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 cutout bin is, it turns out, where some of the most interesting stories live.

The writing here is long-form by design. Most pieces run 2,500 to 4,000 words, sometimes more. 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 loose issues rather than on a strict weekly schedule. Quality scales with time spent, and time spent doesn't compress well. A new piece arrives every three to four weeks on average, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. 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.

Two 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. Era essays zoom out: a scene, a moment, a transition, a sound. The collapse of hair metal in 1992. The strange afterlife of AOR. The export economies that kept whole genres alive after their home markets gave up on them. Retrospectives and era essays inform each other; one is the close-up, the other is the wide shot.

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