Mike Katzif

As half of the guitar-and-drums duo The Black Keys, Dan Auerbach has explored, and repeatedly blown up, nearly every shade of the blues for more than a decade. The band's raw early years in Akron, Ohio, were defined by ragged, high-octane bangers full of heavy riffs and explosive ...

"I like living by the water. It's new and crazy for me," says Mac DeMarco, smoking and peering out at the bay in Far Rockaway, Queens. All around, nature blends with reminders of civilization: Behind him, sun-dappled waves are chopped up by freighter boats and the occasional jet ski passing ...

Striking out on your own during your teens and early 20s is rarely a direct or easy path — it's a breadcrumb trail of false starts and missteps as you figure out who and what you want to be. Ellen Kempner, the Boston songwriter and guitarist behind Palehound, ...

"I can't stop mourning, it's like hearing cancer spreading," singer and bassist Julie DeLano sings. "It's like hope is a fairy tale and so are the gods, and change is unheard of." In "Wake Of The World," the buoyant final track from the Brooklyn band Gold's self-titled album, DeLano unfurls ...

In the fallout of a breakup, it's natural to spiral into self-analysis, pore over the past for evidence of where it all started to go wrong, and then try to recreate the story from selectively remembered details. This is where Night Beds' Ivywild begins. With the transportive opener ...

When was the last time you saw crowd-surfing at a Bright Eyes show? Or watched a mosh pit break out at a Conor Oberst solo performance? Ever? But one late June night, in the cramped and sweaty confines of the Bushwick D.I.Y. space Shea ...

The music of Krill is all about tension just waiting to be released. Seething anxiety runs through the lyrics of bassist and singer Jonah Furman, who deploys drawn-out, sentence-like phrases that tease out pent-up emotions, self-doubt and neurosis. It makes Krill's songs feel jittery and claustrophobic one moment and satsifyingly ...

From the beginning, escapism has played a large role in the music of Trevor Powers. As the mastermind behind Youth Lagoon, Powers comes off as a curious tinkerer who pours himself into sound in an effort to escape his surroundings and anxieties. That's especially true of his 2011 ...

Shaun Fleming is perhaps best known as the drummer of Foxygen, a band with a reputation for wild on-stage antics and off-stage turbulence. (Or maybe you remember his work as a child voice actor for the Disney channel?) But on the side, Fleming steps to the ...

For years, Ryan Lott, the innovative beat-making composer and sonic mastermind of Son Lux, has sat at the intersection of pop and classical, creating imaginative and complex music for every medium. The classically trained musician has scored and constructed sound design for modern dance, TV ads and film — ...

After four years off, Spoon returned last year with They Want My Soul, a stellar album packed with tight, hummable hooks and precise rock 'n' roll bangers — and exceptional weight. The highlight of the record, "Inside Out," is the kind of song that seeps through your skin and enters ...

The story goes that members of Joanna Gruesome first met in 2010 at an anger-management group, and bonded over a mutual love of hardcore and writing songs as musical therapy. Whether fact or a myth that's grown in the telling, it's an origin perfectly matched to the Cardiff band's ...

In the dissonant opening seconds of Speedy Ortiz's new album, Foil Deer, Sadie Dupuis lays out her mission statement concisely: "I've known you not so very long / but watch your back, because baby's so good with a blade." Throughout the record, the songwriter and guitarist repeatedly references that ...

In 2015, it's easy to take for granted how important and far-reaching the space race was. But imagine yourself in 1957: News breaks that there's something in the sky — in space — and if you tune your shortwave radio to an especially high frequency, you can hear its signal ...

The songs of Sadie Dupuis, the songwriter and guitarist of Speedy Ortiz, dance a tightrope of juxtapositions: Equal parts hilarious self-deprecation and wry honesty, she can fire off lyrical phrases masked in ambiguous, sing-songy non sequiturs, then reveal personal opinions and complicated feelings that cut deep. While Speedy Ortiz's ...

So much of punk is about ratcheting up tension, whether through cranked-up amps and explosive drumming or the release of pent-up anger. That's one side to Joanna Gruesome's fast and fuzzy music. But the Cardiff band with the punny name also knows how to offset that noise by deploying hooks ...

The mad-scientist composer throws an ecstatic dance party with skittering polyrhythms, buzzy synths and a pop hook he sings in duet with himself.

Against swelling keyboards and a stark guitar melody, Katie Crutchfield sings of love and loneliness, embracing change with fragile, gutsy honesty.

The no-holds-barred comedian and TV star was a friend and frequent guest on WNYC. Rivers last appeared as a guest host on The Leonard Lopate Show in June. Listen to her here.

On Tuesday, December 17, download a special live performance of Deltron 3030's song "Nobody Can" recorded in the Soundcheck studio.