Paste Magazine • 21st May 2026

Spotify announces AI remixes and Live Nation partnership

Covers are a wonderful part of the music ecosystem. AI-generated ones, significantly less so. And, to no one’s surprise, it is—as always—Spotify at the scene of the crime.Earlier today, Spotify and Universal Music Group announced a licensing agreement allowing Spotify Premium subscribers to “cover” and remix copyrighted music with the help of AI. Oh, joy. It’s a pretty self-evident bid for AI monetization: subscribers pay extra to use the service, while copyrighted songs find new life (and new c...

Paste Magazine • 20th May 2026

Paste Q&A: Car Seat Headrest's retcon of 'Teens of Denial'

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Car Seat Headrest’s Teens of Denial, a breakthrough coming-of-age record that elevated Will Toledo and his bandmates from a message board hidden gem to an indie-rock household name. A week ago, Toledo started leaking to fans that he would be releasing Teens of Denial: Joe’s Story, a full re-imagining of the 2016 album focusing this time on the album’s recurring character, Joe. Revisiting old material has been a hallmark of Car Seat Headrest’s work for some ti...

Paste Magazine • 19th May 2026

Swapmeet is the best of what's next

The day before I was set to interview Swapmeet—the buzzy Australian four-piece turning heads at South by Southwest with their elastic indie rock and spirited live shows—I got an email from their publicist: “They really want to do this at Jersey Mike’s. They love it there. (Apparently, they’ve been asking if they can ‘have it Mike’s way’ at restaurants that are not Jersey Mike’s.) Would that be possible for you?” Then another email came, when I couldn’t respond for a few hours: “We don’t actually...

Paste Magazine • 15th May 2026

For Broken Social Scene, love and hate is the only way

When I was seventeen, I hit rock bottom. I was woken up at 2 a.m. on a January Monday and told my life as I knew it had violently ended. Hours later, I drifted through an airport as if in a fugue state before ending up in an airplane window seat against my will, tear tracks drying on my cheeks. As we took off, I pressed play on my iPod Nano with my teeth chattering, trying and failing to process just how much of myself had been murdered that morning. As luck would have it, Ariel Engle’s voice wa...

Paste Magazine • 13th May 2026

Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost still haunts me

On August 17, 2015, Bren Lukens almost killed themselves. That night, they went up to the roof of their house with thoughts to end their life. “He doesn’t know it, but I got a text message from Jake [Ewald, Bren’s bandmate and best friend], just like saying something really stupid, something really basic, day-to-day stuff,” Bren said, voice wavering, on Tripping in the Dark, the 2016 Modern Baseball mini-documentary. “I got off the roof and told my friend Cam, and he saved my life by telling Jak...

Paste Magazine • 11th May 2026

A Beach Boys agnostic listens to Pet Sounds for the first time

The Pet Sounds Project is Paste’s two-week celebration of the Beach Boys’ eleventh album, which turns sixty years old on May 16, 2026.
When I think of the Beach Boys, I think of—I’m so sorry—the Despicable Me minions. I am well aware that this is blasphemy. But unfortunately, I was ten when that godforsaken “Barbara Ann” cover hit the theaters in the lead trailer for Despicable Me 2, and it’s been burned into my brain ever since. My first impression of Brian Wilson then was not of Brian Wilson a...

Paste Magazine • 7th May 2026

runo plum is the best of what’s next

It’s not often I’m entirely thrown in interviews. I like to think I’ve gotten relatively decent at the art of it by now: I usually overload on prep ahead of time, making massive research documents and writing far more questions than I could ever reasonably use. Even if I am caught off guard, I can often latch onto a word or phrase and work my way back toward my intended line of questioning. 
Last month, I failed. runo plum completely wrong-footed me. The Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter’s upc...

