Emma Madden

Chris Bethell
Sigmund Freud said that the three greatest pleasures in this life are eating, orgasming and shitting. Clearly, Freud never had IBS.
As someone with undiagnosed IBS (it's just sexier that way), shitting is one of the great banes of my life. A simple cup of coffee could make me shit myself. Anti-smoking campaigns appeal to me not for their obvious pro-lung plus points, but because a tiny toke on a cigarette could leave me with shit in my pants. It's a tough, demoralising life, and...

On What Chaos Is Imaginary, the duo have come into their own, both as individuals and as a musical force.

Since the band’s inception, Sunflower Bean has struggled to define their musical identity. In 2015, they rooted their debut album in a vogue New York milieu, as lead singer Julia Cumming adopted the vocal style of My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher. Then, in an effort to depart from their early “fashion band” branding, Sunflower Bean went anti-trend in their 2018 sophomore album, embracing more soft rock sound and taking cues from Fleetwood Mac while performing a slightly more knowing past...

The singer-songwriter’s new single ‘hope is a dangerous thing...’ continues her project of subsuming American icons into her own pop mythology
According to the Czech philosopher Tomáš Kulka, there are three conditions for kitsch. Firstly, “Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions.” Secondly, “the objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.” And finally, “kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to ...

Last month, the term’s status was legitimised when it was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary. How did it become the representative adjective of our times?
The other night, as I stood at the bus stop, some traffic lights spilled into the leftover rain on the pavement, causing a rainbow like gleam across the street. “Doesn’t that look Lynchian?” I heard a man ask his friend at the bus stop.
His comment reminded me of Kafka. Or rather, of ‘Kafkaesque’. "What I'm against is someone...

Outsider art, psych-prog flourishes, and faux-deep philosophy mark their confusing and endearing catalog. Here's where to start.
A wise man named Homer Simpson once laid on a couch, cigar in his mouth, smug look upon his face and coined an immortal slogan for the self-satisfied: "Everyone's stupid but me." It has been a useful phrase to cling to as a longtime fan of Tool, the polarising polymaths who've spent the last 29 years making some of hard rock’s most superficially challenging songs.
T...

"I think sometimes there's a misconception, because my records have been sad that I've had a miserable decade," says Marissa Nadler. "And that would be untrue. I use songwriting as a balm, as a medicinal therapy for myself. So I don't write songs about the good stuff because I'm too busy enjoying them. I've always been attracted to melancholy. It's the aesthetic leaning towards the slow and the minor key, but I'm not, like, a miserable person."
Listeners would be forgiven for their assumption...

Reinvented as Chris, the randy protagonist of her second album of the same name, Christine And The Queens’ Héloïse Lettisier has embraced ’80s funk and pan-sexuality to five-star effect (see our review). But, the morning after a Brief Encounter-style moment at a London train station, she’s got romance on the brain too, finds Emma Madden
Last night, Chris – or Christine And The Queens, or Héloïse Lettisier, they’re one and the same – was running to the train station, screaming, “No! Don’t leav...

“Tommy Tommy Tommy Tommy this is about Tommy I am Tommy Tommy Tommy Tommy Tommy.”
This album is about me, remember?” Tommy Genesis says of lead single ‘Tommy’ from her upcoming album, Tommy Genesis. If Tommy seems inscrutable it’s because she refuses to be defined by anything other than what she is. At the start of her career, when early Soundcloud recordings were discovered by Father – the Atlanta rapper and head of indie rap clique ‘Awful Records’ – she indifferently tagged her music as ‘fe...

This Parisian showcase, in honour a new Apple-produced documentary, is one of the year’s slickest pop performances
Words: Emma Madden
It’s 7pm in Paris, and the sky looks as though cigarettes have been burned out on it. A long line of fans, Apple employees and journalists (and people who look important) are waiting for the doors to open at Salle Pleyel, where Christine and the Queens, or ‘Chris’ as she’s recently rebranded herself, will perform. It might be jarring to see industry men dressed...

on authenticating strategies of white trash employed by white rappers

There’s hardly an image more enduring than a female artist’s tears, and there’s hardly a story in indie rock’s history that has persisted quite like the one behind the music video for The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' beloved mid-'00s single “Maps. “They were real tears,” frontwoman Karen O. confessed to the NME about her emotional video performance in 2007. “My boyfriend at the time” -- rumoured to be Angus Andrew of the band Liars -- “was supposed to come the shoot - he was three hours late and I was ab...

From the mother, to the daughter, to "Wuthering Heights" – here are the essential stages of Kate Bush's career.
In a copy of Q Magazine from 1990, Kate Bush recalled how – growing up – she would dance to the music on the telly. “It was completely unselfconscious and I wasn’t aware of people looking at me,” she says. “One day some people came into the room, saw me and laughed and from that moment on I stopped doing it. I think I’ve been trying to get back there ever since.”
By the time of that...

During one, long confusing summer I signed up to Habbo Hotel, pretended to be a boy called Matt and fell in love – here’s why
Sometimes, our identities alone can prohibit us from fulfilling our desires. Contrary to popular belief, the desire to deceive others on the internet sometimes starts with an innocent rather than a sinister intention. I say that largely because it’s true, but also to save some face. Long before I came out as a lesbian, I catfished. It started when I was 10, long before...

Tinder’s a weird place for lesbians. When King Princess, aka 19-year-old Mikaela Straus, released ‘Pussy Is God’, the feed lit up with girls who like girls posting it as their anthem, just to confirm that they too like “pussy”. Torres, St. Vincent, Anna Calvi walked so that King Princess could run. She is, and will continue to be the icon and image for women desiring women, because God knows, we need it.
Girls who like girls are notoriously timid, and having a song as brazen as ‘Pussy Is God’...