From the Riffiter desk
Genre histories and close readings of the records that reward a second listen. Rate each album inside the essay and leave your take.
Deep Dive
Chick's Someone's Ugly Daughter was cut after midnight at the Hit Factory while Daydream got made in the daytime. On October 30 she was asked about it again. Her answer: #notyet.
Deep Dive · 6 min read
Field Guide
A field guide to the genre RateYourMusic built out of a critic's coinage: where the term came from, the records that earned it, and the 19-year-old in Houston who is taking it somewhere new.
Field Guide · 6 min read
Debate
Three of 2026's most-loved records were recorded in front of an audience. They are three different kinds of record, and the site rates them as one.
Debate · 6 min read
Deep Dive
A Nagoya college band's debut sits in RateYourMusic's 2026 top five, next to Boards of Canada and Neurosis. It opens with a song the band hadn't played live yet, closes with two they'd played for years, and the keyboard player takes the title track.
Deep Dive · 6 min read
Field Guide
What is witch house? A field guide for October, from salem's King Night to this year's surprise archive dump Red Dragon, and the label that carried the sound somewhere nobody expected.
Field Guide · 7 min read
Review
Built from the Purge sessions, mixed while Justin Broadrick recovered from surgery, and nearly wordless: the penultimate Godflesh album is the first one where the machine does all the talking.
Review · 5 min read
Essay
RateYourMusic has just given the mid-80s Austin scene its own page. The bands it was named for mostly lost. The one nobody signed is why anyone still looks.
Essay · 6 min read
Debate
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
Essay
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
Field Guide
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Twelve songs, thirty-one minutes, and a credits page that reads like a Montreal group photo.
New & Notable · 4 min read
Debate
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
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
Four players, one night in Brussels, 42 minutes. The most maximalist band in Europe keeps getting smaller.
Essay · 5 min read
Field Guide
Pedal steel, empty space and the long road from Bruce Langhorne to SUSS.
Field Guide · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Fifteen tracks, seven years of revisions, and a double album that refuses to hide how it was assembled.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Review
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
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
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
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
Merzbow, Hijokaidan, two salarymen with a feedback rig, and a genre that got its name from abroad.
Field Guide · 6 min read
Deep Dive
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
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
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
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
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
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
Thirty-five years of the sellout argument, aimed at the wrong number.
Debate · 6 min read
Review
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
The 1995 record where Brix came back, Craig Scanlon went, and the Fall stopped being comfortable.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Deep Dive
Ten days in a Rio studio, a borrowed Ibanez, and a mix its author never signed off on.
Deep Dive · 5 min read
Essay
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A genre named by a magazine, disowned by its own artists, and remembered for exactly the wrong thing.
Essay · 5 min read
Field Guide
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Metal that swapped the riff for the build — where it came from, where it calcified, and who broke out.
Field Guide · 4 min read