Essay
Chat Pile's new album is filed under a genre that started as an insult
Who Loves the Sun landed on 4 September. Within a day, half the conversation about it was about a word from 1983.
Essay · 5 min read
From the Riffiter desk
Music essays and album deep dives
Genre histories and close readings of the records that reward a second listen. Rate each album inside the essay and leave your take.
Debate
Neue Neue Deutsche Welle started in a YouTube comment. RateYourMusic just made it a movement.
A tag invented in a comment box, adopted in a Spotify bio, and now sitting in the genre tree over two German scenes that have been arguing since 2016.
Debate · 6 min read
Field Guide
Akriila and Hesse Kassel sound nothing alike. Chile made them both.
One is a major-label pop record with a Jane Remover feature. One is 45 minutes of Santiago art-punk with a fifteen-minute opener. Same city, same starting point.
Field Guide · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Yellow House at 20: the Grizzly Bear album that never stops arguing with itself
Twenty years ago today a bedroom tape got outvoted by three other people, and you can hear the vote happening.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
Jay Mitta dropped the MCs, and that is the whole argument about singeli
Kazi Kwanza came out today with nobody rapping on it. In a genre that started with an MC over a sped-up cassette, that is a position.
Essay · 5 min read
Review
Sweeping Promises spent two albums hiding great songs behind one microphone
You Say I Romanticize drops the lo-fi costume Sweeping Promises built their name on. The songs don't just survive it. They needed it gone.
Review · 5 min read
Debate
Endtroducing at 30: it was never the first album made only from samples
A 2LP reissue lands on 18 September with the same Guinness line attached. The line is wrong, and the true story is better.
Debate · 5 min read
Essay
Mastodon lost one voice and hired five: Marrow Deep and the hole where Brent Hinds was
Their first record without a founding member is also the most crowded thing they have ever made. That is not an accident.
Essay · 5 min read
Review
DOOMED! is Open Mike Eagle losing the same argument in fifteen universes
Six years after Anime, Trauma and Divorce, he hands the wreckage to Kenny Segal and to Marvel cosmology. It ends badly everywhere.
Review · 5 min read
Deep Dive
The Beatles in Toronto, 1966: their last Canadian concert, played twice
Two shows at Maple Leaf Gardens on 17 August 1966, thirty minutes each, eleven songs, nothing from the album that had come out twelve days earlier. Between them, a press conference that got them into fresh trouble.
Deep Dive · 4 min read
Field Guide
The best albums with chiming guitars, and why they chime
Everyone names the same five records. They are the right five. What nobody explains is that chime is a studio technique, and once you know the recipe you start hearing it a long way outside indie rock.
Field Guide · 5 min read
New & Notable
Marci's Mask Lady and Late Night Girl is a solo album in name only
Twelve songs, thirty-one minutes, and a credits page that reads like a Montreal group photo.
New & Notable · 4 min read
Debate
Nothing stays hated any more. That is not critics changing their minds.
The reappraisal wave gets explained as nostalgia. Look closer and most of it is a change in who is doing the rating.
Debate · 6 min read
Deep Dive
Neurosis replaced a founding member with their most famous imitator
An Undying Love for a Burning World turned up in March with no warning and Aaron Turner on vocals. In July, in a Montana campground, the band had to prove it in front of people.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
Neptunian Maximalism's albums are concert tapes. Nāgabhūtaṃ stops pretending otherwise.
Four players, one night in Brussels, 42 minutes. The most maximalist band in Europe keeps getting smaller.
Essay · 5 min read
Field Guide
Ambient country: the Western where almost nothing moves
Pedal steel, empty space and the long road from Bruce Langhorne to SUSS.
Field Guide · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Splayed Werks: Tyondai Braxton kept the seams in
Fifteen tracks, seven years of revisions, and a double album that refuses to hide how it was assembled.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Review
Everyone files Tara Clerkin Trio under trip-hop. Somewhere Good comes from the other Bristol.
The lineage reviewers reach for is Portishead. The one that actually explains this record is Movietone, and the label says so out loud.
Review · 5 min read
Debate
Boards of Canada's Inferno, three months on: the argument isn't about the drums
Pitchfork gave it 8.6. The Guardian gave it two stars. The liner notes credit one man. Sorting out what people are actually fighting over.
Debate · 5 min read
Essay
Dub techno has been making the same record since 1995. That is the point.
