Paste Magazine • 6th February 2026

Casey Wasserman is in the Epstein files, and his roster is pushing back

Boy, is it a bad time to be named Casey and also Epstein. Gross! Because, unfortunately for me, Wasserman CEO Casey Wasserman managed to make all parts of my name relevant in one sickening fell swoop.
Wasserman has spent the last few years positioning himself as two things at once: the benevolent power broker behind half of Hollywood’s entertainment infrastructure, and the guy polishing Los Angeles’ halo ahead of the 2028 Olympics. Both versions took a serious hit last week, when newly released...

Paste Magazine • 6th February 2026

Ratboys, 'Singin' to an Empty Chair' Album Review

There are not, I don’t think, very many albums about therapy. To be fair, therapy only recently stopped being a cultural shorthand for weakness; its framing as a kind of basic maintenance, like going to the dentist for your brain, is an awfully new one. But there’s also the simple fact that therapy itself is stubbornly uncinematic. A great deal of art still worships at the altar of the emotional extreme: all-consuming rage, obsessive desire, bottomless grief, impossible joy. The myth of the suff...

Paste Magazine • 4th February 2026

Turnstile follow Grammy wins with statement on state violence

As of Sunday night, Turnstile just became the rare hardcore band to walk out of the Grammys with actual hardware—the Baltimore group won two awards at the Premiere Ceremony, taking home Best Rock Album for Never Enough and Best Metal Performance for “Birds,” after also landing nominations for Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Alternative Music Performance. But in a new statement on Instagram, they frame that milestone less as a personal victory than as an uncomfortable vantage poin...

Paste Magazine • 2nd February 2026

The guitar will never die

The first guitar that mattered to me was not mine. It was my dad’s: a regular‑guy acoustic in the corner of the office/playroom, strings a little dead, wood a little scuffed, transformed into a magic trick every time he played “Casey, Casey, Casey is my daughter / Casey, Casey, Casey, she loves running water” for the seventh time in a row while I spun myself dizzy behind the couch. In the grown‑ups’ world, guitars were supposedly dying, edged out by laptops and controllers and a whole discourse...

Paste Magazine • 2nd February 2026

The 10 best and worst moments from the 2026 Grammys

The 68th Grammys came and went, but not without paying tribute to the power and resistance of music. The Recording Academy picked some weird winners, legacies were rewritten, some great and bizarre performances happened, acceptance speeches were used for anti-ICE positions, and Cher was Cher. There were first-time winners everywhere, including the Cure and TURNSTILE, but it was Bad Bunny who stood victorious at the show’s end. Here are the 10 best and worst moments from the 2026 Grammy Awards. S...

Paste Magazine • 25th January 2026

Every song from 'Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,' ranked

For reasons that remain unclear to me personally, the internet has decided that 2016 was a golden age worth yearning for. I, on the other hand, remember it as a never-ending humiliation ritual, but, well, to each their own. But even I have to admit that there was one beacon of light amidst the constant terrors: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, The Lonely Island’s egregiously underrated celeb mockumentary (think Spinal Tap, but about a Bieber-core megastar whose meteoric rise and catastrophic...

Paste Magazine • 24th January 2026

Wolf Parade's 'Apologies to the Queen Mary' keeps finding new people to haunt

It’s always weird when a song you love goes viral. When I think of Wolf Parade’s anthemic “I’ll Believe in Anything,” I think of being 19 and clutching at the cheap green comforter of my dorm room bed, choking down furious sobs so my next-door neighbors wouldn’t hear me crying through the thin walls. I think of standing alone on Foss Hill at midnight, fingernails dug into the meat of my palms, my gaze cast up at the familiar sight of the Pleiades cluster and the line “Look at a place far away fr...

Paste Magazine • 20th January 2026

Sweden’s current streaming champ isn’t human, but at least their charts are

Ever heard of the song “Jag vet, du är inte min” by the up-and-coming artist Jacub? Yeah, me neither—but that just means we’re not Swedish. The folk-pop crooner has quietly become Sweden’s biggest song of 2026, racking up more than five million Spotify streams in a matter of weeks, all on the strength of a finger-picked guitar, a wounded chorus, and a man sadly realizing his late-night situationship is not, in fact, endgame. So who is this mysterious Jacub, anyway? As luck would have it, “he” is...

