It’s been a significant year for chamber-pop band Winterpills. The Western Massachusetts quintet recently marked their 20th anniversary with a remixed reissue of their debut album — complete with a pair of bonus tracks — and now they’ve returned with This Is How We Dance, their eighth album and first release in nine years.
Across these 12 songs, the rich melodies, shimmering guitars, and evocative lyrics serve as a reminder that even after a long hiatus, Winterpills have lost none of their luster. In fact, they may sound better than ever. Philip Price, the band’s principal lyricist, can summon a mood with just a small turn of phrase, and when his voice intertwines with Flora Reed’s, their harmonies create the luminous core of the band’s sound.
Category: indie-pop
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…
The title of this latest album from Wyldest (aka Zoë Mead) feels like an existentially accurate description on today’s world turmoil.
An examination of the world on a micro and macro level, it sees the London-based singer-songwriter – who has long been acutely talented at portraying introspectiveness in her writing – look more outward for personal upheaval, finding more artistic freedom in the process.
‘After the Ending’ paints this picture vividly. Wyldest’s vocals lilt over shimmering guitars via pop-imbued melodies. It may sound bright, but the track was actually written after Mead received a diagnosis of endometriosis. This forced her to contemplate the prospect of a life-threatening illness and temporarily pause…
Tony Molina fits grace into the smallest spaces. His songs are abbreviated, mostly in the one to two minute range, but never in a hurry. They make their point with radiant jangles and bittersweet curves of melody, sketch out an indelible chorus, and trail off. If you’re in too much of a hurry for Teenage Fanclub, these songs have the same ineffable bright-and-shadowy wistfulness, without the guitar breaks and middle 16s.
On This Day is typical Molina in that it contains 21 songs, a few of them heart-stopping, and lasts just 23 minutes. It is, perhaps, a bit less amplified than earlier albums like the 2018’s Kill the Lights or 2019’s Songs from San Mateo County, an album whose fuzz-crusted sweetness called Bandwagonesque, but shorter.
…2025 Kevin Vanbergen remaster.
Serving as an introduction to the U.S. market, Gala compiles the band’s first three EPs and adds a couple outtakes. One thing that went overlooked about Lush was their ability to veer from violent and edgy noise breaks to pop effervescence. They were always capable of spewing out Saturday morning glow and Sunday evening doom from song to song. Their early reliance on sheets of distortion, buried vocals, and production issues didn’t help this situation. As a result, their out-the-gate raw talent went rather unnoticed, evidenced on their earliest works. Scar demonstrated their under-appreciated diversity immediately. “Thoughtforms” is an example of their heavenly pop greatness, with the vocals sweeter and…
…include two songs that were not initially released on digital streaming platforms.
Hayley Williams has always been bold — from her brightly-hued hair dye to her kickass attitude as the lead singer of Paramore. When it comes to music, the singer is equally unafraid. She belts her heart out and spits brutally honest lyrics across the band’s discography and her own solo albums, 2020’s Petals for Armor and 2021’s Flowers for Vases/Descansos. But never has Williams sounded as brave as she does on her third album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. “I’ll be the biggest star at this fucking karaoke bar,” she declares on the moody title track. The song’s chorus repeats one line over and over again (“Can only go up from here”) as Williams gives up on shooting…
Saul Adamczewski, co-founder of Fat White Family and frontman of Insecure Men, endured a harrowing personal collapse in 2024, spending months in a cupboard in Tulse Hill amid severe psychosis and opioid addiction. After calling his mother and undergoing withdrawal, he began rebuilding his life, reconnecting with family and bandmates. This recovery led to A Man For All Seasons, the second Insecure Men album and a creative rebirth.
Recorded in the spring of 2025, at Ray Davis’ Konk Studios in Hornsey, North London with producer Raf Rundell, the album reflects Adamczewski’s shift toward collaboration, with a band lineup including Marley Mackay, Victor Jakeman, Fat White Family’s Alex White and Steely Dan Monte.
Magnificent Fall, The Notwist‘s new rarities compilation, compiles some special and wild moments from this unique German indie group’s rich history. They’ve always snuck gorgeous songs and thrilling remixes onto split singles, extended plays, and other formats, across their career, and pieced together here – compiled thoughtfully, with sensitivity to flow and the listening experience – these thirteen selections work as a kind of ‘shadow narrative’ of The Notwist, an alternative index of the possibilities this shape-shifting group uncovered during their time together.
