If there were an award for artists with the most consistent bodies of work, Widowspeak would surely be among the winners. Since their 2011 self-titled debut album, their Americana-meets-grunge-meets-shoegaze fundamentals have barely changed; when they do wander, as on 2022’s quasi-concept album Jacket, they always return to their comfort zone – which is exactly where Roses resides. If anything, Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’ seventh album doubles down on classic sounds and imagery. The thumping kick drum and twang that begin “The Hook” have more in common with Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones than Mazzy Star, while its longing for the one who got away could hardly be more ageless. Widowspeak’s reverence for the time-tested…
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A lot of people are making music influenced by trip-hop right now, and a lot of it is very good. But it typically skews towards the sultry meeting point of sexual danger and stoned paranoia with the razor-sharp aesthetic edges of the ’90s and ’00s internet. Bristol’s Tara Clerkin Trio are steeped in their hometown’s trip-hop tradition, but their approach is more folk-rock than the voluptuous blues associated with Tricky or Massive Attack. They make music for autumnal scenes with scarves and coffee rather than a time loop where you’re always ashing the same spliff. Car-stereo stuff like Dido and Beth Orton sometimes comes to mind. It’s almost twee.
Somehow, this approach makes their second album, Somewhere Good, sound slipperier and…
DJ Seinfeld began working on his second album for Ninja Tune right as Mirrors was coming out in 2021, and the album slowly took shape and evolved as his busy touring schedule took him around the world. If This Is It reflects on themes such as letting go, embracing the present, and accepting things as they are. The songs feature many of the hallmarks of Seinfeld’s sound, from effervescent chords to teary-eyed vocal snippets — opener “U Can’t Come Home” even incorporates a voice mail message, though it’s not as dramatic as the one from the previous album’s “These Things Will Come to Be.” Seinfeld’s music has incorporated more guest vocals than samples over the years, so If This Is It feels a bit more collaborative than his past releases, yet it’s still highly personal.
In a genre full of peaceniks, Lakecia Benjamin is a killer. Benjamin, the alto saxophonist, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, has exploded over the course of the 2020’s — both figuratively and musically. Her sound is brash and resonant, yet delicately composed and precisely structured. Benjamin is a focused musician, with all of her artistic choices brimming with intent, and the results are positively thrilling. She has become one of contemporary jazz’s most popular and revered alto saxophonists, and she is just getting started.
Already one of 2026’s best albums, Benjamin’s album We Dream is an outburst of immediacy. Vital and exigent, the album is very much of its time, reflecting the turmoil of the modern world but thankfully also keeping the door open…
From 2019 through 2023, Sharada Shashidhar made memorable vocal contributions to projects by fellow Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra associate Jamael Dean, Carlos Niño, Zeroh, and elder brother Kedar. She truly arrived in 2024 with her own Soft Echoes, a progressive set singled out by BBC DJ Gilles Peterson as one of his ten favorite jazz albums of the year. With this rather different follow-up, Shashidhar reasserts that she is among the more left-field singers to have graduated from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Closer in that regard to Bilal than to José James or Jazzmeia Horn, she gleans from spiritual jazz and classical Indian music, slightly favors non-lexical vocables over lyrics, and demonstrates more than ever here that she is plugged…
Zoh Amba has been making waves recently as a free jazz saxophonist in the same vein as Peter Brötzmann or Albert Ayler. With a reputation built on incendiary live performance, a list of high-profile collaborators, and a handful of critically acclaimed albums (the first of which, O, Sun, was produced by fellow avant-garde traveller John Zorn), you would be forgiven for expecting a certain kind of career trajectory, one that features heavily in the pages of The Wire and on the stages of the most outré jazz festivals. But Amba has other ideas. They are, in baseball parlance, a genuine two-way player, someone who excels equally in two disciplines that are so different that at first there appears to be no link between them.
