Articles

My published work dating back to early 2022: interviews, essays, reviews, news beats, 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!

Did Charli XCX record Sky Ferreira’s demos for Wuthering Heights?

There is perhaps no more dangerous phrase in the music industry than “we should work together.” It starts as flattery, curdles into obligation, and occasionally culminates in a series of cryptic Instagram comments. In the case of Sky Ferreira and Charli XCX, two artists whose creative orbits have been tangling for the better part of a decade, it appears to have ended in the latter.Ferreira, who is credited as a featured artist on the Wuthering Heights soundtrack cut “Eyes of the World,” has stro...

Angine de Poitrine, 'Vol. II' Album Review

I’m on a Montréal rooftop on a brisk September evening, and I really have to pee. I’ve spent the past hour mingling and drinking, waiting for a duo I’ve been told is the hottest rising act in Canada to emerge onstage. It’s now five minutes to go-time, but I don’t think I can hold it any longer. I make my apologies and rush down the stairs of the Ubisoft building, hoping to make it to the bathroom on the fourth floor and back before the apparently much-awaited secret show begins. Almost there, I...

Former TURNSTILE guitarist allegedly just tried to kill his ex-bandmate’s dad

Three years ago, the beloved Baltimore hardcore outfit TURNSTILE officially parted ways with their founding guitarist, Brady Ebert, after 12 years of playing together. Two months ago, TURNSTILE won their first two Grammy Awards. One day ago, Ebert appeared in court after being charged with attempted second-degree murder and first-degree assault. To make matters worse, the victim—according to The Baltimore Banner—was none other than William Yates, the 79-year-old father of TURNSTILE lead singer B...

Wendy Eisenberg, 'Wendy Eisenberg' Album Review

Wendy Eisenberg has evidently always been a fan of the rhetorical question, but perhaps never more so than on Wendy Eisenberg. “You are the oldest you’ve ever been,” they intone, sweet and clear, on the opening track: “Did you feel yourself change?” Whos, whats, wheres, whys, and hows abound: see “Who was I becoming?” (“Meaning Business”), “What gave me that idea?” and “Where was I when that happened?” (“The Ultraworld”), “Why did I try? Did I try?” (“Will You Dare”), “Is that how I wound up her...

Pop stars sign petition calling for ICE detention center closure

We’re only three months into the year, but we’ve already seen a lot of musicians take a stand against the Trump administration: Kesha told the White House to “Stop using my music, perverts” earlier this month; Charley Crockett called the president “a grifter who bankrupted 6 casinos” with no discernible skills save for “filing lawsuits” in early February; Turnstile used their Grammy speech to speak out against “heightened state violence”; Neil Young gave his whole discography to Greenland for fr...

Girl Scout, 'Brink' Album Review

I am, and have always been, staunchly against the Spotify-driven trend of hyper-specific microgenres. Not only is it straight-up stupid much of the time, it’s also actively confining artists themselves, often shoving them into even smaller, odder boxes and forcing them to compete with the other bands trapped inside. We ought to work toward transcending genre, not doubling down on it. And yet: I must admit that Girl Scout’s debut record, Brink, has made me finally understand the appeal of the Spo...

Gladie, 'No Need to Be Lonely' Album Review

Growing up is a mindfuck. As a kid, I took no small amount of comfort in the thought that I wouldn’t be like this forever—that getting better would naturally come hand-in-hand with getting older. That so long as I held out long enough to see it, the future me would inherently be someone better than the me of the present-turned-past. I’ve thus spent much of my young adulthood choking down the same bitter pill: you age without doing anything at all, but that doesn’t mean you automatically mature a...

The Twigs vs. FKA twigs: May the best twig win

Band names are hard. You want something catchy but not forgettable, unique but not incomprehensible, meaningful but not overused. There are only so many words in the English language, so sometimes you simply have to pick one and pray. But the thing about naming your band after a pre-existing word is that you have to make peace with the fact that other people—billions of them, in fact—will continue to use that word in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with you or your music. If I name m...

