Emma Madden

Sternberg’s debut balances stark themes of suicidal ideation, abject hopelessness, and self-hatred with whimsy and redemptive tenderness.
Joanna Sternberg is a New York-based cartoonist and musician, and on their website you can find a comic titled “somethings never change.” Sternberg depicts themselves as a lonely child in the first panel, then an equally lone adult in the following three. Underneath the strip, they write: “this comic is not me looking for compliments or words of comfort and...

Other than pornography, there is no film genre so concerned with the body, nor of gouging a reaction from it, than horror. The word is derived the Latin horrēre – which describes how hairs on the nape of the neck bristle when one is flushed with fear or excitement. Often, this reaction is provoked by images of the body itself: The Phantom of the Opera’s disfigured half-face; the flesh of Frankenstein’s monster fixed together with nails; the extreme anaemia of Dracula. All of these fantastical...

If I tell you that Joanna Sternberg sounds like Wallace Shawn, maybe you’ll strain to hear them better. “Actually, there’s this incredible puppeteer named Shari Lewis,” they tell me, while still sounding like Shawn. “She’d do the voices of Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy — all these puppets. I blame that show for my strange way I speak. I talk like a cartoon.”
Granddaughter to Fraydele Oysher — one of the first female singers in Yiddish theatre as well as inspiration for Barbra Streisand...

Ahead of 'Young Enough,' frontwoman Eva Hendricks discusses growing up, therapy, and Lorde's 'Melodrama'
By Emma Madden
The joy that left somewhere between your fifth birthday party and puberty never escaped Charly Bliss’s Eva Hendricks. A super extrovert or “total hambone,” as she describes herself, Hendricks is exactly the person you picture when you listen to Charly Bliss’s strain of invigorating, hot-blooded power pop. Born into an encouraging family in a small arts town, she spent most o...

Those who don’t consider themselves straight often look to openly gay or queer public figures for suggestions on how to present themselves, and how to enact their own desires. It’s why when King Princess, real name Mikaela Straus, released her single ‘Pussy Is God’ in late 2018, seemingly every girl who likes girls felt inclined to make it their ‘Tinder anthem.’
That a song from a lesbian public figure could be diffused into real life and lived sexual expression is nothing new, but rather som...

Lolita’s childhood, pre-Humbert, was peppered with what he calls “sapphic diversions”, and when he forces their first kiss, her use of tongue — ”a comical refinement” — leads Humbert to believe that “she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian”. Lolita also isn’t into boys. She makes that clear when she’s made to socialise with them at her sedate girls’ school. And when she’s drugged by Humbert at a hotel in anticipation of his first rape on the road, she thickly calls out the na...

When Claire Boucher, who goes by the stage name Grimes, called herself “the future of music” in a 2012 interview with Nardwuar, she wasn’t wrong. “What I was referring to though was more pure musical stuff,” she later clarified to the now-defunct Australian site Everguide. “My mandate is to just take all of these genres, the ones that people think really shouldn’t be together, or that aren’t cool, and just find the parts that are cool because I think it will lead to a more interesting and ori...

Three albums in, the Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist still sounds as though she’s composing music en plein air.
The American pop psychoanalyst Thomas Moore wrote that each of us have three selves: the Eternal Self, who arrives at birth and never changes; the Practical Self, who is shaped by events and experiences; and the Unfolding Self, who is yet to be. On her third album, Oregon-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Heather Woods Broderick is most concerned with this third self. Havi...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

City Slang – February 8th
Only today’s greatest musicians are able to convey absolute solitude — it’s there in Frank Ocean’s echoey soliloquies, and there in Grouper’s lonely hiss. Now it’s here again in Jessica Pratt’s Quiet Signs. Pratt’s third album is that rare thing, where the music is so preternatural that it’s almost impossible to understand how the musician got there. The songs are melodically and hypnotically simple, with each sound seeming to melt into one another in a cosy similitu...

Ever since the early 1990s, thorny copyright laws have determined and dogged the sound of hip-hop. While once a relatively lawless genre, that changed when artists and artists’ managers put a stop to the genre’s Wild West period – so-called because beats were being produced with a myriad of samples, without any fear of going to court.
Take the case of Public Enemy. In today’s legal climate, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, with its countless samples, wouldn’t be able to exist. A...