Paste Magazine • 5th May 2026

Billie Eilish definitely doesn’t watch Survivor

There is, weirdly, a lot of crossover between the music industry and CBS’s beloved reality TV competition show Survivor. Musician Ben Katzman (formerly of Guerilla Toss) got to the final 3 in Season 46 just a few years ago. Country singer Zac Brown had an over-stuffed and ill-advised cameo just a few months ago. For some reason, every music publicist I know is obsessed with the show, with multiple agencies even having their own in-company fantasy league for Season 50. God knows we here at Paste—...

Paste Magazine • 4th May 2026

Suno acquires Songkick data

I’ve used Songkick for a long time—aside from word-of-mouth or simply following bands on social media, I’ve found it’s one of the easiest ways to discover local shows, and to record the gigs you’ve caught. In fact, I was scrolling through it last night, plugging in the shows I was planning to see and filling in the gaps of my schedule for this month. This morning, I deleted the app—time to rely fully on Concert Archives, OhMyRockness (for NYC), and Bandsintown instead.
On April 30, Songkick user...

Paste Magazine • 4th May 2026

Dave Grohl admits to lying about his vocal regimen, vindicating my otolaryngologist and me

Two weeks ago, I wrote an article venting about the fact that Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl claimed beer and whiskey alone kept his vocal cords healthy the same week that my otolaryngologist told me I need to avoid all alcohol due to how severely damaged my own cords are. I was, understandably, irate. As I wrote then: “Has Big Otolaryngology been lying to me all along? Have they been feeding me falsehoods to make me buy the pantoprazole tablets prescribed to me? Could my problem actually be t...

Paste Magazine • 4th May 2026

M.I.A. removed from Kid Cudi tour after making anti-immigrant comments onstage

I’m really not loving the running trend of iconic late-2000s/early-2010s rappers spiraling down the MAGA pipeline, but M.I.A. seems deadset on continuing it. She’s been descending ever-deeper into the depths of right-wing psychosis for a while now—and, weirdly, a lot of it seems to be 5G-based. Back in 2020, she insisted that Wi-Fi and the expanding 5G network were secretly the catalyst for COVID-19, and tweeted: “If I have to choose the vaccine or chip I’m gonna choose death.” In 2024, she laun...

Paste Magazine • 1st May 2026

Why can’t Gen Z stop recording at concerts?

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.
In 1984, a Chicago teen stole a dictation device from his grandmother and snuck it into an AMM show in the hopes of secretly recording the concert. Then he did it again, and again. Over the next thirty-odd years, Aadam Jacobs amassed a truly mind-boggling collection of more than 1...

Paste Magazine • 28th April 2026

Meghan Trainor, 'Toy With Me' Album Review

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, or so they say. In that case, Meghan Trainor’s Toy With Me is the biggest compliment anyone could ever pay Sabrina Carpenter. Between the sexy pastel babydoll aesthetic, glitzy production, cheeky hooks, (attempts at) winking innuendo, and even the stupid banged wig in every visualizer, there’s very little on the “All About That Bass” singer’s latest album that does not have the Short n’ Sweet star in its DNA. What doesn’t scream Sabrina, though, screa...

Paste Magazine • 24th April 2026

Noah Kahan, 'The Great Divide' Album Review

Yesterday, Noah Kahan posted on X: “Reviewers saying the albums too long shit I don’t think it’s long enough.” Seeing as The Great Divide clocks in at a whopping 77 minutes across 17 songs, you can imagine where the criticism might come from. Length isn’t inherently a bad thing. There’s little better than an album that earns its long runtime, that takes a long enough journey through varied enough sounds to justify an hour-plus listen. Unfortunately The Great Divide, the much-awaited follow up to...

Paste Magazine • 23rd April 2026

If Dave Grohl is telling the truth, my otolaryngologist is lying to me

I have had, in all honesty, a pretty rough week. I’ve had a bad sore throat for some time now, but woke up this past Saturday with three egregiously large, firm lumps on my neck. I’ve seen three different doctors this week, each one referred to me by the last, to get them checked out (I will find out whether or not it is cancer in 3-5 business days). When I went to the otolaryngologist on Tuesday, he was appalled—not just by the bumps on my neck (which, hopefully, are just swollen lymph nodes),...

