Here’s a song from last year that still hasn’t left my personal rotation in 2018: “Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day,” a stealthy post-punk ode to working together in tearing down impossible structures of power. It appeared on the debut record by ESCAPE-ISM, “Introduction to Escape-ism,” the first-ever solo record

Protest Platforms is a three-part series examining what it means for music to protest today. Platforms have always helped to shape protest music. Independent artists, punk labels, and do-it-yourself (DIY) organizers have long suggested that the means through which music is created and distributed carries as much political weight as

The days following this year’s Women’s March are as good a time as any to repeat the central question posed by “Levitating,” a collaborative track by Xenia Rubinos, Sammus and Olga Bell: “Are you really down? Way down? All the way down?” “Levitating” is a smooth and steady intersectional anthem

Every sweetly sung Nana Grizol song plays out like a diary entry or a letter written directly to a friend, which make the band’s meandering personal-political poetry all the more impactful. The didactic nature of the music makes the stories more potent, and the embedded values more accessible. Since 2003,

Protest Platforms is a three-part series examining what it means for music to protest today. Platforms have always helped to shape protest music. Independent artists, punk labels, and do-it-yourself (DIY) organizers have long suggested that the means through which music is created and distributed carries as much political weight as

Frank Waln is a hip-hop artist, producer, activist, and storyteller. He is a keeper of oral traditions whose work interrogates history and colonialism. It preserves the legacies of his Sicangu Lakota ancestors and his own experiences growing up on the Rosebud Reservation. Around this time last year, Waln released his

Lauren Denitzio has long been a master of lived-in, personal-political songwriting. With Worriers, Denitzio creates melodic punk songs that weave stories and lessons out of hard-fought feminist wisdom. The stories are sometimes told through wordy, double-time sweet-sung verse, sometimes with a gruff deadpan that sounds weary but never cynical. Worriers

In the first of a three-part series, Liz Pelly explores how platforms can shape music and enable protest. She highlights streaming cooperative, Resonate.

The free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements released its first eponymous album last month. Recorded over one six-hour studio session in August 2015, the 43-minute album is made of largely improvised instrumentation and Camae Ayewa’s radical poetry on Black trauma, survival, and power. It is the product of five musicians meeting for the

From 2013 until when they disbanded earlier this month, the Washington, D.C., group, Pure Disgust, emerged as one of the city’s best punk bands. They used blistering eighties-style hardcore to write songs about police violence, respectability politics, and the realities of being young and black in America. “When will brown