Scott Heisel

Various Artists Friends There’s something about benefit compilations that bring out the best in bands. Case in point: Friends, a 37-track beast of previously unreleased and new material created to raise money for various cancer charities by the newly reactivated Fadeaway Records. Nearly the entire collection is acoustic, and the whole thing feels very comforting […]

Whistling isn’t a frequently used trick in most musicians’ arsenals (unless you’re Andrew Bird or the Ying Yang Twins), but it’s a great way to make an otherwise pedestrian song pop in the mind of the listener. Here are 10 modern examples of whistling being employeed successfully. (Keyword: modern. Sorry, Axl.) This article originally ran […]

Rock ’n’ roll has given us its fair share of musician couples throughout the years, from John and Yoko to Kurt and Courtney to, uh, Chad and Avril. (They’re not all winners, folks.) We’re counting down 10 of our favorite pairings from AP’s scene, past and present (we’re saving “future” for our secret slashfic Tumblr—don’t […]

Recently, as we were finishing this year’s 100 Bands You Need To Know special (AP 309, on sale March 4), our annual look forward at what the newest noise in our scene is, we noticed a whole bunch of publications were looking back, specifically at one album: Green Day’s Dookie, which celebrated its 20th anniversary […]

The Bruce Lee Band Community Support Group EP For his first Bruce Lee Band release in nine years, frontman Mike Park recruited some ringers in the form of AP scribe Jeff Rosenstock (ex-Bomb The Music Industry!) on bass/vocals, Hard Girls/Classics Of Love guitarist Mike Huguenor and Chinkees drummer Kevin Higuchi. Though this lineup have never […]

We here at AP pride ourselves on staying on top of current musical trends. Throughout the course of our 300-plus issues and nearly 29 years in business, we’ve helped spread the gospel of nascent, often misunderstood genres like goth, industrial rock, noise rock, nü metal, pop-punk, metalcore and plenty more.  But recently, we began hearing […]

Y’know, it’s called the music business for a reason: Whether or not they’ll readily admit it, bands, record labels, managers and everyone else are in it at least partially for the money. That’s not to say art isn’t important, but at the end of the day, it’s tough to justify the amount of time spent […]

Against Me! Transgender Dysphoria Blues It’s been nearly four years since Against Me!’s last release, 2010’s glossy, disappointing White Crosses. Since then, they left Sire Records, the rhythm section bailed, Butch Vig didn’t lower his studio rates—oh yeah, and frontman Tom Gabel is now frontwoman Laura Jane Grace. It’s that last topic that drives the […]

We’re gonna pull back the curtain for a second: The original title of this list was going to be, “39 Bands You Didn’t Realize AP Covered This Year (Because You Were Too Busy Bitching About Ronnie Radke And Kellin Quinn To Notice).” See, the AP editorial staff slaves over every single issue of our print/digital […]