Paste Magazine • 22nd April 2026

Exclusive: Guided By Voices talk upcoming album and share new single “When You're My Clown (Nothing Happens)"

The day Robert Pollard stops making music is the day Hell freezes over. The Guided By Voices singer and songwriter has been at it for over four decades now, and his pace hasn’t slowed—if anything, it’s picked up. More impressive than even that, though, is just how consistent the beloved rock band has been throughout the years. They have a formula and, goddamn, have they perfected it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not willing to explore. Take Crawlspace of the Pantheon, the Dayton group’s 44th al...

Paste Magazine • 22nd April 2026

Julia Cumming can finally hear her own voice

I grew up in the sweaty armpit of Florida, weighed down by dense heat and surrounded on all sides by Confederate flags. I was never going to be a sorority girl or a trad wife, and my desperate efforts at pretending otherwise were thoroughly unconvincing. I lay awake at nights furious that I was born a stubby weird kid in the Bible Belt who listened to music no one liked instead of some cool, fashionable New York chick in ripped fishnets, stubbing skinny cigs on the soles of my platform boots bef...

Paste Magazine • 20th April 2026

Lucy Liyou, 'MR COBRA' Album Review

A little over two weeks ago, my friend brought me to Performance Space New York for Lucy Liyou’s one-night-only, one-woman “semi-autobiographical solo theater-music performance,” Mister Cobra. I went in completely blind, my only information prior to the show’s start being the warning ushers gave to the first two rows: you’re in the fake blood splash zone, watch out. Roughly an hour later, I was up on my feet for a standing ovation. Since that night, I’ve tried to put the experience into words, o...

Paste Magazine • 16th April 2026

'Mile End Kicks' director Chandler Levack is a recovering music critic

When the trailer for Chandler Levack’s sophomore feature Mile End Kicks dropped last month, no fewer than five separate people texted me the link. I saw it on at least six “close friends” stories on Instagram. It left me and my cohort of other young female music critics shell-shocked: to quote the now-memed Euphoria line, “Wait, is this fucking play about us?” 
The film, which takes place in 2011, centers around 22-year-old music critic Grace Pine (played excellently by Euphoria’s own Barbie Fer...

Paste Magazine • 15th April 2026

Jury says Ticketmaster and Live Nation ran monopoly, hiked up ticket prices

Live Nation and Ticketmaster have ruined the ticketing industry by illegally functioning as a monopoly, stifling competition, and overcharging customers, per today’s New York federal court ruling. The six-week-long trial that’s been dragging the latter through the mud has finally come to an end. Jurors began their deliberations on Friday and, as of roughly an hour ago, have declared that yes, Big Concert is, in fact, harmful toward the rest of the market. More specifically, they found the ticket...

Paste Magazine • 10th April 2026

Sufjan Stevens' piss poems found by Penn State student

To quote Survivor 50 player Christian Hubicki shortly after he accidentally pooped his pants: “There are many elements of being human. Laughing, crying, cuddling a loved one… But also the sheer and utter embarrassment of unexpected gastrointestinal distress.” In a similar vein, one of the most beautiful and enduring aspects of the human experience is our perennial need to piss. As it turns out, Sufjan Stevens, who has long been a master of capturing every nook and cranny of life, knows this all...

Paste Magazine • 9th April 2026

Parquet Courts' 'Human Performance' turns 10

When I told my dad I was writing an anniversary piece about Parquet Courts’s Human Performance, which turned ten years old yesterday, he immediately scoffed. “That album came out yesterday,” he said, his voice tinny over the speakerphone. “It hasn’t aged at all. It’s way too soon to write an anniversary piece on it. Nothing has changed!”
On some level, he’s not wrong. The Brooklyn band’s third proper album (or fifth, if you count the limited release of American Specialties and Parkay Quartz’s Co...

Paste Magazine • 6th April 2026

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...

Paste Magazine • 3rd April 2026

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...