Articles

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!

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Spirit of the Beehive, 'YOU'LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING' Review

...YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is strongest in these moments: the breaths between one loss and the next, the small mundanities of life after loss, distance made intimate and intimacy made distant. There are times, however, where the album reaches for grandiosity—reaches for catharsis (like the rap-rock portion of “THE DISRUPTION”), for transcendence (like the broad orchestral sweeps resonating on “EARTH KIT,” the record’s closing track). And while they don’t fail, per se, they fall short of reaching whatever grandiosity is aimed for, and instead feel a little out of place in an album so focused on immanence. But I can’t fault SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE for attempting to actualize that burning yearn echoed throughout the record; it’s only natural. That’s the raw truth the album hits on, the open sore it can’t stop pressing: Hunger makes a menace of us all.

Peacock's Mr. Throwback Dunks On Impossible Odds to Deliver Comedy Gold

In Mr. Throwback, Kimberly Gregg, a fictionalized version of Stephen Curry’s COO Tiffany Williams (played by Ego Nwodim), puts together an all-time-best birthday party for a dying 12-year-old in 24 hours. That feat might seem impressive to us low-life normal citizens, but within the “Stephiverse” (as Kimberly once calls the metaphorical solar system revolving around Curry’s sun), that is, quite literally, child’s play. Perhaps that explains the behind-the-scenes lore of the show itself: as write...

The World Is Grim, But Lizz Winstead Insists Abortion Rights Activism Doesn't Have to Be

Often sobering but never sober, No One Asked You—which is titled after a particularly cathartic chant Winstead, Hancock, and co throw back at anti-abortion extremists—spans six years in time, with the bulk of it filmed prior to the 2022 court decision heard ‘round the world. While Winstead, the AAF, and her 2017 multi-comedian roving abortion-stand-up extravaganza (playfully named the Vagical Mystery Tour) serve as the documentary’s core, Leitman spends a lot of the runtime giving a much-needed human face to abortion providers and clinics across the nation—including Mississippi’s Jackson Women’s Health Organization, lovingly known as “Pink House,” which was rocketed to the forefront of the abortion debate as the plaintiff in the notorious Dobbs case...

A Long Talk With clipping. About 'CLPPNG'

clipping. has terrorized my family for about a decade now. When I was in high school, I discovered “Get Up,” a track propelled forward by the constant, grating beeps of an alarm clock—the entire beat is, essentially, an inexplicably successful (yet still immensely annoying) version of Nathan Fielder’s attempt to make the “Blues Smoke Detector” a thing. Naturally, I made the song my personal alarm the second I heard it, and let it be known that I am a heavy sleeper. In other words: As a result of...

Hear Me Out: The Wrong Guy

The 1997 black comedy The Wrong Guy, served up by a veritable smorgasbord of Canadian comedic masterminds (from director David Steinberg to star Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall fame to even a cameo from the Barenaked Ladies as singing doo-wop policemen), is just about the definition of underground these days. Due to a series of unfortunate events mid-production, the film never even got a theatrical release in America, and was instead relegated to wasting away in the straight-to-DVD ether for all...
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