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If the musicians of the world had decided to take 2020 off — or if they all went out and found different jobs — everyone would’ve understood. Touring, the chief way most full-time musicians make their money, was simply not a possibility this year, and it’ll be a long time before we fully understand the effects of the entire live-music economy grinding to a sudden halt. But the music never stopped.

Within the macro tradition that is year-end list season, we at Stereogum have carved out our own micro tradition: Every December, instead of publishing a staff list of the year’s best tracks, we present a bunch of personally selected top-10 lists from our staffers and contributors. So although our rundown of 2019’s best albums represents a hard-argued consensus, the following collection of tunes i

For many of us, 2019 has been a year of flux — politically, culturally, professionally, personally. It’s hard to envision what the future might bring since the recent past has shown us that we don’t know half the things we thought we knew. In unsteady times, music can be a balm and also a mirror. And a lot of the best music of the year responded, in one way or another, to that constant uncertainty

Music has always been a vast universe to explore, and that sense of the unconquerable infinite has only intensified in an age of on-demand streaming and easily accessible recording equipment. The flow of new sounds is so constant, so voluminous, and so diverse that no one could ever claim to have a handle on all of it, not even those of us who listen all day every day. So in a sense attempting to

The legends, for the most part, stayed quiet in 2018. Your Radioheads, your Beyoncés, and your Kendrick Lamars were not entirely silent; Thom Yorke, Johnny Greenwood, and Kendrick Lamar all had movie-music things going, while Beyoncé and JAY-Z wrapped up their internal-affairs trilogy with a shrug of an LP that felt more like an excuse for a tour than anything. Kanye West released an album and a h

We made it! Well, we mostly made it. The world could well end in the next 25 days. But we’ve made it through 11 months of this godless year, and for that, we deserve to congratulate each other. It’s been rough. Every morning, we’ve woken up to some new, terrible surprise: Another brazen violation of justice by the people in charge of our country, another indication of our government descending int

Ikutaro Kakehashi, founder of the Japanese electronic instruments manufacturer Roland, has died at 87. The news was first announced on Facebook by longtime Roland demonstrator Tommy Snyder. Kakehashi was born in Osaka in 1930. He began his career in the 1950s, repairing electronic organs and creating new prototypes while running an electrical appliance shop. In 1960, he launched his own organ comp

This has been such a bullshit year. We’ve seen gun massacres. We’ve seen wild political turmoil across the world. We’ve seen countless icons, musical and otherwise, leave this world for the next realm. We’ve seen a power-mad billionaire and an aging and delusional pro wrestler team up to shut down Gawker. We’ve seen a whole lot of bullshit summer-franchise movies. And then there’s the cherry on to

The amount of great music in the past six months has been almost unfair. As in: How are we supposed to process all this? How can we fully appreciate one major piece of work when there’s always another one coming right around the corner. And when the huge, fully-formed masterpieces are dropping from the sky with no notice whatsoever, is it even safe to tear our faces away from the internet for a da

Lately, Steve Albini — the veteran producer, Shellac frontman, and longtime underground-rock gadfly — has been saying things about how streaming services are the inevitable next development in the way we listen to music, even going so far as to claim that those services have solved “the problem with music,” making labels irrelevant and removing music from the realm of commodity. He made some of th

From star-studded guest lists to an audible influence on several generations of bands, Radiohead’s fan base has always included quite a few of their fellow rock stars. We polled dozens of notable musicians about their favorite Radiohead songs, and this is how they responded. Ed Droste (Grizzly Bear) “Let Down” (From 1997’s OK Computer) Picking a favorite Radiohead song is really really tough. I’ve

Above all else, the Wikipedia entry on post-rock exemplifies how difficult it can be to pin down movements in music: Did the genre begin in the ’90s? The ’80s? The term was coined a little over 20 years ago, in 1994, by Simon Reynolds in the pages of Mojo. Perhaps, however, its vocabulary of textures and rhythms dates back further, to, say, the Velvet Underground, because crap, they invented every

Japanese pop artists rarely come to the US. So when Perfume — the female vocal trio who’ve spent the last decade embodying a unique and amazing techno-pop sound and visual presentation, rising to J-pop prominence in the process — announced that they’d be playing Hammerstein Ballroom (as well as L.A.’s Hollywood Palladium), the response from their US fan base was, basically, hysteria. The members o

The year isn't half over yet. We know that. But since everyone starts unveiling their year-end lists in November, we figured we wouldn't be too far out of pocket if we unveiled our favorites of the 2012 calendar year the week before Memorial Day. Our favorite album of the year (so far) is the one on which a talented young ...

Infamously cantankerous studio rat/national treasure Steve Albini doesn't like to be called a record producer. He prefers the term "recording engineer." That's a dry, clinical term for what Albini actually does, but it makes sense that he'd prefer to be seen that way. Over the past few decades, Albini has overseen the creation of countless numbers of recorded artifacts. And ... 20. Mogwai - "My Fa

The members of Australian violin/guitar/drums instrumental trio Dirty Three have been plenty busy lately; you probably recognize violinist Warren Ellis as Nick Cave's right-hand swamp monster. But they haven't released a new studio album together since Cinder in 2005, so it's a pretty big deal that they got back together to record new joint Toward The Low Sun. Below, download ...

2011 was the year music learned to float. Actually, that's not true at all; music has been reaching for feelings of tidal drift since the first Gregorian monks figured out how to chant, or maybe since the first caveman licked a frog and figured out that his grunts got extra-spacey. But surveying our 2011 top 50, ethereal haze is something ...

Hey, another year-end list! Today, we've already seen Paste and Q name their 50 favorite albums of 2011. Now the British rock mag Uncut also chips in, giving a list that's heavier on doom-and-gloom visions and old-timey sounds than anyone could've expected. The magazine's album of the year, it turns out, is PJ Harvey's Mercury winner Let England Shake, a ...

It's going to be impossible to claim that Beyoncé Knowles has "quietly" put together a vicious song catalog, stocked with everything from heart-wrenching ballads to shamelessly fun bangers, but she has done it without some of the fanfare associated with other pop stars. And, you know, the musical work is stellar; it makes a ton of sense that others have ...

The Strokes' debut album Is This It was first released on 7/30/01. To help us celebrate this 10th Anniversary, we asked some of our favorite indie bands to cover each track. The resulting collection, STROKED: A Tribute To Is This It, is in the spirit of our previous free tribute albums for Radiohead's OK Computer, R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People, ...

Since winning our nerdy hearts in the mid '90s, Weezer have surprised us with weirdo career moves that may alienate some old-school fans but bolster their off-kilter appeal to a new generation. For example, naming and designing an album around a character from Lost. Or branding their own Snuggie. Or collaborating with Kenny G and Adam Lambert. Or "Can't Stop ...