They’ve been smart to let go of chronology when sequencing Magnificent Fall, so the songs here move across phases and stages of The Notwist’s career, helmed by brothers…
Now onto her third album, it’s clear that Stella Donnelly likes to take her time. Donnelly first appeared in the post-Courtney Barnett wave of new alternative music from Australia, and her album Beware of the Dogs was one of the best albums of 2018. That was followed three years later by the well-received Flood in 2022.
Another three years have passed since Flood, and Love and Fortune is obviously an album with a huge amount of care and attention lavished on it. It’s a much more stripped back record than either of its predecessors, with the majority of songs simply Donnelly on piano. And while Beware of the Dogs in particular seemed to fizzle with an energy and an anger about it, Love and Fortune is a more reflective, inward looking collection,…
After making a name for themselves, including charting on the Billboard independent, rock, and alternative lists, with their warm, mellifluous take on vintage folk- and country-rock, Whitney — singer/drummer Julien Ehrlich and guitarist Max Kakacek — experimented with lush electronics and even hip-hop beats on their fourth album, SPARK. Arriving three years later, Small Talk marks a glowing return to inviting organic textures on a philosophical album informed by breakups and broader lessons learned. It was recorded without an outside producer — a first for Whitney, at the encouragement of prior producer Brad Cook — in a barn in Newberg, Oregon, that contained recording gear collected over the years by Ehrlick’s father (also a drummer), including…
Hatchie, aka Harriette Pilbeam, has always had a knack for making melancholy sound strangely uplifting. On her latest album Liquorice, she leans fully into the sound that made her name, delivering a record that plays to her considerable strengths.
The album opens in understated fashion with “Anemoia,” all hazy vocals and wistful lyrics. Things really take off with the sublime “Only One Laughing” and “Carousel,” which both sparkle like The Sundays’ long-lost cousins, located firmly in “I Kicked a Boy” and “Can’t Be Sure” territory. Sandwiched between those two songs is the title track, which, oddly, is the only moment that doesn’t quite land. It feels both a little undercooked and, conversely, slightly overthought compared to the rest of the record.
Will Westerman thinks he spent too much time on An Inbuilt Fault. He’s still proud of it, but the British musician, who records under his surname, wanted to do something differently this time around. “Nothing is ever really finished if it’s a new idea,” he says. “It’s just an arbitrary line in the sand because there’s no template to judge it being finished, other than your own exhaustion.” He spent a long time tinkering with his sophomore album, which was released in 2023, so he decided on another course of action for its follow-up: capture something made in a short timeframe.
Maybe that’s why A Jackal’s Wedding, by contrast, sounds so much looser, not in the sense that it feels unfinished; rather, it’s far more spacious than its two predecessors.
Portugal. The Man, the genre-agnostic outfit led by the multi-faceted John Gourley, is changing before our very eyes.
Not in the way this band has been since they emerged in the mid-2000s, consistently shifting sonic terrains throughout their wonderfully colorful discography, but on a more personal level. Gourley is now a father, fully independent after leaving Atlantic following the band’s 2023 LP, and set up in a home studio, free to welcome in any number of collaborators and to curate a spacious environment for his lofty indie rock visions to flourish. With a new studio, outlook on life, and a catalog that has garnered critical acclaim, the latest Portugal. The Man LP finds Gourley at an interesting, scary, and exhilarating moment in his career.
Born and raised in Valldemossa, a picturesque village on the island of Majorca, singer Júlia Colom grew up immersed in a rich tradition of Spanish folk music. The first song she learned, at age six, was The Song of the Sibyl, a medieval chant performed on Christmas Eve. Passed down orally through generations of Majorcans, The Song of the Sybil is long and ornate — a melismatic tune with lyrics that foretell the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it left a lasting impression on Colom.
