Hearing Things is a new home for independent music journalism.
The music industry is once again at a crossroads. Streaming was supposed to democratize music, making it more equitable for all. That didn’t happen. Now the most famous artists are dominating the industry like never before, while everyone else is scrounging for pennies. What’s left of music media is chasing those same huge artists for an ever-decreasing slice of the SEO pie. Virality is king, stan armies run rampant, A.I. is ascendant. It can sometimes feel like the urge to make a meaningful connection with an artist, album, or song is almost passé.
Hearing Things is a bulwark against all the bullshit.
We are a worker-owned music and culture platform with the freedom and expertise to delve into the art we love (or absolutely do not love!) in a way that furthers the conversation instead of just regurgitating it. We are writers and editors with many decades of collective experience covering music and culture at Pitchfork, The Fader, Vibe, Spin, Gawker, Jezebel, and elsewhere. There’s a good chance we’ve played a part in introducing you to some of your favorite artists and deepened your appreciation of some of this century’s most important records. At Hearing Things, we’re continuing to do that work—and more—on our own terms.
An antidote to the information overload that has poisoned the internet, we are a destination for curated and considered music journalism. Hearing Things offers honest, authoritative interviews and reviews that decode the work of artists from a wide variety of genres including rap, rock, pop, R&B, Latin, electronic, experimental, and whatever microgenre is bubbling up at a given moment. There are investigations that put an infamously corrupt industry under necessary scrutiny. There is analysis of where and how music intersects with the culture at large, playing an essential part in everything from tech to social movements to fashion to film. There will be a podcast where we crack jokes and discuss the music of the week. There is also plenty of fun, random stuff because, hey, music is fun too!
We cover anyone we choose, whether they’re playing stadiums or basements. We have no corporate overlords demanding more traffic at all costs, no one forcing us to play it safe. We’re curious and more than willing to get weird. There is no sniffy house style here. Sometimes we write like we’re going off in the group chat and sometimes we will write like we’re vying for a freaking Pulitzer. We fearlessly break down industry trends—who’s being exploited and how it can be fixed.
Music has changed all of our lives for the better, and listening closely to understand how it affects us has been our lives’ work. That connection is important, and it’s in danger. Hearing Things is a site that will wrinkle your brain, make you laugh, piss you off, and move you to listen differently.
Support independent music journalism and become a member of our Hearing Things community today. Your membership makes it possible for us to exist.
Our Founders
Andy Cush is a writer and musician who’s done time at Pitchfork, Spin, Gawker, and in the indie-psych-jam band Garcia Peoples. Beginning in 2020, he was a contributing editor at Pitchfork, where he wrote about the pandemic’s effects on working musicians, helped to shape the site’s investigative reporting, and occasionally edited the Sunday Review. His writing is informed by his dual perspectives as a musician and listener, seeking a middle path between the sometimes divergent ways that each side thinks and talks about the music they both love. If he could time-travel to any one concert, he’d head to the Fillmore West on April 10, 1970, to catch the double bill of Miles Davis and the Grateful Dead.
Ryan Dombal established and spearheaded features coverage at Pitchfork during his 15 years on staff there. He edited, produced, and wrote multimedia cover stories, reviewed some of the most crucial albums of the century so far, and interviewed everyone from Erykah Badu to Randy Newman. He helped create the wonderfully dumb web series “Over/Under.” He’s constantly searching for new and exciting artists, and wrote early profiles on the likes of James Blake, Charli XCX, and Ethel Cain before they were famous. He would happily live inside D’Angelo’s album Voodoo if given the chance.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is a Xicana writer, editor, and author. She was formerly the top editor at both Jezebel and The Fader, and over the past 25 years has written for a slew of publications including Hell Gate, Vibe, Rookie, Spin, The Guardian, Flaming Hydra, Vogue, and Pitchfork, where she was a contributing writer. Her forthcoming book from Penguin, Vaquera, is about growing up Mexican American in Wyoming and the myth of the American West. Her go-to karaoke joint is Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?” (which is deceptively hard to sing).
Dylan Green is a journalist, critic, and podcast host who has written about hip-hop, film, and culture for publications ranging from DJBooth and Okayplayer to The Fader, Complex, and The Face. They are a former contributing writer at Pitchfork and the host of the Reel Notes podcast, and have interviewed artists both seasoned (Sean Paul, Lupe Fiasco, Large Professor) and fresh (Mike, Clip, BbyAfricka) in the decade they’ve been writing professionally. They’re probably in a Wawa mumbling a Gangsta Boo verse to themselves.
Jill Mapes is a culture writer and editor with past lives at Vulture, Billboard, Flavorwire (RIP), CBS, and The Indianapolis Star. She spent eight years on staff at Pitchfork, expanding the site’s blog, The Pitch, into a hub for short-form features; editing deep dives on everything from TikTok hits to queer nightlife to big ticketing; and penning reviews and profiles of personal favorites like Angel Olsen, Beach House, Mitski, Big Thief, and Caroline Polachek. The best thing that ever happened to her on assignment was getting unsolicited life advice from Cher (“Always wear black eyeliner and ‘do you’”); the worst thing was getting doxxed by Swifties after giving folklore an 8.0.
Our Editorial Independence
Hearing Things is committed to serving our readers above all else. We have no corporate overlords dictating our coverage, and no ulterior motives beyond sharing and talking about music with you.
We have a strict firewall in place around Hearing Things’ editorial decisions, so that they can be made independently from the considerations of investors, advertisers, donors, and any other sources of revenue. If we run ads, the associated companies will have no say in our coverage. Likewise, though Hearing Things may accept donations in the course of operations, we will never allow donors to influence what we publish. When you make a purchase through links on the site, we may earn a commission, but the linked companies have no say over our writing or decision-making.
As members of various musical communities, we may occasionally have social or personal relationships with musicians whose work merits coverage on Hearing Things. Generally, writers will not work on stories about musicians they know personally. In cases where the editors decide that such relationships are not compromising or detrimental to the quality of a story, the relationship will be properly disclosed.
In our investigative reporting on the music industry, we pledge to follow the facts wherever they lead, and to publish them honestly, without omitting essential context or inconvenient details.
As music critics, we also have strong opinions. You’ll be getting plenty of those, too. Before you ask: We will never accept money or favors in exchange for a review or any other coverage of an artist. Whether it’s a rave, a pan, or something in between, we publish what we publish because we really believe it.
Thanks
So many people helped Hearing Things become in a reality including Vaughn Millette, Asha Fuller, and Maya Davila; Justin Thomas Kay (logo and design); Shena Yoshida (website design); Gabe Wilk (website development); Ryan Singel at Outpost; Alex Kisielewski at Ghost; Dan Charnas at the Clive Davis Institute; Elia Einhorn and Mark Yoshizumi at 3dB; and all of the brilliant and enterprising independent journalists at Defector, 404, Hell Gate, Racket, Flaming Hydra, and Aftermath.