Our good-faith assumption that the slow placidity of part one of this ultimately 5-hour epic was a means of introduction turns out to have been wisely made. Year of the Monkey, the second part of Fucked Up‘s quintuple-album-length trilogy also comprising its second and third hours, takes the increased eventfulness of “Rivers and Lakes,” the closing track of Year of the Goat, and builds from there as the base. “Looking for Heaven and Not Finding It,” opens with the striking of a temple bowl, a common preface to Buddhist prayer, as all of the tracks of this cycle have thus far. The following half-hour is spent in the land of light charted by Yes, with major-key joy and brimming golden dewdrops sprinkled everywhere. This is fitting: the story at this point…
Category: alternative rock
Listening to Magazine feels like speedrunning a tour of the circles of hell. The band doesn’t even try to make these songs sum up to anything coherent: each song hits, fades, and the next introduces itself, just to fade again in record time. On each, synthesist Jack Tobias puts down ominous chords and motifs at the worst moments; guitarist-that-sounds-like-a-synthesist Saguiv Rosenstock plays what could very well be the transposed sheet music of a dying dog’s final whimpers; vocalist Zack Borzone moans against the beat in broken Revelations-inspired word association poetry; and drummer Sam Pickard works like the devil to hold the whole operation together. Right when you get accustomed to one song’s palate, it pauses, waits a few seconds,…
In the grand tradition of left-of-center rock bands, Neptune started as an art project. In the 1990s, Boston sculptor Jason Sanford began fashioning homemade guitars and basses out of scrap metal and repurposed detritus, and the band quickly followed (check out their first ever show in 1994). Over the ensuing years, Sanford (who also plays in E with Thalia Zedek) bolted Neptune into a tight and ferocious noise rock unit that brandished very heavy instruments adorned with blades, spikes, and jagged edges. When George Miller made Mad Max: Fury Road, he dropped the ball by not showcasing Neptune riding the Doof Wagon. (Sure, Coma-Doof Warrior was impressive but Neptune as the harbingers of the apocalypse would have killed.) Because of the construction of…
Non-sensical, un-user friendly, at times half finished. Camper Van Beethoven’s second album II & III saw the folk-punk of the band’s debut LP morphing into an even wider array of stylistic influences and (un)ironic contradictions, all rolled up into a coherently incoherent collection of some of the band’s most defining songs.
Originally released in 1986, the follow up to Telephone Free Landslide Victory did much to develop an already iconoclastic Camper Van Beethoven idiom. II & III ranges from alt-country ballads (“Sad Lovers’ Waltz”) to call-backs to the European folk instrumentals of their earlier work (“No Krugerrands For David”, “4 Year Plan”). Also featured is the band’s bluegrass-Americana take on Sonic Youth’s “I Love Her All the Time”…
Les Claypool has been a busy man to start 2026, with an upcoming nationwide tour, releasing a new double album with The Claypool Lennon Delirium, a new EP with Primus, and now comes another release, Return of the Live Frogs: Volume 1.
Back in 2023, Les donned his Colonel persona again to revamp his Fearless Flying frog Brigade for an amazing tour. This release is a reminder of that magic.
The FFFB for this live offering is Sean Ono Lennon (aka Captain Shiner on guitar), Harry Waters (keys), Mike Dillon (percussion), Skerik (sax), and Paulo Baldi (drums) as the band stretches out and gets loose on four original songs. Each track allows for ample individual solos as the players take their turn in the spotlight.
In Perdido Street Station, China Miéville describes “crisis energy”, the moment when a system pushed to its absolute limit transforms, where collapse and maximum release become the same event. Guttersnipe adopt this idea as their guiding principle. On Extinction Burst!, their first record in eight years, they turn crisis energy from concept into visceral reality.
The Leeds duo (Uroceras Gigas and Tipula Confusa) see the supposed split between the cerebral and the visceral as a cultural fabrication. They reject the idea that intellect and bodily experience must be separate, a myth sustained by a society that wants its thinkers detached and its bodies unthinking. As Confusa notes, most lifeforms – bacteria, invertebrates, marine animals…
Social Distortion has returned with their first album in 15 years. born to kill is led by a pair of singles and follows 2011’s Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, as the Orange County punk rock legends mark a significant comeback on their eighth studio album.
