Kim Gordon’s third album, PLAY ME, is distilled and immediate, expanding Gordon’s sonic palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautrock. “We wanted the songs to be short,” Gordon says. “We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident.”
The follow-up to 2024’s Justin Raisen-produced, two-time Grammy-nominated ‘The Collective’ processes, in her inimitable way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill-vibes flattening of culture – where dark humor voices the absurdity of modern life.
Despite its frequent outward gaze, ‘PLAY ME’ is an interior record, one in which a heightened emotionality pulses through physical…
Category: alternative rock
For a band that has always cultivated a unique and idiosyncratic sound, New Age Doom appears to have fully mastered their craft on Angels Against Angels. The album demonstrates a confident command of arrangement and atmosphere, tactically marshalling diverse musical elements while seamlessly integrating multiple genres. At the same time, it advances a spiritual message rooted in equality, love and truth.
Sparkling with elements of jazz, experimental, electronic, progressive rock and dub, the record is elevated further by the unmistakable vocals and lyricism of H.R. (Human Rights), frontman of the legendary band Bad Brains. Angels Against Angels uproots disparate sonic textures and intricately fuses them with both playfulness…
…Tentative Decisions includes the baker’s dozen of 1975-1976 demos (plus one live recording and two tracks from The Artistics, an embryonic version of the band) that was released on one clear vinyl LP and 7″ last November, adding an impressive 32 additional demos (taken from an abortive session to audition for CBS Records) and live cuts from early shows performed as a trio of David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth.
While Talking Heads were one of the most striking acts to come out of New York’s late ’70s punk scene, Tentative Decisions shows they didn’t start there, offering early versions of single “Psycho Killer” and deep cut “Warning Sign” credited to The Artistics, a group frontman Byrne and drummer Frantz formed with bassist…
Long-standing U.S. art rock collective Biota releases a new album every few years. Measured Not Found, its first since 2019’s Fragment for Balance, is a woozy and disorienting journey through shimmering and haunting collages that have become the group’s signature sound.
The instrumentation is broad, including clavioline, French horn, prepared music boxes, Hammond organ, guitars, ektara, Fender Rhodes, strumstick, trumpet, bass, piano, synthesizer, harmonica, flute, rubab, pump organ, accordion, kit drums, tabla, biomellowdrone, bent circuits, dumbek, and violin. The most prominent are piano, synthesizer, guitar, and the other stringed instruments. Vocals are present on a handful of tracks.
Unlike any other outfit aside from…
Tron Ares: Divergence arrives as a surprise release from Nine Inch Nails, shadow-dropped on February 27, 2026, right in the middle of the band’s North American arena tour. Framed as a remix companion to their score for Tron: Ares, the album feels less like a simple reworking and more like a parallel universe to the original soundtrack—darker in places, more club-oriented in others, and fully committed to pushing the digital dystopia of the Tron world into new sonic territory.
The release is currently digital-only, but it’s presented as a two-disc set that reflects two distinct moods. Disc 1 reimagines the Tron: Ares material through new compositions and remix collaborations with a range of electronic artists, pulling the score toward industrial techno…
In the beginning, there was This Heat. Charles Hayward and co traversed the disused pie factories and damp warehouses that suffused South London, and the resultant music was something seriously challenging: dread-laden, perversely fun, janky, dancey, genre-collapsing. Some believed it encompassed post-punk.
…Based in South London, MPTL (‘My Pussy Tastes Like’) Microplastics describe themselves as an “8 person industrial folk collective playing chronoplastic ballads of the future / folk music for a polymer people / stiob-eulogies arranged in the canon of the desecrated harp / crisis songs for the exploding (micro)plastic inevitable” (or 8PIFCPCBOTF / FMFAPP / S-EAITCOTDH / CSFTE(M)PI, for short). They are also…
Third Man Records have released the first-ever live anthology from Ann Arbor, MI–based noise rock legends Laughing Hyenas.
That Girl – Live Recordings 1986–1994 collects 18 ferocious tracks, painstakingly compiled by founding member John Brannon from his personal archive of cassette tapes, then transferred, mixed, and mastered by Grammy® Award–winning producer Bobby Emmett (known for his work with Sturgill Simpson, Jack White, and The Sights).
The collection captures the band’s full-on sonic groove assault in its purest, most unadulterated, and gloriously abrasive form. Highlights include such hard-hitting classics as “Here We Go Again,” recorded live for NYC’s famed WNYU in 1990.
