From Bad Boy to Merge Records, Dawn Richard Reflects on Her One-of-a-Kind Career

Once my art is polished, I still have to run the four miles, still have to make sure I sing live, still have to make sure I’m giving you a visual that is on par with mainstream artists. Because if…

How SOPHIE’s Music Inspired a Generation of Underground Artists

From the earliest singles, SOPHIE’s music had an electric pull. Luminescent, visceral, and delivered with impeccable comic timing, songs like “BIPP” and “HARD” cleaved open an irresistible niche within electronic music and avant-pop. In collaboration with vocalists like Charli XCX,…

40 Albums To Be Released in 2021

Good riddance, 2020. Hello, 2021! The new year brings a renewed sense of hope for the music industry and the world at large, as the end of the pandemic draws closer and closer. With a return to some degree of…

The Weather Station Battles Climate-Change Anxiety, One Song at a Time

“In the beginning of performing [music], I needed to keep things very small, because that was the only thing that felt fully honest,” she explains. “Now I understand that there is a role of a performer that isn’t just completely…

Sample Snitching: How Online Fan Chatter Can Create Legal Trouble for Rap Producers

By the late ’80s, new technology made it possible for producers to take “the original hip-hop DJ concept and apply it to making hip-hop records,” by making “cut and paste collages using older obscure records and electronic samplers,” Manak explained.…

The 41 Most Anticipated Albums of 2021: Kendrick, Rihanna, Adele, and More

Preorder: Bandcamp Lorde TBD About six months after she told fans that the death of her dog Pearl had disrupted the timeline for a new album, Lorde returned with brighter news in May, sharing that she’d been working on new…

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…