If the biggest, hookiest songs of 2023 are united by anything, it’s the insurgents who made them. For one, English singer PinkPantheress made good on her underground fandom with a remix of “Boy’s a Liar,” featuring raspy-voiced female rapper of the moment Ice Spice, whose eye-rolling attitude ingeniously cuts against her own unguardedly emotional pop minimalism.
Others similarly subverted expectations of what makes a hit. Troye Sivan ditched his moody bedroom-pop roots for unashamedly horny bangers that confront our collective hang-ups about what a gay artist should deliver. The aggro sonic hijinks of hyperpop duo 100 gecs coalesced into something strangely beautiful and profound, especially on “Hollywood Baby,” a satire of Barbie-fied showbiz aspirations that’s at least partly aimed at themselves.
Rock noise of the less blaring kind flourished elsewhere, proving that the genre was never dead, just slyly mutating. Lana Del Rey, reigning queen of the extremely extended cut,...
Others similarly subverted expectations of what makes a hit. Troye Sivan ditched his moody bedroom-pop roots for unashamedly horny bangers that confront our collective hang-ups about what a gay artist should deliver. The aggro sonic hijinks of hyperpop duo 100 gecs coalesced into something strangely beautiful and profound, especially on “Hollywood Baby,” a satire of Barbie-fied showbiz aspirations that’s at least partly aimed at themselves.
Rock noise of the less blaring kind flourished elsewhere, proving that the genre was never dead, just slyly mutating. Lana Del Rey, reigning queen of the extremely extended cut,...
- 12/6/2023
- by Slant Staff
- Slant Magazine
The Hold Steady celebrated their 20th anniversary on Saturday night with a hometown blowout in Brooklyn. It was a fittingly rowdy birthday bash for these guys. The Hold Steady might have started as Brooklyn’s finest bar band, dabbling in Last Waltz cosplay when they were barely into their thirties. But by now, they’ve been doing it even longer than The Band circa The Last Waltz. This band loves to revel in rock & roll rituals and fetishize the details, so they did this occasion right. It was exactly two decades after their first show,...
- 2/2/2023
- by Rob Sheffield
- Rollingstone.com
The Hold Steady performed their song, “Family Farm” on Late Night With Seth Meyers Monday, February 23rd.
The band barreled through the track, which is a classic blast of Hold Steady, alternating between driving guitars and twinkling piano, and accented at just the right moments with rich horn fanfare. The camera occasionally panned from the band on stage over to some empty bowling lanes, adding a slightly eerie and desolate feeling to the proceedings as Craig Finn sang, “With a flexible schedule and a willingness to trade your medications/Obsessive...
The band barreled through the track, which is a classic blast of Hold Steady, alternating between driving guitars and twinkling piano, and accented at just the right moments with rich horn fanfare. The camera occasionally panned from the band on stage over to some empty bowling lanes, adding a slightly eerie and desolate feeling to the proceedings as Craig Finn sang, “With a flexible schedule and a willingness to trade your medications/Obsessive...
- 2/23/2021
- by Jon Blistein
- Rollingstone.com
The Hold Steady have revealed “Heavy Covenant,” the latest single from their upcoming album Open Door Policy.
“I know the perfect place to go/Slide your little phone into the airplane mode,” Craig Finn sings over a buzzing guitar riff. “Motel Mariposa/A little south of downtown on the frontage road.”
In a statement, Finn said that “Heavy Covenant” is about travel, technology, and human connection. “The song came out of two different music pieces that Ths piano/keyboardist Franz Nicolay brought in, and with the help of producer Josh Kaufman,...
“I know the perfect place to go/Slide your little phone into the airplane mode,” Craig Finn sings over a buzzing guitar riff. “Motel Mariposa/A little south of downtown on the frontage road.”
In a statement, Finn said that “Heavy Covenant” is about travel, technology, and human connection. “The song came out of two different music pieces that Ths piano/keyboardist Franz Nicolay brought in, and with the help of producer Josh Kaufman,...
- 1/8/2021
- by Angie Martoccio
- Rollingstone.com
The Hold Steady have released a new song, “Family Farm,” which will appear on their upcoming eighth studio album, Open Door Policy, out February 19th, 2021, via the band’s own Positive Jams label and Thirty Tigers.
“Family Farm” is classic Hold Steady, opening with a driving guitar riff and a flourish of Springsteenian piano and horns, before settling into stripped-back verses that give way to a booming chorus. “I was personally happy to get a mention of Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’ in the lyrics, and I appreciate it even more...
“Family Farm” is classic Hold Steady, opening with a driving guitar riff and a flourish of Springsteenian piano and horns, before settling into stripped-back verses that give way to a booming chorus. “I was personally happy to get a mention of Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’ in the lyrics, and I appreciate it even more...
- 12/1/2020
- by Jon Blistein
- Rollingstone.com
Craig Finn has characterized his last two albums with the Hold Steady–2010’s Heaven is Whenever and 2014’s Teeth Dreams–as creative low-points. Despite their bright spots, those records sometimes felt as though the group was suffering from the age-old rock & roll problem: how does a band grow up and still maintain its sense of self?
On Thrashing Thru the Passion, the Hold Steady’s first record in five years, and their first with keyboardist Franz Nicolay in over a decade, the newly reconfigured sextet arrive at a simple answer:...
On Thrashing Thru the Passion, the Hold Steady’s first record in five years, and their first with keyboardist Franz Nicolay in over a decade, the newly reconfigured sextet arrive at a simple answer:...
