Even by the standards of an age in which artists are encouraged to maintain a constant stream of new releases to ensure that they maintain a continual presence in an attention-deficit economy, there’s something pretty startling about Bassvictim’s work rate. Peace + War is the London-based duo’s fourth project in two years: 19 more tracks to add to the 31 they’ve already released since last January. It’s a lot, but then, reading Bassvictim’s interviews you wonder if they’re simply splurging out material in the knowledge that their time is limited. The duo – Polish singer Maria Manow and Brooklyn-born producer Ike Clateman – really don’t give the impression of a band built for longevity. They have already announced their split on at least two separate…
Category: indie-pop
Whisper it quietly, but there’s something stirring on the banks of the River Trent. Whether it be the excellent Divorce (who released one of the best albums of last year in Drive to Goldenhammer), post-grungers Kagoule or the dreamy indie-pop of Vona Vella, it can’t be denied that the Nottingham music scene is in rude health right now.
It could well be that Do Nothing end up being the biggest draw of the lot. When their debut album, Snake Sideways, was released in 2023, they set themselves apart from the usual gaggle of post-punk bands with a certain anxious elegance – it was an album with bags of promise. Now, three years later, Friend World delivers on that promise and more with a collection of tracks that feel looser, bolder and strikingly confident.
Doveland invokes a place of pastoral calm, perhaps a lost corner of the American plains where folk songs might drift across the landscape. Django Django’s sixth album does eventually find its way there, but it takes a surprisingly circuitous route. Song titles like “Meteorite”, “Quicksand”, and “So Heavy” suggest something darker and more muscular. Yet just as the album seems ready to settle into heavy rock, Django Django take it somewhere stranger.
“Meteorite” culminates in a wash of space rock; “Quicksand” is built around an atonal piano motif; and “So Heavy” eventually gives way to delicate, almost jazz-like flute, and beneath it all, the drumming is frequently more jazz-inflected than the straightforward rock arrangements…
“Road trip album” usually connotes an element of escape from everyday life, but on Highway to Hell, the journey is in the ordinary and inescapable. While Emily Moales’ earlier works as Star Moles fixated on science fiction and Medieval literature, she’s come down to earth on her latest record, using stripped-back psychedelia to mythologize the mundane.
On Highway to Hell, Moales sounds looser and more confident than she ever has, exhibiting a counterintuitive control, the kind that only comes by letting go. Oftentimes, the most self-assured lyrics on Highway to Hell are the ones delivered with the least certainty. Moales makes for a sympathetic and keenly observant narrator, deeply tapped into the universe she’s at…
On their previous releases, San Francisco’s Aluminum often combined the swirling, psychedelic guitars of shoegaze with drum loops inspired by big beat and Madchester, though they also had plenty of driving indie pop songs as well. While the group primarily self-recorded their music in the past, second album Iconoclast Haha was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jack Shirley at Oakland’s Atomic Garden Studio, and has more of a live band feel than their other records. Co-leader Ryann Gonsalves sounds much more present in the mix on this album, and she also recalls Kim Deal more than she used to.
Opener “Give Me a Reason” is hazy and grungy but sounds crisp and direct, showcasing the group’s vocal harmonies and an abundance…
There’s something of a throwback feel to Disgusting Sisters‘ debut album. Those old enough to remember Shampoo will recognise a similar ‘not bothered’ aesthetic, as will those who can remember Daphne & Celeste‘s gloriously defiant reaction to being bottled off at Reading Festival. Yet Josephine and Julianna Hopkins aren’t simply playing a tribute act. Ever since suddenly appearing on prolific super-producer Dan Carey’s Speedy Wunderground label with 2024’s Killing It, they’ve gained an army of loyal fans with a series of EPs and every festival spot you can think of. If you’re familiar with them, Skin & Blisters will already sound like an old friend – 10 tracks of snarky indie-pop which at times (check out ‘Weirdo Magnet’) feels like the missing link…
Sometimes there’s music that makes you feel like you’ve been listening to it your whole life. It immediately gets under your skin and stays in your head forever. Even when an artist is new, their songs might sound as iconic to you as, say, J Mascis or Jason Pierce’s stuff. Juice Webster somehow works exactly this kind of magic on your mind. Her 2023 debut, Julia, felt like coming home, like returning to your old teenage bedroom full of posters, vinyl, and precious memories. Her sophomore outing, Kind of Fantasy, is akin to Greta Gerwig’s Narnia – it’s like reliving a whole mix of emotions just by opening an old wardrobe full of you-know-what.