So what if Chappell Roan hates kids?

There are few celebrities who have been as vocal about their distaste for fame as Chappell Roan. This is not inherently a bad thing in the slightest—everyone, even celebrities, are entitled to privacy and human decency. Today’s unparalleled age of parasociality makes that harder to come by than ever, so I have no qualms with a popstar trying to set boundaries. Honestly, good for them. We don’t need another batch of Swifties. However, this hasn’t always been the greatest thing for Roan’s public p...

A long talk with ELUCID

New York City has a particular relationship with its own past: not quite amnesia, not quite nostalgia, but something more like a city-wide habit of paving over what was there without ceremony and daring you to remember. Gentrification is everywhere, don’t get me wrong, but in New York you truly cannot walk five steps without leaving footprints on some forcibly forgotten history or other. Neighborhoods become other neighborhoods. Venues become other venues. The places that mattered to people who...

The rise and fall of teen music movies

Associate Editor Casey Epstein-Gross’s column Cultural Reset features regular deep dives into the impact of music on culture—and vice versa—in the 21st century from the perspective of someone born and raised within it.
When I was about eight years old, I decided I wanted to be seen. Or not seen, really, but heard. I spent the next ten or so years of my life dreaming not of being a princess or falling in love or starting a family—all those things young girls are supposed to dream about—but of bei...

Franz Ferdinand condemn IDF for soundtracking airstrikes with "Take Me Out"

There is, I suppose, a grim irony in a band named after the man whose assassination triggered World War I now having their biggest hit conscripted into propaganda for what increasingly looks like the opening chapter of the next major regional war. On Saturday, the Israeli Defense Forces set a video of fighter jets, ground explosions, and an Israeli soldier celebrating the recent joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran to Franz Ferdinand‘s “Take Me Out”, captioning it “Operation Roaring Lion—this i...

Britney Spears arrested for DUI in California

Britney Spears was arrested by the California Highway Patrol on Wednesday night on suspicion of driving under the influence in Ventura County, not far from her home in Westlake Village. She was pulled over around 9:30 p.m., taken to a hospital to have her blood drawn, booked into the county jail shortly after 3 a.m., and released around 6 a.m. Thursday morning. A court date has been set for May 4.Her manager, Cade Hudson, called the arrest “an unfortunate incident that is completely inexcusable,...

Apple Music's answer to the AI music crisis is to use the honor system

A few weeks ago, we wrote about Sienna Rose, the “anonymous” neo-soul act with three songs in the Spotify Top 50, millions of monthly listeners, and no discernible evidence of being an actual person. Deezer’s detection tools flagged her music as computer-generated. Pretty much everyone on the internet has figured it out by now. And yet the social media accounts tied to the project are still posting as if she’s real—still fielding fan questions, still teasing a potential tour, still doing the who...

The first week of the Ticketmaster trial paints a picture of an industry held hostage

It may have taken roughly three decades, a spectacular Taylor Swift-related meltdown, a bipartisan Senate hearing, and the combined legal firepower of the Department of Justice and 39 state attorneys general, but the federal antitrust trial against Live Nation Entertainment (Ticketmaster’s parent company and the concert industry’s final boss) is finally happening. Opening statements began Tuesday in a Manhattan courtroom, and if the first few days of testimony are any indication, Live Nation’s l...

Lala Lala, 'Heaven 2' Album Review

For an album named after a paradise in the sky, Heaven 2 spends a remarkable amount of time in the dirt. Lillie West licks it off her teeth on the closer, drives past piles of it on the opener, buries her hands in it on “Anywave,” and tries to shake it off on “This City.” Dirt shows up in nearly half the tracklist—as geography, as metaphor, as the residue that won’t wash off no matter how many cities you flee to. It’s a fitting fixation for an artist who spent the years between records living of...

