Darren Hayman is reissuing ‘The Violence’, the sprawling double album he regards as the most ambitious work of his 30-year career. Originally released through Fortuna POP! in 2012 and recorded with his 16-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it returns with previously unreleased songs and demos folded into the running order.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, if she floats or drowns” wrote Darren Hayman on Hefner’s ‘The Sad Witch’, a decade later he’s returning to the subject for The Violence, a concept album based around seventeenth century Essex witch trials and the English Civil war.
As concepts go it’s not as odd a choice as you might think. Leaving aside allegorical links to the present day, intended or otherwise…
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…Alex Amen, at 26 years old, appears like a fresh-faced 1970s James Taylor. He is described by his record label ATO as “an artist untethered from time and place”. Growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, he moved to California to attend film school, before dropping out to join a commune. He then spent three and a half years on Vashon, an island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, living an outdoorsy, back-to-nature lifestyle that weighs heavily in his music. As he absorbed his environment and honed his musical skills, he released his first batch of solo recordings, The Zorthian Tapes, in 2024. He now lives between Texas, California and New York, and Sun of Amen is his first full-length album.
‘Diamonds’, the first track, is described as…
Fischer-Z found success across Europe and sold more than two million albums and collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Steve Cropper and Dexys Midnight Runners’ horn section. Band main man John Watts has released 26 albums and played around 4,000 concerts so far.
Fischer-Z continue to release brand new music and tour all over the world and celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2026. The celebrations begin with this expanded 3CD deluxe digipak which collects their first three albums; World Salad (1979), Going Deaf for a Living (1980) and Red Skies Over Paradise (1981), originally released on United Artists and Liberty. This expanded collection is completed by a selection of bonus tracks from each album’s original release.
Kronstad 23 return with Dødehavet, the Norwegian quartet’s third album and first release on Batov Records. Continuing their instinctive, analogue-led approach, the record sits between cinematic jazz and psychedelic rock, threaded with Scandinavian folk and wider global influences. Recorded live to tape with minimal preparation and no modern studio intervention, Dødehavet captures a band working on feel, interaction and momentum rather than polish or precision.
Despite living at opposite ends of Norway, old friends Øyvind Arnodd Vie Berg (keys), Alexander Tøsdal Tveit (guitar, sitar), Eirik Rømcke (bass) and Hans Christian Dalgaard (drums, percussion) conceived the album almost casually, sketching the idea of a reunion over a drink…
Maria is the debut long-player by London-based Brazilian bassist and composer Moyses Dos Santos. Originally from Sao Paolo, he emigrated to the U.K. in the late 2000s, where he’s made a name as a first-call session and concert musician who has worked with many artists, including Omar, Nile Rodgers, and Janelle Monáe. The album’s flavor is rooted in the styles and rhythms of northeastern Brazil filtered through 21st century British jazz, funk, and soul. Among the set’s many contributors are Azymuth’s keyboard ace Kiko Continentino, arranger Arthur Verocai, trumpeter Theo Croker, vocalist Lynda Dawn, Incognito drummer Francesco Mendolia, pianist Chris Eldred, and many others. The album is titled after Dos Santos’ mother, and given that root connection,…
The Susto Stringband was born in 2022 when Susto frontman Justin Osborne relocated to Asheville, NC and met some of the key players of the Asheville bluegrass scene at an open mic night. The solidified lineup includes Clint Roberts and Jackson Grimm of Holler Choir, Nat Copeland, Helena Rose and Joey Brown, and on this volume, they’ve added the help of friends like Morgan Wade, Joshua Hedley and Madeline Dierauf.
Starting with an acapella version of Ralph Stanley’s ‘Gloryland’ leads you to expect something out of the ordinary. So, when ‘Diamond’s Icaro’ turns out to be paint-by-number bluegrass, it’s all a bit of a disappointment. The album is sold as a set of “Susto favourites” reworked in a bluegrass style, but listening back to the original of…
Frankie Archer combines traditional balladry with very contemporary-sounding electronica. This idea in itself isn’t new, but Archer’s fresh approach and sure hand – and, most importantly, her willingness to experiment – result in a sound that is unlike anyone else. Her first two releases, the EPs Never So Red (2023) and Pressure and Persuasion (2024), seemed like fully-formed, finely-cut gems, but debut album The Dance of Death, which was co-produced by Kylie Minogue collaborator Guy Massey, sees her take her artistry to new levels. As the title suggests, this is a record built around the ideas of death and mortality, but it is anything but one-dimensionally depressing.
