Yeah, mostly is a new collection of 11 songs resembling a collection of short stories traversing a person’s relationship with their dishwasher, a grandparent’s funeral, an ungodly cold night in Los Angeles and other scenes that float in and around the rhythms of daily life.
It is the most personal and self-assured album yet from Will Epstein – also known for his work under the moniker High Water, in addition to collaborations with Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington (Darkside) – as well as the most seemingly effortless application of his songwriting talents. His work composing for movies, like his recent IDA Documentary Award-nominated score for Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV, bleeds into his recent, more accessible work.
Category: indie-pop
Typically, when an artist stays out of our view, every public gesture he or she does make is loaded with extra significance. Think of the ways each demo, cover, or bit of extramusical trivia is instantly subsumed into the canons of D’Angelo, Fiona Apple, or Frank Ocean.
But given how Corbin, who drifted from SoundCloud stardom to deeper recesses of the internet, has released music — first under a different, instantly infamous stage name, and then in intermittent bursts that suggest a true disregard for self-promotion and self-mythologizing — the temptation is to receive his songs as a series of experiments, tips of an iceberg that will languish in a Google Drive folder until it melts.
The grey cover of his new album, Crisis Kid,…
At only 26, Jenny Hollingworth has already (incredibly) been making music for half her life. Having formed freak-pop project Let’s Eat Grandma with Rosa Walton as a young teen, the duo released their striking debut effort, ‘I Gemini’, aged just 16. Now, with three Let’s Eat Grandma albums under their joint belt (the most recent being 2022’s confronting ‘Two Ribbons’), the pair have taken that record’s crux – namely, the metamorphosis of their relationship from inseparable teenagers to independent adult entities – to its natural conclusion, each embarking on solo endeavours under new monikers.
Jenny On Holiday, then, sees her step sideways with a staunchly pop palette, leaving behind the quirkier corners of LEG’s fantastical…
Lightning in a Twilight Hour are another band built around the heartbreak of Bobby Wratten, and like the Field Mice, Northern Picture Library, and Trembling Blue Stars, their albums are made up of songs that trickle like warm tears down the cheeks of a heartbroken soul. Colours Yet to Be Named has all the hallmarks of his work: precisely jangling guitars, dub-inspired basslines, soothingly dark synth pads, and vocals that alternately glide on top of, or sink into, the gloom. Wratten is joined as he was on the group’s previous masterpiece of overwhelming melancholy Overwintering by longtime collaborators Anne Marie Davies and Beth Arzy on vocals along with producer Ian Catt and bassist Michael Hiscock. They work together seamlessly to create a soft…
DERBY’s debut album Slugger presents an interesting paradox: How can an album this derivative also feel authentic, even original?
Single “Gold” seems like a slick attempt to recreate Dijon’s fast and free songwriting magic, his big-feeling bravado, his Americana-twanged R&B; “Jenny” draws clear inspiration from Alex G; his frequent use of pitch-shifted vocals and flanged guitars are siphoned from the Bible of Blonde. Yet DERBY — a Houston native who now lives in New York and whose real name is Craig Caldwell — has talent that continues to reveal itself even after you clock the comparisons and a perspective that cuts through the references. Slugger captures a world of quotidian intensity and rural nostalgia: shooting a deer through the eyes with…
…features a collection of reimagined acoustic tracks known as the “Londinium Versions”, which were recorded in West London with a heavy emphasis on string arrangements.
Technically, ‘Whiplash’ is bôa’s third full-length, but the discography and narrative of the London-based band is a little more complicated than that.
Formed in 1993 as a funk outfit, their first album is technically 1998’s ‘The Race of a Thousand Camels’, though due to label issues it was subsequently re-released as ‘Twilight’ in 2001.
There was also an unreleased full-length, ‘Acton Live’, that preceded it, which was subsequently uploaded and made available online in 2010.
And while 2005’s second record ‘Get There’ is officially ‘Whiplash’’s predecessor, there…
There are albums that, because of their seeming fragility, don’t make a great first impression. The debut offering from White Magic for Lovers is a case in point. Come to The Book of Lies half-attentive in the midst of a busy day and don’t be surprised if it seems to spiral away and get lost in the ether, all too easily overwhelmed by distractions as prosaic as the pinging of an email arriving or the whistling of a boiling kettle.
