Tom Breihan

At this point, nobody is too cool to make Christmas music. The Los Angeles indie-pop singer-songwriter Molly Burch was way ahead of everyone else on that. Burch released her LP last year, and she dropped an entire Christmas album called back in 2019, and she followed it with the two-song holiday single “Cozy Christmas” b/w “December Baby” in 2022. Now, she's got another song for the season.

Earlier this summer, the thunderously ignorant, rap-inflected hardcore band Gridiron were selling Charli XCX parody shirts. It had the Brat green and the font, but it said “Grid.” If you saw that shirt out in the wild, would you get it? Does anyone even refer to Gridiron as just “Grid”? It's so stupid! I love it! In its own way, that's a nice way into the whole Gridiron thing.

It's noise. It's all noise. You can get lost in it. When you tune in, you might catch a few quick shards of something familiar and comforting. You might be like: “Oh, huh, Blonde Redhead, that's cool. Did one of their songs blow up on TikTok or something?” Most of the time, though, it's sheer roiling alien chaos. It's here to overwhelm you. It's here to fuck up your day.

The first time that I saw TV On The Radio play “Staring At The Sun” was at a Baltimore DIY venue called the Supreme Imperial, which hasn’t existed for a very long time and which I think was a converted auto-body shop. Google tells me that this was May 2004, so their debut album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes would’ve just come out. Katrina Ford, the great singer from the Baltimore band Celebration, sang backup, just as she did on the record. My memories of that night are hazy, but I have a clear image of the band just levitating on that song — channeling some primal energy and taking me to another place. Two decades later, coming off a years-long hiatus, TV On The Radio can still evoke that feeling while playing “Staring At The Sun” in the sterile confines of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. It’s really something.

We didn't write or commission a 20th-anniversary piece about U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb . Sorry. Sometimes, there's just not that much to say. Today marks the 20th anniversary of U2's 11th studio album. When they released that record, U2 were nearly a quarter-century removed from their debut album Boy . U2 did an amazing job remaining relevant for a very long time, and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb kept their streak going commercially, at least. That album sold a lot of copies. Plenty of people were into it. But is it really worth doing a deep-dive on that one? For us, it's not.

Just over one year ago, enigmatic rap legend André 3000 released his first-ever proper solo album, and it was a weird one: , a record of flute-based ambient instrumentals. André seemed to be happily semi-retired before the LP came out, but now he's moving with more energy. He's been touring, and he got kids to mosh to his astral space-jazz at Tyler, The Creator's Camp Flog Gnaw fest last weekend. He's up for the Album Of The Year Grammy , which was a surprise to everyone, including him. Today, the benefit compilation is officially out, and it features André's 26-minute track “ Something Is Happening And I May Not Fully Understand But I'm Happy To Stand For The Understanding .” That's not the only new André music out today.

The story of the British '90s band Panchiko is a crazy one. It's almost inaccurate to say that Panchiko have been “rediscovered,” since they were never really discovered in the first place. In the late '90s, a few teenagers in Nottingham got together to make music that sounded a bit like what Radiohead were doing at the time. In 2000, they self-released an EP called . It was just a few dozen CD-Rs, sent out to get labels interested in the group, but nobody took the bait. Panchiko started recording another EP, but then the broke up. All the band members moved on and lived adult lives. Then, the kids found D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L , and they loved it.

Every year since 2002, the Americana Music Association has thrown an annual awards show dedicated to uplifting various strains of rootsy music. This past September, the awards show happened at its usual home, Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium. Performers included Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, the Blind Boys Of Alabama, Dwight Yoakam, Noah Kahan, Shelby Lynn and — hey, look at that — Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman.

Stop whatever you're doing. Kendrick just dropped. After probably the biggest year of his career, Kendrick Lamar has suddenly, out of nowhere, shared a new surprise album called GNX . It's out, right now. The whole thing. Stream it below.

Rap music is miraculous. You could be staring down what promises to be a lazy Friday afternoon, the week before a holiday, and then you could glance at your computer and realize that the world has changed. The album that you've been waiting on, the one that you didn't want to presume to expect, could suddenly fall out of the sky — the whole thing just arriving on your phone all at once. Shit could get crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious. It's that rarest of beasts: the