Editorial

In Ari Aster’s 2016 short film C’est La Vie, Chester Crummings, a homeless man, speaks directly and combatively to camera about his life and society at large as he wanders the streets of LA, surviving, begging for change and casually murdering people. At one point, he says: “You know what Freud says about the nature of horror? He says it’s when the home becomes unhomelike. Unheimlich.”  In Sig...

“It’s cars and cans left!” yells a man on my phone. “Mug going crazy, Jeep going backwards . . . Bugatti in the front with 7 UP . . .” The race is halfway through. Tins clink and tiny wheels screech in a four-way battle for global adoration. We’ve already had a shocker. Barely two seconds in, every Tape contender was knocked and flattened, leaving the contest like they couldn’t wait to be bac...

These 12 months have been momentous for me, and music became the single reliable thing I could take anywhere – something to cling onto, to break ice with, to carry like shrunk friends in a pocket for flights and walks home. I’ve never been more aware

It happens at once, together, like a murmuration of starlings changing course. There’s a young guy onstage, his face long and stabby and white as a...

We’re halfway through 2023 and critics are slouching towards their Best Records Of The Year So Far lists. They’re rarely happy about it. If dicing releases every 12 months is arbitrary, then six months is labor on a factory line, wood chips for the content mill. But this year, I feel like they hate these lists more than usual. They’re having a hard time picking much. And maybe you are, too. P...

In the distance, a baby wails. Above him drape the angel wings of a pillow fort’s white blankets. As we step closer, stained glass emerges, and a cradle, a candle on cloth. “Waaaaa!” goes the baby. A man hovers over it. “God,” the man says, “why did this have to happen to me?” It’s a gross baby. A fairy buzzes in. “Yes, yes,” the fairy agrees, “your first ones were prettier.” The fairy has a f...