The Underground Sound of Emerson College
Design by Sophie Parrish By Declan Ireland It’s 2016 and you’re young—somehow younger than you already are. Everything has this heightened breathing quality, so much so that it takes on an awful animism. The world, your friends, your lover: all of it is powerful and wrong. Except you, my young friend, you have the distinct…
King Crimson’s 1981 endeavor of a concept Discipline was an entire shift for their career. Five years after Red and eleven after The Court of the Crimson King, King Crimson take on a completely new sound in the ’80s, one that is much more melody-based than their earlier work, which relies heavily on creating an ambient and droning atmosphere along with volume dynamics between members. Their older work is more resemblant of bands such as Yes and Can. They also had a bigger line up in their earlier formations, with both woodwind and string instruments. In the 1980s, King Crimson was exclusively a quartet that lasted through Discipline, Beat (1982), and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984). They leaned into the likes of Talking Heads and even groups like Gang of Four. Across their discography, songs follow a regular verse and chorus structure, maintaining their Crimsonian weirdness through the usage of time signature changes and polymetric modulation. Discipline marked new territory for King Crimson, and by the end of the album they already had perfected it.
One month after my sixteenth birthday, I got to see Kid Cudi’s “To The Moon” tour at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. I was young, and afraid of my own shadow but as I walked into the arena, already hazy with weed smoke, and saw twenty thousand other people who felt seen by Cudi’s lyrics, it melted away.
Tranquility is not the first word I would use to describe Andrew Snakez’s latest album; it’s the last. To get to the state described in its title, Tranquility of a Pink Horse, Snakez must first take us on a journey through fields of distortion and meadows of gentler longing, along the way lassoing an impressively diverse array of sonic influences into his coherent universe — simultaneously as familiar and unusual as its kitschy cover image of a pink horse mid-gallop.
Exile in Guyville could be a sob story about shitty ex-boyfriends and childhood trauma and bad sex, but Phair doesn’t sing it like she wants your sympathy, or even like she’s particularly upset over the situation. It sounds like she’s resigned herself to it. It’s the tone of voice of a breakup that you’ve known is coming for months, the end of a relationship that you’ve already mourned the loss of by the time the conversation happens, the numbness that comes with deciding not to expect too much. Her vocals are devoid of any flourish or technical stylings, but are instead a monotone that sounds like she’s complaining to you over the phone.
Unlike the steady and booming resurgence of Duster within the past years, Eiafuawn has seen little resurrection outside of smaller spaces. On February 25, 2022, archival record label The Numero Group released deluxe pressings of Birds in the Ground, as well as full Spotify and Bandcamp uploads. But the area that Eiafuawn finds itself in doesn’t need to be large, and the album doesn’t need a cultural revival. It only needs to play in quiet bedrooms and turned-up headphones, existing in the personal and authentic world it cultivates for each listener. 20 years later, Eiafuawn stands as a meaningful record of early 2000s slacker artistry—gloomy and detached yet oh so emotional. Maybe in our own interior worlds, everything is still all fucked up, but in Parton’s world of Birds in the Ground, everything is right.
Kerrin Connolly is Boston-based artist who self-produced her third album Simpleton, which was released February 20, 2026. Each of her previous albums follows a whimsical outlook on life and mundane struggles in a distinct bedroom pop style, but this new album delves completely into the fantasy world through an alternative pop rock lens.
At this point in their career, By Storm, composed of rapper RiTchie with a T and producer Parker Corey — both formerly of the group Injury Reserve — are a duo defined almost as much by the mythology surrounding their music as the music itself. Since the 2021 release of Injury Reserve’s earth shattering By The Time I Get to Phoenix and the group’s subsequent dissolution/reformation into By Storm, it’s become common practice to wax poetic about their music’s innate connection to grief, about how the sporadic, confrontational sound of that final record so effectively embodied the devastation of post-mortem anguish like little hip-hop before it ever could — and that’s not denying that By The Time I Get to Phoenix was anything but an album about grief.
The album is inverting in on itself, track to track. It is a warning for those who take themselves too seriously to loosen up, and a reminder to pay close attention. A lot has changed between album releases for Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye. He became the father of three kids. Became a partner to long-time collaborator, Rihanna. Was the face of many campaigns from Ray-Ban to Dior. Safe to say he has secured himself even more so from where we left off in his Discography. Don’t Be Dumb has its lesson in the name; it’s up to its listeners to take it into account.