-
The 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 YearsSPIN hit a milestone this year: Our 30th birthday. To celebrate, we caught up with some of the artists behind our past picks for Album of the Year, held a readers' poll, reminisced with former staffers, and now, we've ranked the 300 best albums of the past 30 years. Drawing on ballots from more than a dozen contributors, the editors whittled a roster of just under 1,000 nominees to a list of undisputed...
-
Nate Ruess Is the Happiest He's Ever Been on Solo LP
The first sound on Nate Ruess' debut solo LP, Grand Romantic, is the sound of raspy, maniacal laughter: the kind of deliberately articulated cackle that makes it clear you're not in on the joke. It's a bit surprising coming from a singer with as notoriously wide and ready a smile as Ruess — and one who wrote such a thoughtful note to doubtless disappointed fans regarding the indefinite status of...
-
Q&A: Mac McCaughan Revisits '80s Growing Pains on 'Non-Believers'
Over the past 25 years, Mac McCaughan has built an impressive resume: singer-guitarist of Superchunk, arguably the hardest-working band in indie-rock history, whose tenth (and most recent) full-length, 2013's I Hate Music, stands as one of the 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years; co-founder of Merge Records, the North Carolina label he started with bandmate Laura Ballance, which has put out more...
-
Five Artists to Watch in May 2015
A young soul singer with a synthesized heart, a towering Swede ready to crush the pop competition with a comeback, a frenetic Midwestern trio hoping to capture your attention with scream-ready anthems — here are the five artists you need to know about in May of 2015. Brayton Bowman Who: A singer-songwriter from Philadelphia who now makes New York City his home, Bowman's lately been churning out...
-
Ten Detroit Techno Up-and-Coming Producers to Watch
When Detroit techno made its way from the Motor City in the late ‘80s to overseas locales like London and Berlin, it launched a worldwide phenomenon that quickly grew into a longstanding international techno culture, thanks in part to 1988’s seminal compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit. Early ‘90s rave culture soon followed, facilitating techno’s return to the States and securing...
-
Q&A: ?uestlove Talks Philly's Eighth Annual Roots Picnic Festival
A man who truly needs no introduction, Philly-born 44-year-old Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson is one of the most famous drummers in the world and certainly the most famous in hip-hop itself. Along with rapper Black Thought and a cavalcade of expert sidemen, his group the Roots are critically-acclaimed mainstays (2008's dark and clangorous Rising Down was chosen as one of SPIN's 300 favorite albums of the...