Paste Magazine • 20th January 2026

On 'Don’t Be Dumb,' A$AP Rocky makes both a case and a mess

Eight years is a long gap between albums in any genre, but in rap specifically, it’s not even a lifetime; it’s a generational turnover. Whole careers arrive, peak, flame out, and get repackaged as nostalgia in that span. I mean, last time A$AP Rocky released a record, Kanye wasn’t even a Nazi yet. Let that sink in.
Rocky himself has clearly been thinking about the wait. Too much, maybe. It’s understandable; he left off with the most divisive album of his career, 2018’s arguably too-experimental...

Paste Magazine • 19th January 2026

Bruce Springsteen condemns ICE's "gestapo tactics" at surprise show

Man, it’s always great when a beloved rockstar is actually, you know, a decent, good person. Rare, but great. I thank my lucky stars every day that Bruce Springsteen is one of them. The Boss, indeed.At a surprise weekend appearance at Light of Day Winterfest in Red Bank, New Jersey,  America’s most reliable avatar of working-class decency very calmly torched the Trump administration’s ICE deployments.
“We are living through incredibly critical times,” Springsteen told the crowd, before laying ou...

Paste Magazine • 15th January 2026

Westside Cowboy is the best of what's next

“Authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” Try as they might, no so-called ‘voice of the generation’ has managed to sum up the mid-2020s as perfectly and succinctly as Tina Fey offhandedly did in 2024 on a podcast I don’t even listen to. Over the past few months, this quote has lodged itself in my brain, resurfacing unbidden as I scroll through Twitter, wade through emails, slog through press releases. There is perhaps no line of work that makes you as intimately aware of the scarcity of modern...

Paste Magazine • 14th January 2026

Flea is going solo, and he’s bringing his jazz roots with him

For someone who’s spent nearly half a century anchoring one of the loudest bands on the planet, Flea has taken his time getting around to a proper solo album. That wait ends March 27, when he releases Honora, his first full-length record under his own name—and a sharp left turn away from funk-punk bombast toward jazz, trumpet, and intimate ensemble playing.
Flea’s going back to his roots for this one. Before he ever picked up the bass, he played the trumpet. His first memory of music is the very...

Paste Magazine • 13th January 2026

The hottest neo-soul artist on Spotify doesn’t exist

There’s a whole other internet out there, folks. Prior to today, I had never heard of up-and-coming neo-soul act Sienna Rose before, but based on social media today, it seems a lot of people had—she’s got three songs in the Spotify top 50 and boasts a rapidly rising listener count that’s already well into the millions. She is also, importantly, not real. That’s right, the so-called “anonymous” R&B phenom with no social media presence, digital footprint, or discernible personal traits is AI gener...

Paste Magazine • 9th January 2026

bbno$ comes out of “retirement” after approximately one month

Those early January “I haven’t taken a shit since last year” jokes have reached a new low: the return of an artist after his—to quote the actual press release—“widely discussed retirement announcement last December.” So…last month. You mean last month. That’s not a retirement; that’s barely a smoke break.Much to the relief of a certain gaggle of terminally online tweens, straight-to-TikTok artist bbno$ (pronounced “baby no money”) is finally back from his protracted sabbatical of roughly 28 days...

Paste Magazine • 8th January 2026

Spotify's continued platforming of ICE is indefensible [UPDATED]

Indivisible, the organization behind the No Kings protests, is escalating its pressure campaign against Spotify with an argument that has become increasingly difficult to dismiss. For months, the world’s most powerful music platform has functioned as a delivery system for Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment propaganda. And after the murder of Renee Nicole Macklin Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis yesterday, it’s all the harder to pretend that this arrangement belongs to the realm of...

Paste Magazine • 8th January 2026

Spotify won’t say it’s done with ICE

When it comes to press releases, what is not said often speaks louder than what’s on the page. As of today, Spotify’s official line regarding their partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year reads: “There are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify. The advertisements mentioned were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms.”That is true. There are no ICE ads currently running on Spotify. But that does not mean Spotify has ch...

Paste Magazine • 7th January 2026

Sure, let’s put music in a lollipop

Have you ever bit into a lollipop and thought, “Man, I wish chewing this sucker made the bones in my jaw vibrate at the precise frequency of Ice Spice’s ‘Baddie Baddie’”? No? Well, it seems someone has—specifically, someone working at Lava Tech Brands, the company that just released the most baffling product of 2026 (granted, it’s only been a week): Lollipop Star, a lollipop that uses bone conduction technology to make lines like “I was just poppin’ my shit” echo through your brain the second yo...

