20.09.24
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To celebrate 15 years of Crack Magazine — and everyone who’s made us everything we’ve grown to be — we’re reviving our much-loved crossword with a special, one-off anniversary edition

If you’re coming to our birthday party tomorrow, you already know: Crack Magazine is turning 15. 

Crack Magazine started in a bedroom in Bristol in 2009. Since then, it’s transcended those humble origins to become the most widely read free music monthly in the UK with a truly global digital audience – all this, in spite of an increasingly hostile publishing climate that has seen countless magazines, many of whom served as original inspiration for our earliest issues, sputter and fade. Crack Magazine has not only endured, it has managed to grow – and, 15 years later, stands as one of the last of truly independent voices in music journalism. We go on about that because it really matters. 

What makes Crack so special is simple. The people: our team, our collaborators, our writers, the artists who’ve trusted us, and, above all, our readers and supporters.

So, to say thanks, we’re bringing back a much-loved (and according to some of you, a much-missed) print feature. Welcome to a special, one-off edition of the Crack Crossword – in digital for the first time. Don’t say we don’t treat you. Compiled by our editor-in-chief, Louise Brailey, it keys into the last 15 years, through our lens.

We’ll see you tomorrow to blow off some much needed steam with a top secret line-up of four former Crack cover stars at our Bristol home, The Christmas Steps. Tickets are available for free on a waiting list here. 

We’ll see you there. And here’s to the next 15.