The other string to Amba’s bow…
Originally from Northern California, singer and songwriter Haylie Davis dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles in 2019 to focus on music. Her affection for lyricists like Gram Parsons and Joni Mitchell as well as the soft, warm sounds of ’70s singer/songwriters and the Laurel Canyon movement soon resulted in collaborations with acts like Drugdealer, Sylvie, and Sam Burton under the solo moniker Lady Apple Tree. She eventually left that persona behind and used her own name to record her solo debut album with associates including Burton. The resulting Wandering Star was tracked partly at Los Angeles’ famed Valentine Recording Studios (Bing Crosby, the Beach Boys, Lana Del Rey) and partly at Love Magnet, the Highland Park garage studio of…
After making their Dualtone label debut with 2024’s Easy Company, Futurebirds return with their sixth album and first double-length outing, Far Out Country. It reunites the alternative country-rock group with Easy Company producer Brad Cook as well as contributors like pedal steel guitarist (and former member) Dennis Love and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. As for the band proper, it features the lineup of Daniel Womack, Carter King, and Thomas Johnson — their three rotating singer/songwriters — along with the returning rhythm section of Brannen Miles and Tom Myers. Perhaps to a higher degree than on prior releases, it showcases the individual perspectives of each songwriter, with personal songs inspired by things like relationships, first-time…
What began as a rather bizarre concept has fully blossomed, seven chapters in. Arguably, The Claudettes are the only band to successfully meld soul, rock, punk, and cabaret into an intoxicating stew. The juxtaposition of the two words in the title of Garage Glamour sums it up as succinctly as possible. The Claudettes take the raw, unabashed grit of rock n’ roll with a punkish flair, and combine it with a glitzy club vibe and even shady noir songs, seemingly right out of a soundtrack. In fact, Johnny Iguana, the band’s composer/pianist, is the co-composer of the original score of the Emmy-winning FX/Hulu series The Bear. His co-creator of that score, JQ, joined him to produce two tracks on this album, and Grammy-winning…
This debut record by one-half of prodigious London duo Let’s Eat Grandma plays like an exercise in catharsis, especially after the pair’s last album, 2022’s Two Ribbons, was so palpably shrouded in grief. Rosa Walton’s casual forays into working by herself have already resulted in an unlikely streaming hit, ‘I Really Want to Stay at Your House’, via the soundtrack of videogame Cyberpunk 2077, and have now bloomed into a full-length album that sparkles with the sense of what it is to have a good time.
This is the kind of ’80s revival pop that seems to be slowly edging its way back into fashion, as it tends to cyclically; opener ‘Heart to Heartbreak’ is a glittering paean to the freedom of single life and, like most of the songs here, is…
Modest Mouse has long been a band of wild contrasts and combinations that shouldn’t work, but do. Centered around the emotionally and cerebrally unfiltered character of Isaac Brock’s songwriting, the sound of this longrunning Pacific Northwestern indie group often finds tormented yelps delivering accidentally profound philosophical truths, while the musical backing waffles between chaotic noise and blissfully melodic sweetness. The eighth studio album from Modest Mouse, An Eraser and a Maze, comes thirty three years into their practice of organizing these unruly feelings and sounds, five years after their last album, 2021’s pop-forward The Golden Casket, and four years after the death of drummer and founding member Jeremiah Green.
BBE Music’s celebrated J Jazz compilation series reaches its fifth and final volume in early 2026, culminating in a track list that maintains the exceptionally high standard first set with volume one back in 2018.
This final volume features a selection of tracks that is as diverse as it is deep, reflecting the rich and varied Japanese jazz scene that spanned from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, a golden era of innovation and creativity. J Jazz volume 5 sees compilers Tony Higgins and Mike Peden dig ever deeper into their respective record collections to reveal tracks that encompass myriad styles including white hot jazz funk fusion from Toshiyuki Honda (Eastern Legacy) and Mikio Masuda (Sonic Barrier), super rare ethnic jazz…
Old Crow Medicine Show release their new record Union Made with Hartland Records via Firebird Music. The album finds the two-time Grammy-winning string band reflecting upon the people, places, and stories of a nation-state on the brink of its 250th birthday. It was inspired by the band’s nearly 30-year trek from the street corners of Western North Carolina to the nation’s most celebrated stages. They say the album is a love letter to the America that was, the America that is, and the America that could be. The band has spent more than a quarter century blending the vernacular traditions of old-school America, including mountain music, bluegrass, old-time, and folk, into modern songs that continue to resonate across generations and geographies.
