Jenn Pelly

Grief clarifies the air in Sleater-Kinney’s taut 11th album, which processes loss and societal turmoil and finds strength in chosen family.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 2007 album that permanently altered the pop-punk landscape and marked the arrival of the ambitious and brilliant Hayley Williams.

“The riff! The riff! The riff! The riff!” At a nondescript Irish pub on Avenue A, Marnie Stern is delineating her sonic priorities. A couple hours before, we met up on the Lower East Side for a stroll past the former location of beloved indie basement-bar-bakery Cake Shop, where Stern played some of her earliest shows. Ludlow Street is so unrecognizable, though, that we have to laugh at our collective inability to even find the former Cake Shop. Among the artisan ice cream shops and vape-marts t…

Last month, The New York Times ran an interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner that so damningly revealed sexist and racist prejudices in his thinking that he was swiftly removed from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which he co-founded in 1983. In the interview, Wenner shared his opinion that Joni Mitchell was “not a philosopher of rock’n’roll,” hence her exclusion—and that of any women musicians or artists of color—from his new book of interviews with famous white men. The…

Reissues of the L.A. band’s mid-’90s albums capture how they brought girl-group yearning, three-part harmonies, and virtuoso violin lines to the era of Sassy mag and 120 Minutes.

Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Björk’s second album, the foundation for one of the most consequential careers in pop history.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Carole King’s Tapestry, the second act that turned a master songwriter into a music legend.

On her elegant and complex fifth album, Lana Del Rey sings exquisitely of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. It establishes her as one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

Emily Sprague and I are crouched over a creek in rural Germantown, New York, letting our hands float atop the shallow water. Near the rental house where Sprague and her indie-pop band Florist are recording their fourth album, she tells me to pick up a rock that speaks to me. We are going to do a spell. Amid the overwhelming, technicolor green of our surroundings, she leads me through a brief meditation of sorts. This water, she says—with calm conviction and a slight wink—is connected to all wate…

On her torrential second album, Kristin Hayter creates a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

The core elements of Sonic Youth were still scattered all over their 1986 album, but its dark and sordid sound brilliantly captured the essence of an “underground” band coming to life.

Jenny Lewis and I are in her brown Volvo, idling outside her childhood home. On a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, we are two blocks from Van Nuys Middle School, where Lewis once sang “Killing Me Softly” in a talent show and got suspended for flashing a peace sign in a class photo (it was mistaken for a gang symbol). We are walking distance from what used to be a Sam Goody record store on Van Nuys Boulevard, where Lewis once bought a life-changing tape of De La Soul’s 3 Fee…

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the restless Southern spirit of Lucinda Williams’ fifth album.

Newly reissued on vinyl, Bikini Kill’s 1998 compilation stands as the defining document of the feminist punk band whose music remains relevant, righteous, and unflappably cool.

On her first official release, the 17-year-old songwriting prodigy offers six slickly produced electronic dream pop tracks whose streaks of misery feel discernibly teenage.

Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the radical underbelly of Nirvana’s 1992 compilation Incesticide.

Sophie Allison’s excellent studio debut is a compact album of clear melodies, plainspoken lyrics, and the impossibly tangled logic of infatuation.

The New York composer is an electro-acoustic minimalist who pays special attention to the spaces around her. Her latest album, by turns grounded and disquieting, feels untethered and limitless.

The Raincoats is a beginning, but it is also a record about beginnings. In its songs you hear a cultural genesis story. The Raincoats were a group of women who were, in part, just learning to play their instruments, but their debut album also coincides with the start of a whole artistic sensibility, one of fearless and knowing amateurism. These overcast songs are charged with the feeling of newness that comes with realizing you are not what you expected. It is the sound of finding things buried…