project pitchfork tour 2024

Project Pitchfork Tour Dates 2024

11 upcoming concerts

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Concert Schedule ( 11 )

Project pitchfork 2024 tour info.

Genre: Electronic , Industrial

Hoping to catch a Project Pitchfork concert? 11 concerts are slated across Germany. Find all details for upcoming events, such as tour dates, pricing, and show info in our listings. Purchase Project Pitchfork tickets today!

About Project Pitchfork

German band Project Pitchfork, pioneers of dark-electro since 1989, blend goth, darkwave, and industrial. Known for hits like "Timekiller", they've toured with Rammstein & charted in Germany.

Latest Setlist

Project Pitchfork on May 4, 2024 (source)

Futurum, Prague, Czechia

• Alpha Omega
• Melancholia
• The Queen of Time and Space
• Learning to Live
• Existence v4.1

Artist Video

Artists Performing With Project Pitchfork

Where is Project Pitchfork touring in 2024?

Project Pitchfork 2024 Tour Dates: May 04 - Prague, Czech Republic - Futurum Music Bar May 03 - Dresden, Germany - Kulturzentrum STRASSE E Apr 27 - Görlitz, Germany - L2 Club Apr 26 - Steinberg, Germany - Brauerei Gutshof Wernesgrün Apr 20 - Rostock, Germany - M.A.U. Club Apr 19 - Potsdam, Germany - Waschhaus Potsdam gGmbH Apr 13 - Oberhausen, Germany - Kulttempel Apr 12 - Mannheim, Germany - MS Connexion Complex Apr 06 - Jena, Germany - F-Haus Apr 05 - Nuremberg, Germany - HIRSCH Aug 23 - Magdeburg, Germany - Festung Mark Oct 26 - Krefeld, Germany - Kulturfabrik Krefeld Oct 27 - Stuttgart, Germany - Im Wizemann Nov 01 - Leipzig, Germany - Felsenkeller Leipzig Nov 02 - Glauchau, Germany - Alte Spinnerei Glauchau Nov 08 - Berlin, Germany - Huxleys Neue Welt Nov 09 - Braunschweig, Germany - Westand Kultur und Eventzentrum Nov 10 - Bremen, Germany - Modernes Nov 14 - Langen, Germany - Neue Stadthalle Langen Nov 15 - GOTHA, Germany - Stadthalle Gotha Nov 22 - Augsburg, Germany - Kantine

Who is Project Pitchfork Touring With in 2024?

Project Pitchfork is touring with Beyond Obsession

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Project Pitchfork tour dates 2024 - 2025

Project Pitchfork is currently touring across 1 country and has 14 upcoming concerts.

Their next tour date is at Theater am Tanzbrunnen in Cologne, after that they'll be at Festung Mark in Magdeburg.

Currently touring across

Upcoming concerts (14) See nearest concert

Amphi Festival

Festung Mark

Kulturfabrik (KuFa)

Halle, Im Wizemann

Felsenkeller

Alte Spinnerei

HUXLEY'S NEUE WELT

Neue Stadthalle Langen

Stadthalle Gotha

Past concerts

Reithalle, Straße E

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Recent tour reviews

Please please come back to the United States!! It's been since 2010, that was the last time I saw u in concert before then was 1999. United States is due for the best band ever project pitchfork to come back!!

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Generell muß man sagen Piztchfork live ist immer ein Erlebnis. Auch wieder dieses mal über 2 Sdt. Power und geniale Mucke. Top Konzert der Band und auch die Location war schön. Gerne wieder.

20 Jahre nach unserem ersten Pitchfork-Konzert war es gestern wieder mal soweit.

Und es war wie immer großartig - eine ausgewogene Mischung aus alten Songs wie Alpha Omega, Klassikern wie Timekiller und neuen Stücken wie Vulcano.

Die Halle kochte, zu meinem Leidwesen auch mit ner Gruppe aggressiver Poger, nicht mein Fall, nervte ziemlich. Zur Entschädigung gab es ein kurzes hallo mit Peter.

Grandios wie eh und je. Es lohnt sich immer wieder.

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Project Pitchfork Tour Dates and Upcoming Concerts

Frequently Asked Questions About Project Pitchfork

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PROJECT PITCHFORK Supported by SHE PLEASURES HERSELF + DEVIANT UK

Friday 10th may 2024, 7:00pm - saturday 11th may 2024, 3:00am, price: £26.00 (£27.50 including booking fee).

Not on sale

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About PROJECT PITCHFORK

PROJECT PITCHFORK of Germany are veterans of the goth scene, combining darkwave and electronic dance with ominous industrial flourishes, spearheading their own distinct genre known as dark-electro. They have been filling goth dancefloors worldwide with classics such as Rain, Timekiller and Souls, among many others. Project Pitchfork will be bringing the full show to the UK for this one-off gig, complete with two drummers and huge, spectacular LED light show.

SHE PLEASURES HERSELF from Lisbon, Portugal, are regulars in the European alternative live scene. Their musical style of music is reminiscent of new wave and goth sounds of the 70s and 80s, with post punk mixed into a contemporary and luxurious wave of sonic delight.

DEVIANT UK returns to the stage after a long hiatus - a mainstay of the European goth and industrial scene since 2005 - having played around the world (including a tour with Project Pitchfork). Fronted by charismatic showman Jay Smith, they are renowned for their energetic and theatrical live performances. 

Free afterparty for ticket holders with Vade Retro & guests

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229 Great Portland Street, London, W1B 1PF

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• Project Pitchfork

Germany's Project Pitchfork are veterans of the goth scene, combining darkwave and electronic dance with ominous industrial flourishes, spearheading their own distinct genre known as dark-electro. Project Pitchfork were formed by Peter Spilles and Dirk Scheuber. After agreeing to work together, they picked the project's name by choosing a random word from the dictionary. The lineup changed many times over the years. The current lineup is Peter Spilles (composition, lyrics, vocals), Jürgen Jansen (keyboards) and Achim Färber (live drums)

About Project Pitchfork

Genres: Electronic

Upcoming concerts

We don't know about any upcoming events..

