Rock is not dead, but it is not in charge either. An honest look at a genre that keeps growing its streams while losing its grip on the culture.
From a Fort Greene basement to Saturday Night Live, Geese are the most recent New York band to cross from independent obscurity to mainstream fame.
Vancouver has always punched above its weight in rock, and in 2026 the city’s new guard is keeping the tradition alive. Beyond the festival stages of Khatsahlano and Music Waste, a fresh crop of guitar bands is doing the unglamorous work of building a following one club show at a time. Two of them are […]
Ask where new guitar rock is coming from in 2026 and the honest answer keeps pointing north. Norway and Sweden are quietly turning out a wave of young bands that pull from blues, stoner, classic and psych rock without sounding like a tribute act. None of them are arena names yet, but together they make […]
A song written at Wesleyan in 2005 as a deadpan parody of the rock-star fantasy spent the next twenty years becoming the most efficient delivery vehicle for that fantasy in pop. The production didn’t fail the irony. It made the irony unkillable.
The single that made R.E.M. globally famous is also the gravity well that kept them from escaping mainstream expectations. A diagnosis, not a takedown.