This musical memory sparked Colom’s passion for singing. Curiosity soon became vocation, and at 18, Colom left Majorca for Barcelona, where she earned a degree in music and expanded her practice into composition and contemporary music. Still deeply connected to her Majorcan heritage,…
When Go-Kart Mozart released Tearing Up the Album Charts in 2005, Lawrence was in a bad place. Fighting addiction and hard times, he made one of the few missteps — self-proclaimed — of his career and put out a record made up of old songs written for a Denim album and demos that were in a half-finished state. He was never satisfied by it, and when he had the chance — brought on by a lifted profile thanks to some great Mozart Estate records and a book about his life — he jumped at it. Tower Block in a Jam Jar is a rework of Tearing that juggles the tracks, adds new instrumentation, and features all-new vocals. He also rewrote and retitled the song “At the DDU” to shift away from the subject matter — getting a dose of methadone — that no longer applied.
Vicious Delicious couldn’t feel more seasonally suited: the string-drenched ‘Spider’ and its creepy-crawly refrain – “Spider, spider, crawling inside her” – is like something from a horror movie. But Luvcat isn’t here for spooky season alone – this debut plays more like Halloween with a Valentine’s Day lens over the top. Light versus dark, innocence versus kink, desire versus destruction: Luvcat is always straddling both sides. “Nothing’s fictional, it’s all real,” she promises. And when she declares, “Can’t get off the ferris wheel / When the circus is in me,” during the carnival chaos of ‘Blushing’, it’s clear the ride’s about to start.
Opener ‘Lipstick’ gets straight to business with its flirtatious command: “Come kiss off all my lipstick.” Here, she toys with doll-like role-play…
Pete Namlook, one of the most influential figures in the history of electronic music, passed away in 2012, leaving behind a vast sonic legacy. Yet Air remains his most poetic, organic, and emotionally resonant project. Created between 1993 and 2006, the Air series is a five-part symphony of ambient, ethnic, jazz, neoclassical, and cosmic electronic elements.
Now, nearly two decades later, we proudly present the long-awaited reissue of the entire series – for the first time ever as a complete 5CD boxset. From the wind-kissed sensuality of Air I, through the abstract voyages of Air II, the rich instrumental palette of Air III, the stylistic fusion of Air IV, to the deeply personal and introspective Air V – this collection stands as a milestone in ambient…
California’s The Neighbourhood are on a mission to make goth R&B a touchstone in the musical lexicon. It’s a sound they championed on their debut album, 2013’s I Love You, and continue to explore on their sophomore effort, 2015’s Wiped Out! Once again working with producer Justyn Pilbrow, the Neighbourhood expand upon the moody synth, heavy bass, and echoey guitar-based style of I Love You with a collection of tracks that, while not mind-blowing, will pleasingly remind most fans of the group’s 2012 breakout track, “Sweater Weather.” While other artists have flirted with the darker side of R&B, including Lana Del Rey, the xx, and Halsey (who also worked with Pilbrow on her similarly inclined 2015 debut, Badlands), the Neighbourhood commit to…
This fifth studio album from Admiral Fallow is their first in four years, with at least one track (‘The Shortest Night’) dating back further, to the early days of the pandemic. Clearly, the Glasgow five-piece are the kind of band happy to allow their ideas room to breathe, to crystallise at their own pace, which is something palpable on First of the Birds; the best songs here are stately and refined, unfurling at their own pace.
Opener ‘First Names (Storms)’ is a case in point, as is the stunning ‘Dead in the Water’ along with gorgeous closer ‘All the Distractions’ – all tracks where the sparse, elegant instrumentation provide a foundation for frontman Louis Abbott’s stirring vocals to wash over. Elsewhere, there’s experimentation, with mixed…
With Fur & Gold, Bat for Lashes – aka Natasha Khan – brings a fairytale quality and air of mystery to her music, performing a delicate balancing act between everyday emotions and the power of fantasy. As the title suggests, there’s something gorgeous but raw about her songs, which fly from spare British chamber folk to shades of lavish rock, pop, and dance as she throws herself into stories that update the traditions of other iconic female artists. She’s a warrior princess of the moors with only her steed to keep her company on “Horse and I,” a song whose dramatic sweep would do Kate Bush proud; on the fable-like sensual duet “Trophy,” Khan sings “creatures of mercy/shoot them down and set me free” with Björk-like urgency. Despite Fur & Gold’s unabashedly mystical vibe, Khan emphasizes…