Neapolitan duo Nu Genea have evolved from producing cosmic house music to making a much more organic, vintage-sounding blend of disco, funk, and boogie which incorporates global influences including Mediterranean pop, MPB, and Afrobeat. They released an album with pioneering Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen in 2016, and both of their subsequent LPs, 2018’s Nuova Napoli and 2022’s Bar Mediterraneo, have been in demand, selling out multiple pressings.
People of the Moon, Nu Genea’s 2026 effort, expands their scope, with a greater amount of guest musicians and songs sung in five languages, yet it also feels like the group is continually refining their sound and writing catchier material. The two songs featuring Spanish…
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The soulless age of the Hollywood blockbuster, rife with CGI and A.I., has left viewers nostalgic for the golden age of cinema, when a widescreen epic meant months of set building and thousands of extras, but a small, intimate picture with a compelling story could still become a runaway smash. Ori Kaplan & Lihu Melamed‘s Reverie recalls the film scores of this era, focusing on the timbres of the 1960s and ’70s while unfolding like a reel of greatest themes. At various junctures, one may think of a love story, a car chase, or a desert crossing; the high drama of a western, the tension of a spy film, or even the snappy banter of a Blaxploitation flick. The cover implies a weirdness, a readiness to experiment, the courage to walk deep into a haunted glade, well…
Booker Stardrum and Evan Shornstein’s new album begins by depositing you into a new world. “OOPS!,” the title track and opener, kicks off immediately, with monolithic bass and shuffling drums swarmed by an army of insect-like blips and bleeps. You might need a moment to orient yourself, as piano notes hang in the air and keyboard tones settle like mist on a pond; it’s as though your eyes are adjusting, taking in the contours of the twinkling, alien landscape. The drums and shaker keep their mechanized pace, but the electronics constantly brighten and fade like flowers blooming in time lapse. When the song ends after a brisk two minutes, it feels like you’ve walked many miles without realizing it, distracted by the beautiful sensory overload.
With his playful, nature-bound alter ego, Art Feynman, Luke Temple has so far offered an unpredictable, experimental patchwork of folktronica, Krautrock inspirations, global rhythms, Talking Heads-inspired art pop / rock, environmental field recordings, themes relating to the collective consciousness, and so on.
His fourth Art Feynman album, Orphans, surprises again with a 13-track set of mostly instrumentals. While intended as background music, this is Luke Temple after all, and the songs nevertheless hold an allure all their own. The solo LP starts off with a pair of simple, sparse recordings made up of understated yet bittersweet keyboard melodies over sustained chords, and components like time-keeping bass, nature sounds,…
Few bands from the original psychedelic era can return nearly six decades later with a new studio album that feels driven by artistic curiosity rather than nostalgia. Strawberry Alarm Clock accomplishes exactly that with Where’s One?, an album that embraces the group’s unmistakable musical identity while continuing to expand its creative boundaries.
The opening track, “Feel The Love,” immediately recalls the band’s signature sound. Rich vocal harmonies, swirling organ, flute, and electric sitar evoke the colorful spirit of late-’60s psychedelia without sounding like a museum piece. However, the album quickly makes it clear that revisiting the past is not its primary objective. “Monsters” introduces a darker…
A sonic essay on memory, The Rest Is My Ghost defers from any climax; it offers caution and meditation, but not release. This is by careful design – this soundscape doesn’t want to be enrapturing, in any typical sense. It sits nicely with other such ambient drone works like Richard Skelton’s Ivystrung and Lowercase Noises’ This Is for Our Sins.
There is something oceanic about the whole album – organ-esque glitches on ‘Eclosion’ don’t build up as much as they accumulate, like sediment on a beach. Every section seeks to immerse, like in ‘Sodium Vapour Halo’, which tumbles out without much fanfare, its mournful synth line dragged down and out in a persistent low-end churn.
Everything in the album sounds shrouded,…
Donald Fagen’s Kamakiriad would be notable if only for the fact the album marks a full-on reunion of the two principal Steely Dan staples more than a decade after they splintered. For all the creative sparks and thrilling musicianship that result from the long-awaited regrouping of Fagen and Walter Becker, the 1993 record remains significant for many other reasons — from the hopeful narrative to the sharp playing, adventurous arrangements, and crisp production. More than 30 years later, those facets coalesce like never before on this reference-quality reissue.
