Tom Breihan

Lots of depressing things happened on American television yesterday, but here’s something nice. Stereo MC’s, the British indie-dance group who had a couple of big hits on American alt-rock radio in the early ’90s, are about to embark on their first American tour in 24 years, even if that tour is really only a few East Coast dates. On Monday night, the group got a chance to perform their immortal 1992 banger “Connected” on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show.

Congratulations are in order for Stereogum's Chris DeVille, whose Ohio State Buckeyes beat Notre Dame to win last night's national college football championship game. (At least one of us has a football team who won a big game last weekend.) And congratulations are also in order for Travis Scott's team of handlers, since apparently nobody is scared of another mass casualty incident at one of that guy's performances. In the months ahead, Scott will headline Reading & Leeds and play in the big-font “designs the desert” slot at Coachella . Last night, Scott got to use the college football championship game to debut his new single “4×4.”

“How can I be homophobic? My bitch is gay!” It's one of the dumbest rap lines in recent memory, and that's almost the point. You can hear London rapper Central Cee's shit-eating grin. He knows it's dumb, and he also knows that it's attention-grabbing and memorable. If his song “Doja” came out a few years earlier, it would've been the subject of countless tiresome thinkpieces, people arguing over how seriously to take that line. But Cench released that song in 2022, when that kind of willful ignorance was sheer TikTok bait. He knew it would work, and he was proven correct. Central Cee was already a big name in the UK rap world before “Doja,” but that song was a full-on smash over there. It also found its way to American rap radio, still a vanishingly rare feat for a UK rap hit. Two and a half years later,

More than any other band, Philadelphia's Nothing probably laid the foundation for the recent explosion of interest in shoegaze, especially its heavier variants. Back in 2023, Nothing announced their bicoastal shoegaze fest Slide Away, with incarnations happening in both Philly and Los Angeles. The festival went down last March, and by all accounts, it was something special . This year, Nothing will run it back, holding Slide Away fests in both New York and Los Angeles.

John Sykes, the British hard rock guitarist best known for his time in Thin Lizzy and Whitesnake, has passed away. Sykes' social-media pages reported his passing yesterday, saying that Sykes died after a “hard fought battle with cancer.” Sykes was 65.

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Venerable Chicago noise-rock freaks the Jesus Lizard don't really strike me as musical-theater types, but their latest heaving riff-spray is apparently their riff on a Broadway classic. Allow deranged guitar genius Duane Denison to describe the band's new single “Westside”: “‘Westside' goes along with the previous single, ‘ Cost Of Living ,' which was subconsciously influenced by Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story , and hence the name. Really.” Hmm. OK.

It's happening! For the first time in three years, Nine Inch Nails are getting to hit the road. News of a planned NIN arena tour accidentally leaked and made the Reddit rounds last week, and the band confirmed that there was a tour in the works but that they'd delayed the announcement because of the California wildfires. But now, the announcement is out, and the tour is a bit one. On their Peel It Black tour, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross plan to spend the entire summer hitting arenas across Europe and North America.

Snapped Ankles are some post-punk art-freaks from London, and they like to make things difficult for themselves. The anonymous band members only ever appear in masks. Is Kurt Angle in the band? Probably not, but we don't know. Snapped Ankles make dance-adjacent music, but they're named after one of the worst things that can happen to you while dancing. Their last record was a tribute EP dedicated to cult heroes Blurt. Does all this make you more interested in Snapped Ankles, or less? If it's the former, you will be happy to learn that there's a new Snapped Ankles album on the way.

The Myrtle Beach, South Carolina band Hundredth started out making melodic post-hardcore, and they've moved in a lot of different directions since then. Over the past 15 years or so, Hundredth have moved into the realms of shoegaze, dream-pop, and dance-adjacent music. It's been a while since we've heard from Hundredth. In 2022, they released “ Fantasize ,” a song that they presented as the bridge to their next phase. Three years later, they're back with another new single and a promise of an imminent LP.