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In 2005, when the singer-songwriter Ryan Davis was 20, he left Chicago for Glasgow. It was part of an exchange program between the Art Institute of Chicago, where Davis was a junior, and the Glasgow School of Art, but progress on his fine art degree was an afterthought. Davis arrived in Scotland with a bag of clothes, a guitar, and a four-track tape machine, keen to record some demos and start a music career.

The day he plugged his four-track in for the first time, it spit out an enormous spark.

“I...

All over America today, it’s No Kings Day, as the people rise up to make the kind of protests none of us thought we’d ever need to make in our lifetimes. It’s a day for defiance, for solidarity, as we watch the whole idea of a constitutional republic get dismantled piece by piece — not just by one man, but by a regime, an entire political party that no longer even pretends to have a platform, committed to the abolition of American democracy.

So what better day to blast Pavement?...

Two former executives on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune have accused Sony Pictures of engaging in unlawful race, gender, and age discrimination and retaliation against them.

Shelley Ballance Ellis, a Black woman, and her Latina colleague Monique Diaz have filed complaints with California’s Civil Rights Department and the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that Sony’s management terminated them and other workers in retaliation for collectively opposing harmful discrimination and toxic working conditions on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

The pair have spent close to 50 years combined working on the shows. Ballance Ellis was Executive Director, Licensing and Clearance at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Diaz also worked in the department. The pair were terminated in April.

They are claiming they were terminated because they objected to racial discrimination in the workplace, the pay inequity Diaz experienced, the glass ceiling and other bias Ballance Ellis faced as an older Black woman,...

Alex Ross Perry’s 2019 backstage rock drama Her Smell is bookmarked by cutaways to faux-documentary video footage, capturing its fictional 1990s alternative group in moments of camera-friendly bliss. Placed next to the emotional apocalypse that comprises most of the rest of the film’s runtime, the supposedly “real” Behind the Music-style footage can’t help but feel like an obfuscation of the band’s true story.

Perry avoids such pitfalls with Pavements, a docu-fiction about indie rock titans Pavement. The band’s legendary status, quickly achieved in the early ’90s indie underground, has always felt somewhat at odds with the sense of shaggy self-effacement that their critics often mistook for a conscious lack of effort. Wisely anticipating that the traditional rock-doc format would be a poor fit for such a group, Perry has crafted a far less easily classifiable tribute.

Pavements pulls together at least four different strands for its...

Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples takes a stock story––a lonely middle-aged man finds unexpected love––and places it in an unfamiliar context. For one thing, it’s set in the upstate New York town Rhinebeck, depicted as a place where social life revolves around a bar and golf course. Cantor Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) can barely bring himself do his job, suffering a crisis of faith following his wife’s death. He’s lost his voice, literally and figuratively. Driven to suicidal ideation, he lays down in the street at night and hopes to get run over by a truck. He visits a priest for a discussion about his shaky faith. Although he’s on friendly terms with his boss, the temple’s rabbi (Robert Smigel), and his two lesbian mothers, he drinks to cover up his sorrow.

Carla (Carol Kane) comes into his life when she decides,...

Horse Jumper of Love have announced a North American tour set for fall 2024. Additionally, the indie rock act unveiled the latest single from their upcoming studio album Disaster Trick, “Snow Angel.” The tune boasts contributions from Mj Lenderman and Squirrel Flower’s Ella Williams. Stream the track below.

The new slew of dates kicks off on September 14th in Cleveland. The Boston band will go on to hit cities like Vancouver, Los Angeles, Nashville, and others before wrapping up in Pittsburgh on October 16th. The run follows their upcoming summer jaunt with Diiv (get tickets here).

Get Horse Jumper of Love Tickets Here

Tickets for the new dates go on sale Friday, June 21st via a variety of ticketing platforms. Find full details of where to nab tickets here.

To accompany the tour announcement, Horse Jumper of Love dropped “Snow Angel.” Yet another single that features notable indie stars, the...