Kesha tells the White House to stop using her music, perverts

In a development that should surprise exactly no one who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s ongoing quest to turn every pop song into military propaganda, the White House TikTok account has been caught using Kesha’s 2010 hit “Blow” to soundtrack footage of a fighter jet launching a missile at a naval ship. The video, posted on February 10 with the caption “Lethality 🔥🦅,” has racked up over 17 million views—because nothing says “leader of the free world” quite like a hype-hou...

Mitski, 'Nothing's About to Happen to Me' Album Review

There’s a famous Margaret Atwood passage about the impossibility of going unwatched as a woman, about how solitude doesn’t actually neutralize the gaze so much as internalize it. The “watcher” migrates from the world outside to the space behind your own eyes until “you are a woman with a man inside watching a woman,” until “you are your own voyeur.” Even inside the comfort of one’s own home, the surveillance state and its subject share a single body. Mitski’s eighth album is, on its surface, a r...

12 acts to see at this year’s New Colossus Festival

My fellow New Yorkers, we must prepare ourselves: the New Colossus Festival is upon us once more. Beginning tomorrow, 180 bands will descend upon the streets of the Lower East Side, taking over 12 separate venues for five straight days. It’s a lot, and it’s not for the faint of heart. But fear not: we here at Paste hope to make the considerable challenge of deciding which bands to see a little easier. Here are the acts we’re most looking forward to at this year’s fest.
Aunt Katrina
Aunt Katrina...

Andrew Bird cracks open The Mysterious Production of Eggs

The Mysterious Production of Eggs didn’t arrive in the world so much as it slowly hatched, one false start and discarded version at a time, in the long shadow of a red barn in western Illinois. By the time it was finally released in February 2005, Andrew Bird had already made and scrapped the album twice, relocated from Chicago apartments to his family’s Driftless-area farm, built himself a studio by hand, and discovered that the barn he thought would be his recording salvation was better suited...

Nobody asked for a Gnarls Barkley reunion

I’m pretty sure I fell out a window and woke up in 2006, Frank Reynolds-style, because that is the only conceivable explanation for why I opened my laptop to see headlines cheerfully announcing new music from Gnarls Barkley, the collaborative project of singer CeeLo Green and producer Danger Mouse. This can’t possibly be happening in 2026, right? I mean, we’ve allegedly advanced as a society, have we not? We’ve invented, like, six new kinds of AI, survived a pandemic, sat through ten different J...

The man Bill Callahan is trying to be

The title My Days of 58 sounds like it belongs on the spine of a slim, sun‑faded memoir, something labored over by a man who’s finally ready to decide what mattered and what didn’t. In Bill Callahan’s case, it arrived a lot more casually than that. The phrase arrived courtesy of his 10‑year‑old son, Bass, who wandered in while Callahan was working and wanted to know what the new record was called. When his dad admitted he didn’t have a name yet, Bass took it upon himself to solve the dilemma. “H...

Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s unrealized “P factor” plan for EMI

16 years ago, Jeffrey Epstein looked at one of the biggest record labels on earth and saw the same thing he saw in model agencies and fashion shows: a “P factor” score. (One can reasonably infer the “P” refers to “pussy.”) The now‑public emails around his abortive bid for EMI are a paper trail showing how a convicted sex offender and his friends talked about the industry that signs our favorite artists, negotiates their masters, and decides who gets a slot on which stage—and how little any of it...

Alysa Liu won Olympic gold and has great music taste

The world’s coolest girl just got even cooler. After winning two gold medals this Winter Olympics—the first gold America has received in women’s free skating since 2002—figure skater and all-around people’s princess Alysa Liu skated to the Zara Larsson remix of PinkPantheress’s “Stateside” at the Olympic Exhibition Gala this past Saturday. Everyone say it with me now: boots!Paste named “Stateside” one of its favorite tracks of 2025—as writer Cassidy Sollazzo wrote: “When it was announced that Fa...
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