But persevere because the wispiness here is deceptive. Second and third listens reveal intention, playfulness (for all the prettiness of its melodies, the LP rather ominously shares a title with a book by occultist Aleister Crowley) and a far wider sonic palette than you might initially have realised. To adapt a phrase popularised by…
…features five new tracks, including her recent singles, “Elton John,” and “Mid July,” the original demo of “Erotica,” and “LTTL”, a new version of “Light Through the Linen,” feat. Chrome Sparks.
Returning for her third full-length outing, with Erotica Veronica Miya Folick has delivered a record that’s equal parts haunting, spectral folk-pop and anthemic, guitar-drenched heft.
A cathartic sonic exorcism, it duels between the melancholy and the empowering, showcasing Miya’s ability to switch from tender and serene to grungy power pop.
Take the saccharine opener ‘Erotica’, which serpentines between indie rock and folk; the synthpop richness of ‘La Da Da’; or the impassioned war cry of ‘The Fist’.
Brighton, England’s Fickle Friends choose pop happiness on their effervescantly hooky 2025 eponymous third album. The album arrives almost five years after Are We Gonna Be Alright?, a period that found singer Natassja Shiner and her bandmates going on a two year hiatus to recoup from touring and reconnect with their passion for making music. The time away seems to have proven fruitful and Fickle Friends once again reveal themselves as one of the sweetest sounding bands you might not have heard of.
Self-produced, the album feels at once lighter than past albums, and yet full of serious emotional weight as Shiner takes a deep look inside herself, unpacking her anxiety and fear in ways that seem nakedly raw. It’s feeling of speaking…
Cover the Mirrors, the seventh album from power pop auteur Ben Kweller, is an expression of crushing grief delivered with unbelievable levels of hope and optimism. These songs are Kweller’s first creations since the tragic sudden loss of his son Dorian Zev, who died in 2023 in a car accident at age 16. This kind of world-rattling pain has often historically served as a catalyst for an artist either disappearing from the public eye, or returning to their art as a place to process overwhelming emotions. Cover the Mirrors, while by no means happy, finds Kweller facing all of the heartache and existential confusion related to the death of his son in songs that are honest, vulnerable, and often far more joyful than they are sad. “Don’t Cave” serves as a fairly direct mission…
Blood Cultures have always thrived in the shadows-anonymous figures cloaked in hoods, channeling psychedelic pop through the haze of Bollywood samples, bedroom electronics, and the uneasy glow of 1970s horror cinema. Now, the project is stepping into an entirely new arena: video games. The group’s fourth studio album also serves as the official soundtrack to Skate Story, the long-anticipated PlayStation title from developer Sam Eng.
It’s a natural collision. Eng’s surreal skateboarding odyssey-equal parts myth, motion, and melancholy-finds its mirror in Blood Cultures’ kaleidoscopic sound design. Across previous albums (Happy Birthday, Oh Uncertainty! A Universe Despairs, and LUNO), Blood Cultures…
Galvanized by his special guest slot across the summer’s Oasis uber-gigs, Richard Ashcroft returns with his first album of new material in seven years. Yet little has changed: on Lovin’ You, he’s only thinking, writing, and singing about the big themes.
Best exemplified by the title of recent single ‘Lover’, the former Verve frontman once more draws inspiration from his undeniably deep love for his wife. But while the subject matter is familiar, musically there are new soundscapes, having returned to one of his favourite tricks: built around a looped riff sampled from Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love and Affection’, the track is all finger-snaps, strings, and a skull-thudding bassline, yet with soul and warmth. Shamelessly uplifting…
I Was a King have been at the heart of the Norwegian music scene for the best part of 20 years. For their 10th studio album, the band decamped to Bill Ryder-Jones’ studio in West Kirby just outside Liverpool. As well as being at the helm of the production, Ryder-Jones also contributed piano, harmonium and guitar to the record. The band have said that Ryder-Jones “took the music to new places, and sometimes we got lost. Part of the point of bringing in external producers is that they make something new happen.”
