Stylus Magazine was an independent online music publication that ran from 2002 to 2007. Over five years, more than 200 writers produced nearly 2,000 pages of album reviews, film criticism, essays, interviews, and columns covering everything from indie rock and hip-hop to electronic music, jazz, metal, and pop.

The site shut down in October 2007. For years after, the only way to read Stylus was through the Wayback Machine — cached pages loading slowly, images missing, links broken. Thousands of reviews and features existed in a kind of digital purgatory: theoretically available, practically forgotten.

I figured I’d solve one of those problems. I’m Todd Burns, Stylus’s former editor-in-chief. In 2002, I asked a friend to help me build a music magazine. That friend hand-coded the whole thing in PHP and it somehow held together for five years. In 2026, I asked a new friend to help me put it all back together. That friend is an AI.✎

The Stylus Magazine Archive is a living archive of a dead publication.

Every page has been recovered from the Wayback Machine and rebuilt in its original design. To make things more interesting, I’ve also set these features up so that the original staffers can come back and annotate their own work — adding notes, corrections, confessions, and commentary to reviews they wrote years ago. So, yes, you can absolutely read a 20+ year-old review of a debut album. And now you can also see a 2026 note in the margin of a review I wrote in 2002 lamenting a decades-old typo.

What else? Every article has a ticking counter showing exactly how old it is — down to the second. Our review of About Schmidt, published January 15, 2003, is currently old. A slightly absurd reminder that these opinions were formed in a specific moment, by a specific person — and that moment was a very long time ago.

There’s a message board composed of the original comments on every article — all pre-loaded, but open for anyone to jump back in. The original Stylus search wasn’t great; now it is. There’s a Reader Mode button on every article for when the 2003 table-based layout gets to be too much. The banner ads are fake. And you can buy any review printed on a t-shirt, if that’s your thing.

In January 2010, nearly three years after Stylus shut its doors, former editor Nick Southall organized a reunion. He rallied the old guard — dozens of former contributors scattered across the Internet — and together they produced The Stylus Decade: a top 100 albums list, a top 100 singles list, and seven essays reflecting on the music of the 2000s. Artwork by Miguel Jiron. It was the last thing ever published under the Stylus name.

The original site, thestylusdecade.com, went offline years ago. I’ve recovered it in full from the Wayback Machine and included it here as a companion piece to the archive.

Thanks! If you’re new to Stylus, or just want to revisit the most-discussed writing, start here. These ten articles generated the most reader comments during the site’s original run. Care to chime in now?

If you were a reader back in the day, good to see you again.

If you’re discovering Stylus for the first time, welcome.

If you wrote for Stylus and you’re reading this: Hi! Log in, annotate your old reviews, cringe at your decades-old prose. Write me a strongly-worded email about my editing talent. I’d love to hear from you. Just don’t be surprised if you get a one word email back: “Received.” IYKYK.