The release of Mitski’s concert film The Land and its accompanying live album last autumn consolidated her status as a kind of art-school Taylor Swift: glancingly elusive but still capable of grand emotional spectacle.
Recorded with her live band, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me showcases Mitski’s gift for cutting vintage musical theatre stylings and half-lit Americana with acerbic art-pop, the jaunty list-song ‘Rules’ or the chaotic evil ‘Where’s My Phone?’ almost sharing a theatrical moment with current-day David Byrne.
‘That White Cat’ simmers with jarring anger at parasitic forces who seek to commodify and consume while ‘Dead Women’s disturbing Lana Del Cohen transmission features the lyric…
Category: indie-pop
A project established by two veterans of the Stockholm indie scene to delve into (circa) 1980s inspirations like post-punk, new wave, jangle pop, and indie pop, Salt Lake Alley combined these styles while favoring post-punk on their 2020 full-length debut. While they leaned more heavily into jangle and indie pop with the follow-up, their third album, Always Out of Time, finds them expanding their lineup to four and committing almost fully to a giddy, bittersweet indie pop veiled in shimmer and echo. Members Gustav Tranback, Mikael Carlsson, and later personnel Fredrik Jalker and Thomas Aherne hail from like-minded and not-quite-as-like-minded Swedish acts such as the Honeydrips, the Garlands, and Paper Hearts, among several others.
Until recently, Riya Mahesh’s biography nailed nearly every beat of all-American academic achievement, following a familiar arc from early piano lessons to being crowned prom queen, like Olivia Rodrigo’s well-adjusted Wario. But after hitting a snag and failing to get into Juilliard (happens…), the musician regrouped during the pandemic with a SoundCloud account, a trial run of Logic, and nothing to lose.
As Quiet Light, the Texas-born, Boston-based producer has gone on to release multiple albums of increasingly accomplished art pop, along the way nabbing opening spots for Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Ana Roxanne, and Hovvdy. Naturally, she’s managed all this while also powering through medical school.
With members from various groups in the Melbourne indie rock underground on board, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Season 2’s first album, Power of Now, would be a low-key, off-kilter delight. The band – which features drummer Carolyn Hawkins (Parsnip, School Damage, and Chook Race), bassist Charlotte Zarb (the Snakes, Phil & the Tiles), guitarist Matt Powell (also Phil & the Tiles), keyboardist Claudia Serfaty (Stroppies), and guitarist Freya McLeod (herself) – whip through a half-hour of jangling indie pop gems, angular post-punk mood pieces, and jittery bedroom punk rockers along the way to making a record that stands with the best work of the groups they are associated with. The songs are all quite catchy, sometimes in a sideways…
Sunflower Bean singer and bassist Julia Cumming blooms into her pop self with 2026’s gorgeously realized Julia. Her solo debut, the album captures both a personal and creative transition for Cumming who wrote many of the songs over a two-year period, traveling between her childhood home in N.Y.C. and living rooms in Los Angeles where she worked closely with bassist, guitarist, and producer Brian Robert Jones and producer/engineer Chris Coady.
During the same time, she was busy with Sunflower Bean, releasing both 2023’s Headful of Sugar and 2025’s Mortal Primetime; albums that found the indie trio expanding their sound, balancing edgier alt-rock leanings with Cumming’s love for the lyrical, ’60s and ’70s AM pop she…
With every successive album she makes, Carla dal Forno‘s songwriting becomes clearer, more upfront, and more emotionally direct. She actually intended her fourth solo effort to be more abstract, perhaps closer to the mystery-shrouded experimental work of her earlier group F ingers, but as she was writing the songs, she found that they only made sense when she wrote about her emotional experiences in plain language. Her recording environment also helped shape the directness of the songs. Instead of living in a busy city, she had relocated to a small country town which offered stillness and solitude, making it easier to reflect on her life situations and focus on the truth. That said, even though Confession lays deeply guarded feelings bare,…
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…
There’s an air of celebratory nostalgia around Metric at the moment. Last year, the Canadian quartet played their 2009 album Fantasies in full on tour and that seems to have lit a bit of a creative spark. The band’s 10th studio album, Romanticize the Dive, sees them reunited with Fantasies producer Gavin Brown, and even saw them return to the legendary Electric Lady studios in New York. From the outset, Romanticize the Dive seems like a return to Metric’s roots. While there was much to enjoy on Formentera and its 2023 sequel, you did sometimes long for that intoxicating spark to be lit again.