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Upcoming Events

International events, project pitchfork - open air 2023, magdeburg, project pitchfork - elysium tour – unity pt. ii, krefeld, project pitchfork - elysium tour – unity pt. ii, stuttgart, project pitchfork + spec. guest: beyond obsession - elysium tour - unity pt. ii, leipzig, project pitchfork + spec. guest: beyond obsession - elysium tour - unity pt. ii, glauchau, project pitchfork, berlin, project pitchfork - elysium tour - unity pt. ii, braunschweig, project pitchfork - elysium tour - unity pt. ii, bremen, project pitchfork + spec. guest: beyond obsession - elysium tour - unity pt. ii, gotha, project pitchfork - elysium tour 2024, augsburg, recommended artists, you have subscribed to project pitchfork alert.

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Project Pitchfork Tickets

Project Pitchfork Concert Tickets

Prepare for an EDM takeover with Project Pitchfork tickets. The electronic dance music genre known as EDM has taken hold of the music world with its unstoppable beats. The movement has made its way from the US and European rave clubs of the ‘80s and ‘90s to the top of the modern music charts. Creatively orchestrated by synthesizers and drum machines, the genre produces a sound like no other. The eclectic infusion is typically mastered by DJ mixers, cross-fades, and turntables and is occasionally enhanced by lopped vocals. Covering a wide variety of sub-genres such as dubstep dance-pop and house, the techno movement has become a major and multifaceted force on the popular music scene.

There is a rich history behind its modern sound with origins stemming from reggae and hip-hop influences. The genre reverberates a fresh approach to a style that has been evolving for decades. Beginning with pioneer musical engineers like King Tubby, an array of performers has brought EDM into the realm of popular culture. Artists like Daft Punk, Zedd , Diplo and Deadmau5 have made the genre their own. Buy Project Pitchfork tickets today and catch the beat live!

How much are Project Pitchfork tickets?

Generally, you can take a seat in the audience for around $26 - $235 on average. Project Pitchfork ticket prices will tend to run higher if the artist is performing at a major music festival. Admission to the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, Nevada can start from $287 and a spot at Electric Zoo in New York City typically goes for $379 - $399. Easily secure Project Pitchfork concert tickets in the price range of your choice.

When do Project Pitchfork tickets go on sale?

Project Pitchfork tickets are a hot commodity with the EDM concert-going generation. Admission will typically go on sale once a show date or tour schedule is made public. You can usually buy tickets from us in advance. Buy early without a pre-sale code and make your way to the next live show.

Project Pitchfork Tour Dates & Concert Schedule

EDM events are usually held at large and mid-sized venues as well as in nightclub settings. Project Pitchfork tour dates can showcase appearances at electronic dance music festivals like Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Florida and Electric Forest in Rothbury, Michigan. The genre is known for its international acclaim and live performances can be enjoyed from events like Belgium's Tomorrowland Festival and the UK’s Creamfields.

The Project Pitchfork concert schedule can typically list a string of live shows at popular techno venues like Webster Hall in New York City and Believe Music Hall in Atlanta, Georgia. There’s a good chance that the genre and the artist will make their way to one of your favorite venues.

Songs from the Project Pitchfork Tour Setlist

Project Pitchfork's setlist while performing in Prague , 52 at “Futurum” included the following songs:

• Alpha Omega
• Melancholia
• The Queen of Time and Space
• Learning to Live
• Existence v4.1
• Transformation
• Blood-Thirst

Source: Setlist.fm

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Past Events

Here are the most recent UK tour dates we had listed for Project Pitchfork. Were you there?

August 2015

• Fri 28 Aug ➙ Sun 30 Aug University of Bradford - Student Central Infest 2015 Cocksure, Project Pitchfork, L'Ame Immortelle, Alterred, Mechanical Cabaret…

January 2011

• Sat 15 Jan London, O2 Academy Islington Project Pitchfork

October 2009

• Sat 31 Oct London, O2 Academy Islington Project Pitchfork

January 2008

• Sat 26 Jan Birmingham, The Rainbow Venues Deviant-UK, Project Pitchfork, Deviant-UK, Uberbyte

Project Pitchfork

View all concerts, may 10, 2024.

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Project Pitchfork - September 2010

See also (all categories):

• Live Review: Blackfield Festival - Gelsenkirchen 2015 (Day 3) - 30/06/2015 13:47
• Live Review: E-Tropolis Festival - Oberhausen 2015 - 06/04/2015 16:14
• Live Review: DarkStorm Festival - Chemnitz 2014 - 05/01/2015 16:31
• Live Review: Amphi Festival - Cologne 2014 (Day 1) - 04/08/2014 15:54
• Live Review: Project Pitchfork - Duisburg 2013 - 12/10/2013 17:07
• Live Review: Blackfield Festival - Gelsenkirchen 2013 (Day 2) - 08/07/2013 08:25
• CD Review: Project Pitchfork - Black - 05/03/2013 16:22
• Live Review: Synthetic Snow Festival X - Moscow 2012 (Day 2) - 07/01/2013 10:33
• Live Review: Amphi Festival - Cologne 2012 (Day 2) - 14/08/2012 08:42
• Live Review: Wave Gotik Treffen - Leipzig 2012 (Day 1) - 08/06/2012 13:51
• Live Review: Rewind Easter Fest - Gent 2012 (Day 1) - 13/04/2012 22:10
• Live Review: Project Pitchfork - Krefeld 2012 - 23/01/2012 12:44
• CD Review: Santa Hates You - Jolly Roger - 21/11/2011 12:20
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• CD Review: Project Pitchfork - Quantum Mechanics - 30/08/2011 17:17
• Live Review: Zita Rock Festival - Berlin 2011 (Day 1) - 05/07/2011 10:27
• Project Pitchfork - Munich 2010 - 16/11/2010 19:24
• Amphi Festival - Cologne 2010 (Day 1 - Staatenhaus) - 29/07/2010 11:07
• Project Pitchfork - Continuum Ride - 26/07/2010 17:09
• Project Pitchfork - March 2010 - 10/06/2010 23:44
• Project Pitchfork - Moscow 2010 - 01/04/2010 17:55
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Björk has pulled an orchestral show scheduled to take place in Moscow this June. The date had originally been scheduled for 2020 but was delayed twice due to the pandemic before being canceled today.