Basic Channel put out nine twelve-inches and shut the door. Everyone since has been cutting versions of a record that was never there.
Essay · 6 min read
Review
The London folk revival found its songs in an archive. Nick Granata went looking in the kitchen.
Seven songs about rabbits, dogs, birds and an omelette, played partly on a trumpet with no mouthpiece. It is the strangest record this scene has produced, and the most revealing.
Review · 6 min read
Field Guide
Japanoise: a field guide to a scene that was assembled by mail
Merzbow, Hijokaidan, two salarymen with a feedback rig, and a genre that got its name from abroad.
Field Guide · 6 min read
Deep Dive
In a Bar, Under the Sea: the weirdest record a major label paid for in 1996
dEUS were from Antwerp, signed to Island, and spent 1996 making a 15-track art-rock album with Captain Beefheart's old keyboard player at the desk.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Debate
Game Theory at 20: the Roots album that beats Things Fall Apart
Made in GarageBand in the months after J Dilla died, it opened the four-album run the band should actually be judged on.
Debate · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Fennesz's Endless Summer turns 25. It was never really a glitch record.
A guitar, a laptop and one cheap microphone. Everyone filed it under digital error; almost nobody listens to it that way.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
Julius Eastman's music has no definitive version. That is why it survived.
The sheriff put his scores on the pavement in the early 1980s. Wild Up's fifth Eastman record turns Gay Guerrilla into a chamber orchestra, and nobody can say that is wrong.
Essay · 6 min read
Field Guide
Desert blues: a field guide to Saharan guitar, from Gaddafi's camps to Bluetooth
The genre name was invented at a record shop counter. What it describes is stranger, angrier and better than the name suggests.
Field Guide · 6 min read
Deep Dive
Fantastic Planet at 30: the flop that everyone else kept covering
Thirty years ago today, Failure put out a 17-track album that had been stuck on a shelf for over a year. It sank. Half the bands who came after seem to own a copy.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Debate
The Black Album at 35: Metallica got shorter, not slower
Thirty-five years of the sellout argument, aimed at the wrong number.
Debate · 6 min read
Review
MPTL Microplastics call it industrial folk. Sod in Heaven is what that actually sounds like.
An eight-piece South London collective with a cello, a mandola and a pile of scrap metal made the least likely album-of-the-year contender in years.
Review · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Cerebral Caustic is the Fall album nobody defends. It just got five discs.
The 1995 record where Brix came back, Craig Scanlon went, and the Fall stopped being comfortable.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Deep Dive
África Brasil at 50: Jorge Ben plugged in, then lost the record
Ten days in a Rio studio, a borrowed Ibanez, and a mix its author never signed off on.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
Nowhere to hide: the jazz duo record, and what Halvorson and Akinmusire did with it
Two players, no rhythm section, no third voice to cover for you. Sixty years of a format that exposes everybody.
Essay · 5 min read
Field Guide
Phonk didn't come from nowhere: a field guide to the Memphis tapes underneath it
The word now means cowbells and drift videos. Four steps back it means a cassette economy in Memphis that almost nobody paid for at the time.
Field Guide · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Watching from a Distance at 20: Warning's doom masterpiece was a folk record with the gain up
Patrick Walker spent the last two decades turning the distortion down. Rituals of Shame is him picking the amp back up.
Deep Dive · 4 min read
Essay
Injury Reserve became By Storm. My Ghosts Go Ghost explains the name.
A trio lost a third of itself in 2020. The two who are left finally made a record that isn't about the loss.
Essay · 4 min read
Deep Dive
Ridin' Dirty at 30: no single, no video, and the record Houston built itself on
Jive Records gave UGK almost nothing in 1996. Pimp C and Bun B went gold anyway, and the South spent the next decade catching up.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Lists
Albums like OK Computer: the answer isn't more sad guitar bands
Every recommendation thread hands you Coldplay and Muse. Radiohead's 1997 record has a real family, and most of it isn't made of guitars.
Lists · 5 min read
Essay
Jungle was renamed to survive. Nia Archives is calling it jungle again.
In 1995 most of the scene switched to drum and bass. Half the music got left behind in the swap, and the revival is going back for it.
Essay · 5 min read
Debate
The most overrated albums of all time: the usual suspects are innocent
Sgt. Pepper is not overrated. It is over-assigned. The difference matters, and it changes which records the word actually fits.
