Caitlin & Brent don’t initially sound like a natural pairing. Singer-songwriter Caitlin Sherman released her debut, sure-to-be-breakthrough album Death to the Damsel in early 2020, just in time for the world to shut down and her career to go sideways. A dark, artsy record between pop and Americana, the album wasn’t fit for its time and didn’t get the attention it warranted.
Brent Amaker has been playing with his band, the Rodeo, for 20 years. He sings with a deep baritone, and it’s hard to tell just how much of the act is tongue-in-cheek. The band plays strong country & western music (heavy on the western), but the whole project has the feel of performance art. Amaker’s greatest strength might lie in merging his authentic country music with…
Category: indie-pop
Kiss Big is an album about the end of a long-term relationship (classic, really) and the disorienting aftermath of losing the person you built a life around. It explores feeling untethered from them, yourself, who you thought you were and the world. As well as how, with time, everything rearranges and restarts. The cyclical nature of love and endings. The way we keep beginning again, regardless of how we say we won’t.
Ailbhe Reddy is a Dublin-born songwriter whose music captures the quiet intensity of life’s in-between moments. Her third album Kiss Big is a breakup record – but not in the traditional sense. It explores what happens after the fallout: the numbness, the confusion, the brief flashes of clarity. How identity slips, rearranges…
Lia Braswell’s Rising is forceful and expressive. Each song sounds an individual statement without there being any real sonic outliers (or weak points, for that matter) in the bunch. This makes for an intense listen, but a rich and engaging one too. The musical backbone is a relentless dance rock, mixing the thundering beats and assertive electronics of Pet Shop Boys or the Eurythmics with the breakneck, organic rush of Florence + The Machine and the complex, artful freedom of Wye Oak.
“Out of Sight” belongs to the 1980s, with a thudding, dead-eyed beat, glancing, urgent bleeps, and big burns of synthesizer that curl into a spacious instrumental bridge. “One Too Many” is another for the Less Than Zero crowd with some Duran Duran menace programmed…
Ben Cook, the pilot behind the controls for Young Guv, now known as GUV, has never shied away from trying his hand at a musical style. Previous works found him digging into new wave, country rock, glam, chillwave, and most impressively power pop. No matter the style his unerring way with a melody, his note-prefect production skills, and overall way with a song has mean that every record he’s made has been well worth hearing, and even sometimes bordering on brilliant.
For 2026’s Warmer Than Gold Cook swerves into the sound of the U.K. guitar rock scene of the first half of the 1990s. Taking inspiration from the Stone Roses — most notably “Fool’s Gold” — along with My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, and other paragons of baggy, shoegaze,…
…Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime is Beck’s first compilation since 2000’s B-sides set Stray Cat Blues and features two previously unreleased recordings – solo acoustic covers of Hank Willams’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and Daniel Johnston’s ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’.
The rest of the album is made up of covers, with the exception of a Beck original, the swoonsome ‘Ramona’ (from the soundtrack of Edgar Wright’s 2010 film Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). The title track – his take on The Korgis’ 1980 hit – was first released on the soundtrack of the 2004 Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has gone on to become among Beck’s most popular songs. The cover of Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ originally featured…
The ’90s revival is in full swing, and it’s in no small part thanks to Oasis. The Gallaghers’ long awaited reunion last summer was a huge success, and it was notable that their songs seemed to appeal across the generations. It was a regular sight at those gigs to see children born long after the group’s initial split, singing along word-perfect with their parents.
The gigs also served to introduce this new generation to Cast, who acted as support on the UK and Ireland leg of the Oasis tour. For those of us who remember the tail-end of Britpop, it’s curious to see John Power’s band undergoing a revival; while they had some decent songs such as ‘Fine Time’ and ‘Walkaway’, they never really seemed to seize the public imagination as…
British indie pop musician Lande Hekt dug deep into personal experiences for her first two efforts — 2021’s Going to Hell and 2022’s House Without a View — singing about childhood trauma, sobriety, and exploring her queer identity.
Working alongside producer Matthew Simms (Wire, It Hugs Back), she continues that mix of confessional songwriting and ethereal singing on Lucky Now, wrapped in swirling guitars and occasional distortion. The result is another powerful collection of songs, this time boasting a growing sense of comfort and confidence.
Press kit bios often namecheck bands that sound aspirational at best, but citing such disparate musical touchstones as The Sundays and The Replacements comes across as…
Marta Del Grandi is in a liminal space between the past she always has one eye on and a future she consistently encourages herself to move towards. Her third album, Dream Life, feels like grappling with a reality check where you’ve put in the work but things don’t look the way you expected and there are untold peripheral problems beyond your control.
In the great indie pop tradition, Dream Life masks melancholia with whimsy, whether it’s fantasy land synths, syncopated programmed beats, or slide guitar. The dreamy, brooding, and vaguely foreboding synth arrangement of ‘20 Days of Summer’ touches broadly on a feeling of not being able to laugh at the chaos, as Del Grandi reminds herself “to keep going / try to breathe”.
