Laura O'Connel
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Laura loves covering news about celebrities and influencers.

The Pitchfork Staff on Their Unique, Solitary Year in Listening

Mankaprr Conteh: I feel lucky to have fallen in love in the throes of the pandemic. While my now-boyfriend and I were long-distance-dating this spring, we held our own Verzuz-style battles over FaceTime. Rather than choosing a single artist to…

The 2020 Club Bangers That Could Have Been

Just as they can for a person, nightclubs hold the power to transform a song forever. DJs speak of the process in mystical tones: of timeworn tracks that suddenly grew auras, accrued or shed gravitas, went down in bright red…

The 16 Best Ambient Albums of 2020

When Pitchfork invited electronic composer Keith Fullerton Whitman to initiate us into the mysteries of ambient music a few years back, he asked, “What music isn’t ambient in the 21st century?” He meant it rhetorically, as an observation about listeners’…

How Music Persisted During the Pandemic

Although over 25,000 artists (and counting) have signed UMAW’s Justice at Spotify petition, the group has a hard fight ahead of them. Having to pay even a penny per stream would put Spotify out of business under its current business…

A Year in Music on TikTok

A strange remix shot up the Billboard Hot 100, after creators on TikTok started dancing and posing to it. It was “Roses” by the Guyanese-American rapper SAINt JHN, which a Kazakh teenager named Imanbek had pitched and sped up, adding…

The Best and Worst of Everything Else

So, Pat Corcoran, better known as Pat the Manager, sued his former client, Chance the Rapper. What makes this lawsuit so good for me is that I lived through it, and it’s extremely validating. Like, we covered Chance extremely closely…

The Year Live Music Stopped

Aside from Taiwan, the clearest vision of live music’s post-COVID future might be New Zealand, which has so far managed to stamp out the coronavirus. Government benefits supported the creative community during two tough lockdowns, and now live shows are…

The 20 Best Music Videos of 2020

While the pandemic forced us all inside this year, some of our favorite artists kept us distracted and lifted our spirits by breaking new ground with their visuals. Whether tiptoeing into Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s candy-colored sexual funhouse,…

Our 15 Favorite Music Books of 2020

Being able to easily cue up a song just as you’re reading about it is a small, modern joy, and it’s one we took full advantage of in 2020. In a year largely bereft of live music or even social…

The 22 Best Songs by Latinx Artists in 2020

Latin American and U.S. Latinx music is constantly evolving through migration, displacement, and globalization, and in 2020, it was clear that a catch-all term for genre and identity could never capture that multiplicity. The year gifted us Natanael Cano’s experiments…