I’m Kingfisher is the alter ego of Swedish singer-songwriter Thomas Jonsson. Give Up Together is his sixth album under that guise and comes three years after his last release, Glue, which was far less structured and had a jazzier, looser feel to it.
It opens with the lead single ‘Years of Depression’, which is an emotional entry point and undoubtedly sets the tone for the tracks to come. It certainly has a heavier tone than his earlier work, but it still has that slow, thoughtful application that signifies Jonsson’s work. His writing is both deep and reflective, and in many ways can be seen as almost Leonard Cohen-like in its imagery.
“Here I am. White as f**k and privileged, but also an open wound. I go to the bathhouse to enjoy silence, with naked men with no bodies.
Category: indie-folk
Though still young enough to have as much future stretching ahead as past behind him, Kevin Morby has already clocked up nine albums that track his migrations – first from his native state of Texas to Kansas, then to NYC, LA and back to Kansas (City) – while fine-tuning his countrified folk-rock. Both Harlem River and City Music stand as odes to New York, while Sundowner documented his Midwest homecoming, and 2022’s This Is a Photograph was inspired by Memphis and largely written during a stay there in its historic Peabody hotel. On Morby’s 10th, specific places (and events connected to them) are again the stuff of his songs but now he’s taking stock of his 20 years on the road and mapping out much more of his interior terrain as a result. Despite the title,…
Whitehorse have returned to their folk-rock roots on their latest full-length record, All I Want Is All of It. The Canadian husband-and-wife team of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClellan recorded the album in a 19th-century farmhouse to capture the mood of past spirits in the ancient place.
Of course, only a New World denizen would consider a place built 200 years ago old. Its semi-rural setting on the other side of the tracks offers a haunting aural landscape. The musicians said the location functioned as the creative inspiration behind the new disc.
Whitehorse‘s 11 songs are purposely experimental and vary in style and tone. They range from the primitive rawness of a demo (“Lighthouse”) recorded on McClellan’s iPhone…
Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees – and there are enough of them to warrant her playing three nights at London’s Barbican later this month – she is a strange and endlessly fascinating figure. Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis. On Train on the Island, her fifth album, you’re invited to make some kind of sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing “the real John Cale” silently eating rice, “Sicilians reaching over the clams”, and the imponderable lines: “I’m saving myself by eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel.”
The curious album covers; the uneasy stage presence and between-song non-sequiturs;…
Stephen Becker loves to find poetry and eloquence in the inane activities of everyday life. “Bad Idea”, the first song on his new album, Gravity Blanket, begins: “Had a bad idea again / So I remain uncertain for a while / Took some time to breathe again / And thrift a collared shirt to find my style.” In the lazy, midtempo “Emergency”, he asks a practical question: “Why’d you get a car in New York City? / The train goes far enough.” A fascinating bedroom-pop songwriter and musician, his musical approach may come off as occasionally naïve and “normcore”, but there is deep sophistication and unique textures in every song.
Becker is an in-demand New York sideman, working with artists as diverse as Rubblebucket, Vagabon, Katie Von Schleicher,…
It can take years to develop the kind of band chemistry you can hear straight away, the kind that’s all over mildred’s debut album Fenceline.
It’s not just that the Oakland four-piece write and sing democratically, it’s that their shared authorship feels like a genuine meeting of ideas passed around the room rather than delivered from any one fixed point. What could have felt piecemeal instead feels companionable and lived-in. There’s real warmth in that, and trust too. These are people you want to be friends with: unselfconscious, generous and together because they like the sound of each other’s instincts.
Opener “UPS Brown” gets that across beautifully. A low violin drone runs under guitars that feel both worn and careful, with crunchy…
For her fourth album, Maya Hawke regathered key members of her steady writing/recording crew – Christian Lee Hudson, Benjamin Lazer Davis, Will Graefe – who continue to take chances and gradually broaden her sound instead of opting for the warm comfort of a default sweetly melodic, charmingly confessional songwriter sensibility (although there’s some of that here, too). Joining them in the studio was another prior collaborator, producer/engineer Jonathan Low (Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, Caroline Shaw). Hawke’s most ambitious album to date, the 13-song Maitreya Corso is both her wordiest and most assertive-sounding yet, with some of its tracks employing tricks like layered and manipulated vocals in a way that suggests modern…
Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People is the aural equivalent of comfort food. It’s warm, goes down easy, is simple at the core, and hits many of the right spots. The title alone suggests a universality, the common rhythms of life, the pendulum of emotions, and connection. As you likely know, Hiss Golden Messenger is the moniker for North Carolina singer-songwriter MC Taylor. Taylor penned these songs in a farmhouse on the edge of a bay in California, at his home in the North Carolina Piedmont, and in a motel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Taylor was searching for inspiration, an elusive kind of magic, but instead found himself writing about running toward and away from things, about realistic expectations and slivers of hope in these trying times,…
“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…
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…