The Icelandic artist, who did not mention Ukraine but cited “current events” in the announcement , joins a host of artists cancelling Russian shows, among them Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds , Iggy Pop, the Killers, HEALTH , Green Day , and the Russian rapper Oxxxymiron . The rest of Björk’s orchestral tour is set to go ahead as planned.

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Project Pitchfork

• April 6, 2024 Setlist

Project Pitchfork Setlist at F-Haus, Jena, Germany

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Tour: Elysium Tour statistics Add setlist

• Unity Play Video
• Timekiller Play Video
• Conjure Play Video
• Titânes Play Video
• And The Sun Was Blue Play Video
• Alpha Omega Play Video
• Melancholia Play Video
• Rain Play Video
• The Queen of Time and Space Play Video
• Volcano Play Video
• Summer Walk Play Video
• Acid Ocean Play Video
• God Wrote Play Video
• K.N.K.A. Play Video
• Der Tanz Play Video
• Existence v4.1 Play Video
• Beholder Play Video
• Transformation Play Video
• Souls Play Video
• Learning to Live Play Video
• Blood-Thirst Play Video
• Onyx Play Video
• Rescue ( Final Words was printed on the setlist as the final song but Rescue was played instead ) Play Video

Edits and Comments

3 activities (last edit by ruumisauto , 7 Apr 2024, 06:37 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Learning to Live
• Melancholia
• Summer Walk
• Transformation
• Existence v4.1
• And The Sun Was Blue
• Alpha Omega
• Blood-Thirst
• The Queen of Time and Space

Complete Album stats

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Project Pitchfork Gig Timeline

• Nov 25 2023 Haus Leipzig Leipzig, Germany Add time Add time
• Apr 05 2024 Hirsch Nuremberg, Germany Add time Add time
• Apr 06 2024 F-Haus This Setlist Jena, Germany Add time Add time
• Apr 12 2024 MS Connexion Complex Mannheim, Germany Start time: 9:00 PM 9:00 PM
• Apr 13 2024 Kulttempel Oberhausen, Germany Start time: 9:00 PM 9:00 PM

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<div style="text-align: center;" class="setlistImage"><a href="https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/project-pitchfork/2024/f-haus-jena-germany-2bab005a.html" title="Project Pitchfork Setlist F-Haus, Jena, Germany 2024, Elysium" target="_blank"><img src="https://www.setlist.fm/widgets/setlist-image-v1?id=2bab005a" alt="Project Pitchfork Setlist F-Haus, Jena, Germany 2024, Elysium" style="border: 0;" /></a> <div><a href="https://www.setlist.fm/edit?setlist=2bab005a&amp;step=song">Edit this setlist</a> | <a href="https://www.setlist.fm/setlists/project-pitchfork-13d6e9d5.html">More Project Pitchfork setlists</a></div></div>

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[url=https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/project-pitchfork/2024/f-haus-jena-germany-2bab005a.html][img]https://www.setlist.fm/widgets/setlist-image-v1?id=2bab005a[/img][/url] [url=https://www.setlist.fm/edit?setlist=2bab005a&amp;step=song]Edit this setlist[/url] | [url=https://www.setlist.fm/setlists/project-pitchfork-13d6e9d5.html]More Project Pitchfork setlists[/url]

Tour Update

Marquee memories: friedberg.

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The Ballad of Ray Suzuki: The Secret Life of Early Pitchfork and the Most Notorious Review Ever “Written”

In 2006, Pitchfork panned Jet’s sophomore album not with words, but with a video of a chimp peeing in its own mouth. But who was the “author” behind the review? And what does finding that answer reveal about the early days of the publication?

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The mystery was hiding in plain sight. Maybe you missed it, too, over the years, even if you’ve come back to the page dozens of times to revisit one of the most popular and influential posts in Pitchfork ’s history: a review of the Australian rock band Jet’s 2006 album, Shine On , which consists solely of an embedded YouTube video of a chimp peeing in his own mouth.

It’s plenty to talk about on its own, after all. The review made instant waves at the time with Pitchfork ’s skyrocketing audience, and it’s remained in the halls of site lore, even as the publication has gone from a scrappy music blog to an entire wing in the sparkling quartz tower of Condé Nast. Over the years, the rotating Pitchfork staff has tended to it like a vigilant gardener, periodically replacing the link with a copy when the video goes dead, allowing future generations to find it and be moved by its wisdom. (Phoebe Bridgers, who was 12 when the post originally went up, called it “the best review of all time” in 2016.) But it was only recently that I noticed something that had never caught my eye in all the time I’d spent watching a chimp do unspeakable things. Just who in the hell is Ray Suzuki?

Click on the name listed as the author of the Shine On review and you’ll see one other post with Suzuki’s name attached—a 2003 write-up of N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and Efil4zaggin . Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that he’s also the author of a few blurbs—good call including White Town’s “Your Woman” on the Top Tracks of the 1990s list , Ray—dating as late as 2010. Dig even deeper than that, and you’ll find that Suzuki, ever notable for his range, was also writing news posts on the site in 2001.

“Oh, Ray,” said Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber, when I got him on the phone. “You shouldn’t have written that N.W.A review, probably.”

