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My published work dating back to early 2022: interviews, essays, reviews, and features covering everything from TV retrospectives to political commentary, album reviews to art shows. To see coverage of a specific beat (i.e., music or film), use the "search by tags" feature to narrow down the results!

Paste Magazine •

Transmissions from POP Montréal: Part 1

To be honest, last week was probably not the best time for me to suddenly drop everything and take a last-minute flight to Canada. But when an opportunity falls into your lap to go to see dozens of incredible bands in a city you’ve always wanted to go to in a country you’ve never been to before, you’d be a fool not to snatch that bull by its metaphorical horns and ride it for all it’s worth, or at least until it bucks you off. And that is precisely how I ended up in Montréal, Canada last Thursda...
Paste Magazine •

COVER STORY | Neko Case Won't Be Tamed

By the mid-1800s, Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin decided he’d had enough of the Romantic penchant for sentimentality. He believed that all art ought to strive to capture nature as accurately as possible, and the poets of the era were spitting on that noble pursuit with every ridiculous metaphor they penned. In response to a line from Charles Kingsley’s “The Sands of Dee” that described sea foam as “cruel” and “crawling,” Ruskin scoffed: “The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The s...
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Golden Apples’ Shooting Star and the Art of Breaking Yourself Open

Shooting Star is a record of contradictions. It’s Golden Apples’ fourth album, but it’s the band’s fifth (counting Dumbness, released under the name Cherry). On paper, it’s the Philadelphia outfit’s “most collaborative” work to date; in practice, much of it was written alone, with singer and songwriter Russell Edling tinkering tirelessly in his room until the songs stopped fighting back. Reviews gush about how much “Edling appears to be thriving” on the record; by Edling’s own account, large swa...
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Guerilla Toss Remains the Exception to the Rule

99% of the time, if you get an unsolicited DM from one of your musical heroes asking you for a favor, the general rule of thumb should be to assume you are being scammed and immediately block the sender. But it just so happens that underground dance-punk legends Guerilla Toss were—as they so often are—the exception that proves the rule.“Stephen Malkmus just slid into our DMs on Twitter one day,” Kassie Carlson, Guerilla Toss frontwoman and all-around force of nature, tells me over FaceTime. “He...
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How Big Thief Found Itself Again

Buck Meek and Adrianne Lenker decided James Krivchenia belonged in Big Thief before they ever saw him touch a drumstick—at least, of the inedible variety. “James has this incredible way of enjoying a meal, where he’s, like, really vocal about it, and makes all these beautiful sounds,” Meek tells me over Zoom, eyes crinkling. It’s been more than a decade since Krivchenia engineered Big Thief’s studio debut, Masterpiece, but Meek, the band’s guitarist, clearly still relishes the memory. “We just r...
Paste Magazine •

Modest Mouse Talk Music Cruises, Time Travel, Rollercoasters and Hot Air Balloons, and Psychic Salamander Festival

25 years after The Moon & Antarctica expanded indie rock’s horizon lines, Isaac Brock is still finding new ways to stretch the world of Modest Mouse—and it feels, as he tells me the moment we connect, “good as shit.” This weekend, that expansion takes physical shape in the foothills outside Seattle, where the band will headline and host the inaugural Psychic Salamander Festival at Remlinger Farms. Co-presented with Seattle Theatre Group, the two-day gathering (September 13–14) doubles as both yo...
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Case Oats, 'Last Missouri Exit' Album Review

The life of a music critic is one of perpetual bombardment, so much so that scouring my inbox for new artists to check out can sometimes feel like a crapshoot. PR firms try to maximize that eye-catching potential in their subject headings, but the whims of a critic are unpredictable, fickle, and most importantly, self-centered. Case(y) in point: I discovered Chicago alt-country outfit Case Oats primarily because I saw the band was led by another female Casey (there are very few of us, and even...
Paste Magazine •

Time Capsule: The Wrens, The Meadowlands

In 2003, a group of mid-thirties men from New Jersey released an album seven years in the waiting: The Meadowlands, an exhaustion-ridden, last-ditch attempt at holding onto a rock career they were all but certain had ended before it began. With two well-received but largely unknown records out so far (1994’s Silver and 1996’s Secaucus), the quartet knew they needed their third album to break that mold, but had little faith it would. Perfectionism, writer’s block, and the unrelenting pressure of adult life plagued the process, their love for music and for each other buckling under the totalizing weight of living.
Paste Magazine •