The way the album quietly foregrounds theme and structure without compromising on…
London’s Shannen SP has had an ear for cutting edge club sounds since her secondary school days, when she developed a penchant for bass at DMZ nights and Club Exodus in Leeds. In the late 2010s, her NTS residency and multidisciplinary Ø party at Corsica Studios with Kode9 highlighted African diasporic genres from kuduro to gqom, bringing on guests like Nazar and DJ Lag. On Mzansi Bass, her latest curatorial effort for Colombian label TraTraTrax, Shannen SP assembles a team of South African producers innovating on local genres like 3-step, gqom, and amapiano. From veterans like DJ Lag to newcomers like Jay Music, the artists featured here share a murky minimalism that still imparts an irresistible groove, filling out the spaces between the four-on-the-floor.
Cloud Machines is the extraordinary debut collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, the Baltimore avant-garde institution and band leader behind High Zero Festival, the Red Room collective, Geodesic Gnome, and radical sonic concepts like Spectral Relay (a bespoke signal processing architecture) and Relabi (a conceptual genre defined by a Rorschach-blot pulse). After more than one hundred combined years of this pair pushing the boundaries of what music can be and where it can come from, these two iconoclasts have delivered something genuinely unexpected: an oddly sweet electronic opus that’s as immediately engaging as it is a series of delicious puzzles. When two of experimental music’s most…
With Vesper, Sean Shibe continues his collaboration with the Pentatone through a program entirely devoted to contemporary music. Released in 2026, the recording brings together works by Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, and James Dillon, three composers with no direct ties to the guitar, yet whose writing highlights some of its most unexpected possibilities. The unifying thread lies less in any clear stylistic or aesthetic coherence than in an exploration of contrasting sonic textures. Adès’s Forgotten Dances, which open the album, revisit the model of the Baroque suite while subjecting it to modern distortions. Shibe approaches them with a highly controlled sense of articulation, serving the rhythmic complexity of the works, but his reading, at times…
As the old philosophical question goes, “If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?” That query feels newly relevant in the age of modern music-making.
We live in a world where anyone can hear virtually any song ever recorded, anytime, anywhere (provided there’s an internet connection). Today’s artist isn’t just competing with peers for attention, but with the entire history of recorded sound. The forest is so dense with trees that it becomes impossible to hear anything at all.
That context frames the central question Mike Richmond raises in the press notes for his first solo record: why bother making music? As the former Love Tractor guitarist puts it, “Why am I writing these songs? Is anyone going to care? I’m an old guy who played in a pretty…
On his third LP, Tender Country, Thomas Csorba delves into the softer side of country music, eschewing rowdy barroom burners in favor of a more laid-back, emotional connection to life. The album’s title is fitting, considering the tenderness woven throughout these songs. That’s not to say Csorba is above singing a good drinking song, as evidenced by “Homemade Margaritas.” Only his version involves moving out to the patio and sharing drinks over a citronella candle, with one ear tuned to the sleeping baby inside.
Across ten subdued tracks, Csorba explores love, family, and the everyday emotions of life. Carried by fiddle and guitars, “Lived In” is a perfect example. Csorba describes an ordinary house, with glitter worked into the floorboards…
Let’s recite five famous blues clubs, present and past – Checkerboard Lounge, Buddy Guy’s Legends, Kingston Mines, Blue Door Cafe, and Theresa’s Lounge. The educated guess is that you’ve heard of at least four of them.
Surprisingly, our subject club, the long shuttered Theresa’s Lounge, which is probably one of the best-known of the five, has had the fewest live recordings, only one: that of Junior Wells Live at Theresa’s (1975). Yet, the storied club was where so many legends cut their teeth.
The basement club was the haven of legends – Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, Earl Hooker, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Hound Dog Taylor, Otis Rush, Magic Slim, Little Walter, Otis Spann, and countless…
…featuring 8 bonus tracks including rare studio recordings + iconic live performances.