I wanted to know how a person could fill such a strange, unique role in Pitchfork history and then quietly disappear. And so I began my search for Ray Suzuki plainly enough: by hunting for a writer with that name, who perhaps had demonstrated an inconsistent work ethic and an appreciation for the nuances of indie rock. But the hunt ended up bringing me much further into the depths of Pitchfork ’s history than I could have anticipated. It illuminated an underground ethos that fueled the publication’s rise—a passionate, experimental, and sometimes childish approach that feels particularly distant in 2024, as the site has found itself in dire corporate straits. (In January, Condé Nast laid off a significant portion of Pitchfork ’s staff and announced that it would be folding its operation into GQ. ) It also brought me to the heart of Jet, the band caught in all this.

What I ended up finding is that Suzuki was in some sense the 2000s era of the site personified—which is particularly impressive given his mortal limitations. “Though I have great respect for Ray,” said Chris Kaskie, former president of Pitchfork , “Ray Suzuki was not a real person.”

My first breakthrough in the case landed after I began emailing a variety of 2000s Pitchfork figures—some staff, some contributors—to ask whether they knew how to track down the esteemed Suzuki. One person, who asked to remain anonymous, gave me the tip that rearranged my brain on the matter. “Ray Suzuki was like Pitchfork ’s Alan Smithee,” they told me in an email, referencing the pseudonym used by directors in the 20th century who didn’t want their name on a film. This explained Suzuki’s unlikely genre spectrum and the broad time frame of his work—and it also likely explained the N.W.A review, which was originally published under the name of a different, seemingly real contributor. (Using the Wayback Machine, you can see that, in 2012, Suzuki was swapped in.)

But it turns out that being an Alan Smithee wasn’t the alias’s initial purpose. When it first started appearing as a byline in news posts in 2001, it was actually a punishment. At that time, all the contributors were writing for free, and many of them were less than reliable. Brian Roberts, the then–news editor, had asked contributors to make sure to include their bylines with their news submissions, “probably so I didn’t have to track what email addresses were associated with which writer,” he explained in an email, bemused that he’d been tracked down. (“I’m not even a footnote in the history of Pitchfork , I’m more like a toe-note,” he wrote.) The threat, if any of the hodgepodge of college students and hobbyists failed to honor this request, was that a different writer would be given the credit instead. This writer’s name was Ray Suzuki.

For no real reason, Roberts took the moniker from “Ballad of Ray Suzuki,” a 1999 song by Looper, the postmodern electronic project of Stuart David, the original bassist of Belle and Sebastian, and his wife, Karn. ( Pitchfork ’s review of Looper’s debut LP, Up a Tree , which includes Ray’s theme: 8.1.) David, in turn, had gotten the name from a friend of his, Adrian Stewart, who did DJ sets as Ray Suzuki and was immortalized by providing the spoken word vocals on his namesake track and by riding one of the Vespas in the video. Stewart, for his part, had taken the name from Mark Gordon, of the Irish band Tunic, who used to come up with quirky noms de plume for bandmates and friends.

Ray Suzuki was an alias that was “going spare,” as Gordon explained in an email, and Stewart ended up with it. Gordon said the name was in the tradition of “the Bowie ’70s thing of sticking random words together and seeing if a very mild form of alchemy occurred.” “Suzuki” came from the motorcycle company. Through all this kismet, the name found its way back to Pitchfork , where Ray Suzuki was brought to life, sort of.

There were other Pitchfork aliases in the early days— G.P. Sippy , John Toes, etc.—and Schreiber said some of those came from an “anything goes” mentality. (James P. Wisdom— who gave Pink Floyd’s Animals a perfect 10 in 2000 —is an actual guy, I was shocked to learn.) But Suzuki had more staying power than the others. “I always loved the name,” Schreiber said. “It’s got so much pizzazz.”

It also developed a different utility in the news department: making readers believe Pitchfork was more bustling than it actually was. “There were many days when the only news writing on the site was by Ryan and/or myself,” said Will Bryant, a Pitchfork news editor in the early 2000s, via email. “It would be super-lame to give every byline to ourselves, so we added Ray Suzuki for seasoning.”

Schreiber hired Kaskie as his first full-time employee, and soon after brought in Ryan Kennedy, Kaskie’s best friend, as general manager. Kaskie and Kennedy had met while working together as interns at The Onion , where they bonded over music, in between trips lugging sacks of mail to the post office. They also developed their own internal sense of humor.

“We would email each other the stupidest, weirdest stuff back and forth,” Kennedy remembered of their Onion days, “just trying to make each other laugh. We really didn’t think or care about the business—it was like a Don Draper thing. Like, I want to make Kaskie lose his shit at his desk right now. And he wants to do the same.”

Kennedy’s first day at Pitchfork was spent helping the publication move out of Schreiber’s basement, and they carried some of the prankster spirit into the new office, which was in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. With Scott Plagenhoef, the first outside editorial hire, also on board, Pitchfork had transformed into a team of young, highly opinionated music nerds with little formal editorial experience (little professional experience at all, really), who all saw the latent power of the internet that was lurking.

“I was watching The Onion invest heavily in more print markets for their newspaper,” said Kaskie, “like, ‘Wait a minute, you know that the internet’s a thing?’” He explained that The Onion —satire as it may be—was a crash course in how media companies were failing to meet the moment online, “where so much opportunity lived that they weren’t paying attention to.”

As Pitchfork grew in popularity, there was a conscious effort to become more serious, more legit. Pseudonyms were used less frequently, and writers with outside clout began to contribute substantial pieces—including some of the most legendary perfect-score reviews of the new century. But progress on this front wasn’t a straight line, as anyone regularly checking the site could tell. One of the most storied stunt posts in Pitchfork history ran in 2008, when Black Kids’ Partie Traumatic was reviewed with text that just read “sorry :-/” over a picture of two pugs (score: 3.3). The post, credited to Plagenhoef and featuring Kaskie’s dogs, was meant as a mea culpa for having previously hyped the band up.

“Sometimes [the tone] could be brash, sometimes it could be super passionate,” said Kaskie, “but all of it was rooted in the love of music, and that was clear.” He said they weren’t checking their analytics or studying traffic patterns to decide what to do that day: “What was really exciting was just knowing that, when you don’t have rules, you can kind of set your own.”

