Welcome to The Rotation, a roundup of the week’s key moments in music and why you should listen. Read Volume 11 below, or scroll to the end for playlists on Spotify and Apple Music. Previous instalments available here. In the last…

One final list to round out the year and, indeed, the decade. The end-of-year lists were tough to narrow down, so the task of picking just a few albums from an entire decade of music was straight-up Herculean. Inevitably, we had to leave…

The idea of horror in music can be traced back to 1956. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins released his greatest commercial success in 'I Put a Spell on You'. Hitherto, Hawkins had been an average blues singer and the song was intended as a ballad, but…

It’s 1968 and the beginning of the end for the Beatles. The recording of their new album A Doll’s House is plagued by personal grievances, mounting money troubles and the pressure to create a worthy follow-up to their superlative Sgt.…

At 2pm one Thursday afternoon Chris Kabs walked out of his job as a financial accountant and told his boss “Yo, I gotta go follow my dreams”. Since then he’s been spending every day writing, mixing and recording music in his studio in…

A debate that raged into the first week of 2017, so it better be a solid list, right? It is. 10 | Kanye West - 'Famous' Goddamn. It all got a bit out of hand, didn't it? Whatever side of 2016's biggest pop culture war you landed…

We Cut Corners The Cadences of Others A music year like 2016 doesn’t come along all that often. Globally, we have seen some of the best releases of the decade seize the public consciousness, experiment and divide critical opinion.…

Bon Iver  22, A Million In an interview from 2012, at the height of Bon Iver’s promotional tour for their sophomore album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Justin Vernon likened his highly successful band to a faucet. He proclaimed, to…

Welcome to THE PLAYLIST, where we pick a theme and, er, make a playlist around it. Sometimes you might get an essay, other times you might get just one sentence as a precursor to the laser-focused audio delights that await below. Take it…

As with last week's collection of the very finest songs from January - June 2016, the following albums from the same time period* that you really should wrap your ears around if you haven't yet come from the HeadStuff Music contributors'…