Austin Saalman

Three years prior to the release of his critical and commercial breakthrough Small Change, Tom Waits signed with Asylum Records and released his boozy, nocturnal, and ultimately low-key debut Closing Time.

With the release of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” Pink Floyd’s penetrating exploration of madness and excess, the influential English rockers were catapulted from a revered psychedelic act to an international phenomenon.

North Carolinian cult power pop outfit The Mayflies USA emerged triumphantly from the rich Chapel Hill music scene to deliver three noteworthy college indie releases in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn’s my mother, Jesus is my bestest friend,” sings indie pop phenomenon Lana Del Rey on her beguiling, if overlooked “Paradise” EP, identifying herself yet again as a neon lovechild of popular culture, and further mythologizing herself as a musical force to be reckoned with.…

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Maya Hawke’s sophomore effort MOSS feels more spare than 2020’s autumnal Blush, as though the passing season has diminished its lush foliage to a spectral winterscape, the bare bones of the Stranger Things actress’ creative soul protruding upward through the snow.

Having begun as a teenage doo wop outfit in Kansas City, Missouri, Bloodstone gracefully evolved into a radical force within the era’s burgeoning progressive soul movement, embracing elements of pop, funk, and psychedelia, and emerging as leading architects of the funk rock fusion genre.

Among its decade’s most underrated releases, The Killers’ fourth studio album Battle Born arrived in the aftermath of the group’s brief hiatus, eschewing the glitz and glamor of 2008’s hit-and-miss Day & Age and picking up where 2006’s heartland rock extravaganza Sam’s Town left off six years prior.

It is only fitting that Maggie Rogers recently graduated from Harvard Divinity School, as her sophomore release has proven her the indisputable patron saint of millennial pop.

“My father was a bandleader in Chicago. He was brought [there] in the ’20s by Al Capone,” former Curtom Records executive Marv Heiman reflects upon his Midwestern roots.