The London based MayDay Rooms’ anarcho-punk archive is a valuable resource for radical cultures and politics today, writes Seth Wheeler in The Wire 503/4

In The Wire 502, Holly Dicker argues that in a post-pandemic age dominated by social media and celebrity, the physical engagement and countercultural spirit of rave is under imminent threat

In The Wire 501, Robin James argues that the influential cultural theory of hauntology does not account for developments in Black creative practices and music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries

In The Wire 500, Mattie Colquhoun argues that critics who seek to distance themselves from cultural pessimism too often fail to deal with the unresolved impasse at the heart of 21st century pop culture

In The Wire 499, the Moreskinsound duo of musician and writer David Toop and performance artist Ania Psenitsnikova argues that categories like music and dance limit our understanding of sound and movement

Spotify’s partial catalogue of underground genres such as grime and jungle distorts listeners’ understanding of their history, argues Derek Walmsley

British trans existence in 2025 is precarious, making the intersection of underground music and queer nightlife liberatory and life affirming, writes Rosie Esther Solomon

In The Wire 496, Jo Hutton argues that radiophonic art is its own highly developed and theorised artistic practice, not merely an offshoot of electroacoustic music

In The Wire 495, Hugh Morris argues that the word jazzy denotes a cluster of cliches that neglects to engage with jazz itself

In The Wire 494, Mosi Reeves argues that, while women set the tone in mainstream rap, the underground hiphop scene lags far behind

In The Wire 493, George Rayner-Law argues that as interest in English folk song grows once again, practitioners, critics and listeners should consider carefully the ideological currents beneath the surface

The history of Western music is built upon the work of Indigenous musicians whose voices must be heard, says tanner menard

The trend for classical and orchestral reinterpretations of dance music comes with strings attached

The epic scale and contrived angles of many archival box sets threaten to distort the narrative of the music itself

Negative reviews have been sidelined in an era of commercial pressures and microscenes that celebrate themselves, but criticism is sometimes the only way to reflect the full complexity of music. By Britt Brown

The multilayered contexts and playful durations deployed across a new generation of video albums such as Beyoncé’s Lemonade and gallery installations including Ragnar Kjartansson’s Take Me Here By The Dishwasher recreate the quirks and tensions of old school listening habits.

Cheap recording technology and freely accessible distribution platforms threaten to make the record label redundant. But there are still ways for labels to survive and thrive, says Britt Brown

Films on experimental music need to nuance the relationship between sound and image in order to communicate emotion and provide a true cinematic rendering of their subjects, says Stewart Morgan