Paste Magazine • 13th November 2026

Everything we loved about Iceland Airwaves 2026

Last week, Features Editor Casey Epstein-Gross and staff writer Grace Robins-Somerville hopped on an Icelandair flight and spent a week in Reykjavik for the city’s utterly singular festival, Iceland Airwaves. From shaking ass during shows by Cobrah, SCAM, and knackered to watching the Strokkur geyser erupt, soaking in the surreal Sky Lagoon, and tearing up seeing PISS and Dove Ellis perform, the once-in-a-lifetime experience of Iceland Airwaves surpassed even our wildest expectations. Here are o...

Paste Magazine • 29th October 2026

Schaefer Llana is looking out the window

I first saw Schaefer Llana in an overheated, fluorescent-lit rooftop bar owned by Blake Shelton. It was early evening on day three of Paste’s Nashville showcase at Americanafest, and I was just about dead on my feet from running between Ole Red’s first and 5th-floor stages for seventy-two hours straight. The venue wasn’t, at that point, an ideal setting for an intimate show. The room buzzed with sunburnt hordes of bridesmaid bashes and Eagles fans, all quite buzzed themselves. Then Llana opened...

Paste Magazine • 27th October 2026

10 acts we can't wait to see at Iceland Airwaves

From November 4-8, Iceland Airwaves will host over a hundred acts, which is a bit daunting for anyone hoping to navigate the three-day music extravaganza. So in the hopes of helping other festival-goers narrow down their must-see lists, we chose ten of the acts that we’re most excited to see upon arriving in Reykjavik next week.

The dancefloor is not dead, not even for rockers. Adult DVD, a dance-punk sextet from Leeds, churns out tunes tailor-made for head-banging and ass-shaking in equal meas...

Paste Magazine • 22nd October 2026

Watch Schaefer Llana’s Paste Session at AmericanaFest

Last month, Paste Studio On The Road headed to Nashville for AmericanaFest to catch up with some of our favorite acts. At East Iris Studios, singer-songwriter Schaefer Llana treated us to a live performance, brought to you by our friends at Conectiv.
I watched Llana perform in person at our Live on Broadway party in Nashville and found myself entranced by the music from her debut studio album, Full Circle—perhaps the best word to describe hearing her sing. She writes siren songs, and her voice c...

Paste Magazine • 20th October 2026

Billboard Style are proud meatheads

Billboard Style might be the Best of What’s Next—the superlative we save for the most exciting newcomers on the scene—but, unlike most of our picks, this is not Ben Guterl and Dan Howard’s first rodeo. Or their second. Or third. Or tenth. They’re veritable cowboys by now, fixtures of the indie rock rodeo for well over a decade. Guterl has been in some 15-odd bands in his life, most notably the beloved outfit Forth Wanderers, which he started in his teens. Howard, by his own estimation, has been...

Paste Magazine • 19th October 2026

Jeff Rosenstock is still worried

On a Jumbotron, it never rains. Somewhere in the game of telephone between the world, the camera capturing it, and the screen projecting it back, the water streaking across the sky gets lost in translation and dissipates into thin air. Looking only at the screens flanking the Pier 17 stage, you could almost believe that Jeff Rosenstock’s hair is plastered to his forehead from sweat alone, that the hands passing him around the crowd are dry. It’s a wet September night in New York City: the sky is...

Paste Magazine • 14th October 2026

Geordie Greep responds to sexual assault allegations, apologizes for kissing unconscious Vancouver woman

Geordie Greep has issued a statement responding to the allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in Vancouver last week, confirming in an Instagram statement that he did, in fact, kiss her.
This statement follows Paste’s exclusive report from earlier this afternoon, in which the woman, referred to by the pseudonym “Laura,” and Greep’s former keyboardist Cameron Campbell described the events that transpired in the early morning on October 8. Greep’s representatives had declined to comment wh...

Paste Magazine • 12th October 2026

Jack White reunites The Raconteurs at his Nashville show

You should always stay for the encore. Case in point: Jack White surprised audiences by bringing out his former The Raconteurs bandmates—Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler—during the encore of his Nashville show last Saturday, October 10.While Keeler has been playing in White’s touring band, it was the first time all four members of The Raconteurs have played together on stage since 2019. The quartet played hits “Steady, As She Goes,” “Hands,” “Level,” “Broken Boy Soldier,” and “C...