Kaleo (a Hawaiian word for “the sound”), are a group of talented young rock/blues musicians from (where else would you expect?) Mosfellsbaer, outside Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik, and only recently relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2015.
Having riled up a significant following in their home country as well amassing a horde of streams on Spotify, the band signed with Atlantic Records, and now we have their first complete gift to American listeners.
A/B sounds like a greatest hits album. In a way it kind of is, as it draws from Kaleo’s Icelandic self-titled debut and the handful of singles that have been released in America.
By his own impeccable standards, The Red Castle was one of the most unguarded releases of John Southworth‘s career. A spiritual ramble through grief and wonder, its hybrid of ancient and modern instrumentation felt unexpectedly poignant and immersive. Following the death of his father, it also marked a life chapter and presented a subsequent threshold to somewhere new.
Rain from the East arrives just seven months later and amplifies, both figuratively and literally, Southworth’s signature style in surprising ways. It’s a confident album, compact in its arrangements, but played with ferocity and intention. Like much of his best work, it plucks lesser-heard elements from esoteric subgenres and shakes them into a cocktail only he can serve.
With Spring Flood, Mariam Wallentin and Vestnorsk Jazzensemble present a new collective work in which improvisation, poetry, and vivid imagery merge into a living, organic expression.
The album originates from Wallentin’s stay in Basel in the spring of 2023. There, with the Rhine as a constant sonic backdrop, a series of diary notes began to take shape. As Mariam recalls: “The Rhine flowed and murmured day and night outside the hotel, and the riverbank was covered with small flowers and trees already in bloom. And I encountered spring in a new place. I saw the green breaking through and the water rushing along, accompanied by entirely different scents and temperaments than at home. The familiar and the unknown hand in hand.
Chrysalis Records has launched its Chrysalis Global imprint with an instrumental debut, Guitari Baro (Guitar Conversations), led by a Mande griot trio. The trio pairs master balafonist Lassana Diabaté, with guitarists Gaoussou Kouyaté and Kerfala Diabaté. It is a rare dialogue between balafon and guitar by hereditary West African jali musicians. Notably, this is a pan-African exchange linking Malian tradition and Guinean guitar work. The material draws on Mande idioms while nodding to jazz, Congolese rumba, rock, Guinean dance bands, and Cuban music.
… Co-produced by Dudu Sarr, Lucy Durán and Pape Armand Boye, and recorded in a single session in Dakar, guitarists Kouyaté and Diabaté are brilliantly underpinned by the subtle…
Sometimes, you just have to let things go and while it can be uncomfortable, it can also be incredibly liberating – and the Embrace boys are championing this philosophy superbly in Avalanche, their ninth studio album and their first release in four years. When you stop anticipating the big moments and let it flow, the need to have your life figured out swiftly fades away. It becomes about the small things – the ones you’d otherwise miss. The name of the album is a metaphor for the force of feeling when the little moments all snowball together and how it’s important to celebrate those smaller imperfect moments of life as opposed to being laser focused on the ‘big picture’. It was conceived on the idea that life doesn’t pause for permission; it keeps on…
Bruce Springsteen has been opening his shows with a prayer. He and the E Street Band walk onstage quietly. He steps to the mic as they atmospherically play behind him. Before a single song is performed he simply speaks to the audience. “We begin the night with a prayer for our men and women in service overseas. We pray for an end to this conflict and for their safe return,” he begins, opening with a sentiment most anyone should be able to agree with. It continues: “The E Street Band is here tonight in celebration and defense of the American ideals and values that have sustained our country for 250 years. We are here to call upon the righteous power of art and music and rock ‘n’ roll in these dangerous times.” Then, he gets a little more pointed: “Our…
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band delivered nearly three hours of righteous and rocking music — and a tip for the summer of 2026 — at the group’s Tuesday, May 5 show at the UBS Arena in Elmont, New York. “Don’t go to the beach and play with any seashells,” said Springsteen, referencing the indictment of former FBI head James Comey for a social media post of seashells forming the numbers “86 47.”
The advice came during Springsteen’s This Is Happening Now speech, where the transgressions of the Trump administration is cited as the opening chords of “My City of Ruins” is played. “Our justice department has completely abdicated its independence and it takes its marching orders directly from corrupt White House,”…