Last week, I was at the grocery story perusing the magazine rack and in between picking up Martha Stewart Weddings (research for the Rock n’ Roll Bride magazine) and reading a Marilyn Manson interview in Revolver (it’s really good, by the way), this cover of SPIN caught my attention.

The last time I bought SPIN was somewhere close to 10 years ago but I couldn’t take my eyes off this cover. Sleigh Bells are everywhere at the moment (and Alexis Krauss is gorgeous) but there was something else that made it stand out — the lack of jarring, huge headlines and the matte paper used for the cover.

SPIN, now a bimonthly publication, has undergone a massive redesign. Of the retooling, SPIN says, “In the many discussions about how to best enable this magazine to have a long, prosperous — or any — future, it became impossible to ignore the past. Not just this magazine’s past, but the very idea of what magazines have meant, of what we want to read in them, and why.” They’ve made a number of changes inside that reminds us of the music magazines we used to love including, in their words, “deep, long-view critical thinking and cultural analysis that’s so often lacking today.”

The “new” look is intentional and a nod to the original SPIN magazine and dare I say, very now. For better or worse, many of the design elements remind me of an Urban Outfitters catalog. But in a way, this lo-fi approach stands out amongst the slick redesigns of many other freshened up periodicals.

Readers: Have you picked up the new SPIN and what do you think overall?