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New York City's Favorite Family Band

New York City's Favorite Family Band

Public Opinion
July 11, 2024

A Note from Jack

I’m feeling particularly excited about the world of Track Star this week. It’s incredibly hot in New York City. The type of heat that makes you a little bit cuckoo, which has spurred some really interesting music conversations. If you’re distracted enough by a great song, you’re less focused on the heat. All that to say I’m looking forward to an incredible summer of street interviews… But more importantly, yesterday we published the latest episode of Track Star Presents with Lawrence and it looks like the YouTube algorithm is digging it almost as much as we do. If you don’t know Lawrence, they’re an NYC band fronted by sibling duo Clyde and Gracie Lawrence and they f***ing rock. I’m not going to say anything else about them, just watch them perform for 30 seconds and you'll get sucked in. Maybe we’re finally starting to crack the code on this series…

Falling Back in Love with Radio

By Quinn Moreland

We’re lucky to be alive during a time where endless music is at our fingertips. However, this bounty of options arrives with an unfortunate side effect: frequent indecision. Of course, it’s easy to throw on a playlist created by your streaming service of choice, but isn’t there something…impersonal about that? The discovery doesn’t run too deep and the picks feel more algorithmic than human.

Rather organically, I’ve found myself returning to the radio, a listening medium that I haven’t spent much time with since I was a backseat passenger in my parents’ car. Every morning I turn on my trusty tabletop radio and spin the dial to WKCR 89.9FM, Columbia University’s radio station, where student DJs are playing everything from Sonic Youth to 24-hour marathons of jazz icon Charles Mingus. A touring British band I’ve never heard of could be playing a live set on WFMU (91.1) and Hot 97 is always playing some hot hip-hop.

If I’m trying to listen to more eclectic tunes, I turn to the online radio station NTS. Founded in 2011 by music blogger Femi Adeyemi, NTS was inspired by U.K. pirate radio and American college radio. At any hour of the day, one of NTS’ two live channels will be broadcasting anything from trip hop to ambient field recordings to ’70s disco. Today, NTS hosts around 700 shows a month, a majority from resident DJs like Flo Dill, whose “The Breakfast Show,” mixes oldie deep cuts with new indie tracks. The rest of the shows are curated by guests ranging from eccentric rapper Tierra Whack to PinkPantheress.

NTS’ tagline is “Don’t Assume” and that freewheeling spirit has encouraged me to hit play on shows where I rarely recognize the songs or artists. Most of the shows are structured like DJ mixes instead of a traditional radio format meaning there are no commercials or recaps of what songs just played. Tracklists accompany many of the shows and there’s a helpful feature that allows you to save individual tracks for future reference. Though you can’t replay those songs on the app, you can search for them on YouTube, where they are more likely to be than Spotify. It’s a welcome invitation down a rabbit hole.