Sourced from the original masters, mastered by engineer Rob LoVerde, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents the Grammy-nominated Kamakiriad with expansive…
…newly mastered by Matt Colon at Metropolis Studios (under the supervision of Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes) and features the original track list alongside a curated selection of B-sides and rarities.
Primal Scream found themselves in danger of losing their hip audience in the wake of their misconceived trad-rock record, Give Out But Don’t Give Up. As a reaction, they returned to the genre-bending, electronic dance-rock of the seminal Screamadelica for Give Out‘s follow-up, Vanishing Point. Instead of recycling the dazzlingly bright neo-psychedelia of Screamadelica, Primal Scream reaches deep into cavernous dub and ’60s pop. Vanishing Point is a dark, trippy album, filled with mind-bending rhythms and cinematic flourishes.
On Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s debut album, the London art-rock sextet live up to the compelling fracture their name evokes. In an early press statement, guitarist-singer Billy Ward described how they’re excited by musical “chaos,” straddling the line “between pretty and noisy” and “often trying to jump between the two.” Cannonball cartwheels from ultra-sweet pop balladry to proggy chamber-pop to aggressive post-punk clatter, seemingly treating each of its styles with equal reverence. At first, these tonal shifts may give you whiplash. But after you get your bearings, you start to relish them. It’s quite the feat.
The band — Ward, singer-bassist Vera Leppänen, singer-keyboardist Emmie-Mae Avery, violinist Clio Starwood, drummer Lola Cherry, and…
Dance music is an inherently physical art form. Its hard-hitting beats urge you to move your body and contort it into shapes you otherwise never would, interlocking with the rhythms and basslines flowing from the speakers.
When the textures of the music mirror those of the bodies in motion, the vaporous heat of a packed floor, the beams of light piercing the dark room, it feels that much more visceral.
For their second album as Overmono, brothers Tom and Ed Russell cloak their tracks in this physicality, the vital lifeforce of truly great dance music. Across the eleven cuts on Pure Devotion, the Welsh producers tap into the tactile and tangible, resulting in a tighter, more focused follow-up to the sinuous sprawl of…
Megasound is the rock and roll progeny of three indie pop friends. Kerry Alexander has fronted Bad Bad Hats with Chris Hoge for more than a decade, and the duo have known Elana Carroll (aka Party Nails) even longer. While on tour together in 2018, Carroll joined Bad Bad Hats on stage for an encore performance. It was a cover of “Pretend to Be Nice”, hit single of comic book band Josie & the Pussycats, written by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger for the 2001 live action movie. This swirling musical cauldron produced a bubble of an idea: a new band. Elana on lead vocals, Kerry on guitar, Chris on drums. Songs inspired by early 2000s rock, the music of their collective youths. A fresh watch of Josie & the Pussycats sealed the deal. Megasound was officially born.
Edena Gardens unleash their most expansive work to date. Quintessence is structured in 4 parts as a Magnum Opus—the ancient alchemical process of transformation. But this is not a work of high fantasy. It is a seismic meditation. A study of deep time, weighted matter, and the crushing gravity of change.
Quintessence is massive. 79+ minutes of tethered magnitude, carved into six sprawling tracks. The trio pushes further down into the void, discovering new dimensions. Each piece allow the form to stretch. To break its own boundaries. Shifting terrains and unpredictable geometry. The core remains unhurried: A slow, relentless, unabridged crawl. This sort of alchemy demands patience, allowing every sonic mutation…
A new Digital Deluxe Edition of Woodcut, complete with demos of each track from the album, as well as two live acoustic tracks.
Big Big Train, the award-winning, progressive rock band, issue their 16th studio album. Woodcut is a landmark release for the international group, whose line-up draws together members from England, Scotland, Italy, the USA, Sweden and Norway, in that it marks their first ever full-length conceptual piece. “The story isn’t set in any particular timeframe, but it’s about The Artist, who is struggling with life,” founding member Gregory Spawton begins. “He takes a stroll and finds this piece of heartwood and creates something that he considers beautiful and different. Maybe it’s a dream or maybe it’s real life…
Roy Montgomery and Martha Skye Murphy extend their thing on Nebular, penning a suite of widescreen dreampop epics that harness all their separate strengths into a fizzing artmelt – tipped FFO Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, Flying Saucer Attack, Jessamine and lovesliescrushing.
