“When I was faced with the challenge of writing and recording a new album, I had the choice to stay where I was comfortable, under the sage guidance of a producer or to step out into the dark and produce it myself. It became clear that if I was going to grow in the craft, I needed to become my own lighthouse. So I made the commitment to take on the Producer role. There were a lot of sleepless nights.
Writing Long Wave Home, though no less daunting, became a refuge for me—a place to explore interpersonal connections and the rise and fall of emotions that come with relationships. Writing an album can be very agitating, but it’s a discomfort I am comfortable with. What a gift it is to spend my time examining my inner world…
Category: indie-folk
Having honed his live chops over many years not only as a solo artist, but also with the celebrated groups The Frames and The Swell Season, Glen Hansard is rightly regarded as a masterful live performer. Recorded over two nights last year in Berlin’s Funkhaus – an historic former radio facility – Don’t Settle (Vol 1, Transmissions East) draws from all stages of the singer’s storied career, making for a powerful and spellbinding listen.
The record kicks off with the title track, which builds from atmospheric ballad to stirring rocker, with a notably streak of defiance: “When they pin you to the corner / Pay no need to their dronin’ on”.
Filled with apocalyptic imagery, ‘Down On Our Knees’ is a driving, intense number with echoes of Joy Division, while the haunting…
…Alongside an acoustic rendition of album standout “Surviving You,” ‘Nested in Tangles (Deluxe)’ features an extended dance mix of “A Body, A Map,” Mary Lattimore on the newly expanded “Beholden to the Birds Murmuring Above,” as well as a voice and trombone rework of its title track.
Following her critically acclaimed 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd, composer, vocalist, guitarist, and poet Hannah Frances returns with Nested in Tangles.
…In her winding constructions and gleefully lush arrangements, once again assembled with close collaborator Kevin Copeland, the Vermont-based singer-songwriter evokes many generations of proggy, jazzy indie rock far too sophisticated…
Indie singer/songwriter Rae Chen began releasing his intimate, dreamy music under the pseudonym tofusmell in the early 2020s. He was still based in his home state of Florida when Hardly Art signed on to release his project’s debut EP, the home-recorded Humor, in 2023, although he soon relocated to Winnipeg, Canada.
Featuring 12 songs in all, his full-length debut, All My Time, fleshes out his sound with help from outside producers while staying true to key influences Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith. Six of the songs were recorded with Keiran Placatka (Field Guide, William Prince) in Winnipeg, and four others were tracked with Paul Larson in Los Angeles — the latter group feature a more invigorated, live-band sound. Suggesting Stevens with…
On her sophomore album, Pearla explores themes of love and its ability to contain and dissolve, to stretch and collapse time, and to bridge the spaces between the real and the surreal. While Pearla was concerned with the mysteries of the external world in her debut (aptly described by Pitchfork as “a detective of uncertainty”), this collection is an intimate look at the interior, the relational, and the capacity and bounds of the heart and mind.
Song Room finds Pearla in a tug-of-war between the inner and outer worlds, creating moments of tension that are at times raw and exposing, and at others cosmic and harmonious.
In “Good Dog,” she pivots her fear of losing herself in another person toward the stable accuracy of the moon: “If I become whoever…
Graceland Way, the newest release from harpist-singer-songwriter Mikaela Davis, finds the artist luxuriating in the Los Angeles sunshine, delivering a modern Laurel Canyon pop-rock style, influenced by the famous location’s late 70’s heyday.
Working with longtime collaborators bassist Dan Horne and guitarist John Lee Shannon, the trio co-wrote and co-produced the album. Davis lets her vocals shine, putting her harp playing in the background as the trio brings in various guests to flesh out the record’s sound and scope.
The opening “(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses” is a straight-ahead pop-rocker with pedal steel from Kurt G. Johnson, as the song bops along in a Tom Petty-inspired fashion. The tune delivers a backward looped break…
Angelo De Augustine returns with his fifth album, Angel in Plainclothes — a deeply felt rendering of his multi-year journey of healing and renewal. The first single is a standout psychedelic country piece, “Mirror Mirror,” and offers the first look at Angelo’s multi-year healing journey and the renewal that followed.
