The year is officially half over. It’s been a fun six months, though, and we’ve listened to a ton of great music. So, to mark the occasion, we decided to run a little progress report and offer up our picks for the 30 best albums of the year so far, in one-sentence increments. It’s the least we ...

A year ago, Steven Hyden of the AV Club formulated a rubric for determining the greatness of a musical artist that he deemed The Five-Albums Test. Along with critical respectability and commercial success, Hyden puts up ...

With the year halfway over (just about), the list of our favorite songs of 2012 has grown by leaps and bounds. In the time that has transpired since March, when we published our , we’ve had on repeat some menacing hip-hop, ...

This weekend marks the inaugural Orion Music + More festival, a two-day convergence of indie rock and metal, curated by Metallica. And despite some notable inclusions of metal acts like Sepultura, Black Tusk and Red Fang, the rest of the lineup — Best ...

"History's Greatest Monsters" is a regular evaluation of albums deemed some of the worst in history. We do this not for the sake of schadenfreude, but to try to understand how these reputations were earned. Certainly, there are bound to be pleasant surprises. And certainly, there will be some ...

The most important records in any listener’s collection are not always the first purchases or big names, but rather the ones that opened a door. These gateway experiences can be at once exciting and confusing, disorienting and invigorating, perhaps even a little uncomfortable. Yet when you’re an ...

Earlier this year, we presented a list of 10 of our favorite songs longer than 10 minutes. So, now, we’re offering the flipside of that by lining up 10 of our favorite songs with a duration of a minute and a half. It’s not easy perfecting a ...

Thrill Jockey records, since its launch in 1992, has been synonymous with experimentation, innovation and bold musicians unafraid to take on new frontiers in music. Sometimes that means refining the familiar sounds of indie rock, and sometimes that means breaking through into completely unheard of ...

More than a few parents were undoubtedly freaked out by the sight of young men dressing in androgynous garb, caked in make-up and singing songs of sexual innuendo. Yet when it arrived in the ’70s, glam rock changed rock forever. Yet in spite of the shared quality of putting a lot more drama into ...