
Any musician who has uploaded their music to Spotify as an independent artist knows how futile it all is, expecting to end up on any of the editorial lists made by the company, which help push songs to millions of people using their front page. The fact is, if you don’t have the connections through…

After his father bought a mine in Tucson, Arizona, Joseph Byrd grew up and found himself drawn to music. Initially, it was vibraphone and accordion in pop groups, he soon branched out into local TV arrangements and college jazz combos. A talented kid, he found himself in a fellowship at Stanford, where he rubbed shoulders…

Orville Peck is one of the leading alt-country voices – thankfully, that means his musical choices, rather than simply branding him as ‘alternative’ because he isn’t a heterosexual man – although you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s the case. He’s got a new EP coming out on November 14th called ‘Appaloosa’ and there’s a song…

We wanted to write something about this Whole Thing with Roisin Murphy, but didn’t get much further than “why can’t some people just shut their mouths about other communities, especially ones who loved them so much?” Well, we just watched a very sensitive and well thought out video essay from The Last Mixed Tape, which…

There’s a certain twang in alternative rock that really works the gears of music nerds. You look at Pavement, Television et al, and you find that the discordant guitars aren’t simply playing out of key, but makes you feel a bit smarter. It’s a cunning trick. Well, we got that feeling from the new song…

Hello there. We remembered that listeners of our related radio show – FREE RANGE – might like to read the tracklisting for the show, instead of just listening to the words being pronounced badly throughout it. It’s the last show of the year before the round-up of 2025’s best music, so the last time where…

These are always exercises that are effectively futile and occasionally controversial, but it’s fun to make lists and order things for people to agree and disagree with, right? And it’s worth pointing out that such lists are invariably the fruit of something thinking about something popular that they’re going to arbitrarily score lowly, and something…

We’re hugely enjoying the music of CUZZOS X5 at the minute. With hip hop in dire need of an injection of goofiness without the backpack, these girls have been slinging out club friendly bangers that are stupidly fun and joyful… and cocky as all hell, which is always important we think. They’ve been skewering the…

Time to work out a sad dance routine for duets with strangers while a sped-up version of a song plays, because it’s all going off at TikTok. Now, seeing as social media has been equal parts brilliant and awful over the years, it’s difficult to know what to actually think about all this. Let’s work…

Look, Taylor Swift is breathing such rarified air these days that any suggestion that she’s not going to be a commercial success is pretty much laughable. Any idea that she won’t have a hit is really not what we’re talking about here, so if you are a person who only works on the metric of…
THERE’S NO MONEY IN THIS GAME ANYMORE, BUT IF YOU WANT TO WRITE SOMETHING FOR THE POP CORPS, YOU ARE WELCOME TO GET IN TOUCH. HAPPY HUNTING.
POP CULTURE IS WORTH TALKING ABOUT.
CONTACT: HOWDYPOPCORPSATGMAILDOTCOM