Iggy Pop performs at SXSW. Will new album be his last?

Singer Iggy Pop took the stage again recently at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Conference, performing songs from his new album, “Post Pop Depression.” 

Pop, who is likely best known as the lead singer of the punk band the Stooges, performed at the festival with a band whose members included musicians from Arctic Monkeys, Chavez, and Queens of the Stone Age. The album “Post” is now available. 

Critics who saw Pop’s performance at SXSW were mostly impressed by the show. 

“It was Iggy Pop’s show all the way. He sang with full-throated conviction, utterly hard-nosed within the songs but grinning and thankful between them,” New York Times writer Jon Pareles wrote, while Guardian writers Alex Needham and Lanre Bakare found that “Pop is on magnificent form, supplying two hours of pulverising magic.” 

Pop said earlier this year that the album “Post” could be his final work, a statement that was lamented by some music critics who feel the artist is still on top of his game. “The idea of Pop retiring is a shame, as his youthful exuberance continues to shine even half a century after he first started messing around with some kids with a penchant for noise in Detroit,” Vulture writer Hilary Hughes wrote.

Pop’s band the Stooges released their first self-titled studio album in 1969 and are often credited with helping popularize punk rock. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010. 

Pop’s solo work has also been acclaimed. In between the Stooges’ original work in the 1970s and their new work beginning in the 2000s, Pop released such albums as “The Idiot,” which the musician worked on with David Bowie, and “Lust for Life,” which was also well-received. 

Rolling Stone named Pop’s song “Lust for Life” as one of the 500 best tracks ever recorded. 

Pop has remained prolific, releasing at least three solo albums a decade since 1977’s “The Idiot.” 

And whether it is his final work or not, “Post Pop Depression” is now receiving mostly positive reviews. Boston Globe writer Maura Johnston wrote that the album shows the “assertion and continuation of his decades-long legacy,” while Pitchfork writer Stuart Berman found that “Post” “recaptures the avant-rock frisson of his early collaborations with David Bowie.” 

Andy Gill of The Independent wrote that “it’s a relief to find [Pop] returning to hard rock music” after experimenting with other genres in recent works like “Préliminaires” and that it’s “an album by turns terse, sinuous and playful.”