Opening track ‘Victim of Luck’ immediately seems to recreate that energy with a chiming guitar riff from Jimmy Shaw, while lead singer…
Even the most manufactured pop stars are given the option to reinvent themselves.
Gia Margaret, however, really had no say over the circumstances that led to her breakthrough. The Chicago native started fast as a slowcore singer-songwriter who blew away South By Southwest. Then, somewhere around 2019, after coming down with laryngitis, she lost her voice. While the injury lingered, she went viral by turning herself into, of all things, an ambient artist. Now, at 38 years old, Margaret can finally sing again. Her new album occasionally falls flat, but Singing still hits plenty of high notes.
Margaret was never the type of singer to show off. On her first full-length, she sang softly and discreetly, coaxing meaning from each syllable.
The writer and poet Jonathan Swift began writing poems for his dear friend, and possibly secret wife, Esther Johnson (known as to him as Stella) every year on her birthday, starting in 1719. The works are small treasures, full of love and life even hundreds of years later. Trash Can Sinatras’ singer Francis Reader and producer/Noonday Underground leader Simon Dine are both big fans of the poems and decided to set excerpts from them to music. The two had worked together before so they already knew that Reader’s warm and woody vocals would fit well with Dine’s mixture of loops, orchestral samples, and trip hop-inspired production. They called the band Fellow Mortals and their 14-song 2026 album Stella’s Birth-Day melds tricky wordplay…
For their second full-length album, Under My Umbrella, Miss Grit has lifted the lid on their internal world, lasering in on the anxieties and heartbreak of the past two years, following their acclaimed debut Follow the Cyborg.
On this album, Margaret Sohn – aka Miss Grit (they/she) – channels the noirish atmosphere of classic trip-hop bands, while adding a hefty dose of maximalism and a dream-pop sensibility. The title is a nod to the iconic Rihanna song and embraces Sohn “…letting people in more on this record and trying not to shy away from that. I’m leaving the cyborg behind, I’m letting it all out.”
This record started to take shape when Sohn returned from an intense touring schedule where they’d driven themself around…
Since 2019, The Reds, Pinks & Purples has served as Glenn Donaldson’s primary outlet for mulling over fears and insecurities to the tune of ’80s college rock. It’s the most personal and renowned of the thirty-odd aliases and bands he’s worked on in his prolific career, initially envisioned as a means of turning his long, ambling walks around San Francisco into songs, with trains of thought sharpening into angsty, deadpan verses.
His tenth album under the moniker is Acknowledge Kindness (2026), and he puts extra emphasis on the instrumentals: It’s the most atmospheric and detailed Reds, Pinks & Purples record to date, weaving influences from alt-country and 4AD goth rock.
…It’s hard to believe just how much music…
The landmark 1996 album reconstructed from BBC sessions and live recordings! Suede’s commercial high watermark came in 1996 with Coming Up. The 1995 addition to the line-up of lead guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboard player Neil Codling had given the band a new impetus and focus. At the very pinnacle of ‘Britpop’ – a scene they’d helped inspire but fiercely operated outside of – roared back with an adrenalin rush of new Suede classics.
The first missive from ‘Coming Up’ was the trailblazing ‘Trash’, which reached No. 3 in the UK chart – a joint career-best for the band. That was followed into the Top 10 over the next twelve months by four more hit singles from the album – ‘Beautiful Ones’, ‘Lazy’, ‘Saturday Night’, and ‘Filmstar’.
