Excited to announce the publication this summer of  Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94. On White Rabbit Books. It's a love letter to the music of my youth - and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life, when week by week I was on the frontline of covering a cascade of thrilling developments in underground rock. It's

Stephen Alexander, at his always interesting and insanely prolific blog Torpedo the Ark, brightens my day, at this ever more darkening time, with a post about three Simons of roughly the same age and with certain affinities: Armitage, Critchley, Reynolds. As I note in his comments section, it was a ridiculously common name for boys born from the late '50s to early '70s, such

Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series. It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop. The Rangers review is also a kind of

Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling distinctly one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.The anniversary celebration  came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but

Son vaults ahead of father by joining the select grouping of music critics who have had diss songs aimed at them by aggrieved musicians.  In this case, the wounded ones rather disingenuously claim that  "this song is about the modern American music critic, not about one single person, and any resemblance between the characters in this video and any persons, living or dead, is their

Had a fun chat with Lawrence of Mozart Estate / Go-Kart Mozart / Denim / Felt legend, condensed into this pithy Pitchfork Q+A Kieran on Kirkslop (it's what you think it is) for GQDid a bunch of interviews while in Argentina - this one by Romina Zanellato for Cenital is a good read (and can be easily flipped into English). Another one worth a look is Carlos Priego's for Le Tempestad&nbsp

A couple of things to read:Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of other things worth reading. In

Me and Kieran are going to Argentina this week for the 20th anniversary celebrations of Caja Negra, the Buenos Aires publisher who have put out nearly all of the books of mine that have been translated into Spanish. Actually it takes four to tango because the panel event we are doing on Saturday November 15 at 7pm at the Deseo Club is a quadraphonic colloquy with Argentinian writers Pablo

A couple of related pieces from Kieran Press-Reynolds:1/ A sharply observed portrait for GQ of the trio behind the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon. The show started out with deep descents into the foulness pit of Epstein-Maxwell, but quickly diversified, becoming "an oracle of our hysterical times," K writes. "In an online slopscape dominated by far-right furor and mercenary

Here's a funny and sharply observed report by Kieran Press-Reynolds on a  "no phones" event called OFFLINE, the brainchild of  ex-politician / President-wannabe Andrew Yang. People pay through the nose to reconnect briefly with undistracted living-in-the-here-the-now. Cool animated graphic by the team at Rabbit Holed / Pitchfork depicts Kieran and Yang both fondling some Astro-turf.

Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist".  Probably not true, in fact - but certainly

 Fun piece by Kieran Press-Reynolds looking at oblique strategies for digging up weird music, with a hierarchy of engagements mode from basic to ultra-obscurantist.I had to look up the word "ran-through" 

My friends Oliver Wang and Sharon Mizota are conducting a survey of music critics who currently work in America.  Please participate if you fit the description and can spare a few minutes to leave some completely anonymized data. Message from Wang / Mizota below:Calling all pop music critics! Please take the Critical Minded Pop Music Critic Survey. This survey is open to pop music critics

 Writer-photographer Pat Blashill is a very old mate. We've been friends since 1989, after working together on some stories in New York for Melody Maker - he did the artist portraits and I wrote up the interviews. One of them was Sun Ra, would you believe!Before he moved to New York, Pat was involved in Austin's punk-and-after scene, documenting the mayhem in real-time with his camera. That

Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum". There's also some glimpses into Press-Reynolds family life

RIP Keith Dobson of World Domination Enterprises, possibly the most exciting live band I have ever seen still to this day, and creators of the immortal "Asbestos Lead Asbestos".Lovely bloke and he had the gift of the gab so fun to interview.Keith - who once went as Kif Kif le Batteur - had a long  history with countercultural music going back to the ebb days of the actual counterculture - he

"Actively passive, losing-itself-in-the-noise" - new column by Kieran Press-Reynolds steps out of his lane to explore the "dreamy malaise" of "hazy new-gen alt-rock":  bar italia, untitled halo, deer park et al.Slackerdelia part 3, only this time they don't even have the energy to capitalize their names... Slackerdelia part 3? Well obviously part 1 is Mercury Rev, Pavement etc.&

We took in three No Kings protests across Los Angeles on Saturday - West Hollywood, Los Feliz, and Pasadena. Here, for Vanity Fair, are Joy Press's snapshot impressions of the joyous day and the way it ran counter to the "maddeningly out-of-whack" version of life-in-LA-right-now circulated by the national and international media. The Los Feliz was insane - a nonstop honkathonic carnival on

Be there or be serf.Find out more and sign up here  Tomorrow,  Saturday June 14, there's a protest near you - approaching 2000 across the country - with solidarity demonstrations elsewhere in the world. As the late great Sly Stone (RIP) sang:

It's the 20th anniversary of one of the heroic music reclamation projects of our time - Creel Pone.Keith Fullerton Whitman gives the low down about the label's history here. Which has some surprises - I had gotten the idea it had evolved sideways out of a series of unofficial compilations  of electronic music otherwise only available on avant-garde animations and experimental short

Kieran and I both appear in this interesting piece by Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic, which inspects the discourse of decline in culture - mostly focused on music, but also taking into account contemporary visual art - via some well-known gloomsayers Ted Gioia, Dean Kissick, and Jaime Brooks. Kieran naturally is present to represent the Anti-Declinist position - what would you call

My Czech mate (boom boom, see what I did there?)  Miloš Hroch - a name some of you will recognize from The Wire and The Quietus - has just published Whisper Aloud: Shoegaze Between the East and the West. That's what the title is in English, but as of now, the book is only available in its original language. However you can get a taste with a translated chapter&

This is quite a long-running series, now! Not talking about the When Mates Make Books posts, of which they are countless, but specifically When Matts Make Books. Matt's done a bunch, the prolific bugger that he is: the two blog compendiums The Big Book of Woe and  The Bumper  Book of Woe; the 1970s Lost Rock Albums monograph; his first print book Retreat:

Kieran with a fascinating Rabbit Holed dive into avant-garde ASMR - "from hyperspecific period roleplays to videos so frantic they're physically painful to perform..... this audiovisual internet-folk tradition is still evolving".Of all the young-person stuff Kieran's introduced me to over the years, this might be my favorite. Feels like a completely 21st Century artform.  I can't

I saw that American family sitting glumly in the tea room area of the farm shop the other day. Although the dad may actually be a Brit - he's got one of those grating in-between accents. Passing their table on the way to my favorite nook, I heard him muttering disagreeably about the deficiencies of the bagel that lay forlornly half eaten on his plate. Honestly, anyone with a pinch of sense