That’s almost a wrap, folks, as this year’s Sundance Film Festival concludes its eleven-day run tomorrow. While Team IndieWire has already decamped back to their various home bases (eleven is a lot of days), we’re all still enjoying what this year’s festival has to offer through both its virtual screening platform and our already-fond memories of the best films we saw at this year’s festival.

And what films are those, you might ask? We’re all too happy to share, care of the following list of 17 standout features from this year’s festival, hereby termed the best of the fest. The following list includes over a dozen films one IndieWire staffer really wanted to highlight. Narratives and documentaries, first-time filmmakers and old favorites, comedies, dramas, horror films, and so much more, this list also captures the breadth of filmmaking prowess put on display at this year’s festival.

My favorite thing about being Jewish — and it’s just so hard to pick between classic hits like “unleavened bread,” “having shoulder hair at 15,” and “being used by right-wing nationalists as an excuse to justify the same kind of genocide that tends to be inflicted upon us every other century or so” — is that I’ve always felt like the religion and its attendant culture places an unusual emphasis on being alive. Six thousand years of trying not to die can do that to you. We don’t believe in heaven, and we don’t believe in hell; when someone passes, we say “may their memory be a blessing,” and when we pray on Yom Kippur (one of the few days of the year that most of us go to shul), we only ask God to write our names in the Book of Life so that we can spend another...

Contains spoilers for Immortal Thor #2!As the All-Father, Odin is sidled with immense knowledge, and now the new Thor series has shown a key part of his life that readers have only ever heard about until now. With the secret knowledge of Yggdrasil now revealed, it begins to paint a picture of why stories and storytelling are among the most important forces in the Asgardian mythology and reframes several crucial tales from years past.

Immortal Thor #2 reveals exactly what wisdom Odin learned millennia ago, aka the Odin-Knowledge. In flashback, readers see Odin cut out his eye before Yggdrasil. After, as his pulled into the tree by its roots, he is told by the World Tree: "Yes. This is the lesson. This is the parable. The story always changes. The meaning always remains. There is always a sacrifice. Always a cost Bor-Son. For the Winter to end. For Spring to come again.

When Madonna first met Seymour Stein back in the Eighties, it was under unusual circumstances. Normally, when a record label executive expresses interest in a budding, early-career artist, meetings about their future and potential partnership in the industry take place in glossy high-rise buildings. But an eager 24-year-old Madonna met the Sire Records founder, who died Sunday at age 80, while he was propped up in a hospital bed.

Madonna recalled their first meeting in a moving tribute post shared one day after Stein’s death.

Seymour Stein Has Left Us!

Let this be a lesson, like David Berman once sang, that a setback can be a set-up for a comeback if you don’t let up. Five years after Under the Silver Lake got befuddled notices at Cannes and four since A24 buried it like a cursed heirloom (remind me to tell you a funny story about that if we ever meet Irl), David Robert Mitchell has found a major return to feature filmmaking. IMAX-sized, even: Deadline report he’ll direct Anne Hathaway in an untitled, logline-free, IMAX-shot “thrill-ride” for Warner Bros. and Bad Robot. Production is expected to commence this fall.

It’d be less strange if we weren’t in a climate that fast-tracks independent filmmakers from Sundance premiere to gormless, taste-free franchise filmmaking, but Mitchell’s path––from micro-scale Myth of the American Sleepover to Pynchon-aping Silver Lake, with cult-horror object It Follows right in-between––is...

Animal Collective mashed up their unreleased song “Genie’s Open” with a rendition of Silver Jews’ “Trains Across The Sea” as part of the band’s recent live session for SiriusXM.

While “Genie’s Open” wasn’t included on the band’s 2022 LP Time Skiffs, the track became a fixture on tour in support of the album; however, the SiriusXM session marked the first time they performed the song in tandem with the “Trains Across the Sea.”