“Usually when I make music, I’ll sit down with one instrument and write the song,” states Angelo. “In ‘Mirror Mirror,’ I didn’t stick to this principle and was messing around with the tape machine’s varispeed function—seeing what would happen if I slowed down what I’d recorded on the bowed psaltery, creating an unusual droning noise. The song came from experimenting with layering sound in a very free way and watching…
Since their beginnings, indie folk duo the Milk Carton Kids have been associated with a hushed, melancholy brand of song as well as with effortless guitar technique, with both Kenneth Pattengale and rhythm guitarist Joey Ryan playing vintage 1950s-model Martin and Gibson guitars, respectively. With their fourth studio album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do (2017), they recorded with a backing band for the first time, before returning to the duo model. Since then, however, they’ve toyed with instrumentation, and their seventh LP, Lost Cause Lover Fool, finds them incorporating banjo, mandolin, bass, and/or percussion on some tracks for subtle texture shifts on an album guided by the theme of transformation. At the same time,…
Being a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles will always draw comparisons with the early to mid-’70s, when the so-called golden age of California Sound ruled, well, the airwaves then. In the days of streaming the newer generations, one might not be sure what that means, but with his second album Cherry Picker, L.A. singer-songwriter Spencer Hoffman just might give them a very good hint what that sound can offer when it is both thoughtfully and carefully done.
What that would mean is have an individual, but at the same time a diversified sound that doesn’t simply stick to possible set formulas, even if there is inspiration from greats of the sound that are well-known (Jackson Browne) or not so well known (David Ackles).
Country music used to be full of formulas that begged to be broken, and for a while now Americana and alternative country artists did a great job in doing so. Joining those ranks is Edmonton-based Métis artist, Kaeley Jade, who already made a mark with her debut album Turpentine, for which she won a Canadian Folk Music Award back in 2024 for Indigenous Songwriter of the Year.
Now Jade is back with The Great Unknown, confirming that she just might be the alt country artist to watch out for. As with her debut, two things set Jade apart here – her incredible vocal talent and some good to excellent songwriting which shine throughout the album. At the same time, Jade and her production…
The cover of Sean Solomon’s solo debut features humanlike cartoon animals, drawn by Solomon, who’s provided animation for videos by Odd Future and Run the Jewels, among others, in the style of children’s author Richard Scarry. Scarry’s work, of course, formed the basis of a ’90s cable cartoon show that imprinted the fictional metropolis of Busytown on the minds of Solomon’s generation. Solomon’s own animation style skews more toward the surreal and twisted — think Daniel Clowes mixed with Lisa Hanawalt — but with a covert whimsicality suggesting that the good-natured innocence of Huckle Cat, Lowly Worm, and company is buried in there somewhere. As a singer-songwriter, the L.A.-based musician favors disillusion over delirium, but his…
Two mainstays of Boston’s independent music scene join forces, just not in the way you probably expected. Tanya Donnelly (who doesn’t live in Boston any more) is best known for the yowling, uninhibited punk rock of Belly and the Throwing Muses, as well as her more recent guitar-driven work with 50 Foot Wave. Brokaw has done a million things, including genre-establishing bands like Come and Codeine, but he’s never done anything like this. The “this” in this case is a quartet of medieval choral songs, arranged for Brokaw’s moody, atmospheric guitar and Donnelly’s airiest, purest vocal stylings.
The project began as a one-off when the pair played a benefit in late 2004. Brokaw had been exploring early music influences, finding…
For years, Cactus Lee has quietly built a singular body of work, playing honky-tonks around Austin while releasing records at a steady, self-driven pace.
Lee’s Dream, his second album for Western Vinyl, feels like the natural distillation of that journey-written on the road, refined at home, and shaped by the push and pull between devotion to music and devotion to family. Conceived during a monthlong solo tour through the Midwest and South, the songs began as sketches written in vans and motel rooms, sparked in part by a visit to Guy Clark’s reconstructed basement at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Returning home to personal upheaval, Kevin Dehan turned inward, writing songs…
There is a pervasive scepticism that shadows any artist whose rise is catalyzed by the weirdly unforgiving, blistering algorithms of social media. When someone builds an audience through 60-second clips of virtuosic bedroom playing, the industry immediately asks: “Can they write a song, or can they just play the instrument?”
