Perhaps you’re familiar with Star Moles, the ultra-prolific recording project from Philadelphia musician Emily Moales. Perhaps you’re also familiar with Rubber Band Gun, the similarly ultra-prolific project from regular Star Moles contributor Kevin Basko; Rubber Band Gun and Star Moles dropped the song “Frodoboy” a couple of months ago. Perhaps you would also like to know about Sam and Louise Sullivan, a sibling duo who make a ton of music with Moales and Basko and who have a new album Love & Devotion.
Sam and Louise Sullivan grew up around the US, and they started playing folk music together as kids. These days, they both live in Philadelphia, where Louise runs her own ceramics business and Sam works as a teacher.
Category: indie-pop
Alex Cameron probably didn’t mean to release his album right after the trailer for Digger dropped, but it’s mighty good timing. Digger is a Tom Cruise venture and appears to be halfway between Tropic Thunder’s gonzo work and Christian Bale’s Oscar angling in Vice. Both Vice and Digger ogle like a carnival barker at the transformation of a usually chiseled Hollywood star getting fat, as if the gravitas and comedy simply spring from calories and discrepancy.
“I put on a ton of weight / For a role I didn’t get / Now I’m always late for set / Getting panned in the LA Times / Getting tanned on the internet,” Cameron snarls at the beginning of his new album, Late to Set. Pumped up and steely “Eye of the Tiger” guitars thud behind him, a warbly…
Welcomer’s Miles Sutton observes the world from a remove, delivering even intimate scenes from an ironic remove. Most of the time, he’s only half singing, through the verse injecting conversational lyrics with the barest tinge of melody.
Yet in the chorus, Sutton reveals a fascination with pop: the arrangements bristle with hooks and billow with strings, multi-voiced singing and rock instruments.
This is Sutton’s first full-length album as Welcomer, following a self-titled EP in 2022. The Wellington, New Zealand artist enlisted producer and engineer Jesse Austin-Stewart for this one, working with him to develop layered but buoyant orchestrations for these songs, which glisten and shimmer with trebly picking, swoops of…
Making guitar pop/rock (of any kind) work more often than not depends on the synergy of musicians involved, rather than the guitar expertise, and sometimes even the songwriting quality. That synergy seems to be the driving force for the guitar pop Manchester-to-London duo atmos bloom (Tilda Gratton and Curtis Paterson) create on their second album Everythingness.
The duo, who also became life partners, create the kind of guitar pop where that of every kind from above parentheses comes into play – it can be dream pop, it can be twee pop, it could be jangle pop or whatnot – the thing is Gratton and Paterson practically cover it all here. And they wrap it in some very good to excellent songwriting and equal quality harmonies, with high quality…
Josh da Costa imagined his solo debut album New Wave Graveyard as a “greatest hits from a parallel universe, classic songs from an alternate reality.” He says, “Instead of trying to home in on one specific vibe or sound and capturing it over the course of, say, a month of my life, I chose to sort of chameleon my way through my own taste and record collection and try out different approaches to songwriting – as if I were more than just one artist.”
Anyone who’s witnessed Josh DJ around LA or checked out his Confusing Mix radio show on NTS will be familiar with his curious blends of music – Brussels micro-labels, Flying Nun favorites, and leftfield post-punk – and how they all somehow make sense together.
…features twelve new songs widely available for the first time: stripped-back versions of songs written before the recording of ‘I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!’ had finished, live favourites heard on McRae’s recent headline tours and festivals appearances, a new version of “Mother Wound” featuring Maisie Peters as well as new tracks elsewhere featuring contributions from Brandi Carlile and Brittney Spencer.
Ever since the release of her stand-out ‘Who Hurt You?’ EP back in 2021, Jensen McRae has been marked out as a special songwriter. Even in that early foray, the Californian managed to effortlessly distil an array of powerful emotions into its six tracks in a way that felt, in moments, truly heartbreaking. So it feels more than…
The solo project of Kelly Truong, a producer/songwriter from Southern California, kelz joined the roster of Bayonet Records early on in her music career, with the label issuing her self-recorded debut album, 5 AM and I Can’t Sleep, in 2022. It established a gentle and airy yet dance-oriented sound that she created by combining shimmery synths with fingerpicked guitar, high, gossamer vocals, and simple looped beats.
While the follow-up was four years in the making, it can be described the same way with the caveat that it offers a softer and slightly more intricate version of kelz’s distinctive sound, a sound that never quite moves out of the bedroom headphones and into the club. Its cover design features a blurred photo of Truong.
