#paul-banks

#paul-banks

No Fun Fest returns to NYC for the first time since 2009 as No Fun New Perspectives, a three-day event featuring avant-garde and improvisational music.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial opened at the beginning of the month, providing a snapshot of current trends and curatorial interests in the art world.

With our music, I particularly like to be on the extremes of things. So if it's supposed to be pretty in your face, I like to be fairly in your face. And then at the same time, if it's kind of warm and gentle, I like that to be as warm and gentle as possible. I'm interested in those juxtapositions and making those, that's how we want it to come across.

You could go anywhere in America and argue with some success for the cultural impact wrought by most of the once-subcultural stars of Lizzy Goodman's oral history of New York's post-9/11 rock scene, 'Meet Me In The Bathroom.' Or, for God's sake, Jeff Chang's history of hip-hop, 'Can't Stop Won't Stop.' But to explain this era to someone who hasn't devoted their psyche or youth to 'indie rock,' you'd need to spend a whole dinner, and maybe a few drinks afterwards, justifying why the tentpole events that 'Us v. Them' returns to multiple times in its 300-page run mean anything.

Courtney Barnett celebrated the early release of her highly anticipated fourth album, Creature of Habit, with an intimate performance at Rough Trade in NYC, featuring five new songs and two older tracks.

The first single, 'Timebomb,' is moody with distorted piano. Krug describes it as 'a song about a song about a band on tour, or rather, about the failed revision of that song, upon sadly realizing that its original message no longer rings true.'

Between our daily coverage, our Notable Releases and Indie Basement columns, and our monthly punk and rap roundups, we post tons of new music all the time here on BrooklynVegan. In an effort to keep track of all the new music we're excited about, we've been posting a new playlist each week with many of the songs we love that were (mostly) released that week.

All but one of the song titles on Body Sound, the debut album from experimental string trio Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart, line up nicely-a few words, usually two, usually nouns, separated by a vertical line. The straight line in the middle means different things in different disciplines. In computing, it's called a 'pipe' and serves as a conduit. In poetry, it denotes a pause or break. In music, it marks the beginning and end of measures.

Hundreds of hipsters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are gearing up to watch a rented groundhog whisper in the ear of ex-mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa in McCarren Park on Saturday to see whether they'll be getting six more weeks of winter. The loopy local twist ahead of Feb. 2, Groundhog Day's official date, is the brainchild of 26-year-old event organizer Riley Callanan - who shelled out $2,250 to rent the varmint from an animal rental service.

He didn't know the power of this thing. He just wanted it for its accordion sounds. Still, the instrument fascinated the burgeoning musician, and by the time he was five, he had stumbled on an old VHS concert doc that showed him the real power of analog machinery. I was completely consumed by the mystery of how these things were being made.

When he's not making proggy folk as a solo artist, Richard Dawson gets his skronk on as part of proggy new-wave art-rock group Hen Ogledd. Despite my attempts to do so in the previous sentence, the band are hard to succinctly describe: they can pivot from warm synthpop to mossy faerie folk to baggy Manchester shuffle beats to dense prog and even flashes of hip hop. Hen Ogledd are weird, but also welcoming.

Like so many 20 year olds before him, Zion Battle found something transcendent in Joshua Tree National Park. Since age 16, Battle had been working towards becoming a musician, studying for a time at CalArts and New York's The New School. Then, in 2024, he left behind his academic training to begin making music as Katzin, exploring a more intimate sound shaped by a healthy love for the bedroom dream pop of early Orchid Tapes releases and the fuzz of 1990s indie rock.

ARLO PARKS - "HEAVEN" Arlo Parks is back with another single from the upcoming album Ambiguous Desire. "Heaven is about euphoria, community and staying present," says Arlo about this ethereal, danceable track. "Being in a room full of strangers sweating, connecting, losing and finding themselves is a kind of magic that's beyond language. This song was my attempt at capturing that feeling."

Dry Cleaning singer Florence Shaw likes to keep some distance between her vocals and the rest of the band. Shaw's curious confidences, spoken-word confessions, and bemused monologues appear to have only a passing relationship to the propulsive rhythms and brittle riffs that frame them. That dissonance can be striking at first, but it grows restrictive-stark contrast can only take you so far.

In Defense of the Genre is a column on BrooklynVegan about punk, pop punk, emo, hardcore, post-hardcore, ska-punk, and more, including and often especially the bands and albums and subgenres that weren't always taken so seriously.The first month of 2026 is a wrap! Hopefully you're caught up on the 50 best punk albums of 2025 (and hopefully you caught the best punk songs of December list that went live around New Year's)

What if Portishead's Dummy, Radiohead's Kid A, and Bjork's Homogenic were made today by one band on one record? It might sound something like this. London art-psych band Ulrika Spacek have always had a collage-like approach to their music, taking ideas from jam sessions and using them as raw materials for fully formed songs.

In the five years that they've been active, it sometimes seems as if Purelink are dissolving right before our eyes. They've never again released anything quite as corporeal or propulsive as their debut EP, which paired visceral dub techno with rolling drum'n'bass. On their 2023 debut album, , glitchy drums crackled in a pastel haze, and last year's was even more ethereal; the trio's individual identities melted together under cover of amorphous arrangements that suggested fogbanks, blizzards, and other zero-visibility conditions.