British singer/songwriter Bill Pritchard has been on a path just outside of the limelight since he began releasing solo albums in the late ‘80s. Occupying the time-honored role of “your favorite musician’s favorite musician,” Pritchard’s thoughtful, storytelling tunes have been championed by other artists, and placed by critics alongside the introspective and clever styles of Lloyd Cole, Robyn Hitchcock, and the like. Pritchard’s 1991 album Jolie was a landmark for him, as its pop-friendly arrangements and heightened production approach from the Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie made it one of his most well-received records. Though Pritchard never strayed completely from a pop sound, he’s also experimented with different sides of his songwriting; exploring somber piano balladry…
Category: indie-pop
Lala Lala‘s Lillie West has come a long way from the DIY grunge-inflected debut Sleepyhead to her absolutely standout fourth offering, Heaven 2. Its club-ready, saxophone-led opener ‘Car Anymore’ evokes Destroyer alongside ‘Trans-Europe Express’, as if it’s carrying her away from the past on a high-speed train.
This metamorphosis began right at the end of her breakthrough sophomore album The Lamb back in 2018, on the closing track ‘See You at Home’, which sealed West’s personal shift. “So we’re working with water / I promise I’ll drink it ’cause it’s all I’m allowed to”, she sang under Sen Morimoto‘s tender saxophone, making one of many promises to stay sober after giving up drinking. As we can see now, it worked, and…
…includes a bonus disc of demos and two previously unreleased B-sides from the original sessions, “Comin’ To You” and “Harpsi Chords”.
The third solo album by K Ishibashi under his Kishi Bashi moniker, Sonderlust comes with a tweak to his sound, a footnote on the title, and some emotional baggage. The title is a play on the recently invented word sonder from the Web’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Essentially, it refers to the realization that any random stranger has a life experience as vivid as one’s own. As for the baggage, Ishibashi has admitted to suffering marital woes while working on the album, a fact that affected its tone and especially lyrics, which are often colored by uncertainty. It may also have altered his creative process, given…
There’s an undertone of disappointment in Heavenly’s happy, peppy, tootling power pop, a sense of vulnerability and ache even in the bubbliest cuts. “Excuse Me,” an early single, is about as affirming and positive as garage pop can get, with bashing drums and ecstatic bursts of guitar strumming, but it centers around the wistful lyric “Excuse me, I thought you were someone else/they’ve been on my mind.”
This is the fifth album from the Oxford twee-pop mainstays, a band that formed out of the remnants of C86 outfit Talulah Gosh, around songwriter Amelia Fletcher, her brother Matthew on drums, Peter Momtchiloff, Cathy Rogers on keyboards and Rob Pursley on bass. Heavenly’s main run happened in the early to mid-’90s, the first…
The complete 19-track collection combining both installments of Yungblud’s album ‘Idols’, which adds 6 brand new songs and a re-imagined version of the GRAMMY® nominated single “Zombie” with The Smashing Pumpkins to the tracks released June 2025.
Since emerging in the late 2010s, the British yelper Yungblud — a.k.a. Doncaster, England-born Dominic Harrison — has become an anti-pop hero. His songs channeled the angst and agitation of youth into frenetic mini-anthems that musically reflected the on-shuffle mentality of the 21st century. Yungblud’s voice — a piercing yelp that exists somewhere between Gerard Way’s wail and Brian Molko’s sneer — slotted him in the alt-rock world, but his aspirations seemed…
On her sophomore album Speed Kills, Ally Evenson revels in the ecstasy, longing, and anger that comes at the end of a relationship. Following up her debut record, Blue Super Love less than two years later, the LA-based singer-songwriter has a lot to say about love and moving on.
Evenson is a multi-talented songwriter, vocalist, and guitar player, and is also credited as a producer on the record. Her songs feature distorted electric guitar riffs, sleek synth production, and even acoustic guitar on the pensive final track “Stoic”. She shows off her guitar skills on the track “Blame it on You”, which starts with an electric guitar riff based on the opening of Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy”. The whole record feels inspired by this spunky 90’s culture, and…
These days the term singer songwriter has grown in its scope from just a solo artist with an acoustic instrument and introspective lyrics to a solo artist that basically has a mind of their own and goes anywhere where their fancy, inspiration, and inventiveness take them.
You can add to the latter Delaney Bailey, who after millions of streams has readied her debut album Concave, an album where she seems to care very little about neat musical labels and genres, covering a vast ground between dream pop and everything else, keeping that introspective music and lyrics concept fully intact.
And she may be doing it all instinctively, but she seems to have a deep musical background that she has transformed into music of her…
Born in Argentina and raised in London, Malena Zavala earned critical plaudits for the DIY bedroom pop of her 2018 debut album Aliso. Her 2022 follow-up effort La Yarará found the singer-songwriter exploring her roots across a variety of Latin American styles.
This third album returns to the guitar pop of that first salvo but with a more mature, fleshed-out sound. While South America is still an ongoing inspiration in her work, here its influence is more thematic. Inspired by a road trip from Chile down to Patagonia in Argentina, the music has a softly melancholic tone.
