Robin Hilton

After tricking hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton into abandoning the studio in search of the world's most complicated latte, Los Angeles folk duo The Milk Carton Kids commandeer the mic and take over this week's show. Singers and guitarists Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan have released four ...

The latest video from Swedish pop singer Seinabo Sey is a journey of hope and heartache told through a simple but brilliantly choreographed concept. "I've tried to make it more poetic," Seinabo sings as she walks through darkness toward a blinding light. "But it's only easy if you let it. ...

This week on All Songs Considered, Weezer is back with an insanely catchy new single that takes on everything from sexism to religion, filtered through Rivers Cuomo's playful sense of humor. Marlon Williams puts his choir boy-meets-punk rocker touch on country music, King Gizzard ...

Jimmy LaValle's dream pop project The Album Leaf is back with a new video and its first new music since 2010's A Chorus Of Storytellers. The video, for the song "New Soul," is grand and cosmic, but also strangely intimate, with a seemingly simple narrative about a primitive ...

On our most recent episode of All Songs Considered I noted that Sharon Van Etten can be heard on a new ad for Corona beer, and that a number of my favorite musicians have sold their songs for commercials.

There was a time not too long ago when ...

Disappointment is part of America's DNA. It is as though its citizens are born with the desire for something better, fueling much of the country's entrepreneurial and creative output; but even if everyone had personal jet-packs by now, they'd still be left unsatisfied. And much of what's produced to fill ...

On this week's All Songs Considered, Robin starts the show with a question: What bands have you discovered and fallen in love with from commercials? His first pick, Chairlift, has come a long way since its 2008 ad for the Apple iPod Nano. Bob's first pick, ...

Andy Shauf is a gifted storyteller. Earlier this year the Saskatchewan-based singer-songwriter put out one of 2015's most breathtaking albums, called The Bearer Of Bad News — an appropriately titled collection of mostly grim tales about small town drug addicts, murderous lovers and other weary underachievers.

Shauf has been ...

On this week's All Songs Considered, Bob Boilen is getting excited for the CMJ Music Marathon in New York and Robin Hilton is just plain getting excited. Bob shares some of the things he's most eager to hear at the festival, like Georgia's one-woman musical melee and two ...

The musician and provocateur known as Peaches has just won a Polaris prize for the Best Canadian Album of the 2000s. Music fans selected her sexually charged debut release The Teaches Of Peaches in an online poll over albums by Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene and Feist, among others.

Tomorrow, Oct. 9, would have been John Lennon's 75th birthday. So for this week's Throwback Thursday we're sharing a live webcast we did about The Beatles back in February of 2003. At the time, police in Amsterdam had just discovered a bunch of incredibly rare tapes that were stolen from ...

This week on All Songs Considered, Bob Boilen and Robin share a few of their favorite things: choice tunes from cherished artists. We've got all the bases covered, from a devastating song about dementia from Daughter to an energetic anthem from Frank Turner on the power of ...

This week's puzzler draws mostly on Top 40 hits and as such, should be pretty easy for some careful listeners. Then again, every time I say that people tank ... just like they get near-perfect scores whenever I think it's a particularly hard week. So what do I know?

I ...

This is a video built on surprises and unusual juxtapositions, so it's hard to say much without ruining the pleasure of watching them unfold. But suffice to say, "Norwegian Black Metal," by the L.A.-based electro-pop group Superhumanoids, is both comical and heartbreaking — and worth multiple views.

Directed ...

Three days after Taliban fighters swept into Kunduz, Afghanistan's government says its troops have retaken the strategically important northern city, but reports suggest the fighting is not yet over in the city.

Update at 1:15 p.m. ET: Americans' Role In Combat

New details have emerged about the combat Americans were ...

The members of Nashville's slacker rock group Bully could not be more emotionally detached and dismissive than they are in a new video for the song "Too Tough." Fronted by singer Alicia Bognanno, the band members plod their way through the song in a nondescript suburban living room, completely ...

Good luck getting these tunes out of your head.

Host Bob Boilen kicks off this week's All Songs Considered with new music by Pell, a rapper and songwriter who garnered well-deserved attention for his first mixtape, and is back in a big way with production help from TV ...

It's hard not to marvel at the mystery and splendor of life on earth after watching a new video from the Portland, Ore. ambient-rock band, Helios. "Pearls" follows a group of four friends on a late-summer road trip as they stop to skateboard in the mountains, hike, and frolic in ...

On paper, the musical Hamilton sounds like a joke. But as NPR Music's Timmhotep Aku tells us in this week's +1 podcast, "Maybe you shouldn't judge things on face value."

Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda takes a snooze-worthy subject — the history of America's financial system — ...

Most people know Sia for monster pop hits like "Chandelier" and "Elastic Heart" from her 2014 album 1000 Forms of Fear, and "Breathe Me," which brought Six Feet Under to a devastating close. But long before she was crushing charts on her own, Sia was working ...