Paste Magazine • 11th October 2026

Barry Manilow walks off stage and cancels Vegas show

Barry Manilow’s homecoming at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino lasted only one complete concert before illness forced him to stop.The 83-year-old pop veteran made his return to the stage on Thursday (October 8), after roughly six weeks away. His performance the following night (October 9) was cut off early, and his show on Saturday (October 10) at the International Theater was scrapped entirely.
On Friday, Manilow got through only a song or two before leaving the stage. Members of his band...

Paste Magazine • 7th October 2026

Nate Amos is our child of perpetual motion | COVER STORY

Every song is either a tree or a chair. That’s the working theory of Nate Amos, the “generational songwriting talent” behind This is Lorelei and, with collaborator Rachel Brown, Water From Your Eyes. By his own accounting, Water From Your Eyes songs tend to come out trees, and This is Lorelei’s sprawling Bandcamp back catalog is practically a forest. It wasn’t until 2024’s breakout, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, that Amos actually sat down at a workbench and took a mallet to wood—the results of w...

Paste Magazine • 5th October 2026

Butch Walker accused of abuse and sexual misconduct with minor

Late last night (October 4), Instagram user @amandalunt posted a lengthy statement detailing her decade-long relationship with Marvelous 3 frontman Butch Walker, beginning when she was fifteen and he was over double her age. Allegedly, their entanglement began when he invited her to a local Atlanta radio station and then began groping her inner thighs. 
Lunt, currently a production assistant, then spent over ten years unable to escape Walker’s orbit, despite the musician being in a committed mar...

Paste Magazine • 5th October 2026

The dancefloor was alive at Taste of Iceland

Last Thursday (October 1), I hopped on the F and headed to local NYC hotspot Pianos for a Taste of Iceland—a little amuse-bouche, shall we say, ahead of Reykjavik’s Iceland Airwaves festival the first weekend of November.
Entering the venue, I was handed a raffle ticket without much explanation and ushered in through the double doors. Before I could turn around and ask what my ticket (10724-688, for whatever it’s worth) was for, a booming voice from the front of the crowd interrupted me, reading...

Paste Magazine • 1st October 2026

Review: Greg Freeman finds life amid the rubble on 'All Set the Bone'

We are living after the end of the end of history—both in the sense that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 theory of a democratic finish line has come and gone, and that it feels disconcertingly like we’re living through the end times themselves, alive after everything and left to make a life in the wreckage that optimism left behind. We are living post- everything: post-liberalism, post-language, post-hope. On “Culture,” Greg Freeman adds two more to the list: post-culture and post-rock-and-roll. The cur...

Paste Magazine • 28th September 2026

Review: Kristin Hersh lives off hope on 'Sugar on Blackstone'

Kristin Hersh has had a rough go of things. She was hit by a car when she was sixteen, resulting in severe head injuries, PTSD, lifelong hallucinations and synesthesia, and a dissociative disorder that went misdiagnosed as schizophrenia for decades. Her music was a curse, not a blessing; something bestowed upon her by the part of her created by that dissociative disorder, a persona she half-lovingly maligned as Rat Girl. She got pregnant at nineteen, then lost custody of the child when the fathe...

Paste Magazine • 27th September 2026

The phoenix never rises from the “Ashes of American Flags”

Nothing happens for a reason. We live rootless lives, ungrounded in any grand narrative scheme. It’s kinder to imagine otherwise—to frame ourselves as protagonists of some Homeric epic, subject to the whims of a well-meaning author rather than to the whims of nothing at all. Events sit apart, like pins in a corkboard, and we’re the ones who come along with the red string. The stars in Orio...

Paste Magazine • 25th September 2026

AJJ searches for hope in a hopeless world

Growing up, life only existed between one strip mall and the next—the liminal space between two highways. A smiley sun and a calligraphied Trust in Jesus, it will always get better! plastered on the mint-green wall of a therapist’s waiting room. Days spent stomping through public school hallways with Sean Bonnette’s voice, nasal and tinny, ringing in my ears: “You can hope it gets better, you can follow your dreams / But hope is for presidents / And dreams are for people who are sleeping.” 
Ever...