Billie Marten Finds Control By Letting Go

The first time I saw British indie-folk wunderkind Billie Marten in the flesh, she was, ostensibly, being laughed at. By the midpoint of her set opening for Tennis at NYC’s Pier 17 last month, the audience had devolved into giggles. She made a valiant effort to ignore the bizarre reaction, but when she got a few lines into her quietly devastating song “Vanilla Baby” and could hardly hear herself over the laughter, she had to stop playing entirely. She looked out, baffled, at the crowd: “Why is e...
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Open Mike Eagle Picks Up the Pieces on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited

Open Mike Eagle’s discography, read as a whole, feels almost like a reluctant historical document of the adolescence of the internet rendered in miniature—from irritating novelty to totalizing force. That doesn’t mean, though, that his work feels detached or clinical. If anything, his hyper-personal writing, steeped in self-deprecation and a kind of everyday melancholy, has always made his observations sharper. He didn’t set out to capture technology, but humanity—and it just so happens that, along the way, the two became indistinguishable.
Paste Magazine •

It’s Frankie Cosmos’ Universe and We’re All Living In It

FRANKIE COSMOS’ SIXTH ALBUM, Different Talking, is not about reinventing the wheel. It’s about making the wheel you always wanted to make but never quite could—about returning to the vision you’ve spent your career approximating and, for the first time, bringing it fully to life. It’s Frankie Cosmos, with a full band and without fear; Frankie Cosmos, with both the maturity that comes only with age and the whimsy Kline should’ve felt at 19 but was forced, by circumstance, to grow out of too soon. (As she declares midway through our conversation: “It’s the summer of whimsy. Let’s make it happen. Hashtag it. #WhimsyGirlSummer.”)
Paste Magazine •

Dexys Midnight Runners, 'Searching for the Young Soul Rebels' | Time Capsule

45 years ago, the first iteration of Dexys Midnight Runners (Dexys Mark I, as they’re called in the band’s extensive lore) released Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, an exuberantly sincere and wholly inimitable album that remains one of a kind to this day. Northern soul in sound yet punk in affect, Young Soul Rebels is at once a lightning-in-the-bottle encapsulation of its time and place—early-’80s Britain post-punk at its most raw—and an utterly prescient record even four-score-and-five-years down the line.
Paste Magazine •

Time Capsule: Neutral Milk Hotel, On Avery Island

Most debut albums are remembered for what they became. On Avery Island, instead, is remembered for what it didn’t. Released in 1996, two years before In the Aeroplane Over the Sea would swallow the indie rock ecosystem whole, Neutral Milk Hotel’s first record has long lived in the shadow of its own future. Even its defenders tend to speak about it apologetically: it’s the rough draft, the proof-of-concept, the lo-fi larva that would one day metamorphose into a cult classic. It’s a convenient nar...
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Alan Sparhawk Reclaims His Voice on With Trampled by Turtles

Grief is a part of life. There is no way to get around that. It is also awful: a raw, pulsing wound too painful to look at directly, let alone touch, let alone bandage.When Low’s Alan Sparhawk lost his partner of 30 years in both life and music, Mimi Parker, to ovarian cancer in 2022, the void she left in her wake became a chasm he found nearly impossible to climb out of—not in the least because his primary outlet, the music he created with Parker in Low, felt impossible to even think of in her...
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Ezra Furman: Beyond the Limits of Language

Ezra Furman’s Goodbye Small Head is designed to thwart our efforts at thesis-based categorization. It’s not a treatise. It’s not a manifesto. It doesn’t convert pain into power, or offer catharsis, or wrap itself in clarity. If it offers anything, it’s what John Keats called negative capability: the capacity to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” That line, though nearly 250 years old, could just as easily be one of Furman’s. “Over the years, I want more and more to live in that place of transcendence,” she tells me during our conversation, her voice choppy but warm through my tinny laptop speakers. “Or at least keep reference of it around me. I want to always keep one hand on that transcendent and unknowable.” For Furman, music isn’t a tool to decode the ineffable. It’s a way to touch it—to make visceral what language itself simply can’t.
Paste Magazine •

How Sunflower Bean Mastered the Art of Playing It Through

By the time Sunflower Bean wanders into the storage facility I’m haphazardly attempting to pass off as a respectable interview space, they’d already sweat through their stage clothes once. It’s midday in Austin, partway through the third and final installment of Paste’s multi-day, multi-stage concert series at South by Southwest, and the stifling Texas heat is so all-consuming it seems to bake everything flat and still—except the NYC trio, who just lit up our outdoor stage (“The Sun Stage,” we’d dubbed it, although on this brutal 97° afternoon, the name had begun to feel painfully redundant)...
Paste Magazine •

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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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