Figuring out that Ray Suzuki was an Alan Smithee was one thing, but narrowing down who , exactly, had used it for the Jet review was something else altogether. For a while I was getting nowhere by taking guesses at likely writers. There was Nick Sylvester, for example, who wrote the savage Pitchfork review of the first Jet album, 2003’s Get Born (score: 3.7); he never got back to me. There was Rob Mitchum, who wrote another memorable Pitchfork pan from a few months after the Shine On review—of Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky (score: 5.2); wasn’t him, he told me in an email. (“The legacy of one notorious review is more than enough, ha,” Mitchum said.)

I was beginning to fear I was never going to learn who “wrote” the review when Plagenhoef said he might have some answers—but warned that he had to get any interview requests approved by Apple, where he works as global head of music programming. I sent a list of formal questions and waited anxiously, thinking about how Jet’s debut single, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” —a foot-tapping earworm of a bar-rock song—was catapulted into ubiquity by being featured in an iPod commercial . (The song reached no. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Get Born ultimately sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.) I had visions of PR professionals, black silhouettes at a conference table with white AirPods glistening in their ears, telling Plagenhoef to stay out of this one. But then the email came through.

“Three of us,” Plagenhoef wrote, referring to himself, Kaskie, and Kennedy, “sat at a separate table from the rest of the group and conceived of the review.”

The scene was Lula Cafe, which is directly downstairs from the old Pitchfork office, where the entire staff—at this point featuring additional employees and interns—had gone for a celebratory lunch of some kind. There’s discrepancy about who was explicitly a part of this conversation; Schreiber remembers being involved, but Plagenhoef, Kaskie, and Kennedy remember being sectioned off. Regardless, there was discussion about what to do with this new Jet record, which, everyone at hand seemed to agree, was terrible.

For anyone who has ever wanted a Pitchfork review of Shine On with actual words, this explanation from Plagenhoef is as close as you’re going to get:

We were talking about the central problem as we saw it with the record, how the Return to Rock trend that started with the Strokes, White Stripes, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and really rock in general—had curdled into a set of lazy signifiers and poses. When the point or driver of what you’re doing is reclamation it’s inherently limiting and resistant to new ideas. It’s a creative cul-de-sac. Progression—whether it was in hip-hop, pop, guitar music, electronic music—was important to us at the time. Seeing mainstream rock music, which of course most of us had grown up with a fondness for, become so knuckle-dragging and Xeroxed was disappointing.

Such was the verdict of the critical merit of Jet, but after Sylvester’s conceptual review for Get Born , which took the form of a made-up conversation between the band and a venue manager, going back to a straightforward album review for Shine On “felt unnecessary,” wrote Plagenhoef. “It was almost better to not bother reviewing the record and giving space to something else,” he explained. “So the challenge became, Is there some third approach? And that’s when we started throwing out ideas for something metaphorical and dismissive.”

Kennedy and Kaskie—two operational employees who never had formal bylines on the site—clicked back into their collaborative shitposting mindset to help figure something out. A third approach that Kennedy considered was in the style of a recent post he’d enjoyed that was published the previous year on Tiny Mix Tapes , a music blog that has since been unplugged . It was a review for Nine Inch Nails’ With Teeth that was absent of text or a byline—and instead featured just an embedded image of the album being thrown in a digital recycling bin of a computer (score: 1.5 out of 5).

“There’s no reader interpretation,” Kennedy said. “It’s thrown in the garbage. Haha. Done. I’m like, ‘You know, I would love to do something with that. We could do better.’ And in my head, I’m thinking of images and all these things, and nothing’s really hitting. Kaskie’s sitting there, we’re kind of riffing, going back and forth. And then he’s just like, ‘The monkey drinking its piss.’”

The video—succinctly titled “Funny monkey peeing in his own mouth EPIC” —was originally something that Kaskie had sent Kennedy in their Onion days, after Kaskie’s mom, Jane, had sent it to him , in an attempt to “speak their language,” as Kennedy reasoned it. (“If she was to walk into a room you would be like, ‘No way did she send this.’”) The video had made its way into the Pitchfork office over time, a sort of proto-meme among a few people. And as soon as Kaskie suggested it for the review, Plagenhoef—by all accounts a stoic and serious person—was cracking up, and they knew they had something. “Fucking Kaskie hit the cigarette with the tip of the whip right there,” said Kennedy. (It should also be stated directly that despite its name, the clip actually captures a chimp urinating, not a monkey. To some, that’s an important distinction ; to others, they’re practically one and the same .)

Just nine seconds in length, the video contains within it what Kennedy, at least, sees as the perfect narrative for how they felt about Jet and Shine On : “The monkey,” he explained, “the way he tilts his head and gets blasted in the face—and then goes back for seconds! That is where I’m won over. He drinks, gets shot in the eye, and then he looks right at the camera, and he goes right back for more! He’s communicating, like, ‘I know what I’m doing, you can’t stop me.’” Kennedy described Sylvester’s Get Born review as describing a band “intoxicated by its own sweat.” “Like the monkey, they go back for more,” Kennedy said, “because they like their own taste.”

When the Shine On review was originally published —with the decision to give the collaborative effort of the staff to Ray Suzuki—it had no score. The video was the score.

This put it in the canon of Pitchfork reviews that experimented with the scoring form, like Bob Pollard’s Relaxation of the Asshole , which was given a simultaneous 10 and 0 , or Radiohead’s In Rainbows , which, in the spirit of the band’s pay-what-you-want model for that album, provided an option for readers to provide their own score . Later on, the Pitchfork CMS required that a traditional number be put in for albums, and the nuance of this type of review was lost. Pollard was stripped of his 10 at that point. Radiohead were given a 9.3. Jet were given a 0.0.

But even without the original zero score, the review had an immediate impact when it went up. Some remember the response to it being negative, some remember it being positive—but either way, it got people’s attention, that much everyone remembers. And without so much as a single word of copy, it communicated everything about the Pitchfork agenda.

