Whether making hip-hop, punk, salsa or spiritual jazz, Bay Area artists didn’t disappoint this year. The KQED Arts & Culture ...

What Happened to the Streets? is 21 Savage's follow-up to 2024's American Dream, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 ...

Technically, Up My Standards is a mixtape, but it sounds more like one long radio freestyle. The only moments where Philly’s Shadstackzz isn’t rapping at full force are when the beats switch from one ...

Here are the 51 best rock and metal albums of 2025. We're officially more than halfway through the decade. It's already produced its own crop of new ascending stars and quite a handful of veterans who ...

With so much good music being released all the time, it can be hard to determine what to listen to first. Every week, Pitchfork offers a run-down of significant new releases available on streaming ...

Earlier this year, my colleague and bud Kelefa Sanneh suggested that music critics, as a lot, have gone soft—becoming submissive, overly agreeable, and, in some cases, nearly servile. He’s right, of ...

The best things in life are free. Sign up for our email to enjoy your city without spending a thing (as well as some options when you’re feeling flush). Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to ...

LL Cool J's Mr. Smith arrived at a crucial crossroads in his career. Coming off 14 Shots to the Dome, which had been deemed one of the more lackluster efforts up to that point, the rapper faced ...

This post was updated Nov. 19 at 3:35 p.m. Summer Walker is closing a chapter of her career with another confessional album. The R&B singer-songwriter’s third LP, “Finally Over It,” released Nov. 14, ...

We love those classic Christmas recordings. And we cherish the chance to hear Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand, the Beach Boys, Darlene Love and other greats sing these standards each ...

Packaged with live recordings and studio rarities, the Mats’ 1984 masterpiece gets a thoughtful new box set that illustrates the precarity and magic of their unlikely breakthrough. These are coming-of ...

On December 6, 1999, just 25 days before the new millennium, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit against file-sharing platform Napster for copyright infringement. Now, 25 ...