Williams has just shared another new track, her 20th of 2025. Is she done? We don’t know!
Storied classic rock battleship Journey has finally reached the end of its… wait. Shit. How do I get out of this one? Its… journey. Fuck! I fucked it up! Whatever. No time to stop now. Let’s just keep going. I bet nobody noticed anyway.
Tuesday marked the 10th anniversary of The Universe Smiles On You, the debut album from the chilled-out, mostly instrumental Texan soul-funk trio Khruangbin. Since that album’s release, Khruangbin have racked up tons of streams and played high up on the bill at vast numbers of music festivals. Last year, they got a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and performed on the telecast. Today, Khruangbin mark the anniversary of that first LP with the surprise release of The Universe Smiles Upon You ii, a re-recorded version of the original.
Shudder To Think are in the midst of their first tour in 17 years, and they teased new music. Now the DC art-rock crew is sharing “Thirst Walk” and “Playback,” their first new songs in 27 years.