Home About Journalism

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!

Paste Magazine •

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 •

'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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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 •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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,...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Paste Magazine •

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...
Load More