Paste Magazine • 5th April 2025

Time Capsule: Modest Mouse, The Lonesome Crowded West

One of the most beautiful things about music is how thoroughly it can transport you into environments, headspaces, emotions, and situations you’ve never actually experienced. Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me is unimaginably devastating regardless of whether or not you have personally lost someone to cancer. You can feel the pain bleeding through the surface-level restraint and cheer of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours even if you haven’t made an album with a partner while your very public relationship w...

Paste Magazine • 19th March 2025

How clipping. Hacked Life’s Glitching Contradictions

It’s 2025, which means we are officially a decade beyond the future famously predicted in Back to the Future Part II, which took place primarily in the magical, distant tomorrow of 2015. While we might not have self-tying shoelaces or X-ray vision yet, other features of the film weren’t terribly far off: drones, biometric security, hoverboards (kind of) and video calls all certainly exist now. But that doesn’t mean our future actually feels like the one depicted in the 1989 blockbuster. Our dron...

Paste Magazine • 13th March 2025

Jeffrey Lewis Keeps Running From the Tiger

When I speak with anti-folk legend, accomplished cartoonist and New York DIY scene icon Jeffrey Lewis in his East Village apartment, I am but one of around 70 things on his plate that day. He is working on three music videos (one filmed just the day before); planning his upcoming tour; sketching its poster; drawing, writing, and inking the latest issue of his comic book series Statics; penning a new song for a local open mic that evening (he makes a point of trying to go every week with new mate...

Paste Magazine • 4th March 2025

Car Seat Headrest Announce Long-Awaited New Album, The Scholars

This is not a drill, y’all—Car Seat Headrest is back. It’s been five long, long years, but the wait has officially come to an end: Car Seat Headrest has finally announced the details for their fifth studio record, and it is a doozy. The Scholars, slated for a May 2 release from Matador, is not just any album; it’s a wholesale rock opera, Ziggy Stardust style. Although, if you’ve been keeping up with the band’s interactive webquest riddle game they’ve used to tease the record these past few weeks...

Paste Magazine • 3rd March 2025

New Colossus Festival 2025: 7 Acts We Can’t Wait to See

New York’s New Colossus Festival is back this year and bigger than ever—spanning six days, taking over almost a dozen venues across the Lower East Side and featuring nearly 200 emerging artists from around the world from March 4-9. It’s a musical extravaganza, and one you won’t want to miss. At the same time, though, 200 artists is a lot, so it’s fair to feel a little overwhelmed. To get you started, here’s a quick list of seven acts we here at Paste can’t help but feel particularly excited abou...

Paste Magazine • 5th February 2025

Throwing Muses: A Homecoming Like You’ve Never Heard Before

By the time I get off my hour-and-change Zoom call with Kristin Hersh, my cheeks are physically hurting from smiling. Then, a text from my roommate comes in, asking if I wanted to grab dinner now that my interview was over. Confused, I ask how she even knew I was done. She replies, “Because I don’t hear giggling any more.” A beat. Then, a second text: “And why WERE you giggling the whole time?? Aren’t you supposed to be professional or something???”Kristin Hersh has long been characterized as “w...

Paste Magazine • 5th February 2025

Exclusive: Guided By Voices Release New Single “I Will Be A Monk”

Guided By Voices is one of the most prolific bands in recent memory, with 40 albums to their name (and 18 in the past decade alone!)—and this year, they’ll be adding yet another record, Universe Room, to an already extensive discography. The album promises to provide “previously undiscovered constellations of sounds,” per their label Rockathon Records, exploring everything from cosmic new-wave landscapes to every nook and cranny of classic indie rock. According to frontman Robert Pollard, the al...

Paste Magazine • 1st February 2025

Time Capsule: PJ Harvey, Is This Desire?

In the grand scheme of PJ Harvey’s illustrious career, her fourth solo record, Is This Desire?, often gets overlooked. It’s understandable, bookended as it is by her breakout hit (1995’s To Bring You My Love) and her greatest commercial success (2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea). It’s understandable, but criminal.Of course, the fact that an album like Is This Desire? could ever possibly fall between the cracks is itself a testament to the ridiculously high quality of each and e...