Paste Magazine • 5th January 2026

Royel Otis guitarist tries to stifle misconduct allegations with a Reddit dragnet

When you are accused—anonymously, repeatedly, and in granular detail—of having a nonconsensual sexual relationship with a minor, there are a few normal ways to respond. You can deny it. You can sue. You can issue a clear, on-the-record statement saying “this is false,” like an adult who understands how these things work. Or you can do whatever the hell Royel Otis guitarist Leroy Bressington (known professionally as Royel Maddell) just tried to do, which is ask a U.S. federal court to force Reddi...

Paste Magazine • 3rd January 2026

Time Capsule: Lisa Germano, 'Geek the Girl'

There is a lie that gets sold alongside empowerment, especially the version of feminism that prizes sharp elbows and sharper tongues: if you believe hard enough in your own strength, you can will it into existence. It’s a comforting fantasy, one that lets the world stay exactly as violent as it is while shifting responsibility onto women to be brave enough, angry enough, prepared enough. But when it comes face to face with reality—more specifically, when it comes face to face with a man who is bigger or stronger or in a position of authority and wants something from you that you do not want to give—it collapses quietly, privately, and with an astonishing amount of shame. How do you square the identity you’ve built with the cold truth of your own powerlessness, the same powerlessness you’ve crafted your life around rejecting?

Paste Magazine • 31st December 2025

No Album Left Behind: Armand Hammer’s 'Mercy' finds meaning in the quiet work of staying human

“What’s the role of a poet in times like these?” The line crops up midway through Armand Hammer’s Mercy, but billy woods and E L U C I D spend the album’s entire runtime circling it. It’s a familiar provocation, worn thin by repetition yet no less urgent for it. We are, after all, watching in real time as the essence of personhood sheds all things human, becoming a dataset made up of search results, corporate algorithms, and commodity consumption statistics—made all the worse by a media apparatus that treats human life as a sliding metric, its value revised with each headline and calibrated to whichever bodies the New York Times decided to count that day. In a world where nothing seems to accumulate into meaning or consequence, why keep writing, creating, caring at all?

Paste Magazine • 23rd December 2025

Nicki Minaj rents out what’s left of her cultural capital to Turning Point USA

Apparently unsatisfied with melting her brain out on X last week, Nicki Minaj spent the weekend taking her MAGA era on the road, popping up as a surprise guest at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest and doing exactly what you’d expect: praising Trump, dunking on Gavin Newsom, whining about being silenced, and earning standing ovations from people who think Joe Rogan is a philosopher and applause is a substitute for coherence.
Minaj walked onstage hand-in-hand with Erika Kirk, widow of Turning Point...

Paste Magazine • 19th December 2025

Jelly Roll gets pardoned, proving redemption works best with a publicist

Huge week for the Jelly Roll diehards out there—your favorite Christian country rapper was just granted a full pardon by Tennessee governor Bill Lee. With around 40 stints in jail—the most serious being for a robbery at age 17 and drug charges at 23—the rapper-turned-singer legally named Jason Deford has, as he tells it, had difficulty traveling internationally for concert tours and “Christian missionary work” due to all the burdensome felony-related paperwork. Deford doesn’t have to worry about...

Paste Magazine • 16th December 2025

Nicki Minaj speedruns MAGA brain rot in flirtatious online beef with Gavin Newsom

If all modern politics is a form of performance, this week offered a masterclass in farce, one taught by Nicki Minaj and featuring Gavin Newsom. What started as a clumsy, half-defensive, off-the-cuff statement about trans kids has metastasized into something far stranger: one of the most beloved rappers of the 21st century declaring herself locked in mortal online combat with the governor of California. This largely one-sided feud culminated, fittingly, with the rumored presidential hopeful twee...

Paste Magazine • 8th December 2025

Dove Ellis, 'Blizzard' Album Review

The German Romantic poet Novalis once wrote of his search for “a single secret word” that would strip the world of its crude veil and reveal the glorious truth beneath. He never named the word, leaving it as the symbolic key sought by all Romantics—the one that would halt the onslaught of reason and restore humanity to its mythical, spiritual roots. It’s been a long time since the Romantic age, though. If there is truly a “word,” so to speak, it’s safe to say that it has not yet been voiced.
Rou...