Debate · 6 min read
Essay
Hyperpop was a playlist, not a scene. The records outlived the word.
Spotify coined the tag in 2019. PC Music shut the door in 2023. The music is having its best year since.
Essay · 6 min read
Field Guide
What is shoegaze? The insult, the pedals, and why it refuses to stay dead
A word coined to mock four bands in Camden now describes half of TikTok. Here's what it actually means.
Field Guide · 7 min read
Deep Dive
Daniel Stewart left Melbourne to stop repeating himself. Station Model Violence is what came back.
Six people, one saxophone, an eight-minute centre. The best-argued post-punk record of 2026 came out of a man moving cities and starting over.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
Broadcast built pop out of a past that never happened
For fifteen years the Birmingham duo made 60s memories no one actually had. Trish Keenan's death in 2011 froze the project into legend, and a devoted scrobble cult has kept it playing ever since.
Essay · 4 min read
Essay
Trip-hop got sold as dinner music. The best records are about dread
A genre named by a magazine, disowned by its own artists, and remembered for exactly the wrong thing.
Essay · 5 min read
Field Guide
Krautrock was a British joke. Underneath it were three different countries of sound
The word the Germans hated, the music they actually made, and why 'best krautrock albums' is really three separate lists.
Field Guide · 6 min read
Essay
Hypnagogic pop had the worst name in music criticism. The records were right.
A critic coined it in 2009, the artists disowned it, the scene's institutions were dead by 2011, and its central idea now runs half of Bandcamp.
Essay · 6 min read
Field Guide
Math rock: a field guide to the knot and the release
The name is the worst thing about it. Math rock is not about arithmetic; it's about a knot pulled tight and then let go.
Field Guide · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Hissing Prigs in Static Couture at 30: the noise rock record that wanted to be pop
Brainiac spent 1996 building dance music out of broken gear. Fourteen months later Tim Taylor was dead and the album froze into a legend it never asked for.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
The best albums of 2006 aren't the ones 2006 picked
Twenty years on, the year's consensus list and the year's surviving records barely overlap. That gap is the interesting part.
Essay · 6 min read
Debate
Dr. Octagonecologyst at 30: masterpiece or prank?
Kool Keith's alien gynecologist turns thirty. The argument over whether it's a landmark or a very committed joke is still live.
Debate · 5 min read
Deep Dive
deathcrash swore off slowcore. Somersaults is what they became instead
The London band's third album drags the voice to the front and lets the fatalism go. It's a gamble, and mostly it lands.
Deep Dive · 4 min read
Field Guide
The slow apocalypse: a field guide to post-metal
Metal that swapped the riff for the build — where it came from, where it calcified, and who broke out.
Field Guide · 4 min read
Deep Dive
World of Echo at 40: Arthur Russell left a thousand tapes and one finished record
He revised everything forever and released almost nothing. The one album he let go of is the one where the revising became the music.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
The summer of 1996 buried Wild Cowboys. Thirty years on, it's still the best thing Sadat X ever did
Sadat X's solo debut landed on 15 July 1996, in the middle of the loudest fortnight rap has ever had. The calendar wrote its reputation. The record deserved better.
Essay · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Ulrika Spacek keep losing rooms. On EXPO they built one out of themselves
Gentrification took their studio in 2019. Their fourth album is about the place that replaced it, and it's the best thing they've made.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Lists
Same name, twice: the strange ritual of the non-debut self-title
A self-titled debut is nothing. These twelve artists already had a name, a discography and a reputation — and used their own name again anyway.
Lists · 7 min read
Essay
Bark Psychosis' Hex named post-rock — then post-rock became everything Hex isn't
The record the word was coined for has vocals, songs, and almost no crescendos. A story about how a genre got away from its own founding text.
Essay · 5 min read
Deep Dive
The Trials of Van Occupanther at 20: Midlake's flight into a past that never happened
In 2006, a band of Texas jazz students made a Fleetwood Mac record about a fictional 19th-century recluse. It found a small, devoted cult and never let go of it.
Deep Dive · 4 min read
Deep Dive
The Eraser at 20: the laptop record that let Thom Yorke stop being Radiohead
Twenty years ago today, the frontman of the world's most scrutinized band put out nine electronic sketches under his own name and quietly changed what came next.
Deep Dive · 4 min read