The album opens with the title track. Born To Kill is an anthem of an opener, designed to be listened to loud. Mike Ness sounds absolutely unstoppable as his no-frills but all-powerful guitar tone rips through the soundscape of the driving title track, supporting his signature, gravelly voice that still carries a venomous bite. “Born To Kill,” like most of what is to follow, stays true to what you would expect from Social Distortion; this is punk very much influenced by classic rockabilly.
A tribute to a tribute? During the final mix sessions for Peggy Suicide, Cope invited some musicians to Ramport Studio to celebrate the album’s completion. He called this late-night-party recording session E-Man Groovin’ – a tribute to the Jimmy Castor Bunch song of the same name, and the album’s mascot. Since Cope’s old digital tapes were damaged, this new tribute was created using recycled loops and samples from the original. Fifteen grooves imbued with the distinctive Peggy Suicide spirit – Kraut, Baggie, On-the-One – rescued from the archives of Oblivion! Yowzah!
Tracklist shows 15 tracks. However, CD only has 14 tracks. This is due to two of the tracks segueing together as one track. Track 12 is 5:55 long. “Rizla Deutschland” actually lasts…
They Came Like Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza is the first significant collaboration from two luminaries of alternative music; Thurston Moore, best known for his time at the helm of noise rock legends Sonic Youth and Bonner Kramer (known for many years simply as Kramer), whose reverb-heavy production served as an additional instrument on pivotal albums from Galaxie 500, Low, Daniel Johnston, and many, many more. Both musicians have long histories of collaboration and prolific output tied to no single style of expression, so the possibilities for an album of sounds conjured up by Moore and Kramer are limitless, and They Came Like Swallows takes on tones of mourning, outrage, and hope with its seven expansive pieces.
The Horizon Spirals/The Horizon Viral brings together OOIOO and Lightning Bolt, both Thrill Jockey labelmates and longtime pillars of the experimental rock underground. The split LP arrived in April of 2026, soon after the two groups had played several West Coast dates together. The OOIOO side consists of two long tracks, both of which revisit the gamelan-inspired percussion arrangements of their 2014 album Gamel. “The Horizon” focuses on hypnotic percussive patterns and YoshimiO’s supernatural vocal abilities. The song changes to a faster rhythm halfway, elevating the mood with soaring trumpet and busy, locked-in percussion. “Gamel Be Sure to Spiral” revisits “Be Sure to Loop” from 1999’s Feather Float, adding gamelan percussion to…
Wielding little more than drums and a keyboard, Osaka-based duo HYPER GAL are waging a perpetual loudness war against themselves.
Formed in the late 2010s, the band was inspired by the anarchic creativity of Japanese noise acts like Melt-Banana, Solmania, and Boredoms. But while their forebears deconstructed rock conventions, HYPER GAL’s primary influence is the glistening textures of pop. Their songwriting formula is bracingly simple: Kurumi Kadoya loops a keyboard phrase, pushing the volume until the melody grinds into a thick harmonic paste. Then she lays into the drums, heavy on the cymbals, while her bandmate Koharu Ishida half-sings and half-raps with a dreamy detachment.
The band’s 2021 debut album, Pure, which…
No matter who is actually present in the same physical space while Oakland-based experimental artist and field recordist Kathryn Mohr records or performs, she is always alone. Even when her music’s turns toward intense claustrophobia — writhing over a stifled ability to connect with another body in the room — her work aims to convince any ears against the wall that they are catching the last set of layered voices bearing down over the last fuzz-ridden guitar remaining on the face of the earth. There’s no stillness in her isolation either, as 2025’s Waiting Room, her critical breakthrough and debut release with The Flenser, proved. Even in its more muted acoustic meditations, there is the suggestion of boots scuffing against each other to…
Making music that’s jittery, neurotic, darkly comical, but also powerfully catchy, the Violent Femmes are a pillar of the American underground movement, and one of the best early examples of alternative rock.
40th anniversary reissue of their long out of print third album The Blind Leading the Naked. Features fan favorites “I Held Her In My Arms” and “Old Mother Reagan” along with their classic cover of the T-Rex song “Children Of the Revolution.”
A more mainstream effort courtesy of producer Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads). Gordon Gano returns to his troubled teen persona and the Violent Femmes rock harder than on their previous two releases. A nice cover of the T. Rex classic “Children of the Revolution”…
Martín Schellekens and Martín Espinosa have never been shy about their fondness for Sonic Youth. They started out calling themselves Hey Joni, after all. But that alias didn’t last; eventually they hit on Land Whales, a name with no associations attached. Subtly surrealistic, “Land Whales” conveys a blurry constellation of ideas: brute force and sheer impossibility; weightless grace and its gravity-bound opposite.