The spare guitars and echoed vocals of ‘Only Thing That’s Right’ and ‘Lost in the Depths of the Andes’ are enlivened by the lusciousness…
Ten thousand years ago, a man died in what would become Somerset. His bones waited in a cave until 1903, when they were discovered and given a name: Cheddar Man. Now he’s the subject of a song by Voka Gentle, who use his story to contemplate what we’re doing to the places where people have lived for millennia. “Let’s say the sea levels rise and we lose north Somerset, which, by the way, is looking increasingly likely…” William J Stokes’s voice is dry, conversational, with the studied neutrality of a local news presenter. Beneath it, the music shuffles and twitches, glassy and off-kilter; post-punk refracted through Laurie Anderson’s deadpan intelligence.
The album circles power from multiple angles: a photoshoot, a Greek tragedy, a preacher…
A record that swaps love language for religious language every few bars should, in theory, settle on one or the other. Petal Rock Black never does, and its refusal to pick is what keeps it from curdling into wellness music or collapsing into a diary entry.
George Clinton starts the title track by reciting a strange devotional poem over silence, “storm-smeared picture,” “rust be the delirious scream,” “dreams a symphony we all soar on,” his voice old and enormous and arriving from no identifiable tradition, and by the time WILLOW enters, she brings a complaint that could have been left on a voicemail: “I don’t know why I have to Be just who you want me to.” Clinton is building a cathedral. She is trying to leave a room. The distance between those two impulses covers most of what this…
A lot can change during the fraught time between when a musician finishes recording an album and when it’s released, often months later, per a label’s schedule. For Mirah, everything changed. In the summer of 2018, two weeks before her sixth album, Understanding, came out, the indie rock songwriter lost her beloved father. Four months after that, she gave birth to a son. A year after that, she attempted to resume life as a touring musician, only for the pandemic to nix her plans and intensify her postpartum anxiety.
All this heavy stuff — death, birth, grief, joy, “the whole turn of the earth,” as she sings on “The Beginning of Time” — beats inside the impossibly tender heart of Dedication, Mirah’s first album in seven years, a lifetime of change.
…features five new bonus tracks.
Coming off an extended three-year hiatus, the Neighbourhood deliver a hushed yet hooky fifth album with 2025’s Ultrasound. The LP is the group’s first since 2020’s Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones and finds them moving away from that previous production’s glittery, conceptual sci-fi David Bowie intimations and back toward the shadowy alt-pop of their early years.
Notably, it finds them reunited with producer Justyn Pilbrow, who helmed 2013’s I Love You. and 2015’s Wiped Out!, as well as Jono Dorr, who contributed to the band’s 2014 mixtape #000000 & #FFFFFF. Consequently, many of the tracks have a soft, dreamy quality, recalling the late-night beach party melancholy of the group’s early…
Arriving two years after Women, which found the quasi-instrumental psych rock combo expanding their nostalgic, style-shifting sound with string arrangements and guest vocals, Pur Jus is so named because it gets back to basics.
Inspired by near constant touring, the album was entirely written, performed, recorded (live in the studio), and mixed by the Bergen, Norway-based trio, using only guitars (Øyvind Blomstrøm), bass (Chris Holm), drums and percussion (Kim Åge Furuhaug), keyboards (Blomstrøm and Holm), and the occasional vocals. The results may be less diverse and dramatic than their predecessors by comparison, but grooves and chill-out feels are still in plentiful supply.
The album kicks things off with a drum fill…
On November 1, 2024, The Cure released Songs of a Lost World and that same night, they performed the album in full at London’s Troxy for 3,000 fans, while more than a million others tuned in via a free global livestream.
That performance has now been transformed into The Show of a Lost World, a recut, remixed, and remastered concert film that presents all 31 songs from the night across a generous two hours and forty-seven minutes. Directed by Nick Wickham, with a new surround sound mix by Robert Smith, the film upgrades the original broadcast into a cinematic experience that does justice to both the intimacy of the venue and the scale of the band’s legacy.
Beyond the novelty of premiering their first…
The pearl of Aotearoa, Bic Runga, returns with her sixth album Red Sunset, an aesthetic blend of the familiar with a lively, blossoming charge.
In the decade since her last album, the largely covers project Close Your Eyes, and the 15 years since her last album of all original songs, Belle, Runga has expanded her indie-pop palette even further. The subtle electronics, old-school R&B, and French exotica first introduced on Belle are now joined by elements of gritty, lo-fi funk, nu-disco polish, and bedroom synth pop, adding up to a greater depth of sound that feels recognisably hers, yet slightly alien in an appealing way.
Returning to Paris – the city that birthed her stellar 2005 album Birds – inspired Runga and her partner Kody Nielson to start work on…
Life feels a bit of a grind at the moment. Every news headline seems to suggest the world’s going to hell in a handcart, and rain has become an almost constant fixture during the early weeks of 2026.
So, as an antidote to indie navel gazing, here comes Brighton quartet Congratulations with a debut album that feels like a big day-glo shot of adrenaline. The four-piece have spent the last couple of years building a name for themselves as a band with a live show defined by chaotic energy – it’s not unusual to leave a Congratulations live show after witnessing frenetic ‘running on the spot’ dancing performed by a group in matching jumpsuits.
So can the frazzled, sweaty atmospherics of a Congratulations gig be accurately recreated…