Animal Collective’s Avey Tare and Geologist previously covered Silver Jews’ “Ballad of...

The afternoon sun streams through the windows of the Brooklyn art space ChaShaMa. Steve Keene, possibly the world’s most prolific painter, is hard at work, even though the gallery’s hosting a retrospective of his work. Right now, he’s adding a few blond streaks to Iggy Pop’s hair on the cover of the first Stooges album. Keene’s most famous for painting album covers on plywood panels, dozens per week, then selling them absurdly cheap. “It’s handmade,” he says with his easy grin. “That means somebody...

“I live in the darkness,” John Darnielle warns us on the Mountain Goats’ latest. That Darnielle needs to spell that out so clearly ought to be cause for alarm, since he hasn’t exactly been Mary Poppins up to this point. One of the most charming songs he ever wrote, 2005’s “Dance Music,” was an origin story of sorts about the power of his record player to drawn out the pain of his abusive childhood; “Against Pollution,” a lovely hinge point on the Goats’ excellent 2004 album We Shall All Be Healed,...

Scottish post-rockers Mogwai have released a new song, “Ritchie Sacramento,” from their upcoming album, As the Love Continues, out February 19th

“Ritchie Sacramento” is an all-enveloping track topped with shimmering guitars and Stuart Braithwaite’s melodic vocals, which are deftly undercut by a deep rumble of bass and distortion.

In a statement, Braithwaite said of the song: “‘Ritchie Sacramento”s title came from a misunderstanding a friend of ours had about how to say Ryuchi Sakamoto. The lyrics were inspired by a story Bob Nastanovich shared about his friend and...

When it comes to lowered expectations in pop, there probably isn’t a better candidate than the Avalanches’ third record. The Australian Edm combo’s debut, Since I Left You, took the art of constructing music out of samples to a heightened level of craft; that patchwork quilt of music was one of 2000’s kickiest albums. Nearly two decades passed before we heard from the Avalanches again, and when we did, time seemed to have passed them by: 2016’s Wildflower was a far less satisfying grab-bag of voices, sound effects...

Sad13’s Sadie Dupuis has revealed a spooky video for “The Crow” in time for Halloween.

The animated video for the Haunted Painting track features skeletal chicks in a nest, a ghost trying on clothes, and Dupuis ordering a drink from a sea monster. “What was it like to come of age/In such a cruel place,” she sings. “Supping on the bones/Of your old chaperones?”

“’The Crow’ wound up the heaviest song on Haunted Painting, although the demo was originally inspired by Clairo and solo Rob Crow,” Dupuis said in a statement.

The Avalanches have teamed with Leon Bridges for their new track “Interstellar Love,” the latest single from the Australian duo’s upcoming album We Will Always Love You.

The track features a sample of Alan Parsons Project’s “Eye in the Sky” and is inspired — like the album itself — by the story of astronomer Carl Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan capturing their romance on tape and sending it into space as part of the Voyager’s Golden Record.

“Leon is an incredible singer, with just the most beautiful voice.

Nineties nostalgia is still peaking, especially these days, when the former decade’s languid news cycle, easygoing economic conditions, and casual creative climate seem achingly distant from the miserable way we live now. And, of course, new bands are bands constantly cropping up that sound like Matador and Kill Rock Stars heroes of the Clinton-era underground. A new book out this month perfectly captures that artistic and cultural heyday. Now Is the Time to Invent!: Reports From the Indie-Rock Revolution, 1986-2000, from Verse/Chorus Press, collects writing from Puncture,...

The following contains spoilers for Fargo season 4 episode 1.

Loosely inspired by Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 film, the FX series Fargo also gets loose inspiration from real events, cryptic though they may be. They say the names are changed out of respect for the living, but everything is told as it happened out of respect for the dead. Season 4 is set in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1950. Chris Rock plays Loy Cannon, the boss of an African American crime family. He’s got an eye to the future, because “Italians, they’re the past.”

