Lars Gotrich

At this point, it's basically tradition: The last show of the year is dedicated to the loud, the fast, the heavy, the cosmic and the sublime. A.K.A., when All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen and I talk about metal, punk and a broad definition of experimental music. Maybe you've listened ...

#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the #NPRreads hashtag. Each weekend, we highlight some of the best stories.

From digital editor Chris Hopkins:

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At the entrance of the endless abyss, a whale-serpent imprints the complete discography of Aluk Todolo's instrumental occult rock into your being. It's true! (It's not.) The process is terrifying at first, but as the squeals of cosmic guitar feedback and sinister rhythm section course through your veins ...

When the grindcore band Agoraphobic Nosebleed officially hit the stage for the first time in its 20-year history, expectations were extremely high. "We want people's minds to be blown," vocalist Richard Johnson told me a few weeks before Maryland Deathfest in May, leaving fans to speculate about just how the ...

The sweeping beauty of Solstafir's music comes from a place of pain and restoration, but it wasn't always that way. With 2014's Ótta, the Icelandic black-metal band fully and gracefully transitioned to atmospheric rock. One of the album's best songs, "Miðaftann," sounds somber and haunting without guitars or drums — ...

There's a little chuckle in Zane Campbell's heartbroken hiccup, a world of hurt and truth that is, against all sense, hilariously dark. Though the off-kilter folk and country singer-songwriter's career has spanned decades and is rooted deeply in his family (Campbell's aunt was the iconic Maryland folk musician, Ola Belle ...

To listen to Zomes is to know calm. For a time, Zomes had been the solo project of Lungfish's Asa Osborne, in which Osborne traded in the guitar for an electric organ, a drum machine and simplicity rooted in repetition and patience. In recent years, Hanna Olivegren has elevated Zomes ...

Glenn Jones' music is remarkably intimate: It feels so close, you'd swear you could reach out and touch the airwaves vibrating between strings. After a decade in which Jones has flown solo on the guitar, his sixth album Fleeting illuminates textures in his thoughtful and complex compositions, which leap ...

By his own admission, Cian Nugent is a restless guitarist: His instrumental compositions, both solo and with a band, sprawl and seek with a pastoral atmosphere. He's a storyteller who likes the room to let it all hang out. But on his third album, Night Fiction, Nugent embraces the ...

In sacred music, there really has been nothing like The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Once a mystery with a fluid, unknown line-up which rarely performed live, the Liverpool-based band released only two albums — The Gift of Tears (1987) and Mirror (1991) — that were unburdened by sound ...

As it stands right now, the current D.C. hardcore/punk scene doesn't dwell too much on its past. It's there, it exists, but few seek out the sonic lineage left by Dischord Records in the '80s and '90s, which has proved crucial to the area's revitalization. Two Inch Astronaut, however, ...

In the early 2000s, Glassjaw was a square peg in a round hole — a dynamic post-hardcore band pitched to a mainstream audience caught somewhere between spiky-haired aggro-metal and swoop-haired screamo. Still, Glassjaw's New York hardcore bona fides were hard to dispute, Daryl Palumbo's nerve-wracking voice could shred and salve ...

"We just lost our minds and we never got them back." In so few words, guitarist Drew St. Ivany encapsulates the colossal mind-screw that was Laddio Bolocko, a late '90s NYC noise-rock band before being a NYC band was even remotely cool again. In Laddio Bolocko was the raging firestorm ...

InTechnicolour works in that strain of stoner-metal that's less atmospheric and weed-fueled and more progressive — you know, for the kids who banged heads to Kyuss and nerded out on Rush. It's well-trod territory, with more than a decade of records looking to ISIS' Panopticon, Mastodon's Leviathan and Baroness' Red ...

In the wake of tragedy, grief guides us on an unknown path: Its corridors are dim and shallow, its destination uncertain. Even as the path widens with time, grief makes way for bittersweet memory, though it all still hurts something awful.

One year ago, Jonathan Athon (known to most everyone ...

Flip through the jukebox at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C., and you'll find The Modern Lovers' self-titled album, The Best Of The Ronettes, the No Thanks! '70s Punk Rebellion comp (for The Undertones' crucial "Teenage Kicks"), and some recent music from the area's finest, like Ex Hex and ...

If there's one thread running through the 15 years of The Max Levine Ensemble, it's that no one knows who the hell they are. (Then again, we're all just bags of meat figuring things out one day at a time, some better than others.) Backlash, Baby is the Washington, D.C. ...

There's a relentless antagonism to Total Abuse that is so, so satisfying. When it formed in 2006, the Texas band first looked to iconic '80s hardcore punk for its sound. But weirdness soon took hold, crawling into the dank headspace between the Swedish noise-rock band Brainbombs and Black Flag's most ...

Fronted by vocalist Veronica Torres' uninhibited force of paranoia, PILL makes spazzy, sax-sputtering post-punk that invokes the gritty noise that came out of early '80s NYC. How you feel about the video for PILL's dreamy and unnerving "Hot Glue" depends on how you feel about pointy press-on nails, phallic produce ...

Verses are overrated. If your song has a chorus with a walloping right hook, why risk the wind-up? The New York noise-punk trio Cold Sweats spends very little time with a throbbing, Pixies-indebted bass line in "Hater Failure" before lunging into the festering cherry on top. A guitar ...