At the core of I Was a King are Frode Strømstads and Lise Frøkedal. This is an album of melodious, elegant songs which wear their influences very much on their sleeve, especially Teenage Fanclub and Big Star. In fact, in the past,…
Tristen Gaspadarek has released four albums of impeccably made, tuneful guitar pop, netting her a devoted fan base and the respect of her peers without achieving breakout success. This is the recipe of a cult artist, one whose music remains consistently individualistic, meeting the high bar of her own standards, while remaining allergic to mainstream attention. At some point you just lean into it. Tristen’s fifth album is titled Unpopular Music, and while it ought to be heard by many, it will at the very least be appreciated by those who consider her a woefully underrated singer/songwriter. Recorded at her Nashville home studio alongside husband and co-producer Buddy Hughen, Unpopular Music is warm, punchy, and abundant with the abstract lyricism…
Konk If You’re Lonely: Fat White Family live at Konk Studios is the latest instalment in the Domino Documents series, an album featuring Fat White Family’s most incendiary moments recorded live in one day at London’s Konk Studios. The Fat White Family cast has forever been a revolving door of interesting and lively characters, each iteration brilliant in its own right, but they have never sounded better than on the 13 career-spanning tracks that make up Konk If You’re Lonely.
Fresh off the back of the trio of triumphant “Counter-Vortex 360°” shows at London’s Colour Factory in December 2024, the band decamped to Konk Studios to get the set down for posterity’s sake. What emerges is a document of a band at the top of their game, oozing swagger…
As one half of Brooklyn-based duo Water from Your Eyes, Nate Amos makes left-field pop that feels hypermodern: wry, memey lyricism; post-ironic genre-hopping; the kind of jilted chaos and tonal jumble that characterises a social media feed. Yet the band had actually been plugging away for seven years before their 2023 breakthrough.
Amos’s solo project This Is Lorelei has been going even longer, only gaining proper traction with last year’s belated debut album Box for Buddy, Box for Star.
Now Amos is capitalising on this recent momentum with another release, this time a compilation of re-recorded songs dredged from his extensive Bandcamp back catalogue. Unlike his WFYE output, these tracks are mainly…
Well, this is a surprise. Not so much that the Sunderland band should do a Christmas album, mind. Despite their raw and spiky hardcore framework, which channelled heavyweights like Gang of Four and Fugazi, they were always capable of being gentle, dreamlike, flirting with but never tipping over into the whimsical, as on their huge breakthrough cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”. And maybe even more relevantly, their harmony singing bordered on the choral from the start, something made explicit on their a capella reworking folk songs and their own work on their 2012 Rant album.
No, it’s not a surprise that they’d do this, or do it well. But it to be this good? For the pacing, the fit of the arrangements to the songs, the ability…
With their latest EP, the four-song A Brief Intermission in the Flattening of Time, Spanish Love Songs adopt their roomiest and rangiest perspectives to date. Though clocking in at only 14 minutes, the project follows a cogent arc, as the band and various guests, including Kevin Devine and Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, traverse the tundra of disillusionment and egoic right-sizing. Unsurprisingly, Brief Intermission, like 2023’s No Joy and 2020’s Brave Faces Everyone, brims with distinct earworms.
On “Lifers Too”, Slocum articulates anger (at his parents’ generation), guilt (about the actions of his own generation), fear (for the entire species), and apathy (as a result of being thoroughly overwhelmed). In Springsteenian…
…featuring four bonus tracks.
On this, their 10th album, the melodious Mancunians started at the drum kit and built from there. This is no bad thing. The overall effect is wide-ranging, surprising and altogether more uplifting than either the delicious despairing Giants of All Sizes (2019) or gentle, soulful Flying Dream 1 (2021).
We kick off with “Things I’ve Been Telling Myself for Years”, (for instance, “Of course I’ll live to 96 and fix the welfare state”) a self-deprecating piece of analysis that packs in the influences without ever being derivative. As Garvey puts it, “We referenced The Meters, Beastie Boys, Sly and Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Arctics, Queens of the Stone Age, Bolan, Tom Waits, Public Enemy and…
…includes instrumentals and acoustic versions (plus a new stripped track).
On their first two albums Kit Sebastian — the duo of multi-instrumentalist Kit Martin and vocalist Merve Erdem — hit upon a winning formula. They blended ’60s psychedelia from around the globe with jazz, soundtrack funk, easy listening, and nostalgic pop, then added winsome vocals and catchy, moody melodies played on instruments often unfamiliar to Western music, like oud and saz. Things were working do well that when it came time to record a third album, they didn’t tinker with the approach much.
Maybe New Internationale is a little more focused, taught and more psychedelic in spots? Perhaps a little less jazz and a little more sounds of…