The Wire is the world's leading independent monthly music magazine. The first issue was published in 1982. More than four decades on the magazine remains committed to reporting on a dynamic global network of underground, alternative and experimental musics by publishing journalism and photography by some of the subculture’s most original and authoritative critics and observers.

A digital subscription gives you access to the complete online archive of back issues of The Wire since issue one, summer 1982 — that's over 40 years, 470 issues and 40,000 pages. Click here to read the free trial issue, or click here to see the full archive.

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2025 Rewind: the Year in Underground Music, including the Top 50 New Releases of the Year, the Top 50 Archive Releases of the Year, our critics’s cultural reflections, our columnists’ genre charts and analyses, and essays on low music & high fashion, DIY radio, alternative futures, new hybrids, underground portals, and slow drones for fast times. Plus: features on Tristan Perich, Anna Högberg, Hilary Woods, Carrier, Hypomanic Daydream, Erwan Keravec, Melvin Gibbs on Makaya McCraven, and Mark Wastell on Derek Bailey’s Company. In the regular sections: Invisible Jukebox: Ikonika, Global Ear: underground resistance in Chicago, Unlimited Editions: Warm Winters Ltd, Against The Grain: anarcho-punk lives, The Inner Sleeve: Tony Herrington on Here & Now/Alternative TV, Epiphanies: Cosey Fanni Tutti on a life in art. In the review sections: Juana Molina, Jean-Paul Guionnet, Tiger Milk, The Bottle Tapes, KIK, Ann Kroeber & Alan Splet, Daisy Rickman, Robert Fripp, the women of P-funk, Unsound, Cabaret Voltaire, and much more.