If ever a band deserved an LP of live material…
One of many bands to have explored the country’s more perilous frontiers of DIY culture, Brighton-based bass & drum sludge-punk-noise-rock duo Human Leather finally slam their fury down on tape with their long-awaited debut album, Here Comes the Mind, There Goes the Body. An album that underlines the world’s incessant failures, Human Leather don’t mince their words, rightfully pissed off and unafraid to tells us about it.
The tripwire tension between the two-piece assault team of Amée Chanter and Thomas Close is like a calcified ball of bile and rage. Renowned for their intense live shows, so often the sharp-edged ferocity of a band’s live performance is blunted between the studio walls. Not the case here, however, and it’s thanks to…
To parse the logic of Sex Mad, one must first inhabit the isolation of 1985 Victoria, British Columbia: a provincial capital where middle-class security doubled as a picturesque cemetery for the newly wed and nearly dead. Here, as the looming artifice of Expo 86 threatened to modernize the coast, the Pacific horizon acted as a literal dead-end and the Wright brothers’ basement as a laboratory. While the global hardcore scene was calcifying into a thudding caricature – The Exploited’s gurning pantomime merging with the metal-hocked bluster of the US crossover set – Rob and John Wright were busy deconstructing the very physics of the power trio.
When guitarist Andy Kerr completed the circuit, internal pressure reached a critical mass.
Spinnen (“Spiders”) is the Munich-based duo of Sophie Neudecker (drums/vocals) and Veronica “Katta” Burnuthian (bass/keyboards/vocals), and although this is technically their debut album, they have been active in Munich’s experimental noise-rock scene for some time, working alongside groups like Friends of Gas. Pushing the spider theme, they say this album consists of two body parts (i.e. side one and side two) and eight legs (songs), but this is just a witty way of pointing out that Warmes Licht (“Warm Light”) is, structurally, entirely conventional. The music, too, is far more accessible than you might expect, with eight disciplined songs, the longest under six minutes long and the shortest just one minute and forty-four seconds. But the relative…
The latest volume in Bulbous Monocle’s Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 reissue campaign vaults over the Matador years back to the band’s earliest LP. Tangle was released in 1989, prior to TFUL282’s years of rigorous touring.
It’s a first album; you can hear styles engaged and influences acknowledged in a partially digested manner that differs from their later years, when, if they wanted to sound like something, they just covered the song.
There’s a deep vein of blues and western guitar, most evident on the slow, sinister groove of “Cold Cold Ground,” but also audible on the twangy lead guitar of “Sister Hell” and the languid slide intro to “Choke.” The band works a few Sonic Youth moves into the mix as well, like…
Originally released through Relapse Records, the album has been remastered by long time Unsane collaborator and engineer Andrew Schneider. Include the extra track “No Soul” which was originally released on Frank Kozik’s infamous Man’s Ruin label as a limited edition vinyl only release. Additionally the band has made available digitally this release’s original 6 song demo session recorded at AmRep Studios in Minneapolis.
New York City’s Unsane assisted in pioneering a more aggressive, less studied version of noise rock, one that blended the scum/art industrial sturm und drang of Foetus, the Swans, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Sonic Youth with the decidedly more straightforward hardcore idiom favored by acts like Sick of It All.
This release unearths a previously unreleased live recording from Boris’s 2019 US tour, captured shortly after the release of the single tears e.p and the album LΦVE & EVΦL.
Released in 2019, LΦVE & EVΦL is a conceptual work consisting of two contrasting yet intertwined albums. Following the heavy yet catchy Noise (2014) and the organic deepening of Dear (2017), the 2019 single tears e.p arrived as a pendulum swing toward pure popness, featuring collaborations with Narasaki (Coaltar Of The Deepers) and Shinobu Narita. Subsequently, the album LΦVE & EVΦL peered into the abyss of “heavy” even further-manifesting a world of saturated contours and gridless, intoxicating soundscapes that redefined…
This release marks the second installment of the 20th anniversary project celebrating the original studio album Rainbow (2006). It documents a live performance recorded on February 8, 2019, at U.F.O. CLUB in Higashi-Koenji, Tokyo.
