Aquarium Drunkard

Issued in 1977, My Good Friends captures a moment when eastern Nigeria's musicians folded highlife, funk, soul, and psychedelia into something restless and idiosyncratic. The results are gloriously untidy. While the contemporary story of Nigerian popular music is often told through towering figures like Fela Kuti, William Onyeabor, and King Sunny Adé, records like this...

The initial standard for a compact disc was 74 minutes. Legend has it the length was decided upon in order to fit all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony onto a single disc. In terms of format, the arrival and adoption of the CD in 1983 changed not only how we listen to recorded music, but how it’s presented as an art form. No longer beholden to the 22 minute confines of a “12 side...

For years, Brazilian shoegaze has felt like a borrowed climate. Estranhos Lugares Para os Olhos suggests otherwise, recasting the genre's familiar wall of sound in tropical hues. Echo Upstairs doesn't abandon shoegaze's dream-state—it changes the weather.

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Thirty years on, the Trainspotting soundtrack remains one of the defining musical documents of the 1990s. Equal parts mixtape, time capsule, and gateway drug, it introduced a generation to Iggy Pop, Underworld, Lou Reed, and a world of records just beyond the mainstream.

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Hovering and almost ethereally weightless, Acid and Honey delivers the kind of saltwater-soaked psychedelia as only crafted by Byron Bay's The Babe Rainbow. With velvety warm basslines and drum machine rhythms, the band's seventh album continues down a recent path of ebullient reggae, R&B explorations and and a dose of warm, synth-coated waves. Meditative and explo...