Frog were reclusive until they weren’t. The Americana band’s mastermind, Daniel Bateman, put the project on hold for four years before bringing his brother, Steve, into the previously one-man-band in 2023. The subsequent record, Grog, kicked off a prolific streak: Frog for Sale is the lo-fi alt-country duo’s third album in 14 months, a pseudo-sequel to 2025’s 1000 Variations on the Same Song. Playing with the textures of bossa nova, jangle pop, and twee folk in his signature falsetto, Bateman tears through a songwriting spree inspired by fellow creative compulsives, from Lil Wayne to Mozart, plunking away on piano, strumming guitar, and delivering goofy anecdotes like a homespun cabaret act. Getting lost in the whirlwind is half the fun.
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…
To behold Stonehenge is to bear witness to the human capacity for ingenuity. For songwriter Nate Amos, who records as This Is Lorelei, an encounter with the megalithic structure was life-changing: It convinced him to stop smoking weed.
The prospect of giving up a habit he’d indulged nearly every day for 15 years was daunting, but Amos decided to channel his subsequent restless energy into songwriting. Maybe it was the lack of weed; maybe Amos was building off the recent success of his various other projects; maybe those Neolithic rocks transmitted something magic to him — regardless, the resulting album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, is a keenly crafted and wonderfully adventurous set of songs, both earnest and appealingly funny.
Out on his own after making music with bands like Veronica Falls and Ultimate Painting, James Hoare has gone further down the rabbit hole in pursuit of the most understated, most intimate version of melancholy guitar pop possible. Under the name Penny Arcade Hoare plays his tender tunes softly in front of a tape machine, though really it sounds like he’s on the bed right next to you the listener the whole time.
His first record under this banner was 2024’s Backwater Collage and it was lovely in its preciseness and calm, mixing catchy melodies and production that never reached the red on the dials. Taking that sparse template and breaking it down even more, 2026’s Double Exposure is just as true and blue, even more so at times.
Despite its sound owing much to late-‘90s alternative – and that it’s coming two years on from her initial breakthrough – there’s something so beautifully ‘now’ about Little Miss Sunshine, this debut full-length from Eaves Wilder. Not the ‘now’ that one might imagine rapacious, cartoonish A&Rs to seek – that’s already been and gone, despite their efforts, if it even existed. But a ‘now’ that, among other things, has digitally-literate teens metaphorically crate-digging in a way that’s seen many a veteran act performing to audiences younger than their biggest hits; Olivia Rodrigo using her stage as a pseudo mixtape, Hayley Williams spilling her own guts across new material, and acts like Mitski, Wolf Alice and Wet Leg crossing over into pop spheres…
‘No Time for Poetry (Easy Listening Edition)’ is a reimagined instrumental version of the 2025 album ‘No Time for Poetry’ by the Oakland-based duo The Saxophones. This edition replaces the original vocals with saxophone, bass clarinet, and alto flute lines to create a smooth, “easy listening” experience.
With their first three albums, The Saxophones — married couple Alexi Erenkov (vocals, woodwinds) and Alison Alderdice (drums, backing vocals) with multi-instrumentalist Richard Laws — have established a haunting and dreamy, lightly jazz-inflected style of minimalist indie pop that evokes smoky back rooms, seaside reflection, romance, and the analog era.
Their fourth LP, No Time for Poetry, finds them…
Straddling the fringe of melancholy and optimism, Irish singer-songwriter A.S. Fanning’s fourth and latest record Take Me Back to Nowhere is awash with an abundance of solemn introspection, journeys into fractured belief systems and ever-evolving, conflicting realities.
Born from traditional Irish literary works and folk tales, Fanning’s sonic playground both swings skyward into interstellar textures and frolics between pillars of grounded, wistful lyricism. Bearing witness to a battalion of contradictions, he toils between conflicting concepts, questions solutions to the modern world, and grapples with the turmoil and tenderness of love.
Take Me Back to Nowhere is a raw, unfiltered foray into creative freedom and an ode to…