All those potential connotations take on greater significance when you consider that the group came together in Cuba and recorded its music — a fusion of grunge, post-hardcore, and shoegaze — in a Havana apartment, against all odds.
Land Whales’ sound is uncannily familiar. Their second album, How to Make a Breakfast,…
The Shits have been a band for a little under nine years and Diet of Worms is their third album. Neither of which is especially eye-catching as statistics go, but noteworthy in the context of the Leeds DIY punk scene in which they originate, where bands (including ones featuring members of The Shits) frequently rise and fall leaving hardly any documented evidence they were there. A lot of the groups who historically pre-empted the sound heard on Diet of Worms – noise rock, pigfuck, scum rock, sludge punk or some other microgenre terminology – didn’t stick around for anything like this long either, implosive tendencies being a common issue.
So while The Shits’ notoriety has been boosted by the rowdy aura around them,…
When Dave Grohl and Nate Mendel took over the curation for the May 2026 issue of MOJO, they didn’t just pick a few favorite songs—they built a bridge between the Foo Fighters’ legendary past and their 12th studio album, Your Favorite Toy.
Foo.Fm functions as a 15-track “musical odyssey.” It’s a rare look behind the curtain at the records that fueled the band’s recent creative pivot back to their punk-rock roots.
The tracklist is a masterclass in balance, weaving together the “holy trinity” of their influences: legacy pioneers, contemporary heavyweights, and the new guard of alternative rock.
The compilation kicks off with a heavy nod to the underground. The inclusion of Hüsker Dü and Kim Gordon acts as a reminder…
During the late ’70s, the beginnings of a wave of music heavily inspired by the garage rock and psychedelia of the 1960s began to swell. Chalk it up to many factors — the availability of a number of reissues, especially the Pebbles series, a disillusionment with the restrictive rules of punk rock, the passage of enough time so that the era seemed glamorous, the chance to get cheap vintage gear — but the result was an underground that evolved in many interesting directions and even went quite overground at different times. Cherry Red’s 2026 collection This Can’t Be Today: American Psychedelia & the Paisley Underground 1977-1988 looks to document the scene, gathering together the many strands and sounds of the time to present a comprehensive view.
…Original album recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in 2000 and remastered by Bob Weston in 2025 and never-before-released live studio album, ‘True Live Tapes’, recorded by Greg Norman in 2000 and mastered by Bob Weston in 2025.
Before, listening to Don Caballero felt similar to being beaten over the head with a huge baseball bat of pure audible genius: often too overwhelming and complicated for your average music listener to listen to for very long, much less understand. With American Don, it seems that the baseball bat has been traded in for a pillow, and instead of beating they are slowly smothering. Much of the aggressive bite of the music has been simmered out: distortion is much more rare, time…
After 33 years, Guitar Wolf returns to Goner Records, where they started! Way back in 1993, Wolf Rock was released by Goner and immediately, around the world, people enthralled with raw rock n roll and pure Japanese enthusiasm for over-the-top noise realized they had a new band to watch out for.
Many tours, many records, and many eardrums later, Guitar Wolf has returned for the latest, and greatest Guitar Wolf record yet – More Jet. More raw, crunching guitar noise, frantic rhythms, and unpredictable screaming! More head-scratchingly-great song topics! The perfect blend of Link Wray / Ramones / Joan Jett / Cramps sound and attitude mixed with industrial-strength noise.
Led by singer and guitarist Seiji the group’s…
Why it’s volume two from the Rotting Tapes series that’s being given a vinyl reissue, rather than volumes one, three or four is anybody’s guess, but why not? All four tapes contained two tracks each, all were recorded live in Tokyo in the first half of 1982, and all feature the duo Michio Kadotani (1959-1990, vocals/guitar) and Nanjo Asahito (bass), this time joined by an uncredited drummer. The group was well-named; although the music at times seems like impenetrable, formless sludge, there’s often a real beauty and poetry to it, too. When Rotting Telepathies performed together, there was, perhaps fitfully, a unique alchemy, and when it works, it’s glorious, presaging the more fully formed music of noisy, doomy Japanese bands like Gallhammer, but it’s also…