Crack: Bristol's Independent Music and Culture Magazine

Crack is a monthly independent music and culture magazine founded in Bristol in 2009. Published free of charge on newsprint and distributed across the United Kingdom and continental Europe, it has grown from a bedroom project run by two young founders into one of the most influential voices in contemporary underground music journalism. With cover stars ranging from Björk, MF Doom and FKA Twigs to Thom Yorke, Gorillaz and André 3000, the magazine has built an international reputation for championing emerging artists and visual culture while remaining rooted in its home city of Bristol.

History and Founding

Crack was founded in 2009 by graphic designer Jake Applebee and journalism graduate Thomas Frost. The two launched the magazine in the aftermath of the late-2000s recession with almost no money behind them. In later interviews, Applebee described the early years candidly: the founders lived with their parents and took on waiting and bar work in the evenings to keep the project alive, and conditions stayed difficult for at least two years before the title began to find its footing.

The magazine began life on a modest scale, appearing bi-monthly in its earliest incarnation with a claimed readership of around 30,000. Early distribution figures cited by the magazine itself showed some 9,000 copies going out in Bristol, 1,000 in Cardiff and a further 2,000 in London, supported by a developing website. Even in those formative days, the calibre of artists featured was strikingly high: early issues carried features on acts such as LCD Soundsystem, Four Tet, Mystery Jets, Foals, Laura Marling and Gilles Peterson, alongside the work of illustrators including Stanley Donwood. That combination of serious music writing and strong visual design became the title's defining characteristic.

Editorial Identity and Content

Crack is published monthly on newsprint, a deliberate aesthetic choice that sets it apart from the glossy mainstream music press. The magazine describes itself as an independent music and culture title aimed at a culturally engaged, curious readership, and its pages blend long-form interviews, photo shoots, reviews and features on art, fashion and film. The editorial team has worked with celebrated photographers including Emmanuel Olunkwa, Clementine Schneidermann and Elliot Kennedy, while art directors such as Ade Udoma have given the publication a distinctive visual identity.

Rather than chasing the chart-driven news cycle, Crack has consistently used its pages to spotlight underground and up-and-coming artists, often giving them their first major magazine coverage. The title's independence — it is published by Crack Industries Ltd — has allowed it to take risks on unconventional covers and challenging subject matter, and the Guardian featured the magazine in a 2014 survey of the "free-thinking little magazines making a big noise" in British publishing.

Cover Stars and Interviews

The roll call of artists to have appeared on the cover of Crack is among the most impressive of any independent music magazine. Cover stars have included Björk, MF Doom, Lil Yachty, FKA Twigs, Gorillaz, Queens of the Stone Age, Vegyn, Oklou, Thundercat, André 3000, Clairo, Oneohtrix Point Never and Flying Lotus. Later issues added further heavyweight names such as Adrienne Lenker, Fontaines D.C. and PJ Harvey.

A notable editorial coup came in 2012, when the magazine secured what was reported as the first independent music magazine interview with the Los Angeles producer Flying Lotus, timed to the release of his fourth studio album Until the Quiet Comes. Such interviews helped establish Crack as a title that serious artists would choose for in-depth, visually ambitious coverage rather than the standard promotional round. The magazine marked its 100th issue in May 2019 with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke on the cover, a milestone that underlined how far the bedroom project had come.

Behind the Shoots

Crack's photographic shoots have become the stuff of publishing lore among its contributors. The magazine's team have described the shoot with the late MF Doom as a particularly fraught assignment: they were reportedly told they had five minutes with the masked rapper and had to build a studio in the kitchen of his recording studio, somehow capturing the shot before he could pull the plug. Other celebrated shoots include an A$AP Ferg session with fashion icon Dapper Dan in Harlem, which the magazine's art director singled out as a particular achievement for a small independent title founded in Bristol, and an early Christine and the Queens cover shoot remembered for its rawness.

The decade of standout imagery was celebrated in a book published to mark the magazine's tenth anniversary in 2019, reproducing highlights from its archive in a high-quality compendium. The book collected the magazine's most memorable photography and told the behind-the-scenes story of how a tiny Bristol title built a visual identity that rivalled anything in the mainstream press.

European Expansion

Having consolidated its position in Britain, Crack began to expand internationally in the mid-2010s. In 2015 the magazine launched a Berlin edition, acknowledging the German capital's central place in European electronic music and club culture. Two years later, in 2017, it followed with an Amsterdam edition. The international editions carried the title's editorial approach into new markets while remaining tied to the Bristol operation, and the magazine today is described as the largest independent free monthly magazine in Europe.

The expansion reflected the magazine's broader ambition: to build a genuinely pan-European cultural platform rather than remaining a local listings title. Its September 2024 issue — featuring artists such as Knocked Loose, Dar Disku, the documentarian Adam Curtis and the Bristol collective Mermaid Chunky — demonstrated the continued mix of British and international coverage that defines the brand.

Simple Things Festival

Beyond publishing, the team behind Crack are deeply involved in Bristol's live music scene. They curate the Simple Things Festival in their home city, a multi-venue event that has become a fixture of the UK music calendar. The festival's programming mirrors the magazine's editorial taste: adventurous, wide-ranging and weighted towards new and underground acts, staged across some of Bristol's most distinctive venues. The curation role has given the magazine a year-round presence in the city's cultural life and a direct relationship with the artists it covers.

CC Co and Diversification

In 2021 the Crack team launched CC Co, a creative agency also known as the Crack Creative Company. The agency was led by the magazine's head of content Duncan Harrison alongside company directors Luke Sutton and Jake Applebee. The move formalised work the team had increasingly been doing for brands and cultural institutions, leveraging the editorial expertise and visual identity built up over a decade in publishing.

The agency sits alongside a growing family of Crack-branded ventures. The team also operate a film production company and the digital platform crackaud.io, on which new mixes are posted every day, extending the magazine's curatorial role into the streaming space. Diversification of this kind has become essential for independent publishers, and Crack's moves into events, agency work and digital platforms show how a print title can build a sustainable cultural business without compromising its editorial independence.

The Christmas Steps Pub

One of the magazine's more unusual ventures is its Bristol home, The Christmas Steps, a historic pub in central Bristol whose building dates to the 1600s. The venue operates as the magazine's social headquarters, serving food and drink alongside what has been described as a free Crack Magazine jukebox, piping a cutting-edge soundtrack to punters' nights out. The pub hosted the magazine's 15th birthday party in September 2024 — a free all-dayer held on 21 September with a surprise line-up of DJ sets and live performances from four former cover stars, returning the title to where it all started.

Distribution and the Website

Crack's free-distribution model is central to its identity. The magazine is handed out in cultural venues, record shops, bars and public spaces across Britain and continental Europe, with the website crackmagazine.net extending its reach online. Being free to pick up has been a deliberate editorial as well as commercial choice: it removes the barrier to discovery and puts the title in the hands of readers who might never buy a music magazine, while advertising and brand partnerships fund the operation. The model has proven resilient where many paid music titles have struggled, and Crack is now widely cited as the largest independent free monthly in Europe.

Legacy

From its origins as a recession-era bedroom project, Crack has become one of the decade's defining independent music publications. It proved that a small, design-led, free magazine could compete for the biggest names in music on editorial merit alone, and it built a template — festival, creative agency, digital platform, cultural venue — for how an independent publisher can survive in the twenty-first century. Still based in Bristol, and still publishing monthly on newsprint, it remains the title's own clearest argument that independence, in both senses, works.