Thirty-One years of decompression sickness: A review of Radiohead’s “The Bends”
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Thirty-One years of decompression sickness: A review of Radiohead’s “The Bends”

Today marks thirty-one years of decompression sickness. The album's title isn't metaphorical decoration; it's diagnostic. Decompression sickness, the bends, happens when you ascend too quickly from depth, when dissolved gases in your blood expand faster than your body can process them. Nitrogen bubbles form in joints and tissues, in the brain, in the heart. The pain is your body rejecting the transition, refusing the violence of moving between pressures too fast. This is what The Bends understands about existing in 1995, or 2026, or any moment when the gap between what you're supposed to feel and what you actually feel becomes physiologically untenable.
ALBUM REVIEW: BRNDA’s Total Pain
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ALBUM REVIEW: BRNDA’s Total Pain

Four years after releasing their last album Do You Like Salt?, local art-punk four-piece BRNDA returns with the phenomenal Total Pain, a 12-song LP that blends the DIY sounds of D.C. punk and 60s Art Nouveau aesthetics with lyrical explorations of food, animals, and the relationship between pleasure and pain into one of the freshest projects of the year.
ALBUM REVIEW: Jeffrey Lewis’s The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis
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ALBUM REVIEW: Jeffrey Lewis’s The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis

More than a story about the healing power of music, “Inger” captures The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis’s theme of legacy. Notably, the singer he describes looks a lot like Lewis himself. Taken with the album’s homage to Bob Dylan’s most famous record in the midst of the current Dylan renaissance, it's clear Lewis is reflecting on his career. Capturing the way relationships shift and identities evolve, Lewis pays tribute to the past, reasserting his value at a particularly opportune time.