Lars Gotrich

Kowloon Walled City's bummer jams are bona fide: Just hit play and proceed to heave your body in sadness. But on its third album, Grievances, the San Francisco noise-rock band isn't always obvious in how it chooses to be heavy.

In the first single, "Backlit," the band dials down ...

Maybe the name Ex-Breathers is a punk joke, like how in the '90s every zine and show flyer listed the former members of bands in parenthesis to help y'all keep track of the Page Six punk drama. It's just as well, because three years after their debut album, the Tallahassee ...

The bedroom is supposed to be the one place of sanctuary for a songwriter, "a world," Brian Wilson once sang, "where I can go and tell my secrets to." It's where the wildest, most vulnerable ideas commune with Tascam 4-tracks and laptops. But when Virginia native Will Toledo ...

You are a werewolf. You are a cop. You ride a motorcycle. You need a bottle of cheap Canadian whiskey, a foxy lady at your side and a soundtrack that howls at the moon. You need Shooting Guns.

The instrumental psych-rock band from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, knows how to choogle, burn ...

LANGUAGE ADVISORY: This song contains explicit language.

Diet Cig singer Alex Luciano shouldn't get away with a silly simile like, "And you know I'm scared / Like a third grader on a triple dog dare." Luciano curls her mouth around "triple dog dare" with a knowing grin/side-eye, and that's when ...

In her autobiography, 14th century nun and Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila wrote of her encounter with an angel that thrust a "long spear of gold" into her heart: "The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this ...

Sometimes it's just better from the war horse's mouth. Here's Hammercult's statement on "Rise Of The Hammer":

"Rise Of The Hammer" is really all about what Hammercult is about: Power, intensity and badassness! This is the first song on the Built For War album, which welcomes the listener to ...

When you record on one of Scandinavia's largest pipe organs, the result damn well better be a thing of monstrous beauty and bombast. Anna von Hausswolff took her band and longtime producer Filip Leyman to the concert hall Acusticum in Piteå, Sweden, to work on her third album, The ...

Deafheaven achieved a rare feat with 2013's Sunbather: The band became a legit metal crossover. Sunbather draws from black metal, but was also uplifting with its inventive guitar work and ecstatic sense of propulsion. The group has since moved from the Bay Area to L.A. and adopted a darker ...

Restorations' LP3 was a gorgeous, vulnerable and big-hearted rock and roll record with three electric guitars dialed to the lump in your throat. A year since its release, these introspective anthems about self-doubt and uncertainty still ring true and take on a whole new power live.

Fearing for the ...

For the members of The Kominas, the personal has no choice but to be political. They're Muslim, they're American, they're brown, they're punk. They write from experience, and part of that experience includes being "the only ones" at the punk show, where they call out institutional and ...

In 1998, Unwound was closing in on the height of its powers. Two years earlier, the Olympia band had released the career-defining Repetition, which dug into Unwound's weirder grooves with a muscle-constricting tension that, when released, made it feel as if the world was opening up. Challenge For A Civilized ...

In the five years since she released the triple-album Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom tried to pack her harp into a hatchback for a Portlandia sketch, sang on "Kindness Be Conceived" by Thao And The Get Down Stay Down, and starred in ...

Have you ever been paid for a show with a bag of oranges? Dealt with a dude who says he's on the list when only 10 people are going to show up anyway? Waddled through a maze of zine tables? Then you probably went to an indie-rock show in the ...

Gloom can be thrilling. No, really. Rev up a morose guitar riff swirled in reverb with a mean rhythm section, and suddenly a dank basement show throbs. That's where Cleveland's Pleasure Leftists thrive, with former members of the hardcore bands 9 Shocks Terror and Homostupids joined by vocalist Haley Morris.

Windhand does a thing and does it well: gargantuan doom-metal smoked in moody grunge. From album to album, the Richmond band recognizes its strengths and pushes them forward. Out in September, Grief's Infernal Flower digs the soulful and harrowing vocalist Dorthia Cottrell out of the mix while richly ...

Look at the liner notes to any record by The Go-Betweens, and every song is co-credited "R. Forster/G. McLennan." Perhaps it was out of mutual respect, perhaps it was out of creative solidarity, but as with "Lennon/McCartney," fans of the Australian rock band could always tell who wrote what ...

Sometimes rock 'n' roll can be a load of bull, gamed by release schedules, promotion cycles and Twitter beefs that turn as tepid as a beer left swimming in a swampy cooler all night. Featuring two guys who've been through the grind — Zak Sally played bass with Low ...

A serene figure is suspended in what seems like nothingness, and evaporates into a dream world that creeps far too close to reality. The black space looks worn and decayed, as if clawed by nails. Henrick Uldalen's oil painting adorns the front cover of Chelsea Wolfe's ...