Having started down this path around 2019, with bare folk ballads in the vein of Joan Baez…
Weezer founding member and original bassist, Matt Sharp, while working on a series of “lost-albums” from the cutting room floor of his creative-life, stumbled upon a curious multi-track reel of analog tape. This mysterious reel found at the bottom of a treasure chest of other master recordings just happened to contain Weezer’s very first studio sessions.
These were the very same recordings that were responsible for earning the band a record contract for their iconic debut “Blue” album. These newly discovered sessions feature raw, vividly emotional and ecstatic versions of the band’s timeless hit songs Say It Ain’t So and Undone (The Sweater Song.) Sharp and legendary music producer Joe Chicarrelli took these recordings…
After Thao Nguyen made her solo debut with 2005’s Like the Linen, she reinforced her offbeat, bluesy indie folk sound with the bolder hooks, burrowing grooves, and colorful textures of her band Thao & the Get Down Stay Down. The group found her working with producers like Tucker Martine, John Congleton, and Merrill Garbus across five albums. Show Me marks Nguyen’s debut under the solo moniker THAO, although fans of the Get Down Stay Down should be reassured that not only does her distinctive style remain similar, the album was produced by Garbus and her tUnE-yArDs bandmate Nate Brenner. It also features several notable guests. A song that was released as an early single, “Sick of the Times” is an anthem for the era if ever there was one.
The Big Moon‘s music has always been a personal, introspective affair. The London four-piece’s last album, 2022’s Here Is Everything, concerned lead singer Juliette Jackson’s pregnancy and how she’s negotiating the early days of motherhood. Four years later, Forever has a very different backstory. In 2024, Jackson discovered, during a routine check, that she’d developed a benign cyst in her ear – one that, although not cancerous, would kill her if not removed. The resulting surgery also meant that Jackson would permanently lose some of her hearing. It’s the sort of life-changing diagnosis that could push someone into the depths of despair. However, Jackson was determined to make her band’s next album a joyous affair – imagining a hopeful…
The Snuts’ new record Joy in Short Moments marks the Scottish band’s fourth studio album, and it follows the huge commercial success of their opening trilogy, all of which peaked in the UK Top 10. It’s easy to see why; the band are constantly catchy and often relatable.
There’s no better example of this on the record than the reflective and wise ‘Youth Ain’t Easy’, featuring the lyrics “Now that I’m old, youth ain’t easy”, which seems sure to resonate with a young crowd. Yet, the group do not remain so upbeat and joyous that it becomes cheesy; they contrast the happy, upbeat numbers with more sombre moments like ‘PTS’, a song looking back on a relationship through the lens of ‘Post Traumatic Stress’, which ends on the slightly sour…
Daughter’s Elena Tonra originally released the 2018 eponymous album Ex:Re (pronounced “ex ray” and derived from “Regarding Ex”) as a one-time outlet for feelings following a difficult breakup. The solo project’s whispery, melancholic vocals and gloomy, often eerie acoustic-electronic textures connected with certain listeners, and it became something of a cult favorite in the years to follow. Tonra eventually went back to the studio with engineer/producer Fabian Prynn and cellist Josephine Stephenson from the debut to record a follow-up. Joining them was Ben Reed (bass), Jethro Fox (electric guitar), and experimental musician Hinako Omori (synthesizers). The resulting Save As picks up where Ex:Re left off, if without an aggravating stimulus other than…
A project built around lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Bobby Townson and his sister, singer and miscellaneous instrumentalist Emma Townson, who also does the band’s artwork, British Birds emerged from Chorley, England, in the early 2020s. The D.I.Y. outfit, which has rotated bassists and drummers, essentially hand-sold their first two albums at shows and few record shops. Their eclectic sound — which assimilates numerous vintage pop/rock styles (cool ones), from garage pop to ’60s mod music and Beatlesque hard rock, ’80s college rock, arty punk, classic indie pop, and more — as well as their witty, anti-establishment spirit, came to the attention of the U.K.’s Skep Wax Records, which signed on to release their third album. It features bassist…
The band Great Lakes was formed in Athens, Georgia, in 1996 with members Ben Crum, Dan Donahue, and Jamey Huggins, and from there, the numbers grew, with a revolving cast of musicians from the local scene involved, until, by 2008, Crum was left as the only permanent member.