…Peanut is the sixth-ish album by New York-based musician and engineer Otto Benson, and the first with vocals. He shed a lot of skin before arriving at this album’s dusky, dusty sound, which is defined by gentle nylon-stringed guitar and shivery Rhodes piano and lands somewhere at the intersection of Frankie Cosmos, Hayden Pedigo, and Let It Die-era Feist. A scan of his meticulously maintained website reveals a trove of hyperactive vaporwave under the name Memo Boy; ambient music as Ronnie P; puckish hyperpop under the name OTTO; a tingly beat tape with Mietze Conte; and at least a handful more experiments with different forms of contemporary electronic pop.
…All of this is to say that form is clearly important to Benson; although Peanut is his…
Throughout 2024, the Swedish duo Club 8 released a single a month, then gathered them up on an enchanting record titled A Year with Club 8. The idea was such a good one that they did the same thing in 2025.
This time the resulting album was titled Seasonal Echoes and it finds them walking a similar path of warmly melancholic indie pop spiced with the occasional burst of noise pop and a wistful ballad or two. This is the kind of music Johan Angergård and Karolina Komstedt were seemingly born to make, and it should heat the hearts of pop lovers both vintage and newly minted to hear them still making music this sweetly real. As always, Angergård constructs perfect pop miniatures for Komstedt’s lilting voice;…
Syd dePalma’s Paris is dreamlike. Echoes abound, sculpting recognizable rock, folk, and pop stylings into imaginative new shapes. As he plays with light and shadow, the borders between fantasy and reality blur. The familiar soars. An eerie melancholy fills even the most straightforward of dePalma’s melodies, a desperation buried deep in the foundation of every line he sings. The lyrics are uncanny, the sounds constantly shifting. Only two years out from debut, El Lugar de Arder, Paris is a ferocious next step for dePalma, one that radiates surreal energy.
Vivid imagery abounds: of body parts, desire, tears, the sky, the ground, the city, the country. As lead singer on almost all tracks, dePalma makes for a compelling guide to his uncanny world.
European Sun came together when musician/writer Steve Miles met U.K. indie pop stalwart Rob Pursey (of Heavenly, Tender Trap, the Catenary Wires, etc.) through a mutual musician friend. With Miles on lead vocals and guitar, and backed by Pursey and his frequent bandmates Amelia Fletcher and drummer Ian Button, they launched European Sun with an eponymous album in 2020. It showcased Miles’ anxiously observant, underdog-minded spoke-sung lyrics within a tuneful, D.I.Y indie pop setting. With the vocally kindred Elin Miles stepping in for Fletcher on backing vocals, their second album, When Britain Was Great, sees Miles let loose more as a writer, with confessional songs full of observant social commentary, pop culture references, and timidity.
…features two bonus tracks not on the original album. The bonus tracks, “My Lover” and “I Love(d) New York”, were originally left off the initial release due to vinyl space constraints.
Seven albums in, White Lies continue to evolve while keeping their signature mix of shadowy synth-pop and widescreen emotion intact. Night Light finds the London trio leaning deeper into electronic textures than ever before, with the guitars now playing a supporting role to shimmering synths, pulsing basslines, and Harry McVeigh’s commanding baritone.
It’s a sleek, modern evolution that keeps the band’s DNA intact while exploring new sonic territory. The album bursts to life with ‘Nothing On Me’, a quickfire opener that clocks in at just…
…’Growing Pains (Deluxe)’ features six added tracks, including “Heavy Heart,” and “Tumbleweed,” and four acoustic tracks that were recorded at Second Nature Vintage in Nashville.
Closing in on their 20-year anniversary, LA’s blues and hip-hop-infused indie pop/rock band Andy Frasco & The U.N. continue to mix sharp humor with often weighty issues on Growing Pains, their 10th studio album.
Though the band has always been willing to wade into the occasional deep lyrical waters in the past (though admittedly with plenty of sly humor and subtlety), this new record finds Frasco and company reflecting on growing up and mortality. That is apparent on the album’s first single, the undeniably catchy “Try Not to Die,” ticking…
Since the dissolution of Yura Yura Teikoku, Shintaro Sakamoto has refined a solo language built on understatement. Where his former band favoured volatility, his solo records proceed at lower pressure, privileging texture, spacing and grooves that remain deliberately underdeveloped. On his fifth solo album, Yoo-hoo, that approach resolves into a two-part movement, the record gradually shifting from suspension into motion without ever announcing the change. ‘Is There a Place For You There?’ establishes the album’s opening register, its unhurried and blown-out vocal and flattened delivery setting a mood of controlled inertia, melting against, even slowing the beckoning rhythm of Yuta Suganuma’s drums. The early stretch is governed by tactile…
Although Whitney K is widely characterised as being the artistic expedient of itinerant Canadian musician Konner Whitney (see what he did there?), his latest recording venture Bubble feels much more like a band project than his/their previous recordings. Whitney himself is responsible for all the lyrics here but the musical backings are credited to the core band responsible for recording them in their ‘home studio’ in Montreal. This is mostly Whitney himself alongside Josh Boguski, Michael Halls and Avalon Tassonyi, with support from James Perry. There are other supplementary musicians on ‘Bubble’ but for the most part this is the line-up that has worked on Whitney K’s recent records. Here they deliver a raw and restrained set of songs nourished by warm…