Miranda Wollen

Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste who covers contemporary and legacy music with a critic’s ear and a reporter’s curiosity. Her work tracks how albums, artists and scenes evolve over time, balancing close listening with interviews and on-the-ground reporting. She moves between news on releases, longform reviews, anniversary features and conversations with musicians, giving readers both timely updates and deeper context.

Album reviews and longform criticism

Wollen’s core coverage is album-focused criticism that treats records as complete worlds, not just collections of songs. In her review of Aldous Harding’s Train On The Island, she highlights the album’s minimal, open-hearted approach and connects its peculiar songwriting to the artist’s broader body of work, signaling a preference for idiosyncratic, narrative-rich music. Her piece on Lambchop’s seventeenth album frames the record as a kind of hymn to a “failed America,” using the release to explore national mood and the band’s evolving sound.

She writes anniversary essays on records like Beck’s Morning Phase, reflecting on how the album carried her through a difficult adolescence, and on Mac Miller’s The Divine Feminine, where she unpacks its mix of sacred and silly tones ten years on. Time-capsule articles on The Cure’s The Head on the Door and R.E.M.’s Life’s Rich Pageant show her interest in how classic albums age, often foregrounding their emotional textures, sonic risks and place in a longer career arc.

Across these pieces, she tends to pair close textual reading of lyrics and arrangements with personal and cultural context, making her reviews useful for anyone looking to position an album within broader genre narratives.

Interviews and artist profiles

Alongside criticism, Wollen conducts in-depth interviews that focus on how musicians build and rebuild their lives around their work.

In her profile of Birdy around the album Portraits, she follows the artist through young adulthood and discusses how a bolder sound reflects shifts in identity and confidence. Her conversation with Madeline Kenney centers on writing through a breakup and a pandemic, framing the artist’s creative process as a way of assembling a new life from “the rubble of the old.”

With Blonde Redhead, she emphasizes intentionality, tracing how three collaborators sustain a decades-long relationship and the thinking behind their first record in nine years. A feature on Anna Shoemaker focuses on the aftermath of a breakup and the return to a childhood home, using the album Back to Pennsylvania as a lens on starting over.

More recent interviews with Way Dynamic and other emerging acts show her interest in offbeat, self-contained artistic universes, where she draws out the imaginative logic behind their songs rather than just promotional talking points. These pieces typically blend reported detail, quoted conversation and scene-setting prose, giving artists room to speak while keeping a clear editorial through-line.

News, releases and scene coverage

Wollen also files shorter, time-sensitive pieces that track what is happening across indie rock, alt-pop and adjacent scenes. On Paste’s front page, her bylines cover announcements such as Drake’s release of FOMO, Fog Lake’s upcoming album Hollowbody and Dakota Johnson’s turn in an SNL promo with guest band Turnstile, indicating that she follows both headline acts and cult-favorite names. Her coverage of the delay of The Strokes’ new album fits the same pattern: she treats release logistics as part of a longer story about a band’s trajectory, not just calendar news.

Festival reporting like “Dancing in the rain at Primavera Sound” shows a willingness to be on site, capturing weather, crowd dynamics and set highlights to situate performances in a lived environment rather than a purely critical one.

In reviews of records like Role Model’s Chuck Timely & the Hourglass, she writes in a concise, evaluative mode - calling the album “box-mix Americana” - while still noting what makes the project enjoyable. Across this newsier work, she tends to favor clear descriptions, artist quotes where available and a tone that treats smaller developments as meaningful without overstatement.

Beat focus and background

Within Paste, Wollen’s beat is squarely entertainment, with a strong emphasis on music across indie, alternative rock, singer-songwriter, Americana and adjacent genres.

Her archive shows a consistent return to artists working at the boundary between mainstream and niche, from legacy bands like The Cure and R.E.M. to contemporary figures such as Aldous Harding, Lambchop and Role Model. Earlier in her career she worked as Paste’s music intern, writing and pitching both short news items and longform features, interviews and profiles - experience that now underpins the range of formats in her staff role. Outside Paste, professional information indicates that she also reports on politics and contributes editorial work to other publications, which broadens her perspective beyond the music world even as her primary published output remains focused on culture and entertainment.

For outreach around albums, tours, festival appearances or artist narratives that hinge on personal reinvention and long-term career arcs, her record suggests a particular interest in stories where the music and the life around it are tightly intertwined.