The season opener gives a detailed history of Kansas City’s organized crime, from the Hebrew mobsters who put money on the streets and skimmed the profits off the top of most vices in the city. The Moskowitz Syndicate ran the underworld, we learn from young Ethelrida Pearl Smutney (Emyri Crutchfield), who is writing a paper on...

Sadie Dupuis never intended for her song “Ghost (of a Good Time)” to become a quarantine anthem. The synth-pop tune was partially inspired by her memory of a Bushwick, Brooklyn, show that started at 1 a.m., but its true subject is binging a Netflix series all day — something many of us can relate to at this moment in time. “Who would have thought that me singing ‘I don’t want to go outside’ is now the only choice?” says Dupuis, 32. “I’m a trailblazer.”

“Ghost (of a Good Time)” is...

Fleet Foxes’ rustic neo-folk music and skybound harmonies loomed large over indie-ish rock in the early 2010s, not unlike the way Arcade Fire touched the mid-2000s or Pavement shaped the Nineties. Their last album, 2017’s correctly titled Crack-Up, was a stranger listen than usual for them, proggily ambitious and often opaquely sprawling. With Shore, their newly released fourth album, they’ve wandered back to the campfire, except only now it’s a world on fire: “We’re a long way from the past/I’ll be better off in a year in two,...

In the spring of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic tore through New York City at terrifying speed, Robin Pecknold stayed home in his rented one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. “I wasn’t being creative at all,” says the Fleet Foxes singer-songwriter, 34. “There were some dark weeks where I would end up waking up at 7 or 8 p.m. and stay up until noon. The world just seemed like it was more sane at night.”

On top of everything else — “the stress that we’ve all been going through, just by being alive...

The Avalanches have unveiled their video for new song “Running Red Lights,” which features Rivers Cuomo and rapper Pink Siifu. The clip is dedicated to the late David Berman and stars dancer Erik Cavanaugh, a former contestant from America’s Got Talent, and a cameo from Los Angeles billboard icon Angelyne.

“Running Red Lights” addresses love and loss and the Greg Brunkalla-directed visual opens with Cavanaugh being told by a psychic that “You are coming full circle.” Feeling inspired, he leaves the psychic and dances down the street as he heads...

The trial of Robert Durst, the infamous murder suspect who was the focus of HBO’s acclaimed 2015 “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” documentary miniseries, began this week. Also on trial: “The Jinx.”

Durst, a 76-year-old millionaire heir to a New York real estate fortune, is on trial in Los Angeles for the murder of Susan Berman, who was found dead via a gunshot in the back of her head in late 2000. Los Angeles County prosecutors began presenting their case that Durst murdered Berman, his longtime friend, to 12 jurors in a trial that is expected to last up to five months.

It didn’t take long for “The Jinx,” which centered on three murders Durst has been suspected of since 1982 and featured interviews with the millionaire, to come up during the Los Angeles trial. Jurors were played the final clip of “The Jinx,” where Durst, presumably unaware his microphone was still on,...

The Recording Academy’s “In Memoriam” section, which traditionally runs towards the end of the Grammy Awards ceremony and honors those in the music industry who died in the previous year, is bound to displease many — as the internet’s ire proves annually. Omissions are to blame: some due to time constraints, others to very recent circumstances, but more than anything, our musician heroes are reaching that certain age, may they all rest in peace.

This year’s batch omitted some alternative faves, rap legends and one of rock’s most renowned lyricists. Among the missing were Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter along with Silver Jews’ David Berman, notorious Geto Boy Mc Bushwick Bill, cult singer Scott Walker, Prodigy singer Keith Flint, Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis, The English Beat/General Public vocalist Ranking Roger, influential guitarist Neal Casal and Little Feat’s Paul Barrere.

In addition, the list misspelled The Cars’ Ric Ocasek,...