The Elephant Six Collective plays a part in the early days of Great Lakes; the Elephant Six Collective being a number of bands all connected to four friends in Ruston, Louisiana, who shared a love for music and exchanged homemade cassette recordings, the friends went on to form bands such as The Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Olivia Tremor Control. Originally part of the Elephant Six Collective’s Athens-based second‑wave, connected through the people…
Few musicians can name a chiptuned guitar sketch “Artrock” and be taken seriously. One of them is Leo Fincham, a precocious Londoner whose songs evoke irony-tinged earnestness and referential irreverence, the sorts of tensions terms like “art rock” were invented to resolve. Along with Rowan Please of the Femcels, he helms the madcap duo Worldpeace DMT, whose debut, The Velvet Underground & Rowan (2025), stuffed a thrift store’s worth of sounds — Glockenspiels! 8-bit consoles! Broadcast footage! — into mechanically precise music, as if childhood memories could be exported as sample packs. The resulting RAM space is evident on Stick Around for Tea, a slighter record with the ragtag splendor of a low-budget musical. More remarkably, its metaphorical…
…deluxe edition feature 25 tracks spanning 1 hour and 34 minutes. It appends the original 13-track record with a bonus disc of B-sides, acoustic takes, and early home demos from 1997.
Two years following the tragic demise of Lush, guitarist Emma Anderson formed the dream pop outfit Sing-Sing with vocalist Lisa O’Neill (Locust, Kid Loco) in 1998. The pairing couldn’t have been more magical, for Sing-Sing presented a glowing dynamic. By fall 2002, American indie fans finally got their hands on the duo’s debut album, The Joy of Sing-Sing; it had been previously released in Europe a year earlier, but the stateside release was worth the wait.
The Joy of Sing-Sing showcases Anderson’s signature vocal shimmer. O’Neill is a matchless…
Strawberry Guy is the name used by Welsh-born, Liverpool-based artist Alexander Stephens for his softly delivered, hyper-melodic symphonic pop. He used to be the keyboardist in The Orielles but left to release his debut solo album back in 2021 and has spent the last five years readying his second album, Give Me a Dream.
On paper it may seem a longer than average time to work on an album, but the results help explain the lengthy gestation. His music to date has largely been recorded in this bedroom and in many ways he fitted the image of your archetypal lo-fi-DIY-bedroom artist but Give Me a Dream was recorded at the legendary Sonic Ranch studio in Texas. “Going from my bedroom to probably one of the best studios in the world was…
You know Fine Glindvad Jensen from somewhere. Perhaps you recognize the Danish polymath as the pitched-up voice echoing across Two Shell’s 2022 breakout “home”; maybe the hooks she wrote for that NewJeans EP got stuck in your head. Perhaps you’re familiar with her cohort at Copenhagen’s prestigious (and publicly funded) Rhythmic Music Conservatory, where she shared the halls with Smerz, Erika de Casier, ML Buch, and Astrid Sonne, among others. Her dusky alto may remind you of Hope Sandoval, or Lana, or the beautiful stranger who covered Nancy Sinatra at your local dive’s open mic—or did you imagine that? The great trick of her beguiling second solo album, Jazz dreams, is the veil of velvety uncertainty it casts over sounds I’d thought were carved into stone…