With the release of her debut full-length, Evening Star, Emma Harner doesn’t just answer the question; she completely dismantles it. Arriving in the wake of her breakout 2025 EP Taking My Side and a string of sold-out international dates, Harner‘s debut is a masterclass in tension and release, proving her to be one of the most formidable architects of modern folk and math rock working today.
There’s an almost supernatural quietude in Juni Habel’s music, a calm that reaches out of the speakers and stills the soul. The Norwegian songwriter tends to sing in a near-whisper, close to the microphone, sometimes competing with the ambient hum of the room, but don’t mistake her low volume for a lack of power. Habel is in total command of all her instruments — her gentle but resolute voice, the fingerpicked acoustic guitar that encircles her singing like a tangle of vines, the subtle strains of organ and piano that serve as moss on the forest floor of her songs. Her third album, Evergreen in Your Mind, is pastoral folk music as slow cinema; meditative but deceptively intense, and impossible to turn away from once you’re under its spell.
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”…
Celebrating 20 years of Frank Turner’s solo debut EP Campfire Punkrock, Xtra Mile Recordings release a special anniversary extended edition of the seminal release. Featuring the original EP tracks and 6 further live tracks recorded from Frank’s 50th solo gig in London 2006 – taking listeners right back to where it all began at the very early days of Frank’s incredible solo career. The 12” LP features new reworked artwork with shiny gold campfire on matt black cover plus coloured vinyl.
The original EP was recorded by Frank’s guitarist Ben Lloyd at the Oxford home of Turner’s bass player Tarrant Anderson and mixed by Tristan Ivemy. If features fan favourites ‘Nashville Tennessee’, ‘The Real Damage’ and ‘Ballad Of Me And My Friends’
On the first two Fantastic Cat records, the quartet of singer-songwriters (Anthony D’Amato, Brian Dunne, Don DiLego, and Mike Montali) brought their own styles successfully into a band setting. However, on their third album, the cheekily titled Cat Out of Hell, Fantastic Cat feels like a long-running, well-oiled, veteran outfit.
Things are more fluid as individual contributions have melded, crafting an overall, interlocking sound. The extremely well-produced album adds sonic touches like strings, harpsichord, and tambourines to spruce up the group’s solid base of indie/folk rock tunes, all delivered with pristine harmonies and evocative lyrics.
Opening exuberantly with “Donnie Takes the Bus”, Fantastic Cat drops into a cheery,…
A flicker of light was the namesake of Lia Pappas-Kemps‘s first EP, 2024’s Gleam, but the Toronto singer-songwriter’s full-length debut Winged proves that she’s more than just a flash in the pan. The idea of depicting a new indie rock-adjacent local artist often conjures one blurry-edged, vague cipher with a pretty generic sound profile. While Pappas-Kemps is adamantly a deviation from the norm, depending on where you start with her already-chameleonic œuvre, that may or may not be immediately apparent.
The second half of Winged opens a portal that makes it undeniable. On a twisted, knotty tree trunk of a song called “Wound Up and Coiling,” Pappas-Kemps kicks the project’s mouth agape as the titular tension becomes too much…
…Tenderness was born out of a tough storm of circumstances: the pandemic, a cancelled tour, a break-up, and the loss of her father. Furloughed and with too much time on her hands, Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) began to write new songs in her north London living room, windows wide open to the hot summer outside. In August 2020, during that “weird window” of the pandemic where lockdown eased up enough for a trip to the seaside, or across London, Young visited producer Euan Hinshelwood (Younghusband, Cate Le Bon) at his Greenwich studio. In two days, the pair recorded eight demos with no pressure or plan. The final recordings are sparse in that country way but layered with Hinshelwood’s carefully chosen textures: synths, drones, rich…