Danielle Chelosky
Danielle Chelosky writes about the emotional charge of contemporary music, connecting new releases and archival material to the private intensity of listening. Her coverage at Stereogum centers on how songs, albums, and performances register on a personal level, with a particular focus on emerging artists, intimate pop, and the ongoing narratives around cult and alternative figures.
Current role and focus at Stereogum
Chelosky is a music writer at Stereogum, contributing news posts, track write-ups, and list entries across the outlet’s coverage. Much of her work highlights new singles from artists on the cusp of wider attention, such as Sudan Archives’ “Come And Find You,” which she situates within the artist’s rollout of the album The BPM. She also writes short news items around live performances and radio sessions, including coverage of Sudan Archives’ Sade cover for XMU, where she frames the performance within the artist’s current record cycle. In Stereogum’s “The 50 Best Albums Of 2024 So Far” list, her entry on the Marías’ Submarine underscores her interest in lush, emotionally driven pop and alternative records. Across formats, she writes in compressed, declarative blurbs that foreground the feeling and mood of the music rather than technical analysis.
Beat within music and recurring subjects
Within the broader music beat, Chelosky gravitates toward artists who blur genre lines and build strong personal aesthetics, from experimental R&B to alt-pop and indie rock. Her Stereogum work includes staff picks and song roundups, where she selects tracks that skew toward emotionally direct lyrics and intimate production, often emphasizing how a song captures a particular state of mind or digital-age relationship dynamic. She engages with both new releases and legacy acts, covering material like a track from the Fall’s posthumous album recorded before Mark E. Smith’s death, tying archival recordings to ongoing fan attachment and the afterlife of a band’s catalog. In these pieces, she tends to frame music as part of a continuous narrative of grief, memory, and fandom rather than isolated releases.
Work at other outlets and broader writing profile
Beyond Stereogum, Chelosky publishes music journalism at outlets such as NPR, Billboard, and The Fader, expanding her coverage from niche internet-centric acts to more widely recognized artists and trends. She also writes about culture and relationships in literary venues, with prose and poetry appearing in magazines like Spectra and other small-press publications. Her fiction and essay work often explores sex, relationships, and online life, themes that echo the intimacy and emotional volatility she tracks in music. This parallel body of work gives her music coverage a diaristic edge, with a consistent interest in how songs intersect with vulnerability, desire, and self-presentation.
Voice, perspective, and format
Chelosky’s voice is direct and conversational, using tight, vivid descriptions to capture both sonic qualities and emotional stakes. In list entries and blurbs, she favors a close, listener-centric perspective, describing how records feel to inhabit rather than only how they sound. Her background as a fiction writer and poet informs her attention to narrative and mood, often treating albums and singles as fragments of larger personal stories. Across Stereogum and her other journalism, she works in short-form formats—news posts, staff picks, and compact essays—that align with fast-moving music cycles while still carving out space for reflection on what a song or album does to the person hearing it.
4 more music journalists.
Aisling Murphy
Aisling Murphy is the theatre reporter and critic at The Globe and Mail. She stands out for writing about theatre as both art and infrastructure, with coverage that links new Canadian stage work, awards culture, and pop-inflected criticism. She covers theatre, music, and pop culture in a detailed, conversational style, moving between reviews, reported features, and analysis of the systems that shape what gets produced. Her beat includes the Dora Awards, Toronto stages, new writing, intimate productions, and smaller venues, as well as controversy where artistic decisions meet politics and community response. Before The Globe, she was senior editor of Intermission Magazine, and her bylines include The New York Times, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, and the Baltimore Sun.
Alex Hudson
Alex Hudson is Editor-in-Chief of Exclaim! and leads coverage of music’s links to sports, literature, and technology, with a strong focus on Canadian artists. Hudson reports on how music intersects with other fields, not as a separate industry. Recent coverage has included Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer on how playing piano saved his career, Ottawa Bluesfest’s Canada-wide soccer watch party, Lakes of Canada’s Margaret Atwood-inspired album Transgressions, Hannah Mary McKinnon on The Beaches influencing her rock-themed novel, and Alexander Nilsson’s 1001 Albums Generator as a tool for broadening music discovery beyond algorithmic recommendations.
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz
Alexis Mikulski Ruiz is a commerce writer whose distinct focus is the buying and streaming side of music, entertainment and lifestyle, helping readers decide how to watch major events and what to purchase around them. She is an e-commerce specialist at Rolling Stone, covering products, platforms and deals tied to award shows, festivals, sports and everyday culture. Her beat blends music streaming guides with shopping and product recommendations across fashion, beauty, tech, food, wellness and drinks. She reports through experience-focused service journalism, using lists, comparison roundups and step-by-step guides to answer concrete questions about how to stream major cultural moments, where to shop and which products to choose. Her background includes commerce and lifestyle writing for consumer publications such as Esquire, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Daily, Women’s Wear Daily and Billboard.
Allie Gregory
Allie Gregory maps how audiences encounter new music by tracking the practical pathways of releases, tours, festivals, platforms and projects. She is a managing editor and news writer at Exclaim!, where she is a primary editorial contact for forthcoming releases and news tips and helps shape the outlet’s daily agenda around new music and its broader entertainment context. Her reporting centres on timely album and tour announcements, live logistics and festival programming across indie, metal, country, pop and adjacent film and streaming news. She writes direct, information-heavy pieces that foreground calendars, support acts, set times and programming structures, while also producing longer-form interviews, cultural stories and staff-pick recommendations that connect artists’ work, controversy and creative campaigns to how audiences encounter music and entertainment on the road, at festivals and on screens.