“Jet was the whole goal,” Kaskie said. “Irreverence, new ideas, playing with the tools the internet had to offer.” Schreiber reminded me, with a laugh, of how new YouTube was at that time—only a year old—and that embedding videos was then “cutting-edge tech.”

“One thing that I really tried to do with Pitchfork in the early days,” Schreiber said, “was think of it as entertainment.” He emphasized that they “took the music extremely seriously,” but also that they wanted to find ways to “catch you off guard and knock you back a step.” In this case maybe two steps.

In the 2000s, Pitchfork learned how to use its powers for good, putting relatively unknown acts like Arcade Fire on the map. But perhaps just as importantly, it also developed quite a punch. Like a young Mike Tyson, Pitchfork arrived on the scene with vicious, violent right hooks that could easily end the careers of musicians stepping into the ring—musicians who, in many cases, never really had a chance in the first place. The cautionary tale in the Pitchfork world is its 2004 review of Travistan , the solo debut of the Dismemberment Plan’s Travis Morrison, which was given a 0.0. In its wake, record stores wouldn’t stock the album, and Morrison’s musical reputation was severely damaged. After this, “the Pitchfork Effect” was recognized in The New York Times and Wired as something to reckon with.

In 2018, the writer Amos Barshad did a story for Slate in which he attempted interviews with various artists, like Morrison, who had received knockout blows of 0.0. With the exception of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, no one agreed to be interviewed, including Jet. Morrison, clearly struggling with the subject, sent an email saying it was a “really frightening and awful experience” to be pummeled by Pitchfork , and described the ongoing horrors of being “branded” by the review.

Most Pitchfork figures I spoke to noted that Jet was a major-label band and suggested that this made them fairer game than, say, Travis Morrison. But when I called Barshad, he emphasized the way status didn’t seem to make a difference in how it felt to the artist. Even with “clear indie-rock legend guy” Moore, he said—whose accolades obviously supersede one bad review of the Sonic Youth album NYC Ghosts & Flowers — Pitchfork ’s 0.0 did not come across as a glancing blow. “He remembered the details of it, and was putting it into the context of where the band was at the time,” Barshad said. “So it obviously left a mark even on him.”

After I reached out to Jet to ask for an interview, their manager told me he didn’t think anyone in the group would want to talk. I then emailed Dave Sardy, the producer of Get Born and Shine On , who initially said OK before thinking twice. “Is this a hit job on Jet?” he asked. Despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise, I never heard from him again.

“I used to really like my own harsh reviews if they were well written,” said Stuart David of Looper, calling from Scotland. Our conversation was initially about his group’s unlikely role in this saga via “Ballad of Ray Suzuki,” but while I had him, I asked for his perspective, as a fellow artist, on the Jet review. He could still recall a line from a negative 2005 NME review of Looper’s third LP, The Snare —“the desultory whoosh of a once-promising career as it plummets, irretrievably, down the art-pop pan”—and its writer, Sarah Dempster (score: 1 out of 5). “That’s clever,” he said. The Shine On review, as he saw it, was just “trolling people who couldn’t reply or couldn’t troll back.” “To do it anonymously,” he considered, “seems quite cowardly, I think.”

For many years, Jet didn’t seem to weigh in on the matter. They released one more album, 2009’s Shaka Rock , and broke up in 2012. But after Phoebe Bridgers commented on a 2021 Instagram post by Pitchfork about the review—“I think about this once a day,” she wrote—Chris Cester, Jet’s drummer, replied to her.

“I think I saw you on SNL recently it was really cool …” he replied. “Did you smash your guitar or something? It was a huge statement. Dangerous.” He ended his comment with “It’s tough out there best of luck to you.” Cester was doing what he couldn’t in 2006: trolling back.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that Jet’s opinion on this matter might end up being playful in its own right. One of the band’s best-known songs, the Kinks-ish romp “Rollover D.J.,” is essentially a monkey-piss-level review of DJ culture. “Well, I know that you think you’re a star,” Chris’s brother Nic sings. “A pill-poppin’ jukebox is all that you are.”

When I sent Chris Cester—who, with Nic, is a cowriter of most Jet songs—an Instagram message, I didn’t really expect a response. I did my best to explain that I was coming from a place of respect, even though I recognized it was a delicate subject.

“It’s not delicate,” Chris wrote back, “tbh the first time I saw it I laughed my ass off.”

Chris called me a few days later while he was getting his car washed and said he honestly didn’t know who Bridgers was when he saw her comment. He then looked her up and was unimpressed by her SNL performance , in which she broke a guitar. (The event was arranged with discreet pyrotechnics to go off when Bridgers struck a dummy PA; David Crosby called it “pathetic,” and Bridgers replied by calling him a “little bitch.”) “She’s got her thing,” Chris said, in a thick Aussie accent. “People seem to like it, I guess, if you’ve got a cardigan or something.”

A (Brief) History of Pitchfork Stunt Reviews

While none may be as historically significant as “What is this shit?” —or as beloved as “shit sandwich” — Pitchfork has pulled its fair share of stunt reviews over the years. Here’s an incomplete timeline:

2001: Tool, Lateralus . Shortly before his infamous Kid A review , Brent DiCrescenzo wrote this from the perspective of a fictional high schooler obsessed with the band. “There is simply no way you could just dismiss the music,” said DiCrescenzo’s stand-in . Well, Pitchfork could—with a 1.9.

2002: Eminem, The Eminem Show. A review light on punctuation and heavy on praise that ends with an AIM conversation. It’s a shitpost that captures the spirit of Eminem better than anything else said about his music. 

2005: Robert Pollard, Relaxation of the Asshole . The Guided by Voices frontman released a live comedy album. Pitchfork got its jokes off too, giving the record a 10.0 and 0.0 simultaneously.  

2007: Radiohead, In Rainbows . Radiohead allowed listeners to pay what they wanted for the album. So Pitchfork followed suit, allowing readers to give In Rainbows their own score. (But really, it was a 9.3 .)

