Jason Heller

There's placid grace to Deep In The Iris, the third and latest full-length by Braids, but don't let that fool you. Something's churning beneath the album's calm, cool surface. Unlike Flourish // Perish, the Montreal trio's icy, challenging record from 2013, Deep In The Iris represents a thaw: Throughout its ...

"In your chrysalis I go," croons Jonas Bjerre, the elf-voiced frontman of Denmark's Mew, in the soaring song "Interview The Girls." It's one of the standout tracks on the group's sixth album, cryptically titled +-, and Bjerre's poetic verse is symbolic of the disc as a whole: Six years ...

Early in A Crown for Cold Silver — the debut novel by Alex Marshall (a pseudonym for an established author striking off in an epic new direction) — an old woman's battle scars are mistaken for matronly wrinkles. It's a tiny detail, but it speaks volumes. In Marshall's fictional, vaguely ...

Rowan Van Zandt has never been alone. That's because he has lived his entire life in the company of his family: his mom, his dad, and his fraternal twin Faron. Where Faron is strong and impetuous, Rowan is bookish and quiet. The Van Zandts love each other, despite their differences, ...

The Little Washer of Sorrows is not what it seems. At first glance, the debut collection of short stories by Canadian author Katherine Fawcett offers funny, sympathetic sketches of characters who might live next door to you: The homemaker who underutilizes her college degree; the aspiring heavy metal musician with ...

In a candid, hilarious interview with Noisey in 2013, Eoin Loveless — singer-guitarist of the British rock duo Drenge — recalled an incident when he was a schoolboy. A fellow student threw a tantrum in science class and stormed out of the room screaming, "You can't tell me what ...

Every song on Deeper, the stunning new album from The Soft Moon, bears a one-word title. The synth-based project, which revolves around singer-songwriter Luis Vasquez, has always struck a minimal tone. But on Deeper, Vasquez has distilled The Soft Moon's sound into something even more severe.

It's not a departure ...

Lower Dens' last album, 2012's Nootropics, dealt with singer-guitarist Jana Hunter's preoccupation with transhumanism — the notion that human evolution is far from over, and that we may have to alter our own species radically in order to survive the challenges of the future, both here on Earth ...

Carola Dibbell is a veteran music journalist, and it shows. In her debut novel The Only Ones — which may or may not be named after the cult '70s band — Dibbell writes rhythmically and lyrically about New York City's outer boroughs in the latter half of the 21st century, ...

One of science fiction's toughest challenges is making nonhuman characters feel human. Robots are particularly hard: SF authors have spent decades putting every conceivable spin on the concept of manmade automatons, and the results have just as often been laughable as profound. Ian Tregillis tackles this prickly puzzle — and ...

The Go! Team began as a bedroom project before blowing up on the strength of its 2004 debut, Thunder, Lightning, Strike. No surprise there; the group's mix of indie-pop, hip-hop energy, scratchy samples and stadium-worthy sing-alongs was bubbly enough to make the dead pick up pom-poms and cheer along. ...

Sartre famously wrote that hell is other people. For many fantasy writers, though, it's a bureaucracy. In fact, the whole hell-as-bureaucracy theme has become hackneyed over the years — as much of a cliché as, well, bureaucracies being hellish.

In his novel The Devil's Detective, debut author Simon Kurt Unsworth ...

In the early '90s, Swervedriver frontman Adam Franklin was an oddity in the British shoegaze scene. Unlike his contemporaries in My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Slowdive — who subverted the showy exhibitionism of pop music by shrouding themselves in isolating blankets of sound — Franklin clearly liked to ...

Many traditionalist bands look to breathe life into old riffs, but Moon Duo seems to put more thought into it than most. The band's third album, Shadow Of The Sun, is another collection of cyclical songs based on the simple, repetitive riffs of singer-guitarist Ripley Johnson and singer-keyboardist Sanae ...

America's recent tussle with Ebola — and the current resurgence of measles — has made pandemics a major issue, and a major fear. Not that you'd know it from Laura Van Den Berg's Find Me. In it, a haunted young woman named Joy winds up in a hospital in rural ...

"Magic will break your heart," warns Mama Dolores, the grandmother of Mercedes "Meche" Vega, the protagonist of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's debut novel, Signal to Noise. When it comes to magic, Mama Dolores is not speaking metaphorically: Meche, a 15-year-old girl living in Mexico City, has discovered how to practice magic, actual ...

Fantasy's turn toward the grim has not lessened lately, nor should it. The success of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire not only justifies all that brooding darkness, it's opened the doors for many other excellent and similarly grim books. Randy Henderson, however, has something else ...

In spite of the noisy aura it's drawn around itself, there's not much mystery to A Place To Bury Strangers. The New York band has been dishing out slight variations on the same sonic blitzkrieg since its self-titled 2007 debut; the only thing that's changed is the fine tuning. ...

Phil Elverum can be forgiven for taking three years to release Sauna, his latest full-length album under the name Mount Eerie. After all, he did unleash two albums in 2012, the complementary and equally moving Clear Moon and Ocean Roar. With Sauna, he's stepped back, taken a deep breath, ...

Bullying has become a hot-button issue in recent years, a fact that Allen Kurzweil hasn't overlooked in Whipping Boy. It's his first volume of nonfiction, and the premise is as ripped-from-the-headlines as they come: Forty years after suffering the vicious abuse of a bully in school, Kurzweil has written an ...