Arielle Gordon

The first album from FKA Twigs would be her final release without a proper title. Perhaps the naming scheme — starting with EP1’s eerie minimalism in 2012 and followed by the elegant R&B of 2013’s EP2 — was an attempt to keep some distance between Twigs, born Tahliah Barnett, and her listeners. As a professional back-up dancer, she was already far too aware of the foibles of visibility — she was beginning to get recognized in public for her dancing, but nothing beyond, “Hey, aren’t you that girl from that video?” LP1, released 10 years ago today, is, fittingly, a debut about the dance of perception: the power of delayed gratification, the intimacy of the slow reveal, the ultimate vulnerability of “do[ing] it” (you know what) with the lights on. In the dark, after all, it’s much harder to ask, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

A truly great opening line is rare; the best stick around long after you've forgotten the finer details of whatever follows. “ In 1984, I was

“A straightforward message is not interesting for me,” says Nilüfer Yanya, calling from her home in east London.

“We are like the Gallagher brothers, but in the Canadian sense,” Tegan Quin told in 2003. Along with her identical twin sister, Sara, she had just finished promoting their album from the previous year, If It Was You , and in interviews, the pair joked that it sent them into therapy. That record, whose cover literally featured the pair yelling in perpendicular directions, rumbled with a palpable if unfocused angst, its strongest ideas buckling under the unbearable weight of being 19 years old in the public eye. By the end of that tour, perhaps to prevent an Oasis-sized meltdown, the two had moved to opposite sides of the country, Sara in Montreal and Tegan in Vancouver. Once tourmates and roommates, they began to repair their fractured relationship as penpals, sending demo CDs through the Canadian postal service.

The Marathon Petroleum refinery looms over the Boynton neighborhood of Detroit, MI like massive drill bits that cored through the center of the Earth. At night, when the lights on its dozens of towers light up, it resembles an alien electric grid, its red, blue, and white bulbs imprisoned like trapped Tinkerbells within steel beams. A few years ago, the plant was forced to pay an $80,000 fine, plus almost $300,000 in “community investments,” after a broken pipe leaked toxic gas into the lungs and waterways of local residents.

Read Arielle Gordon’s review of the album.

How should heartbreak sound? Writing about budding love or desire can be simple, aided by universal clichés, an ecstatic rush of endorphins and, hopefully, a really sexy bassline.

The Hard Quartet is not, as pop stars say, a “project.” In the words of one of its members, Pavement and Jicks frontman Stephen Malkmus , “It's a band,” man.

Read Arielle Gordon’s review of the album.

Channing Tatum and Zoë Kravitz managed to make their relationship work despite the countless celebrity breakups over the years.