AI musicians are here. They are among us. In a recent article, Billboard called attention to a number of AI artists across a bunch of different genres who have appeared on various different niche Billboard charts — inhuman creations with names like ChildPets Galore, Unbound Music, Enlly Blue. Breaking Rust, and BOI WHAT. (A lot of them seem to operate in the contemporary Christian space, which is sort of interesting when you consider that these things are inherently godless just by virtue of their existence.) The most prominent of those artists is the fake R&B singer Xania Monet, who appears to be the first AI-generated artist to appear on any Billboard airplay chart. Yesterday, Xania Monet’s creator appeared on CBS This Morning to discuss her enterprise.

Radiohead are in the midst of playing their first shows since 2018. The band kicked off their reunion tour yesterday at Madrid’s Movistar Arena, and they performed at the same venue tonight and brought out some deep-cuts and tour debuts.

Do you ever listen to the film podcast Blank Check With Griffin And David? You really should. It’s consistently one of the best things on the internet. One might even say that it’s consistently one of the only good things on the internet. If you are reading this website, it’s safe to say that you are into deep popular-culture nerdery, and Blank Check does that with movies in a way that I hope we do with music. The current series on the Coen Brothers is a blast. I don’t really like writing about podcasts, and Blank Check doesn’t often has a ton of crossover with our world even though they keep booking my friends as guests, but the Slow Xmas series is a good opportunity to bring it up.

Shout out Rupert Giles. That guy really did his best to look out for Buffy and her friends, and he rarely got any credit for it. Instead, he kept getting beat up by vampires and demons and whatnot, and the people he loved kept getting killed. Maybe he died in the end? I can’t remember. I hope not. But now, he’s at least getting some shine, since he’s the namesake for a new song from the young Manchester fuzz-pop band cruush.

The kids are bringing back early-’00s metalcore. I didn’t see this development coming, but it’s been very fun to watch. There’s a whole scene that’s developed around Ephyra, a Connecticut-based label that only came into existence in 2022. Bands like Balmora, Since My Beloved, Azshara, and Blow Up The Outside World are fully steeped in the complicated song-structures and bone-deep guitar-crunches that Poison The Well and Prayer For Cleansing brought into the game many years ago. And then there’s I Promised The World, a Texan band that seems to have beamed in directly from 2003, before any of the band members were actually born.

Remember Sports haven’t released an album since 2021’s Like A Stone, though there was an EP called Leap Day in 2022. Still, when new album The Refrigerator drops next February on the band’s new label home Get Better Records, it will essentially mark the Philly indie mainstays’ first new music in half a decade. That’s reason to rejoice, and new single “Bug” will only increase your anticipation.

Next Month, the Liverpool Band To Watch King Hannah will release a new limited edition 7″. “This Hotel Room” b/w “Look At Miss Ohio” follows this year’s “Leftovers,” which itself was an outtake from last year’s Big Swimmer. The B-side is a Gillian Welch cover. Today we hear A-side “This Hotel Room,” a smoldering folk-rock slow jam buoyed by powerful harmonies from bandmates Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle. They sound like a band fully capable of doing justice to a Gillian Welch song.

Back in March, Chrystia Cabral, the Bay Area art-pop musician who records under the name SPELLLING, released her extremely cool album Portrait Of My Heart, one of our favorite records of the year’s first half. One of that LP’s highlights is a vast, dreamy ballad called “Destiny Arrives.” Today, SPELLLING shares a brand-new version of “Destiny Arrives” that features Weyes Blood, someone who knows how to make a vast and dreamy ballad.

Cat Power’s seventh studio album The Greatest turns 20 next year, and to celebrate, the musician born Chan Marshall is releasing a new three-song EP in January called Redux. As a preview, one of those songs is out today, a newly recorded cover of James Brown’s 1958 classic “Try Me.”

Based on name alone, you might assume that deathcrash was a 19-year-old rapper who dressed like a bat and whose beats sounded like the modem-connector static noise. Nope! Instead, deathcrash come from the the fertile South London post-punk scene, and they make majestic ’90s-style slowcore. The first two deathcrash albums, 2022’s Return and 2023’s Less, came out during a busy six-minth stretch. Now, they’re back with their first new single in a couple of years.