Sometimes a solo project and sometimes a band, Jilian Medford’s IAN SWEET has switched up its sound from album to album, sometimes favoring bright guitar pop, sometimes shimmery, synth-aided noise pop, and other times applying heavier guitar tones and dissonance to the songwriter’s personal, melodic songs. With IAN SWEET’s fifth album, Shiverstruck, she delivers her most direct-sounding material yet, which is to say that she sticks with mostly full-band arrangements of amplified indie and synthy pop, but makes room for balladry, the occasional appearance of instruments like strings and piano, and a more vulnerable sensibility. The occasion is a breakup album that also carries the weight of a relocation from N.Y.C. to her hometown of L.A. and…
The newest offering from pianist/composer Marco Benevento, Glera, finds the artist expanding his sonic palette, working with different vocalists to score the retro Italian movies playing in his head.
Benevento was heavily inspired by Italian film scores and melody for this album, which uses cinematic lines on every track, providing emotion and depth to the mostly instrumental tunes. Benevento plays more of a role as composer/leader here; a jamband veteran, Marco lets the songwriting be the focus throughout Glera as the tunes run short, set the visual scene, and move on. Opening with the excellent “Frizzante”, the joyful instrumental bounces along with a sunshiny feeling and could have been a theme song to a 70’s television show with its bright,…
All the Beauty is Pete Yorn’s new album, arriving via Shelly Records. The 11-song release marks his third full-length collaboration with Jackson Phillips of Day Wave, continuing a creative partnership that has shaped Yorn’s recent run of records.
Built around Yorn’s signature mix of alternative rock and melodic indie songwriting, the album expands on the breezy, guitar-driven sound the pair established on Caretakers and Hawaii. The title track, released ahead of the album, sets the tone with a focus on staying present and recognizing moments of beauty in everyday life.
The record was produced by Jackson Phillips and Pete Yorn, with Phillips also handling engineering and mixing. Across its 11 tracks, All the Beauty balances understated arrangements…
Romance is a funny old game. One minute, you’ll be in the trenches of heartbreak, swearing off love forever. The next, you’re down bad for someone new and do a full 180 into living in a swoony movie in your head.
Suki Waterhouse’s third album, Loveland, captures some of the feelings of that latter experience, mining her relationships and infatuations past and present to build a world you’ll want to immerse yourself in whether you’re coupled up, on the hunt or convinced you’re destined to be alone.
“Picture this, it’s innocent / ‘Cause I haven’t even held your hand yet / Do you know that you’ve been coming up in my dreams?” she asks over the Strokes-y guitars of ‘Almost’, diving into a fantasy that plays out in her head alone.
Aaron Lee Tasjan’s version of outsider-ism began as a 13-year-old, when his family moved from California to Ohio. It turned out to be the first of many times he’s used music to bridge a gap between folks who seemingly had little in common, and it’s one of the stories found on his latest album, Get Over It, Underdog. For this record, though, music nearly abandoned Tasjan, returning just when he needed it most.
That Ohio story, “Ballad of an East Canton Lowlife,” falls smack-dab in the middle of Get Over It, Underdog, but serves to reintroduce us to Tasjan a bit, even a half-dozen albums in, as, well, a bit of a teenage misfit – “Born a white boy/I don’t know why/I was raised up to never even try” – even as he knows, as he proves a moment later…
…features three remix bonus tracks.
The Charlatans are one of those bands with little following in the United States but a massive fanbase in the UK. The rare American who happens upon them is likely searching for artists associated with Oasis or Blur before digging into Inspiral Carpets, Manic Street Preachers, or Ocean Colour Scene. That’s how far we are removed from the Cheshire band, now boasting 14 albums, 22 top 40 singles, and three number one albums.
Despite our collective ignorance, the Charlatans have returned after an eight-year hiatus with a certain amount of fanfare. The band, which features Tim Burgess (vocals), Martin Blunt (bass), Mark Collins (guitar), Tony Rogers (keyboards), and Pete Salisbury (drums), entered the studio with…
The deluxe edition features 15 additional tracks: rare remixes, live versions and instrumentals.