Michio Kurihara is a singular guitarist who has played a central role in Japan’s psychedelic rock scene through his work with YBO2, White Heaven, THE STARS, and other key projects. Rainbow, created and released in 2006 under the name Boris with Michio Kurihara, reaches its 20th anniversary this year. Since 2007, Kurihara has also joined Boris as a support guitarist on tours and live performances, while performing on several occasions under the Boris with Michio Kurihara name in parallel.
Bloody Head have been lurking at the fringes for some ten years now, occupying a greasy, hard-to-clean crevice where noise-rock and psychedelia begin to intermingle. In this time they’ve tottered, threatened, collapsed and cajoled, their unexpected incursions akin to having a mysterious, slightly cracked ‘character’ glom onto you at the pub. Like said pub weirdo, they charm and bemuse and recount tall tales, all while a violent sense of mania flickers intermittently behind the eyes.
Bend Down and Kiss the Ground comes hot on the heels of last year’s excellent Perpetual Eden, and hews close to that album’s rangier, slightly-more-streamlined sound. Things remain ugly and warped, but they’re keeping up their attempts at sprucing and spritzing: submitting…
Though little-known in America prior to 2000, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant formed in Japan back in 1991 and began playing raucous garage rock & roll inspired by the Stooges, Thee Headcoats, the Who, and MC5. Futoshi Abe’s thrashy guitar riffs propel the fast-paced, hard-hitting tunes over the driving rhythms of Kouji Ueno’s thick bass grooves and Kazuyuki Kuhara’s heavy backbeat. Yusuke Chiba’s mod, raspy vocals, alternately sung and screamed out mostly in Japanese, hold the whole thing together with a rough-as-rock-gets swagger.
Initially, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant’s sound was derived from British punk and blues. The band recorded their first EP, Wonder Style, in 1995. They soon followed up with their debut album, Cult Grass Stars, recorded in London with…
Tight and Loose is an artifact of a time before San Francisco became a bedroom community for the tech empires. Back in the late 1980s, it was still possible for people living there to work in record stores and other non-advancement enterprises to invest their time in creative endeavors that mocked the notion of redeeming values. World of Pooh was one such endeavor.
The band comprised Barbara Manning (voice, guitar, bass), Brandan Kearney (voice, guitar) and Jay Paget (drums). While it was considerably closer to conventional rock ’n’ roll than many of the other combos its members played in (Caroliner, Archipeligo Brewing Co., Glands of External Secretion), World of Pooh was no one’s ladder for pop success. Therein lies some of…
The Live at City Gardens EP features a blistering six-song soundboard recording captured live on February 11, 1984, at the legendary punk club City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey.
The EP showcases the band’s raw, electrifying energy as they were on the cusp of releasing their landmark album, Let It Be. The latter tune was a birthday request from Jesperson, who was The Replacement’s manager and the co-founder of the band’s label, Twin-Tone Records, in addition to being Let It Be’s co-producer.
A collector’s item, this 10″ EP was released exclusively as a pre-order bonus alongside The Replacements – Let It Be (Deluxe Edition). It features clear, high-quality audio and includes a rare live performance of the ballad “You’re Getting Married.”
A staggering 36 years into their mission to explore strange new sounds, to boldly embed themselves inside rewardingly thorny knots of riff, Brighton-based mavericks I’m Being Good’s fascination for the delectable complexities within subterranean noise thrives unabated.
Their ninth full-length is the sound of insatiable curiosity on the prowl, an exercise in just how many dangerous twists and occasional jump-scares this kind of post-math, post-prog, post-post-rock music can encompass. Spaceshitter’s not simply out to unnerve you – that would be ungentlemanly, and the group have plenty more ideas in their quiver. But this is definitely a record that savours every curveball it sends out there.
Like forebears Polvo and contemporaries…
San Diego in the ’90s was a great place to be if you were a weird punk kid. A conservative Navy town on the surface, the hardcore underground churned out innovative bands at a furious clip, with the bleeding edge of the scene revolving around Gravity Records and its standard-bearers, Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Balancing nihilistic fervor with a ragged poetic sensibility, these bands transmuted post-adolescent angst into timeless invectives against boredom and apathy. After Heroin broke up in 1993, guitarist Scott Bartoloni joined with vocalist Matt Goldsby, bassist Ryan Noel, and drummer Mario Rubalcaba to form Clikatat Ikatowi. Combining the intensity of hardcore with the epic soundscapes of local noise rock exemplars Drive Like Jehu, Clikatat Ikatowi quickly…