Named by friends in The Mekons after a faction in China’s Cultural Revolution of the late ’60s, Gang of Four is perhaps most widely known as the post-punk provocateurs responsible for songs like “Anthrax,” “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” and “To Hell with Poverty.” Seemingly fueled by punk’s lasting anger-derived energy when they formed in Leeds in 1977, on seminal records like their …

While the legacy of Kurt Cobain continues to loom large, one of the greatest gifts that he left behind was turning his fans on to

Glancing over the list of things that highlighted my 2014, one might think that I finally suffered the midlife crisis due for one whose formative years were in the ’80s. But as we are living in an era when everything that was once old is new again, I’d like to think that this is just reflective of the cream rising to the top as it …

In the annals of punk rock history, there is a wide spectrum of notoriety, from the unsung heroes to the Hall of Fame pillars with which everyone is familiar. Somewhere in between those extremes are the Pagans, the Cleveland punk band fronted by Mike Hudson that operated in fits and spurts in the late ’70s and ’80s. Every bit as volatile as they were fearsome, …

While it seems that since the turn of the millennium that even the most inconsequential of bands from decades past have

Both as a member of Welsh psych-pop hooligans Super Furry Animals and as a solo artist, Gruff Rhys has always combined innate songwriting smarts with a certain curiosity and exploratory nature as well as hereditary pride. In both instances, he’s sung in both his native tongue and English, creating a songbook inherently catchy even when you can’t understand a word he’s singing. No stranger to …

As the bass player in both Joy Divison and New Order, Peter Hook has been at the center of two of the most distinctive and influential bands to follow in the wake of punk rock. As he details in his recent book, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, that infamously short-lived band formed as a direct result of seeing the Sex Pistols and took up …

Like much of a certain portion of my generation, the early ’90s signify an era of music marked by shimmering melodies blurred by swathes of

In the six years we’ve been publishing The Agit Reader, we’ve watched Nika Roza Danilova (a.k.a. Zola Jesus) develop from a dilettante

With an iconoclastic artist like Leonard Cohen, a new album is almost irrelevant. Possessing a lengthy discography of records filled with the kind of religious