Paste Magazine • 16th January 2025

lots of hands, 'into a pretty room' Album Review

Does anyone remember Bloom, that iOS software Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers created in, like, 2008? I certainly do. I have a distinct memory of sitting next to my dad in his bed as a kid, watching him tap his phone and giggling as pastels rippled across the screen, accompanied by ambient hums, beeps and drones—although, to be fair, I had literally forgotten about all of this entirely until earlier this week, both the app’s and the memory’s existence having faded from my mind for the majority of t...

Paste Magazine • 11th January 2025

Time Capsule: The Mountain Goats, Zopilote Machine

Zopilote Machine arrived with little fanfare, its 19 tracks of raw acoustic performances and narrative sophistication standing in stark defiance of contemporary production trends, from the glossy pop of Mariah Carey’s Music Box to even the Steve Albini-helmed rock sheen of In Utero. No bass, no drums, no electric guitar—just Darnielle’s fervent strumming and vehement vocals averaging a brief two minutes per track. But the album’s lean aesthetic wasn’t so much the consequence of limited means as...

Paste Magazine • 10th January 2025

Annie DiRusso: The Best of What’s Next

Annie DiRusso has millions of views on TikTok, hundreds of thousands of Spotify listeners and headline shows already under her belt. Yet, when I spoke to her this past Monday afternoon—T-minus five days until the announcement of her debut album, Super Pedestrian, its accompanying tour and the release of the record’s fourth single, “Back in Town”—DiRusso simply looked like any other 25-year-old. But that’s kind of the point.On Super Pedestrian, DiRusso is back in town at long last, and not just a...

Paste Magazine • 31st December 2024

How to Soundtrack Your New Year's Eve Right

Everyone wants to feel like their life is a movie—from twenty-somethings repeatedly insisting their weekend “is gonna be a movie,” to every active TikTok user developing a chronic case of “main character syndrome,” to the age-old experience of staring out of a rainy bus window all melancholy, pretending there’s a camera artfully shifting focus from your face to the details of the raindrops while the song in your earbuds becomes the scene’s diegetic soundtrack. For many, this phenomenon comes to...

Paste Magazine • 30th December 2024

A Decade Half-Spent: AJJ’s 'Good Luck Everybody'

We are deep in the final dregs of 2024, which means, terrifyingly, that in just a few days we will hit the halfway mark of the decade—and, perhaps even more terrifyingly, that the onset of COVID-19 was almost five whole years ago. I’ve never been great at grappling with the passage of time but, for some reason, that fact, even more than most, feels nearly incomprehensible. How can it possibly be almost five years since quarantine? How can it possibly be five years since all of us privileged non-...

Paste Magazine • 12th December 2024

Listen to Heavy Meddo's New Single "La Mer"

Heavy Meddo, the electrifying indie rock project spearheaded by the legendary Bill Baird, is making waves yet again. Made up of Baird, drummer DB Tamir, multi-instrumentalist Jordan Johns, and White Denim’s virtuoso Jonathan Horne, it’s safe to say that the Texas-based group has an extraordinary amount of experience under their collective belt. The band’s latest release, “La Mer,” is featured on a split 7” with Queen Serene’s “Glitter Disco.” Clocking in at nearly six minutes, “La Mer” journeys...

Paste Magazine • 7th December 2024

Severance Is Back and More Ominous Than Ever in First Season 2 Trailer

It’s been over two years since we last stepped into Lumon Industries’ fluorescent-lit labyrinth, but the wait is nearly over. Apple TV+ unveiled the much-anticipated trailer for Season 2 of Severance today at CCXP24 in São Paulo, Brazil, offering a tantalizing glimpse into the next chapter of the Emmy-winning workplace thriller. Fans in attendance were joined by creator Dan Erickson and stars Adam Scott, Britt Lower, and Tramell Tillman, who teased a season set to dive deeper into the unsettling...

Paste Magazine • 6th December 2024

Marion Filmmakers on Tangling with Stampeding Bulls, Awards Buzz and Hollywood Royalty

“Dig in!” Joe Weiland commands, gesturing to the pint of Stella Artois in front of me. It’s a crisp autumn Saturday afternoon in New York City, and I’m tucked away in a booth of a bustling SoHo restaurant with Weiland and Finn Constantine, the young British directorial duo behind Marion, an unusual, compelling 13-minute tour de force that has found some powerful supporters, especially Sienna Miller and Cate Blanchett (who both rushed to join the film as executive producers immediately after seei...