One of the more enigmatic bands of the classic 4AD era, Swallow was formed by Louise Trehy and Mike Mason, who met in early 90’s Camberwell, London. both were deeply involved with the independent music scene of the time; Louise co-founded Setanta Records (home of The Divine Comedy, Edwyn Collins and Into Paradise with whom Mike would occasionally play), and Mike traversed between bike courier, video director, and lighting designer for Spacemen 3, Slowdive, Spiritualized, Curve and Chapterhouse. Prompted by Louise, they started writing songs together, drawing inspiration from a healthy mix of sources: CAN, noise, post-punk, and American forces of nature like Captain Beefheart and Butthole Surfers. Their first songs quickly surfaced and were recorded…
Last year, the Red Clay Strays found themselves fully embraced by the country-music establishment, winning the CMA Award for Vocal Group of the Year. Chalk up their Nashville acceptance to the band’s Mobile, Alabama, roots, maybe, or the Southern drawl of chiseled lead singer Brandon Coleman. But on Grateful, the Strays’ third album, they reveal themselves to be not country’s next great group, but a bona fide rock & roll band. And a God-fearing one at that.
Reuniting with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb, who oversaw the six-piece’s 2024 effort, Made by These Moments, the Strays deliver an urgent, timely record that stands toe to toe with anything coming out of the rock world. There are slippery slide-guitar jams about…
The extremely personal nature of this album is evident in the introduction to the song “Canopies.” What begins as a gentle prelude is actually a moment captured on a family trip to Houston, where Azniv Korkejian (AKA Bedouine) discreetly recorded a conversation with her mother and later wove it into the song’s opening bars. The track becomes a vessel for a story her mother once carried alone, her childhood spent in an orphanage, placed there by her own mother as a way to escape an abusive father. Nearby, in those years, her mother would sing into the air as if sending a message across distance, feeling her daughter’s presence in the breeze. The line she remembers, “the waves of Beirut’s beaches flutter, and how sweetly they blow my darling’s…
To say that history looms over Horror is just another way of saying that it’s a Mekons record. The globally scattered collective, which originally convened in Leeds, England, in the late 1970s, has long drawn lines connecting the warmongers of our time to the dominant creeps of centuries past. The first words they sing on Horror depict the departure on Christmas 1654 of the frigate Gloucester. Tasked with vanquishing Spanish control of the West Indies, the warship gave up and settled for conquering Jamaica. Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher, pick your present villain — they all work for the same company.
Horror, released in April 2025, maneuvers in vintage Mekons fashion between the planting season of our discontent and the present,…
When Slift announced their new, fourth album, they promised it’ll contain way shorter tracks than before, which felt tantamount to Usain Bolt promising to cut his own legs off. Since the Frenchmen went surprisingly viral via a KEXP live session during the pandemic, they’ve specialised in increasingly widescreen space rock, pulling metal, krautrock and even jazz into their heady galaxy, up to 15 minutes at a time.
Their vastness has become key to their identity, particularly during the many, many live shows they play each year, where they add hallucinogenic video to the mix and convey the same delirium as the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fantasia’s opening title track is the only song with a run-time that could have…
The ninth studio album from the alt-rock/folk outfit Deer Tick is inspired by their hometown of Providence, RI. The group dug into the city’s shady past and crafted musical tales based on gangsters, religion and the immigrant experience, as the wide-ranging record finds Deer Tick at their most creative. The band (singer/guitarist John McCauley, guitarist/singer Ian O’Neil, drummer/singer Dennis Ryan, and bassist Christopher Ryan) self-produced their album for the first time in their career, and that was key to the musical freedom found on Coin-O-Matic. The title itself comes from a cigarette-vending-machine company that served as the headquarters of Raymond Patriarca, a crime boss from Providence, setting the tone.
The stout “Dog Years” opens with acoustic…
A unique and brilliant collaboration between the legendary dub/reggae pioneer and German electronic production duo Mouse on Mars (aka Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma). Lee “Scratch” Perry’s last ever official album project before his passing in 2019. Recorded in 3 days at Mouse on Mars’ Paraverse Studio in Berlin in 2019.
Lee, Jan and Andi conducted a revolving cast of musicians and collaborators throughout the complex’s different rooms and spaces.
Spatial, No Problem. finds the artists breaking new ground – the one thing Lee was sure of was that this shouldn’t be just another reggae album. It covers everything from krautrock, ambient, dub, jazz, New Orleans brass and much more.
“We hardly spoke about what we were doing.