2008: Black Kids, Partie Traumatic . As a mea culpa for praising the band’s earlier EP, this review consisted solely of a pic of two pugs with the caption “Sorry :-/ ”

2015: Pope Francis, Wake Up! In a lukewarm pan, P4K gave the pontiff a 3.16 , naturally. It was eventually given a slightly more reverential grade of 5.0 .

2021: Peppa Pig, Peppa’s Adventures: The Album . “Peppa is, of course, a very young artist,” says this 6.5 review of the animated star’s album . “One hopes that she will refine her political sensibility as she matures.” She hasn’t released an album since.

Careful not to be perceived as speaking for the whole band, Chris explained that, after being featured in the iPod commercial, he felt like Jet had an Apple-shaped target on its back. He noted that it was a wonderful boon to have such immediate mainstream exposure—if anything rivaled the Pitchfork Effect in 2004, it was the iPod Effect—but brought up the cost as well. “That was still kind of a faux pas at that point,” he said, joking that, given the encouraging attitude about artists having their music in commercials these days, Jet could be called “trailblazers.” “Like any 22-year-old,” he said, describing himself when Get Born came out, “you’re looking outside for validation. I’m 42 now. Things have changed in that regard.”

Chris said he remembered the band thinking the Shine On review was funny but acknowledged that it might have initially bothered them “for like a week.” That the general feeling was that it was “bullshit,” “pretty snarky,” and “unfair.” Still, he insisted, he shook it off because you have to when you’re in that position: “You learn that pretty early on about being in the spotlight,” Chris said, “if you get really excited about people kissing your ass, you get really upset when people kick you in the balls.”

Shine On ended up becoming the last non-compilation album to receive a 0.0 from Pitchfork , and that’s likely because it was realized that the score was an unnecessarily low blow. “A lot of the records that we had already given the zero to,” Schreiber said, “in hindsight, they might have been awful records, but to say that they have absolutely no merit whatsoever is just probably false.” Kennedy described the zero for Jet as being “a pretty nakedly dirty grade.” “I guess even monkey piss has some value to it,” he said. “There’s, like, some potassium.”

The question of whether Pitchfork ’s review was “fair” to Jet was something I had spent a decent amount of time thinking about. From a certain angle, the review feels less like a piece of music criticism and more like a Dada-ist joke on what music criticism even is . Or at the very least like a shitpost that was prophetic in its use of the visual, flippant language people would soon be employing en masse to post about art online. Squint, and it’s a masterpiece … of some kind. But it goes down in the stats sheet as an actual review—and in that sense, it wasn’t really fair to Jet.

In some sense, the review may not even be fair to Pitchfork , either. Amy Phillips, who was at the fabled lunch as a new employee—and would stay at Pitchfork for 18 years, eventually becoming executive editor, until she was caught in this year’s layoffs—described the review as “the lowest form of reacting to something.” “It’s just kind of like putting a middle finger up and moving on,” Phillips said. In terms of memorable Pitchfork pans, she’s partial to the carefully thought-out ones, like current reviews director Jeremy Larson’s more recent takedowns of Greta Van Fleet (score: 1.6) and Måneskin (2.0). Plagenhoef, similarly, feels that the Jet review unduly takes the focus away from all the great actual writing that’s been on the site over the years, and all he and others did to build Pitchfork into the editorial powerhouse that it became.

“We wanted to lead with quality,” Plagenhoef wrote, “to be trusted, to be thoughtful and mindful and a beacon to our users. Stunt reviews [like the Shine On review] felt closed off and limiting, like you were talking to members of a club to which I didn’t necessarily want to belong.”

What’s happened to Pitchfork since 2006 is easy to oversimplify. Conscious decisions were made to embrace the increased responsibility that came from popularity—and with that, the prankster spirit was eroded over time. “Watching that go sucked, for sure,” said Kennedy, who ended his second stint with Pitchfork in 2019. The editorial voice also became less aggressive and reactive, as well as more open to the critical value of pop and major-label music in all its forms. Most Pitchfork figures seem to agree that this was, by and large, a good and necessary evolution. (Unless you’re asking Chris Ott .) But simultaneous to any conscious internal evolution, outside market forces were pushing the entire music industry in a direction that publications had to adjust to.

“Social media and late capitalism,” said Plagenhoef, who left Pitchfork as editor in chief in 2011, “have each sucked up so much of the energy around cultural conversation for different reasons and in different ways to the detriment of not only critics but entire industries.” Kaskie, who left Pitchfork two years after Condé Nast purchased it in 2015, brought up the way that culture started to homogenize; how Jay-Z was turning up at Grizzly Bear shows and Bon Iver was featuring on Kanye West records. “Suddenly you’re trying to cover everything,” he said, “just so you can make sure you get everybody to pay attention to what you’re doing, and you lose focus.” He went on, “To see something getting bigger for the sake of scale you start to disconnect, and that seemed like a tension point that may have happened at Condé.”

Still, Pitchfork has remained the most powerful voice in music journalism, even if that voice is simply less powerful than it used to be due to forces largely outside its control. Which is why it was such a shock that Condé Nast didn’t see enough value to keep from implementing a red wedding. Pitchfork , once the heavyweight champ, got knocked in the teeth, and it’s staggering. But it’s not down yet.

“I think the important thing is to not lose sight of that,” Schreiber said, in reference to the fact that Pitchfork , which he left in 2019, remains a highly popular site. (A Condé Nast analytics employee stated in January that Pitchfork had the highest daily site visitors of any CN title; a CN representative confirmed this after publication.) “And to know that a lot of these layoffs are happening because some people at the top of these corporations are just not making the most informed decisions that they probably could be.” One bright spot after the layoffs, Schreiber said, was that many Pitchfork figures were back in touch again after years of drifting apart. “I do think there’s an opportunity for a lot of us right now,” he said. “Maybe there’s a lot of appetite for trying to figure out a way for us all to move forward collectively.”