- 8/16/2019
- by Jonathan Bernstein
- Rollingstone.com
The Hold Steady have released a new song, “You Did Good Kid,” the latest preview of their forthcoming album, Thrashing Thru the Passion, out August 16th. The album is the first to feature the band’s current six-piece lineup, which includes keyboardist Franz Nicolay, who rejoined the band in 2016 after leaving in 2010.
“‘You Did Good Kid’ is the first song we worked on for this session, and remains a favorite,” frontman Craig Finn said in a statement. “It went though a few iterations before we came to this arrangement, and...
“‘You Did Good Kid’ is the first song we worked on for this session, and remains a favorite,” frontman Craig Finn said in a statement. “It went though a few iterations before we came to this arrangement, and...
- 7/23/2019
- by Jonathan Bernstein
- Rollingstone.com
When Franz Nicolay left hyper-literate rockers The Hold Steady in January, he explained that it was to become “a vaudeville troubadour,” a banjo-plucking, tap-dancing dude able to “walk into a room of strangers and entertain them.” Then he spent most of the year touring with hyper-literate punkers Against Me! But he also made an album in that time, his second, in which he tosses the bits that distinguish those two bands from each other, and keeps only the connective tissue. Which means, unfortunately, that Luck And Courage is a hyper-literate album that lithely avoids both rocking and punking out. Fans ...
- 10/12/2010
- avclub.com
'We wanted to make a more dynamic record, and I hope we did that,' guitarist Tad Kubler tells MTV News.
By Kyle Anderson
The Hold Steady's Craig Finn
Photo: MTV News
When they began in 2005, the Hold Steady set out to be the best bar band in the world. Over the course of four albums, they have steadily grown from a buzzed-about indie group playing tiny Brooklyn clubs to a world-traveling group that headlines festivals and fills theaters.
Though the Hold Steady traditionally put out an album a year, 2008's Stay Positive kept them on the road, where they visited Australia for the first time, played a massive number of festivals and opened dates for Dave Matthews Band and Counting Crows in Europe. It broke up their annual-lp pace for their fifth album, Heaven Is Whenever, which hit shelves Tuesday (May 4), but the extra time helped make the new album the group's "most musical,...
By Kyle Anderson
The Hold Steady's Craig Finn
Photo: MTV News
When they began in 2005, the Hold Steady set out to be the best bar band in the world. Over the course of four albums, they have steadily grown from a buzzed-about indie group playing tiny Brooklyn clubs to a world-traveling group that headlines festivals and fills theaters.
Though the Hold Steady traditionally put out an album a year, 2008's Stay Positive kept them on the road, where they visited Australia for the first time, played a massive number of festivals and opened dates for Dave Matthews Band and Counting Crows in Europe. It broke up their annual-lp pace for their fifth album, Heaven Is Whenever, which hit shelves Tuesday (May 4), but the extra time helped make the new album the group's "most musical,...
- 5/4/2010
- MTV Music News
At the beginning of the year, The Hold Steady announced it was amicably parting ways with Franz Nicolay, whose whirling, dramatic piano and organ heavily marked the band’s last two albums, Boys And Girls In America and Stay Positive. Some fans assumed that Nicolay’s departure would make for a leaner, less melodramatic band, but The Hold Steady’s fifth album, Heaven Is Whenever, sounds as deliberately mythical as ever. Partly it’s the tempos, which are slower en masse than ever, but it’s also the tone of the songs, which are the most elegiac bunch that Craig ...
- 5/4/2010
- avclub.com
The wonder years The Hold Steady’s great gift used to be the ability to transform adolescence into something that holds within its unbearable awkwardness the irreplaceable magic of discovery. But on its magnificent fifth album, the band has finally grown up a little, and singer/narrator Craig Finn sounds like a spectator in the grandstands, taking in the game and issuing casual advice to the kids on field: “You can’t kiss every girl,” he sings with near-fatherly earnestness on “Soft in the Center.” The songs, meanwhile, sound bigger than before, his bandmates compensating for the departure of keyboardist Franz Nicolay...
- 5/3/2010
- Pastemagazine.com
No matter how you spent your Record Store Day on Saturday (April 17), it probably wasn't nearly as busy as the day hyper-literate, heavy-drinking Brooklyn rockers the Hold Steady had. To celebrate the retail-based holiday that honors local music retailers as well as the limited-edition vinyl-only release of their new album Heaven Is Whenever (available to the non-turntable-owning public on May 4), they played a pair of shows, beginning the evening at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan and closing out the night at Brooklyn's Music Hall of Williamsburg.
Having lost mustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay, the group has fleshed out its lineup with new ivory tickler Dan Neustadt and a third guitarist named Steve Selvidge (formerly of Lucero). Though the new members only have two weeks of touring under their belt, there weren't a whole lot of missteps during the group's late-night set at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Armed with a handful...
Having lost mustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay, the group has fleshed out its lineup with new ivory tickler Dan Neustadt and a third guitarist named Steve Selvidge (formerly of Lucero). Though the new members only have two weeks of touring under their belt, there weren't a whole lot of missteps during the group's late-night set at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Armed with a handful...
- 4/19/2010
- by Kyle Anderson
- MTV Newsroom
[Photo by Sean Edgar] Just a month after keyboardist Franz Nicolay announced he’d left the band, The Hold Steady is releasing its first album without him. Heaven is Whenever is set for a May 4 release date on Vagrant, and on it, guitarist Tad Kubler promises fans a new direction for the band. “Rather than just concentrate on changes in the instrumentation, we made changes to the song writing process,” he says....
- 2/23/2010
- Pastemagazine.com
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