While their debut record Feel It Break is a minor key affair, the siren voice of frontwoman Katie Stelmanis is pretty near mythical.

As Twin Shadow, George Lewis Jr’s music may conjure up the spectre of fey ’80s pop and lovelorn ’50s crooning alike, but its preoccupations with memory and experience are more interesting still.

Each week Duncan Greive performs some low grade analysis on the week’s New Zealand Singles Chart and reviews a few new release pop singles.

Growing tomatoes and learning how to make apple cider – Feist has been enjoying the fruits of a well-earned break. Now back with new album Metals, the elusive songstress talks to VOLUME about getting back together with her guitar.

Mark de Clive-Lowe witnessed D'Angelo play London's Brixton Academy on Wednesday 19 July 2000.

A breed of surrealist MCs like Kool Keith and Lil B have been known to say some pretty out-there things. But the most Dadaistic rappers of the lot may well be Heems, Kool A.D. and Dap of New York City’s Das Racist.

Matt Heath was in the first band on stage at the first ever Big Day Out in Auckland. The band was called Kid Eternity.

Each week Duncan Greive performs some low grade analysis on the week’s New Zealand Singles Chart and reviews a few new release pop singles. To submit or suggest a track for review email singles@volumemagazine.co.nz or tweet @duncangreive

Photos of Fleet Foxes at the Auckland Town Hall. Saturday, 14 January 2012.

Photos of Beirut at the Wellington Opera House. Monday, January 16 2012.

The distinctive illustrations of Ruban Nielson and Henrietta Harris have appeared on album covers, tour posters and T-shirts and, in Nielson's case, the artwork itself has framed the songs that followed.

David Maclennan instigated a jam session with The Cure at a Wellington practice room on 3 August 1981.

The brand new single from Volume stars Hook Ups.

With their debut single Pale White Sheets debuting this week, Hook Ups' Kowhai and Monty Hook reveal some of their back story for Talking Heads.

Nick Lowe is about to return to New Zealand with his own band, on the heels of his latest release.

When Street Chant's Emily Littler shared the Kings Arms stage with Kurt Vile last month, she used it as an opportunity to debut new material under her solo moniker, Emily Edrosa, and pick the brains of her Philadelphian musical hero.

North American post-rockers Explosions in the Sky take time out from doing the laundry to return to New Zealand for two shows this month.

A column in which Duncan Greive scours the world’s charts in the hope of finding, if not the perfect beat, then something worth whistling at least.