Sneaks' 'Happy Birthday' Begs Us to Reconsider Musical Definitions

Sneaks' Happy Birthday is a worthwhile release for its insistence upon being categorized as music without a category.

                                      
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Sneaks' Happy Birthday is a worthwhile release for its insistence upon being categorized as music without a category.

Kristin Hersh thinks influences are a crutch, and chops are a barrier between artists and their truest expressions. We talk about life, music, the pandemic, dissociation, and the energy that courses not from her but through her when she's at her best.

Jaye Jayle salvage the best materials from Iggy Pop and David Bowie's Berlin-era on Prisyn to construct a powerful and impressive engine all their own.

Eyedress' Let's Skip to the Wedding is a jaggedly dreamy assemblage of sounds that's both temporally compact and imaginatively expansive, all wrapped in vintage shoegaze ephemera.

With Every Bad, Porridge Radio seduce us with the vulnerability and existential confusion of Dana Margolin's deathly beautiful lyricism interweaved with alluring pop melodies.

The first album in three decades from the Psychedelic Furs beats expectations just one track in with "The Boy That Invented Rock and Roll".

Fontaines D.C.'s A Hero's Death is the follow-up to the acclaimed Dogrel, and it features some of their best work -- alongside some of their most generic.

Fontaines D.C. guitarist Conor Curley speaks with PopMatters about their influences and the flatness around promoting their new album, A Hero's Death.

The Academy of Sun's The Quiet Earth is an interesting mish-mash of styles. Singer-songwriter-pianist-bandleader Nick Hudson prefers to use "Gothic dystopian post-punk" to describe the band.

There's a whole lotta love (and maybe a little hate) in the captivating new memoir by Chris Frantz, who is an open book while talking about life with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, and wife Tina Weymouth in this candid interview.

Post-punk's Protomartyr have honed their sound into something apocalyptic on their defiantly modernist Ultimate Success Today.

Television’s 1977 masterpiece Marquee Moon is the 25th Greatest Album of All Time, but is it too “too too” to put a finger on? Counterbalance sees it all backward.

Like Aaron Sorkin, the veteran rock band U2 has been making ambitious, iconic art for decades—art that can be soaring but occasionally self-important. Sorkin and U2's work draws parallels in comfort and struggle.

Cherry Red Records' six-disc Revillos compilation, Stratoplay, successfully charts the convoluted history of Scottish new wave sensations.

The eight songs on WiiRMZ's Faster Cheaper are like a good sock to the jaw, bone-rattling, and disorienting in their potency.

With Welcome to Bobby's Motel, Pottery have crafted songs to cleanse your musical pallet and keep you firmly on the tips of your toes.

Chrome Waves, ex-Nachtmystium man Jeff Wilson offers up solo debut, Open Roads, featuring dark and remarkable sounds in tune with Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus.

Outspoken electropunks Sleaford Mods revel in their journey and call for a new humanism while speaking out about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the music business and the body politic.

On 10:20, Wire retain the sound they've been cultivating for the last few albums and use it to reinvigorate and reinterpret tracks from their various periods.

When Bob Marley went to London in 1977 he discovered, documented, and reveled in the punky reggae party.

Jehnny Beth's (Savages) solo debut To Love Is to Live feels like a really good book. Each track gives you a deeper dive into a complex and multifaceted, destructive character.

One of the pleasures of human culture is that, as a combined stream of millions of individuals' efforts in this current moment, and millions of people's inputs across time stretching back thousands of years, no single person will ever have seen or heard it all.

Jade Hairpins' Harmony Avenue exudes the free-spirited exuberance of a side project, jam-packed with ideas and vivid tone colors, and aimed for both the melodic and harmonic sweet tooth.

Mancunian guitarist/texturalist Vini Reilly parlayed the momentum from his famous Morrissey collaboration into an essential, definitive statement for the Durutti Column.

The Fall's Reformation! Post-TLC, originally released in 2007, teams Mark E. Smith with an almost all-American band, who he subsequently fired after a few months, leaving just one record and a few questions behind.

Presented as part of the new Buzzcocks' box-set, Sell You Everything, Modern showed a band that wasn't interested in just repeating itself or playing to nostalgia.

Following The OOZ and its accolades, King Krule crafts a similarly hazy gem with Man Alive! that digs into his distinct aesthetic rather than forges new ground.

David Thomas guides another version of Pere Ubu through a selection of material from their early years, dusting off the "hits" and throwing new light on some forgotten gems.

Argentinian post-punkers Las Kellies channel a legendary Athens, Georgia band, but this Suck This Tangerine is no paint-by-numbers affair.

In these times of pandemic turmoil and outright trauma, what better match does the tempestuous human soul have than the sea? And what better lyricist than the Cure's Robert Smith, who twins the wrath (or sadness) of the sea with similar human emotions?

Ghost Work features former/current members of Seaweed, Minus the Bear, Snapcase, and the group offer up a delicious blend of punk rock/post-punk goodness on "Go Stat".

At Severed Heads' third-last show in New York, after decades of playing electronic, art-pop, Tom Ellard swung a noose around his band's head and, with an imitable grin, slowly pulled tighter. After 40 years, Severed Heads is done, and Ellard muses on his long career.

Philadelphia's Courier Club fuse post-punk with '90s indie on a breathless five-song EP that leaves the listener wanting more.

Reminiscent of classic grunge and doom, Wailin Storms' "Rattle" is bound to set the pace of this collective's career.

This week we are celebrating the best post-punk albums of all-time and today we conclude with part five featuring Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads and more.

This week we are celebrating the best post-punk albums of all-time and today we have part four with Talking Heads, the Fall, Devo and more.