Jayson Greene

I am scouring Phil Elverum’s stove. It needs it. His house is generally clean, if cluttered with books and art in that appealing, bohemian way. But his stove evinces single parenthood: The burners, once silver, have gone geologic with blackened food crust, and I am working to dislodge the most stubborn bits with a sponge. In the bathroom down the hall, his young daughter sloshes in a clawfoot tub, chatting to herself. Elverum walks past, en route from the living room, toys in his hands. “Can you…

Overtones: Is Rihanna the Most Influential Pop Singer of the Past Decade? Photo by: Photos by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images for Vogue, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Turner, and Jason Merritt/Getty Images When people write about Robyn Rihanna Fenty’s singing, they often use words like “flat” or “thin” or “limitations”—something that suggests her voice is the secret defect hiding in her otherwise-brilliant plumage, the limp disguised by the swagger. She “doesn’t have the range,” as the dea…

New projects by Google and Sony use machine-learning technology to create music that essentially writes itself. Should we be scared—or excited?

Twenty years on, Radiohead revisit their 1997 masterpiece with a deluxe reissue. The bonus material includes familiar B-sides and a few previously unheard recordings that hint at an intriguing road not taken.

Yves Tumor’s latest album is a benchmark in experimental music. It is searing and borderless, music that is aware of oppressive confinement, and music with an intoxicating urge to be free.

When Robyn returned this summer, she was met by her adoring fans not as a queen nodding to her subjects, but more like the reappearance of badly needed weather—a shaft of light warming them. Her new single “Missing U” came with a sweet video featuring the DJs for Robyn Night, a themed dance party in Brooklyn where her faithful have congregated for years. “This is the community that your music has made,” party cofounder Russ Marshalek said earnestly into the camera. “She’s just brought a lot of j…

While there’s plenty of his melancholic, drug-induced staples, what you won’t find here is the Atlanta rapper stretching or surprising himself.

The divisive pop star still gets bogged down in melancholy, but the charm of Post Malone’s third album is in his versatile voice and his ability to make a great hook inside pretty much any song.

Read Jayson Greene’s review of the album.

Over my 15-year career as a music critic, I’ve devoted thousands of hours to the art of translating music, imperfectly, into words. Now, thanks to an AI tool from Google called MusicLM, I can translate words, imperfectly, into music. The results can be startling. For fun, I tried feeding in some prompts from Pitchfork’s album reviews. Here are just a few words that a writer recently used to describe a song: “arpeggiated synths and light-up dancefloor grooves.” Simple, right? Effective. You can a…