It could be an entertaining spectacle, if you ignored the crumbling institutions it was built upon and the creeping fear in the air — but enough about life in 21st century America. The Grammys have their own problems, with the show going on in the face of a roiling crisis at its governing body, the Recording Academy, after recently dismissed CEO Deborah Dugan dropped a long list of grave allegations against it, including rampant gender bias and corruption around the awards process. (The Academy denies it all.)

For all of its flaws,...

In 2009, Anders Osborne found himself at rock bottom. He was bankrupt, his house was in foreclosure, his wife had kicked him out, and he couldn’t see his two young kids. His livelihood was playing gigs, but he couldn’t even do that — he’d often show up too drunk or high to perform. “For close to a year, I’d [either] try to find a friend’s couch to sleep on [or] I lived in the park,” says Osborne, a New Orleans-based singer-songwriter who’s collaborated with everyone from Phil Lesh to Tim McGraw.

Indie-rock singer-songwriter David Berman passed away in August 2019, and over the weekend, numerous fans, friends and former bandmates gathered to celebrate what would have been the musician’s 53rd birthday with tribute shows in New York, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon.

At the Portland show — hosted by local zine chickfactor at Bunk Bar — Pavement members Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich covered songs from Berman’s band Silver Jews, including American Water‘s “Random Rules” and Starlite Walker‘s “Trains Across the Sea.” (Both Malkmus and Nastanovich had occasionally performed with Silver Jews.

When Austin Jenckes was just a teenager, his father committed suicide. Naturally, it was a tragedy that has shaped the Washington State songwriter’s life and informed his music. But the loss also turned Jenckes into a passionate proponent of mental health awareness. On December 2nd, he’ll host a benefit concert in Nashville to support the cause.

“My dad died when I was 16. He struggled with depression; he took his own life. He was everything that I looked at as what was cool,” says Jenckes. “When he died, I...

On Sunday, indie-rock fans were pleasantly shocked to see that the Tennessee Titans had posted a video message honoring David Berman, of the Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, who died earlier this year. “Nashville (and the world) will always love David Berman,” the message on the Nissan Stadium jumbotron read.

Berman, who moved from Charlottesville, Virginia to Nashville around the same time Nashville got its NFL franchise, was a Titans fan who sometimes put football into his songs and writing, like this 2016 poem honoring Darius Van Arman, founder of the Charlottesville indie label Jagjaguwar,...

Lana Del Rey has always been a pop classicist at heart — but she’s finally made her pop classic. The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. No other songwriter around does such an expert job of building up elaborate romantic fantasies, and then burning them to the ground. She purrs lines like,...

Animal Collective members Avey Tare and Geologist pay tribute to late Purple Mountains singer David Berman with a cover of Silver Jews’ “Ballad of Reverend War Character.” Proceeds from the downloads of their rendition via Bandcamp will be donated to MusiCares and Music Health Alliance.

“A few weeks ago we planned on seeing Purple Mountains together,” the band members said in a statement; Berman died by suicide on the eve of his first tour in years. “Instead we spent the night listening to David’s records and talking about how...

First Aid Kit paid tribute to the late David Berman with a gut-wrenching cover of Silver Jews’ “Random Rules.” The Swedish folk duo also released an original song “Strange Beauty” in honor of Berman, who died by suicide at the age of 52 earlier this month.

Singer Klara Söderberg takes the lead on “Random Rules,” gently laying her vocals down over aching guitar. “So if you don’t want me I promise not to linger/But before I go I gotta ask you dear about the tan line on your ring finger.

David Berman once wrote that Paul Simon got it all wrong — there’s really only two ways to leave your lover. “You can up and leave, Steve. Or you can go to your grave, Dave.” Berman spent much of his existence leaving his lives behind, pulling up stakes and starting a new life somewhere else, until the horrible news of his death yesterday at 52. He was beloved for his Silver Jews albums and his 1999 classic book of poetry, Actual Air. He had just returned to release an excellent new album under the name Purple Mountains.