A flame-haired, dirty white-suited Tyler Childers strides with intent through a standing, whooping, exultant ovation in Nashville and takes the stage to give his rejection speech at the Americana Music Association’s annual awards ceremony. Freshly anointed as Americana’s Emerging Artist of the Year, Childers wastes no time ripping the genre a new asshole. After declaring…
Frank Ockenfels III first crossed paths with David Bowie by chance. Ockenfels was assigned to photograph Bowie and his band Tin Machine for an early-’90s iteration of Creem magazine. It was the last of four photo sessions the band had endured that day in Los Angeles, and Ockenfels asked them to remove their shirts. Then,…
After 40 years of cutting-edge music and cultural coverage, SPIN celebrated its milestone birthday in style at Back to Basics’ debut event — a bespoke concert headlined by hip-hop luminaries Clipse and CeeLo Green at the SCOPE Art Show on the sands of Miami’s South Beach. The Dec. 4 Miami Art Week party was thrown…
Bright Eyes will play their twin 2005 albums I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn in their entirety at three special shows next summer — their first to celebrate their back catalog in this fashion. The events will take place May 6 at Red Rocks outside Denver, May 23 at…
The National’s Bryce Dessner, Nick Cave, Miley Cyrus, HUNTR/X, Wicked‘s Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood are among the musicians who received nominations today (Dec. 8) for the Golden Globe Awards, which will take place Jan. 5 live on CBS. Dessner and Cave are nominated for Best Original Song for the title…
Robert Smith has tapped a host of beloved acts for his first stint curating the lineups for the U.K.’s annual Teenage Cancer Trust charity concert series, including My Bloody Valentine, Garbage, CHVRCHES and Manic Street Preachers. The seven shows will be held at Royal Albert Hall in London beginning March 23 with Elbow and MRCY,…
The best thing that happened to pop music in recent years is that Grammy-winning songwriter Amy Allen watched that insipid Twilight saga and was revolted by the sight of the childbirth scene. This experience spurred Allen to leave “real school,” as she calls the nursing program she was enrolled in at Boston College, and go…
Artist/producer Dijon coaxed Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon back to the live stage last night (Dec. 6) during his performances on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, as the latter joined a super-sized band for the occasion also featuring Zack Villere, Nick Hakim and former Dirty Projectors vocalist Amber Coffman. Dijon contributed to Vernon’s 2025 Bon Iver comeback…
At a March Seattle gig, SML generated three epic improvisations of subtle groove science (the second piece even evoked the funky swagger of Average White Band’s “Schoolboy Crush”) and galvanic hypnosis. It was the best show this writer saw in 2025, and that it differed from the relative concision of the group’s records just proves…
The latest Warp album from the New York composer/pianist Kelly Moran, Don’t Trust Mirrors, is the culmination of six years of work, and it sounds like a definitive career statement. In retrospect, 2024’s conventionally pretty neo-classical record Moves in the Field stands as an anomaly in her catalog. Its elegant, sprightly piano pieces diverge from…
