Carrie Battan

Rosalía, Beach House, Tokischa, Beyoncé, and other standout musicians and tastemakers.

On “This Is Why,” Paramore is trying to grow up and move on. But it’s the teen-age angst of the band’s early work that still inspires.

As an act of vulnerability, “Baby J” may not live up to expectations, but it’s further confirmation of Mulaney’s comedic talent.

The satirical film “Sick of Myself” shows the warping effects of social media by way of a character who gives herself a hideous rash.

We’d been discussing a pilot she’d shot just before the pandemic that HBO had commissioned but ultimately declined to pursue. It was a disappointment, like all stalled projects can be, but it ultimately made its way onto the list of things not worth worrying about. “I have no frustration about it,” Silverman said with a shrug. “It’s their channel.” Her personal life, though, has recently put this c’est la vie mind-set to the test. In May, Silverman’s stepmother, Janice, died of pancreatic cancer…

The first season was a pleasant reunion; the second season has some issues.

Stylistically austere but emotionally rich, the record had a sensibility that spoke to introverts and impressed star-making blogs. Despite the quietude of the music, which at times bordered on morose, the xx became unexpectedly influential, transcending their status as indie darlings. They topped charts in the U.K., were sampled by Rihanna, and won the prestigious Mercury Prize. And yet they never made the sorts of bold leaps common among breakout artists looking to secure lasting commercial suc…

The singer’s new album comes loaded with expectations about her talent and the future of the music industry.

At the time, “Catwalk” was panned by critics who dismissed its vapidness. “The models spend long hours admiring their reflections,” wrote Janet Maslin in the Times. “The Greeks had a word for this, but they never saw narcissism carried to the extremes that Mr. Leacock’s camera captures.” And yet even such a gauzy, allegedly two-dimensional film as “Catwalk” manages to hint, albeit lightly, at the internal conflict that seems to have plagued most models throughout history: a desire to be seen for…

Four years and three albums later, though, Drake no longer seems particularly interested in making the sort of soft, emotional music that connected with a more feminine sensibility. His most recent releases, “Her Loss” (a 2022 collaborative album with the Atlanta rapper 21 Savage) and, out just this past Friday, “For All the Dogs,” are embittered documents of masculine frustration. Drake, perhaps the most influential and commercially successful artist of his generation besides Taylor Swift, has…

Still, social media consistently manages to shine a light on unexpected corners of music history—mostly on TikTok, where old songs are just as likely to become hits as new ones. During the depths of the pandemic, in 2020, a British teen-ager named Victoria Walker started producing instrumentals for a friend’s music on her laptop; she also began recording her own songs using GarageBand. Eventually, she uploaded them, under the name PinkPantheress, to her TikTok, where they attracted an unusual am…

“Renaissance,” the superstar performer’s new concert film, which draws on footage of a global tour Beyoncé commenced in May this year and completed in October, shows the artist making good on that promise. The tour issues from her 2022 album of the same name, a dance record born out of a need to escape the ennui and claustrophobia of the pandemic’s prime time. As a paean to underground house and disco scenes and queer communities of the eighties and nineties, the album might have been Beyoncé’s…

Novak, who is prone to self-narration, doubled back: “But then I’m, like, why do I feel the audience is owed a separation of my breasts?” Novak is forty-one, but she has a girlish face and a long-standing interest in elaborate skin-care rituals that, to an audience member, might make her look like the high-school version of herself she explores in the performance. “Get on Your Knees” is a ninety-minute show about fellatio, a description that might make people assume that Novak is yet another rau…

A collection of articles about Magazine from The New Yorker, including news, in-depth reporting, commentary, and analysis.

As with childbirth, the humdrum or unpleasant realities of pregnancy are often smoothed over in popular culture. “She runs to the bathroom, she throws up once, and then, in the next scene, she’s in overalls painting a barn, like, ‘Yay! I can’t wait to meet you!’ ” Amy Schumer joked in her Netflix special “Growing,” from 2019. That special was filmed when Schumer was pregnant and suffering from an extreme and poorly understood version of morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum. Though the…

These days, Carmichael is less interested in keeping secrets. In fact, he is building an entire phase of his career around obsessively dragging skeletons into the light. In 2022, he released a quiet, artful standup special called “Rothaniel,” in which he came out as gay and talked about the revelation that his father had kept a second family secret for decades. For the past two months, HBO has been airing “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” an invigorating and discomfiting new series about the per…

This spring, Oppenheim released “Spermworld,” a documentary adaptation of a Times story about the sperm-donation black market. This film, too, is a series of portraits, and one of “Spermworld” ’s subjects is a single sixtysomething sperm donor named Steve who gives women sperm out of some do-gooder instinct gone astray. He expects nothing in return—until he forges a connection with one of the recipients, Rachel, many decades his junior, who clings onto the hope that she will get pregnant in spit…

“Teenage Dream” was emblematic of an early Obama era of colorful, hedonistic pop music made by women. Long before TikTok became a social-media phenomenon, the pop singer Kesha made her début, in 2009, with a single of the same name, a blaring electro-pop hit that minted Kesha—who, at the time, stylized her stage name as Ke$ha—as a heroically sloppy party girl, whose sing-rap voice was filtered through Auto-Tune. With stringy, unwashed hair, a nose piercing, and an affinity for experimental makeu…

The twenty-eight-year-old relishes his status as a “cancelled” comic. He also happens to be one of the most popular acts in the country.

The artist sings with wry, petulant specificity, whether she’s addressing a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, or that ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend.