About

Deep Cuts is a magazine about the bands the canon forgot.

Music history, the way it gets told in books and on streaming platforms and in algorithm-generated playlists, is mostly the same forty or fifty artists arranged in different orders. The headliners. The genre-definers. The ones whose names you already know. There's nothing wrong with that history — it's just incomplete. For every band that became the story of an era, there are a dozen who lived through the same years, made records, toured the same circuits, were reviewed in the same magazines, and then quietly disappeared from the conversation. Some of them didn't deserve to be remembered. Many of them did.

This magazine is about those bands. Not as nostalgia, not as a fan project, not as a checklist of forgotten albums to rediscover, but as something more interesting: a way of understanding how music actually works as an industry, a culture, and a set of lived careers. The story of a band that didn't become Bon Jovi tells you something about the 1980s that the story of Bon Jovi can't. The story of a hair metal band that found a second life playing stadiums in Northeast India tells you something about globalization, about genre, about what "success" means once you stop measuring it by Billboard. The discount-bin afterlife of an album that should have sold platinum, or the one-album commercial existence of a band whose lead singer became more interesting after the band ended than during it — these are where some of the most interesting stories live.

The writing here is long-form by design. Most pieces run between 4,000 and 8,000 words, occasionally longer for the major retrospectives. They're researched against contemporaneous press, interviews, and the work of other critics — not generated from memory or vibes. They argue for a thesis, not just summarize a discography. They're written to be read in one sitting, on a Sunday morning, with coffee. They're written to be the best thing on the internet about whatever specific band or moment they cover.

The magazine publishes in numbered issues, each running five essays over five consecutive weeks, with a short break between issues. Subscribers to the email list hear about each new essay the moment it goes live; everyone else can find them in the archive whenever they're ready.

Three kinds of writing live here.

Retrospectives are deep dives on a single band — career arc, album by album, critical reception then and now, what their story tells us about their era. The form ranges from straightforward band histories (FireHouse, Vain, Rough Cutt) to broader structural arguments built around a single artist's trajectory (Queensrÿche, Cinderella, Vixen). Some retrospectives engage with two or three records in particular depth while treating the rest of the catalog as context — Hardline's two essential albums, Warrant's chaotic 1990s — but they all share the form's defining feature: the band is the subject, and the editorial argument runs through the band's specific history.

Long Plays are single-album deep dives — one record, the conditions that produced it, what it actually sounds like, what it tells us about the band or the moment. The format takes its name from the old LP designation and is structured around the principle that some albums deserve the same scope of attention that the standard retrospective gives to entire catalogs. Long Plays have covered Mötley Crüe's 1994 self-titled album with John Corabi, Foreigner's Unusual Heat, Def Leppard's Slang, and other records whose specific commercial-creative moment rewards the close engagement.

One and Done is a recurring section about bands whose meaningful commercial existence was effectively a single record. The strict version of the category — bands with exactly one album to their discography — is sometimes accurate; the broader editorial version — bands whose major-label commercial moment was a single record, regardless of what they did afterward — is the version the section actually engages with. The format gives the magazine structural vocabulary for the specific commercial pattern that produced bands like Tuff, Femme Fatale, and Signal — bands whose entire commercial relationship with the mainstream music industry happened in an eighteen-month window that the broader rock-history vocabulary has consistently failed to take seriously.

The name comes from the old vinyl-era term for the album tracks that weren't released as singles — the ones tucked between the hits, often the most interesting things on the record, mostly forgotten by people who only listened to the radio. That's the territory this magazine is interested in. The deep cuts. The B-sides of the historical record. The tracks the canon skipped.

If any of this sounds like the kind of writing you've been looking for and haven't been able to find, subscribe to the newsletter and the next essay will arrive in your inbox the day it's published.

To get in touch: editor@deep-cuts.uk