It was one of the fastest growing genres on Spotify last year: lofi hip-hop, a genre of online pirate stations and clandestine jazz samples. But an implosion under the weight of that success looms. Bas van Leeuwen: “There’s a shitstorm coming.” Jaap van der Doelen investigates.

Douglas Martin has finally returned from an exclusive summit, where he drank limited-edition microbrews with Waldo, Carmen Sandiego, Machiavelli, and the members of Eat Skull. He is happy to be back. In spite of my absence from the music writing world for the past couple of months in favor of occupying myself with mental restoration […]

Douglas Martin was in the Sandbox-era lineup of Guided by Voices. He was the greatest four-year-old bassist in indie-rock history. No need to put the word classic in scare-quotes. Between 1994 and 1996, the lineup of Guided by Voices released some immeasurably great output. If most pop-rock bands had the opportunity to slap their name […]

Douglas Martin keeps ’em laced in the illa snakes. Psychedelic Horseshit’s name is instantly recognizable among the lo-fi horde, but for all the wrong reasons. Psychedelic Horseshit jokingly created the rather abhorrent term “shitgaze,” one used to describe scuzzy-as-fuck-but-otherwise-great bands like Times New Viking and Eat Skull. Psychedelic Horseshit is far more famous for this […]

First the White Stripes break up, now every day Douglas Martin wakes up, somebody got something to say. As long as there’s been a “lo-fi” genre, there have been bands ditching their basements for studios the second a record exec utters the term “album budget”. But as we slowly move out of the era of […]