Paste Magazine • 18th November 2024

If I Come Back, You’ll Still Be Here: Car Seat Headrest’s How to Leave Town a Decade Later

2014 Will Toledo remains alive within and because of a record like this: still frozen in the midst of his cross-country, post-graduation road trip, stuck in an eternal limbo between Virginia and Seattle, college and adult life, a relationship and its end, his Bandcamp days and the onset of mainstream success. Car Seat Headrest's 'How to Leave Town' is a calcification of the split-second between Schrodinger reaching the box and him opening it, stretched out like taffy into something resembling an eternity, and then finding meaning even in that seemingly helpless moment anyways.

Paste Magazine • 9th November 2024

Time Capsule: Silver Jews, 'Starlite Walker'

“Songs build little rooms in time,” drawls David Berman on the album he released less than a month before he took his own life in the summer of 2019. “And housed within the song’s design / Is the ghost the host has left behind / To greet and sweep the guest inside / Stoke the fire and sing his lines.” This mentality is jarringly reminiscent of the lines that began Berman's entire career under the Silver Jews moniker -- the very first song on their very first album, "Starlite Walker," is much the same...

Paste Magazine • 13th October 2024

25 Songs About Cities Ranked By How Much I Think You Should Avoid Visiting That City

Cities are great! Who doesn’t love a good ole city? But, then again, there are so many cities in our big, wide world. How can anyone possibly decide which to prioritize visiting, and more importantly, which to avoid like the plague? At Paste, we are, somewhat notoriously, big fans of music. As such, we couldn’t think of a better way to answer the age-old question of “Which city sucks the hardest?” than by examining every single song that has ever been written about a city then compiling a list t...

Paste Magazine • 8th October 2024

Xiu Xiu’s 13” Is Another Gut-Punch of an Album From the World’s Most Visceral Band

There is no band quite as adept at actualizing the ineffable as Xiu Xiu. Over the course of their whopping 17-album discography, Xiu Xiu have managed to consistently put words and sound to feelings that I didn’t realize I felt, or even could feel at all. It’s not that other music isn’t evocative, but that Xiu Xiu’s music doesn’t evoke a feeling so much as it embodies it. Perhaps the best way to describe the distinction is via a cover: Tracy Chapman’s original “Fast Car” is phenomenal and heart-w...

Paste Magazine • 27th September 2024

10 Years In, Critical Role is Still Just Getting Started

On December 19, 2012, voice actors Liam O’Brien (Gaara in Naruto) and Sam Riegel (Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) discussed their upcoming one-time foray into the world of tabletop roleplaying games on their podcast All Work No Play: O’Brien, who last played Dungeons & Dragons when he was a sophomore in high school, explains that, normally, D&D is experienced in the form of campaigns, which are “ongoing…serial dramas,” à la “Charles Dickens,” requiring players to “get together regular...

Paste Magazine • 12th September 2024

The Front Room Weaponizes Incontinence for Its Crappy Horror-Comedy

Max and Sam Eggers’ debut, the hagsploitation flick The Front Room, had me at a loss for words at least a dozen times. That is not necessarily a compliment. Despite being billed as a horror-comedy, the primary emotion The Front Room elicits is one of sheer disbelief. The Front Room is, quite literally, a shit show. But that is less an insult than a fact of the movie’s runtime: the majority of the film depicts an elderly woman soiling herself to dunk on her step-son’s wife. (That being said, it f...

Paste Magazine • 4th September 2024

Despite Its Colorful Reimagining, Kaos Has Frustratingly Little to Say About the Mythology Its Adapting

It’s not his fault, but Rick Riordan ruined Greek mythology modernizations for the rest of us, the same way that J.K. Rowling (as much as I may dislike her) ruined the concept of wizarding schools. Their stories have become so ubiquitous with their central conceits that any new takes on those genres need to be almost impossibly unique. I love Greek mythology as much as the next girl who spent second grade wholeheartedly believing she was the daughter of Athena and her parents were merely adopted...

Paste Magazine • 29th August 2024

English Teacher Is the Second Coming of Caleb Gallo, and It Was Worth the Wait

English Teacher is a very big deal for a very select subset of people: those of us who, for one reason or another, were active on Tumblr in 2016. In other words: those familiar with The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo. (If you had a Tumblr eight years ago, you almost definitely stumbled across the webseries once or twice, even if only in the form of the oft-memed screencap of Jason Greene’s magnificent Freckle dramatically intoning that “Sometimes… things that are expensive… are worse.”) Th...