It didn’t take much for Montgomery and Murphy to connect. All Murphy did was include one of Mongomery’s songs on a mixtape and the conversations that followed led them to spot harmonies in their approaches to music: they both recorded to a Tascam multitrack recorder, for one. And if you’ve been following either artist, you’ll have noticed their collaborations bubbling up through the cracks in the last few years. Murphy appeared on Montgomery’s…
Avon’s lesser-hailed, glam ‘80s synth-pop and new wave movement is spotlighted in-depth via 20 songs compiled by studio engineer Dave Massey, who smartly portrays the breadth and quality of an ‘80s blindspot.
The Bristol & Bath Blitz Club Meets Art School Sound – 80’s Explosion traces the reverberating influence of Rusty Egan and co.’s new wave crucible, The Blitz Club, along the M4 leyline, where it met Avon art school kids advancing from punk and funk into a new decade. Egan’s signature DJ brew – e.g. Kraftwerk to Visage, Burundi Black to Bowie, Japan and Grace Jones – would spark myriad emulators who were also mirroring the chops of Duran Duran (sons of the Brum club scene an hour north) and the likes of Martyn Ware…
Multiple BMA winner, vocalist, songwriter, and song interpreter Janiva Magness has delivered her first comprehensive live album, 18 albums into her storied career, with Truth in the Room: The Clearmountain Sessions. The fact that she uses “Sessions” in the title suggests this is not your typical live date. You could call Magness a perfectionist. She wanted to be sure that she had the consummate engineer by calling on the legendary Bob Clearmountain. She recorded at Berkeley Street Studios (formerly Apogee Studios) to an intimate gathering of 150 invited friends and music industry guests. So, every possible element was in her favor. The terms had to be right. That being said, the album still has plenty of energy and emotional weight. Magness would…
Joyce & Tutty Moreno, the legendary architects of Brazilian sophisticated samba, have partnered with Adrian Younge to complete JID027 — a deeply emotional album born from tragedy. Set in motion by the endorsement of their late friend João Donato, the project became a tribute to him following his sudden passing. The result is a breathtaking collection of improvisation, poetry, and resilience.
Joyce Moreno is like the Joni Mitchell of Brazil, a singular, multi-talented paragon of feminine musical energy. Unapologetically independent, Joyce is a masterful guitar player, angelic vocalist and inspired composer who’s blazed her own musical trail since her start in the music business in the sixties as an outspoken…
Margaret Glaspy’s latest album, I Am Both, is a low-key masterwork of observational wisdom, lilting melodies, and sharp wit. She delivers her stinging lines with a conversational ease, wielding the authority of hard-won experience over ringing guitar licks that echo the guilelessness of her storytelling. Her intimacy compels us to immediately identify with the singer, even when she is singing about people other than herself.
…On songs such as the dreamy “Common Ground” and the more somber “Petty”, the singer bites off lyrics about mutual disappointments. She keeps the lyrics simple to show how basic and trivial spitefulness can be, and at the same time so complex and inflammatory: “I thought we were on the same page / Apparently not /…
An abandoned cathedral. A gruesome murder. A powerful supernatural entity living in the catacombs. It all comes to a head in downtown Los Angeles. What will happen and who will live to tell the tale? Such is the storyline of Cathedral, the thrilling new album and terrifying graphic novel from director and musician John Carpenter, based on a dream Carpenter had in 2024.
Cathedral has all the drama, dark atmosphere, and frenetic pacing of a classic heavy metal record. Especially designed as the soundtrack to the graphic novel, each track corresponds to a specific section of the book. The liner notes included with the album packaging feature prompts for each track, creating a fully interactive experience. Combined with the graphic novel,…
John Darnielle looks back with wry fondness on this 24th full-length album, revisiting obscure events and semi-famous people in his typically arch and literate way. Music figures prominently in this gallery of memories — he dedicates one song to the prog band Renaissance’s 1976 date at Carnegie Hall, another to a mythical opening slot for grungy Candlebox, still another to the speed metal band, Venom, “hollering cocaine.”
One of the best of these songs recounts the later days of Layne Staley, who doesn’t want this, any of this, now that he’s got it. As usual, Darnielle writes crisp, well-tailored third-person stories about other people, which clearly also reflect his own experiences.
This is a relatively subtle album, not exactly…