What used to come off as a nearly unimaginable extremity—the sort of forbidding musical brutality that Dying Fetus has made its specialty—now can seem almost quaint.

In 2012, pop radio sounds like an airbrushed, Auto-Tuned wasteland, and nobody in their right mind knows what the hell “alt-rock” means anymore. But a number of Pitchfork-approved, taste-making experimentalists have emerged in the past decade—chief among them Brooklyn trio ...

Lydon was perhaps the greatest angry young man ever, twisting with cynicism and contempt, raging against the machine. But at 56, he’s long past his angry-young-man years, and repositions his shtick effectively as a babbling old man.

Both Exmilitary and The Money Store have offered reviewers a seemingly unlimited supply of influences and reference points to chart, analyze, and argue about: noise rock, Public Enemy, industrial dance, dubstep, Suicidal Tendencies, Gang Gang Dance, Def Jux, Dalek, even ...

On its sixth album, High on Fire further entrenches its position as the American version of Motörhead, not least because singer/guitarist Matt Pike sounds more than ever like Motörhead main man Lemmy Kilmister. (And also because the initial response to ...

On One Second of Love, her third full-length and first on Secretly Canadian, Ramona Gonzalez has finally secured an appropriately widescreen sound to match her biggest, funkiest, darkest, most eclectic ideas.

The old-age album is fast becoming a genre of its own, and it is fascinating to see how these icons who have shaped our culture confront old age.

Reportedly recorded in 1966 in a Colorado cabin (with electricity but no running water), the recordings were warm-ups for a gig, and thus never intended to be released as an official album. As such, they have a charming lo-fi quality ...

By the usual pop-music standards, Cleveland’s Rocket From the Tombs barely even counted as a band during its first incarnation, from 1974 to 1975. The group never officially released any music at all, never recorded anything beyond a handful of ...

Our critics pick the best albums of the year.

It may be true, as one British critic sniffed, that Bush no longer knows how to write pop songs. More to the point, I’d say that the 53-year-old singer no longer cares.

Capitol’s new restoration of Smile finally offers what rock geeks had only dared dream: a flatly definitive version of what should have ended up being the American Sgt. Pepper.

Even when Thee Oh Sees pretend to expand their sound, they’re still shit-kicking the same old garage-bound rock they were banging out on their first LP.

Local weirdo hip-hop trio Dumb Lunch’s second album is just as woozy and psychedelic as its predecessor, Royal Blunts, released earlier this year.

An Album by Korallreven kicks off with the glorious “As Young as Yesterday,” an epic voyage of synth-pads and electro-sprinkles and beats that skitter across the stereo spectrum like 3D snowflakes.