Summer’s here, and with the season comes a tidal wave of album releases. It’s the best time of year to be a music fan, but also the most overwhelming. With so many new songs dropping…

For a proggy sludge metal act, incorporating hooks into chunky riffs can be tricky. After the ambitious mixed bag of Yellow & Green, Baroness pulled off the transition on Purple. The album embraced catchy vocal melodies…

Peter Frampton has influenced the identity of loud guitar music to the point where people less than half his age have probably inadvertently heard his hits. When you’ve helped write the hard rock rulebook and…

Considering the bottomless pit of nihilistic absurdism that is Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!, Tim Heidecker’s folk rock albums might seem relatively unassuming. Still, it wasn’t long before he rustled some jimmies with…

I Images courtesy “Murder in the Front Row.”Decades after their release, countless fans still furiously debate whether Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets is the best Metallica album. But the Bay Area spawned an…

Empathy has become depressingly scarce over the past four years, with polarization and animosity pulling people farther apart by the day. Kishi Bashi’s observations inform his latest album, Omoiyari. In Japanese, the title translates as…

It’s understandable that Frank Iero didn’t think he’d make solo albums. After rising to fame as the guitarist for 2000s emo titans My Chemical Romance, finding his own identity became a daunting task. He proved…

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of music on the internet. Don’t get me wrong; I love how platforms like YouTube, Bandcamp and Soundcloud have opened the floodgates of independent artists. But navigating…

Steven Ellison’s legacy far predates his role in Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 landmark album, To Pimp a Butterfly. As Flying Lotus, his glitchy, abstract production has continually pushed hip-hop’s artistic boundaries. In 2006, Los Angeles set a new standard for…

We all know the festival grind: trying to fit as many performances as possible into a handful of days. Anyone who says that’s not overwhelming is a liar. This is why RIFF makes these handy …