As for Jet, they recently reunited and are continuing to do tour dates to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Get Born . Reflecting on the road he’s gone down with the band, Chris Cester doesn’t regret anything.

“This is the thing with Jet,” he said. “Each one of us individually are quite capable of doing something complicated that’s harder to decipher, wander off for seven minutes, and impress people. But none of that shit gets remembered. And it’s not so much about having hit songs but it is about finding that thing in your creativity where it’s going to be remembered. You don’t want to be a fucking footnote, you know what I mean? All artists strive for it, and none of them admit it.”

While I was working on this story, a friend sent me a video from a wedding he attended. It was the bride and groom’s first dance, and the song they had chosen was Jet’s “Look What You’ve Done,” from Get Born . The song, a surprisingly tasteful ballad, sounds fresh—it feels of its time and outside it, as well. I wouldn’t call it a detour in a creative cul-de-sac. More like a stretch down a peaceful highway at night.

“You sound like you’ve got your shit together,” Chris said to me, while we were talking about Shine On . “What did you think about the album when you heard it?”

I told him the truth, which was that Get Born was a formative record for my 13-year-old self when it came out and helped set me on a path of finding a broader musical world as a teenager. ( Pitchfork , in turn, helped substantially with that process.) But partially because of the initial influence of Pitchfork ’s review, I had only really listened to Shine On in recent months and thought it demonstrated admirable growth from Jet. I particularly like the song “Bring It on Back,” which sounds something like Spoon doing an Oasis cover. It is not a glass of monkey piss, by any stretch. “Looking back [on Shine On ] after all this time,” Chris said, “I’m really proud.”

At one point, I decided to read through other prominent reviews of Shine On that came out in 2006. They may not have gotten the clicks that Pitchfork did—and they don’t make me laugh like that foul, foul chimp—but they were decidedly more measured, thoughtful, and, yes, fair. More than anything, the other reviews are just a useful reminder that there are additional opinions of Shine On worth considering besides Ray Suzuki’s.

One that stood out was written by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian (score: 3 out of 5), published a few days before Pitchfork ’s review. Petridis isn’t over the moon about the record, but he’s honest about having found some charm in it, too. “Nobody is going to buy Shine On expecting intellectual enlightenment,” he wrote. “It’s trad-rock ordinaire, yet something lifts it out of the ordinary: its cheek, maybe, or its freewheeling vitality, or the occasional musical surprise it springs. Perhaps most appealingly, given the current inhibitions of mainstream rock, Shine On doesn’t appear to give a monkey’s.”

Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times , Los Angeles Times , Stereogum , and elsewhere.

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The trial of US reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia will begin June 26

MOSCOW (AP) — The espionage trial in Russia of Wall Street Journal reporter  Evan Gershkovich  will begin on June 26 and will be held behind closed doors, a statement from the court that will hear the case said Monday.

Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, has been behind bars since his March 2023 arrest and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

The trial is to be held in the Sverdlovsky Regional Court in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, where he was arrested. Gershkovich has since been held in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) to the west.

The court said trial will be closed to the public, as is usual in espionage cases.

Gershkovich, 32, is accused of “gathering secret information” on orders from the CIA about Uralvagonzavod, a facility that produces and repairs military equipment, the Prosecutor General’s office said last week in the first details of the accusations against him.

The reporter, his employer and the U.S. government have denied the allegations, and  Washington designated him as wrongfully detained .

Russia’s Federal Security Service alleged that Gershkovich was acting on U.S. orders to collect state secrets but provided no evidence to back up the accusations.

“Evan has done nothing wrong. He should never have been arrested in the first place. Journalism is not a crime,” U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week. “The charges against him are false. And the Russian government knows that they’re false. He should be released immediately.”

The Biden administration has sought to negotiate Gershkovich’s release, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Moscow would consider a prisoner swap only after a trial verdict.

Uralvagonzavod, a state tank and railroad car factory in the city of Nizhny Tagil, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Yekaterinburg, became known in 2011-12 as a bedrock of support for President Vladimir Putin.

Plant foreman Igor Kholmanskih appeared on Putin’s annual phone-in program in December 2011 and denounced mass protests occurring in Moscow at the time as a threat to “stability,” proposing that he and his colleagues travel to the Russian capital to help suppress the unrest. A week later, Putin appointed Kholmanskikh to be his envoy in the region.

Putin has said he believes a deal could be reached to free Gershkovich, hinting he would be open to swapping him for a Russian national imprisoned in Germany. That appeared to be  Vadim Krasikov , who is serving a life sentence for the 2019 killing in Berlin of a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent.

Asked by The Associated Press about Gershkovich, Putin said the U.S. is “taking energetic steps” to secure his release. He told international news agencies at an economic forum in St. Petersburg in early June that any such releases “aren’t decided via mass media” but through a “discreet, calm and professional approach.”

“And they certainly should be decided only on the basis of reciprocity,” he added, in an allusion to a potential prisoner swap.

Gershkovich was the first U.S. journalist taken into custody on espionage charges since Nicholas Daniloff in 1986 at the height of the Cold War. Gershkovich’s arrest shocked foreign journalists in Russia, even though the country had enacted increasingly  repressive laws on freedom of speech  after sending troops into Ukraine.

Alsu Kurmasheva , a reporter for U.S.-funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe with dual U.S.-Russian citizenship, has been jailed since October awaiting trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent while collecting information about the Russian military.

The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, Gershkovich is fluent in Russian and moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

U.S. Ambassador Lynne Tracy, who regularly visited Gershkovich in prison and attended his court hearings, has called the charges against him “fiction” and said that Russia is “using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends.”

Separately,  U.S. soldier Gordon Black  is on trial in Vladivostok on charges of theft and threatening murder in a dispute with a Russian woman. Black, who was stationed in South Korea but visiting the Pacific Coast city, on Monday told a court that he denied the allegation of threatening murder but “partially” admitted to theft, according to the state news agency RIA-Novosti.

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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