Paste Magazine • 22nd September 2026

Adult DVD wants people to move

The dance floor is dead. Charli xcx declared as much earlier this year, then repeated herself on her latest album: “I think the dance floor is dead / So now we’re making rock music.” Despite the line itself being more cheeky than serious, it spurred countless debates across the internet: magazine thinkpieces, hundreds of X and Reddit posts, even a derisive comment from Madonna (“If your dance floor feels dead, maybe you’re playing the wrong music”). For two weeks, the discourse was everywhere. I...

Paste Magazine • 18th September 2026

J Mascis is sick of perfect guitar sounds

In an ideal world, nobody would ask J Mascis anything. The Dinosaur Jr. frontman has long been known as a particularly laconic interviewee, and across the forty-five minutes of our Zoom call, I learn this firsthand. When I ask him about his reticence toward interviews, he just shrugs. “I don’t mind answering questions, but a lot of times people want you to just talk. If there’s a one-word answer to a question, then I answer it. But that’s not enough for people,” he gripes. “If they didn’t want a...

Paste Magazine • 15th September 2026

@ is a force of nature

A beekeeper and a computer programmer walk into a recording studio, and then promptly walk out again. This is not the set-up for a joke so much as it is the legitimate story behind Autosmile, the second record from Philadelphia duo @. Although they first became friends in 2015—in front of a horde of taxidermied animals at the Harvard Museum of Natural History—Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak’s musical collaboration began online and in-house during COVID-19, and at least for now, they plan to ke...

Paste Magazine • 11th September 2026

The Glow Pt. 2 is an album about death that kept me alive

I lied in the headline. The Glow Pt. 2 is not actually an album about death. Even its title track, with lyrics like “I faced death, I went in with my arms swinging / But I heard my own breath / And I had to face that I’m still living,” has nothing at all to do with dying—nothing at all to do with killing yourself, or failing to. Some years after the record was released, Phil Elverum rolled his eyes at his younger self’s melodrama: “I was more dramatic back then. ‘I faced death’ is kind of a ridi...

Paste Magazine • 10th September 2026

The Tubs’ Owen Williams is doing a hatchet job on himself

In 2010, Owen Williams walked into an anger management class and walked out with a band. The Cardiff experimental noise group Joanna Gruesome began in that therapy circle, where Williams met bassist Max Warren and guitarist George Nicholls. Alongside singer Lan McArdle and drummer Dave Sandford, Joanna Gruesome took the Wales DIY scene by storm for seven years before disbanding in 2017. 
The following year, Williams and Nicholls found themselves trapped in a Welsh caravan park as a storm raged a...

Paste Magazine • 8th September 2026

Lily Seabird will never die

By the time I arrive at Lucky, a “dive bar for grown-ups” on Avenue B, Lily Seabird has already made friends with the bartender and is in the middle of being invited to drinks afterward at the woman’s other bar. She’s sipping a massive negroni at the counter, gabbing with the other customers like a regular, despite having never set foot in here before. She seems so comfortable that—even though I recognize her from photos and seeing her live at Paste’s SXSW showcase the year prior—there’s a momen...

Paste Magazine • 3rd September 2026

Yoni Wolf is split in two

When I was about fourteen, I became obsessed with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which claims that every person on Earth fits into one of sixteen molds. (I—like both Yoni Wolf and his ex-girlfriend, according to a line on his new record—was an ENFP.) There’s something incredibly appealing about being told who and what you are down to the minutiae; I thought that if I understood exactly what I was, that’d justify the rest of me. But maybe that level of pseudo-specificity was misguided. Maybe th...

Paste Magazine • 1st September 2026

Alex Warren is aggressively inoffensive on WILDCHILD

When I think of Alex Warren, I think of COVID-19 and being trapped in my childhood home, depressed and scrolling mindlessly through social media every moment of the day—of watching the Hype House form with equal parts disgust, fascination, and, yes, maybe a little bit of jealousy. Warren might be a Grammy nominee now, but I’ll always think of him as the David Dobrik-wannabe with fluffy hair and a camera perpetually in hand: the guy who “pranked” his girlfriend (now wife) by destroying her car to...