We already shared our own picks for the best albums and songs of 2016, and now we're happy to present yours. After a week of voting, the results of our annual readers poll, the Gummy Awards, are in. As far as we can tell there was no Russian interference, unless Vladimir Putin is way into Frank Ocean. Below, find your top 10 choices for each category. Well done, everybody! STEREOGUM READERS' 10 BEST...
Music videos played a major part in the presentation of Angel Olsen's recent album My Woman, which cracked the top 10 of our annual best albums list. Most memorably, Olsen wore a silver wig in the videos for "Intern" and "Shut Up Kiss Me." In a new interview with former Stereogum dude Brandon Stosuy at The Creative Independent, Olsen delves deep into the ideas behind these videos and reveals some creative...
The music-video event of 2016 was easily the HBO premiere of Beyoncé's Lemonade -- inarguably one of the best albums of the year, and maybe one of the best movies, too. Lemonade was a leap -- an indulgent artistic vision that could've easily fallen flat on its face and somehow instead transcended the music-video form, becoming something personal and moving and cohesive. It succeeded so completely...
NBA YoungBoy is in jail right now, and he might not come out for the next decade or two. A few weeks ago, Austin police raided the club where YoungBoy was booked to perform that night, taking him out in handcuffs and sending him home to Baton Rouge. There, he's being held on a $200,000 bond, awaiting trial for two counts of first-degree attempted murder. Police say that, earlier in November, YoungBoy...
Chairlift's place within modern music was never easy to identify, partially because that place always seemed to be evolving. But one thing that was clear was how gorgeously and gracefully they existed wherever their muse happened to lead. The avant-pop band shifted shape frequently throughout its decade-plus together, trying on new approaches and aesthetics like a model rifling through an infinite...
Richard Marx subdued a violent passenger on Korean Air flight 480, and his wife, former MTV VJ Daisy Fuentes, captured several photos of the incident. According to TMZ, a man began attacking fellow passengers on the flight from Hanoi to Seoul and Marx teamed up with flight attendants to take him down and restrain him. In photos below you can see the fray, and even a shot of the adult contemporary star...
The follow-up to St. Vincent's 2014 self-titled album is due out next spring, according to a new interview Annie Clark gave as part of her Guitar World cover story. (The cover itself -- seen above -- is "an absurdist comment" on the magazine's old buyer's guide covers that depicted bikini-clad models "holding guitars like they’ve never held a guitar before," Clark said.) She talked a lot about her...
This morning, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame announced its 2017 class of inductees, the six artists who are on their way into the Hall next year. The two mortal-lock first-ballot nominees, Pearl Jam and Tupac Shakur, are now officially on their way into the hall; as Rolling Stone reports, they are now the first two Hall Of Fame artists who began their careers during the '90s. They join a class that...
Julie Byrne is one of the chosen few who can genuinely say she’s from “all over.” Byrne has led a nomadic existence since leaving her hometown of Buffalo at 18, and is part of a network of artists known nationally for existing neither here nor there, setting up “home” wherever it feels right for a…
Over the last few years, Charli XCX has become one of the most exciting and idiosyncratic pop stars of our time. She’s had a hand in some massive hits, but rather than skyrocketing to household-name and festival-headliner status, she’s continued to skirt the fringes, making forward-thinking, genre-agnostic pop music as if trying to recalibrate the…
We’ve started a little tradition here at Stereogum: each year, I call Wayne Coyne and ask him about a bunch of the big stories from the last 11 or so months. Sometimes this is detritus, like funny internet ephemera or goofy trends. Sometimes it’s the music or pop culture that dominated the year’s conversation, or…
Joseph D’Agostino keeps apologizing for all the negativity. Reclining on couches in a Brooklyn Heights bar that, for whatever reason, has a bocce court in the back, he and Matt Whipple are musing on the status of their band, Cymbals Eat Guitars. This has recently been a recurring conversation for them: the feeling like they…
At Iceland Airwaves 2014, I accidentally saw Fufanu. I had no idea who they were, but followed two English friends to a venue in downtown Reykjavik called Gaukurinn — which is essentially a dive-y metal bar, which is also how you can describe a fair number of the bars in Reykjavik. They didn’t even have…
Everything changes and nothing stands still. Fred Thomas’ new album, Changer, is about the constant nature of transformation, in the same way his music — both his solo work and as part of Saturday Looks Good To Me — has always been about harnessing the power of specific memories to figure out how they relate…
“In my country, and in a lot of countries, people still go to the well to get their water,” Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko explains to me as she begins to reveal the metaphorical crux of one of her new songs. Tamko grew up in Cameroon before moving to New York in the early 2000s, and she…
Back in the summer of 2014, Casper Clausen, Rasmus Stolberg, and Mads Brauer of Efterklang, and their touring drummer, Finnish percussionist Tatu Rönkkö, were invited to present a special collaboration at Finland’s Our Festival. The idea was: They spend 10 days in a cottage in the Finnish countryside, writing new music together, and present their…
Margaret Glaspy has had a big year. You could maybe even call it a huge year. The New York-based musician recorded her debut full-length, Emotions And Math, in her bedroom, fully intending to self-release it. Instead, she got picked up by ATO Records, put out the album, and has been touring throughout the US and…
Upstairs At Eric’s is an apartment and photo studio in midtown Manhattan owned by photographer Eric Johnson. It’s not necessarily named for the Yazoo album; Johnson just liked the name. There are platinum album plaques for Lauryn Hill and Maxwell scattered about, industrial lights in the corner and a gray Bengal house cat named Cooley…
Shirley Collins is living history. The 81-year-old artist is best known as one of England’s premier folk singers of the ’60s revival, but her contributions extend far beyond that. Collins is a writer, lecturer, oral historian, and perhaps most importantly: a song collector. …
Every now and then, you look at a lineup for Bonnaroo or Panorama or some other mainstream festival, and tucked amidst all the expected indie and pop and rap names is the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. It’s one of the more curious narratives in our little pocket of the music landscape — that this group,…
The year Bonnie Raitt turned 40, she became a pop star. …
Like any flailing twenty-something, Oakland-based Australian Hazel English feels an anxiety-inducing lack of control. The kind you feel when relocating over 12,000 miles across the globe, knowing all but no one in your new home. The “out of control” that exists when building a music career in foreign territory, relying on musicians you meet at…
Appropriately enough, Kero Kero Bonito got their start on the internet. In 2013, school friends Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled posted an advertisement on an ex-pat message board in hopes of finding a Japanese singer in London who wanted to be in a band. They met their match in Sarah Perry, then a fellow university…