On their sixth album, the increasingly prolific neo-psych outfit Portugal. The Man look to the past for inspiration on In the Mountain in the Cloud. The album represents a breakthrough for the band on a couple of levels, the most obvious of which is their signing to major-label Atlantic, which comes as a big step up after years of quietly working their way through the indie circuit. The other is the less tangible artistic breakthrough. With such a rigorous release schedule, Portugal. The Man has been a band that listeners have been able to watch hone their craft step by step, slowly tinkering and adjusting things and growing into a band that’s not only hit their stride, but is in full…
Melodi Ghazal’s debut full-length finds the Copenhagen-based artist tracing a path through cultural inheritance and sonic exploration. Raised by Iranian parents and shaped by everything from pre-revolutionary Persian pop to VH1 balladry, her sound was honed at the illustrious Rhythmic Music Conservatory – the same stable as left-field contemporaries like ML Buch and Astrid Sonne.
The opener ‘Heart on the Loose’ drifts in on cyclical grooves and devotional lyricism, Ghazal’s voice hovering over soft-focus electronics and darkening daf rhythms, while ‘Miracle’ is a swirl of delayed synths and sultry bass.
‘Fariba Forever’ sets spoken word against manipulated melodies, ‘Numb’ pairs shimmering guitar with a muted sense of release,…
If there’s one thing you can be sure of with The Last Dinner Party, it’s that they’re not short of confidence. After releasing a debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, that debuted at Number 1 and was nominated for the Mercury Prize, and playing a succession of gigs that successfully combined camp theatrics with magnetic stage presence, you wouldn’t be surprised to see the London five-piece put their feet up for a while.
Not a bit of it. The band’s second album, From the Pyre, follows just 18 months on from that planet-straddling success story and already sounds like an instant hit. It has all the elements that made Prelude to Ecstasy such a success, and seems to refine them. Abigail Morris’ voice swoops and soars magnificently, Emily Roberts launches…
Toward the end of “I’ll Let You Finish,” the rollicking opener of his second record Fire from the Hip, Finn Wolfhard does something unexpected. After affecting a nineties indie rocker drawl and doling out charmingly rambling lyrics, the twenty-three-year-old singer/actor finishes the song by singing Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 VMAs. It’s an odd moment, one that would come off as a pretentious cop-out in another’s hands. And in a way, it does have a quality of randomness for its own sake, but Wolfhard somehow makes it work. Part of that is due to how much crackling personality he suffuses into the song itself, but Wolfhard’s recontextualization of that soundbite offers a strangely compelling parallel to his own difficult…
Forty-two years into a career that has quietly defined the underbelly of American neo-psychedelia, Seattle’s The Green Pajamas return with When Fever Let Me Dream. Led by the ever-prolific singer-songwriter Jeff Kelly, the band delivers a record that feels like a lucid, late-night transmission from a bygone era-yet it remains completely timeless.
When Fever Let Me Dream captures the band at their most atmospheric. Heavily indebted to the experimental studio sorcery of the Beatles’ Revolver and the pastoral whimsy of early Pink Floyd, the album floats seamlessly between melodic baroque-pop and hazy, nocturnal rock. The brief opening instrumental “Intro: Pastyme With Good Companye” immediately sets…
Fabienne Delsol does modern garage psych as well as anyone; her handful of solo albums have been mysterious, magical delights full of drama and intrigue; it’s no wonder that one of her songs ended up on the soundtrack of Killing Eve. Any music coordinator looking for a song that combines the hooky pop of French ye-ye, the guitar and keys swirl of psychedelia, the stomp of Freakbeat, and the sweetness of the beat group era would do well to pick any one of her songs.
There are plenty of fine examples of Delsol at her best on her 2026 record Indigo Red. Co-produced by Ed Deegan and Delsol herself with a crack band of contributors (Thomas Gardner, Carwyn Eliis) on board, the record sounds typically good, coated in reverb and echo but still cracking…
The duo of multi-instrumentalists Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre, sundayclub started out in rural Canada as a way to process the emotions of growing into adulthood, having relationships that fade, and self-discovery. Framing their yearning, bittersweet songs in a shimmery, classic dream pop sound perfected by Carmichael’s gentle, airy vocals, they soon landed on Paper Bag Records (with help from the Weakerthans’ Stephen Carroll, who heard them and passed their music along to the label’s A&R) and based themselves in Winnipeg. Produced by Carmichael, St. Pierre, and Kris Ulrich (Boy Golden, Field Guide), the SUNDAYCLUB LP begins with the brief introductory track “Tune In,” which, while not fully orchestrated, establishes their dreamy, longing…