It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and you’re looking at our redesigned website for discovering hardcore bands and sharing 100 gecs memes. This is the fifth (or sixth?) version of stereogum.com I’ve overseen since launching this blog on LiveJournal one hundred years ago, but it’s the first time in over a decade I called all the shots, because we are now, as you might have heard, once again a completely independent music publication.

All your favorite editorial features are still here, but every page has been made less cluttered, faster-loading, and easy to navigate. In addition to a host of minor and major cosmetic upgrades (check out our new logo!) we spent the summer organizing and recategorizing our massive archives, should you want to read a review of Coachella 2013. (Coachella was a festival where you could watch bands perform IRL.)

I won’t go over every change but here are some things worth pointing out:

• Our popular column The Number Ones, where we are reviewing every #1 single in order since 1958, has been given a specialized template. There are even previous/next buttons that … are broken at the moment! Our developers are fixing that.

• Heavy Rotation, the ill-defined section where Stereogum writers wordlessly highlight new albums they wanna highlight, now features buy links so you can more easily rotate these releases yourself. Heavy Rotation is also now viewable on mobile for the first time. Everything has been reformatted with mobile reading in mind. Since you’re probably reading this on a mobile device right now? Whatever 5G is, we’re ready for it.

• You’re seeing way fewer ads, in some cases half as many banners as usual in a long article. I will save my TED Talk about programmatic advertising for another post, but thanks everyone for bearing with the more obtrusive units we ran when we really, really needed revenue. The sticky video unit is gone, and we’re not serving any internet chum boxes (though you wouldn’t have believed what this former child star looks like now).

• In fact Stereogum’s launch week is presented with limited advertising all around thanks to support from POLLEN, Spotify’s genre-less playlist that aims to expose curious listeners to all types of great new music. Check out Pollen here and look for new playlists from Stereogum’s editorial team throughout this week here. I wrote this paragraph in my future podcast host voice.

• You can’t find your comment history and some of you may experience login problems today. This is a bug, not a feature (don’t worry old comments are not gone, and the aforementioned devs are working on restoring them). Full disclosure: the promised overhaul of Stereogum’s commenting functionality (editing! uploading! flagging trolls!) was intended for this relaunch, but is not quite ready yet. We’re gonna address any unforeseen issues with the new site and its various plugins, and you’ll get your upgraded commenting capabilities and more in a month or so.

• We’re on TikTok now.

I realize destination websites seem passé in a world of social media. (“Even the word blog sounds a little grandma-y” -Ezra Koenig, 2013.) But you guys never stopped loading stereogum.com in your browsers — even visiting our homepage every day (in this economy?!) — and we want Stereogum to continue as a vital place to discover and discuss the best music, new and old. We remain very grateful because you’re the best commentariat on the web, and we don’t know how to monetize our socials.

If you notice anything amiss please email the tips [at] stereogum.com line, otherwise I might not see your complaint comment. We have some really exciting features planned for this week so stay tuned. And please for the love of god subscribe to our newsletter.

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