Carrying the torch of great artists and bands is not as easy as some listeners might think. That torch could be damn heavy if you haven’t picked up all the right cues and if you didn’t add at least a modicum of something that turns out to be your own.
The case in point here – British conglomerate that goes under the name of Simon Bromide and The Bromides (yes, there is a guy there that goes under the name of Simon Bromide, with his real last name being Berridge) and their latest album Forest Mountain Forest.
The band’s PR cites quite a few hip names as inspiration, from Husker Dü to Yo La Tengo, among many. And sure, you can hear traces of that here and there, but it is something else…
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The Veils have occupied a distinctive place within alternative music for more than two decades, blending literary lyricism with emotionally driven songwriting and an evolving sound. Formed around singer-songwriter Finn Andrews, the band emerged in the early 2000s after Andrews signed to Rough Trade Records at just 16 years old. Since then, The Veils have released eight studio albums, moving between piano-led ballads, expansive rock arrangements, and atmospheric indie soundscapes while maintaining a strong emotional core. Their music frequently explores themes of love, loss, identity, and mortality, delivered through Andrews’ expressive vocals and poetic writing style.
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.
In addition to her delicate, spacious arrangements; gentle, articulate vocals; and affection for unusual melodies and harmonic progressions, Vermont singer/songwriter 
Performing under the moniker 
There is something deceptive about The Chauffeur. On first listen, 
…featuring a previously unreleased demo, alternate versions of much-loved album favorites and a cover from the sessions for their seminal debut album.
It seems obvious and trite to say that 
The extremely personal nature of this album is evident in the introduction to the song “Canopies.” What begins as a gentle prelude is actually a moment captured on a family trip to Houston, where Azniv Korkejian (AKA 
These days – on the new, ninth Fink album – Greenall is operating within a lineage of authentic, quietly revolutionary artists from England’s verdant southwestern toe. Artists like Michael Chapman. In 1970, the elusive acoustic guitar wizard released an album called Fully Qualified Survivor. The cult-classic served as a lodestar for Greenall – along with bandmates Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker – as he began jigsawing together 
Above all else, 
Philadelphia singer/songwriter 
For more than 3 decades, 
At some point over the more than 20 years that she has been performing and recording, 
Simon Joyner’s 2024 album Coyote Butterfly ranks among the most simultaneously beautiful and devastating documents of its kind, a painfully raw and autobiographical account of the untimely death of Joyner’s son Owen. Since the early ‘90s, Joyner has been one of independent music’s most authentically independent artists, and while his poetic songs have never shied away from difficult emotions, the depths of vulnerability and sorrow he found on Coyote Butterfly were even more searingly real than anything he’d made before. Even though the album focused on collecting the finite feelings of grief, it represented a place to honor these feelings rather than a capstone in Joyner’s life of work. 
Thomas Dollbaum is a songwriter who values atmosphere above all else. His voice is loamy and deep, the dissipating smoke in a room right after you’ve blown out a candle, and it will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the road-trip elegies of Damien Jurado or the art-folk incantations of Richard Buckner. On his second album, 
Musicians who become parents sometimes feel compelled to write songs about it. But really, what is there to say? Every parenthood experience is unique, and also very much the same, and probably has been for something like three hundred thousand years since humans evolved. All the wonder or magic inherent in the process is deeply personal, and therefore dreary as hell when someone else sings about it. That’s a grinchy perspective, no question, but