Strawberry Guy is the name used by Welsh-born, Liverpool-based artist Alexander Stephens for his softly delivered, hyper-melodic symphonic pop. He used to be the keyboardist in The Orielles but left to release his debut solo album back in 2021 and has spent the last five years readying his second album, Give Me a Dream.
On paper it may seem a longer than average time to work on an album, but the results help explain the lengthy gestation. His music to date has largely been recorded in this bedroom and in many ways he fitted the image of your archetypal lo-fi-DIY-bedroom artist but Give Me a Dream was recorded at the legendary Sonic Ranch studio in Texas. “Going from my bedroom to probably one of the best studios in the world was…
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You know Fine Glindvad Jensen from somewhere. Perhaps you recognize the Danish polymath as the pitched-up voice echoing across Two Shell’s 2022 breakout “home”; maybe the hooks she wrote for that NewJeans EP got stuck in your head. Perhaps you’re familiar with her cohort at Copenhagen’s prestigious (and publicly funded) Rhythmic Music Conservatory, where she shared the halls with Smerz, Erika de Casier, ML Buch, and Astrid Sonne, among others. Her dusky alto may remind you of Hope Sandoval, or Lana, or the beautiful stranger who covered Nancy Sinatra at your local dive’s open mic—or did you imagine that? The great trick of her beguiling second solo album, 
The Cat’s Miaow started in 1992 as a home-recording duo, Bart Cummings and Andrew Withycombe knocking out songs on Withycombe’s four-track. Soon joined by Kerrie Bolton and Cam Smith, the quartet spent the next five years quietly, slowly working away in the suburbs of Melbourne. They’ve long been spoken-of in hushed tones in pop circles for their perfectly unadorned nuggets of gentle indiepop mastery, put to 4-track tape and drip-fed to the world a few decades back via 7” singles, cassettes and compilation appearances.
While 
For the last decade, 
Since Britpop began, there have been endless arguments about the best Britpop band, the best Britpop album, the defining Britpop image. Choices vary, but it feels inarguable that Elastica – and Elastica – remain the coolest in all the above categories. The four-piece were cemented as elegant, eternal stars on their self-titled 1995 debut album: a collection of short, sharp songs, with equally short, sharp haircuts on the cover. Like the supernatural pop ideal immortalised in 1998’s Velvet Goldmine – a film they cameoed in – Elastica came from London but also seemingly arrived fully formed from another, sexier, less effortful dimension. Untouchable louche perfection. Exacting boy-girl androgynous tension. Post punk guitars arrived encased in…
…early bird vinyl pressing (limited to 400) comes with a bonus CD, the “dronus disc,” a standalone drone piece the band want played simultaneously with the album itself.
Many current artists who have been filed by PR people with that good old singer-songwriter label have long ago abandoned what initially signified it – a singer with a singular acoustic instrument explaining what bothers or makes her or him happy. Not only have the lyrical themes diversified (a long time at that), but the musical approach has too, from diversified arrangements to bringing in elements that are not essentially either folk, blues or country in some shape or form.
The 2LP set pairs the original album with a specially curated collection of B-sides, showcasing the depth and creativity surrounding the 
There’s a hollow space surrounding the guitar solo on “Shiver,” an absorbent deep cut on the second studio album from British indie-pop darling Rachel Chinouriri. The production is both distant and overwhelming as it mirror the 27-year-old’s inner turmoil. She’s feeling alone again, haunted by memories, and it’s like her words are vanishing into thin air before reaching anyone who will listen. Still, she sings, “Life goes on, and on, and on.” But what does she want that life to look like?
In 1988, The House of Love’s debut album arrived as a fully-formed piece of pop perfection, following two years of intensive writing, rehearsing and live performances. The Gift explores those two years, as the band leapt from the Camberwell squat scene into the centre of the UK’s indie world as it went overground.
It’s hard not to feel disillusioned by the state of the world right now. It’s getting harder to scrape by; our algorithms are a constant whiplash between images of genocide and manmade destruction and TikTok Shop hauls that will end up in rotting landfills; and it feels like few in power are interested in helping anyone besides the rich. Why not just give up, stop caring and bury your head in the sand?
If I Let It Quiet is the fourth album by the Salt Lake City-based singer-songwriter 
Sometimes, a new album’s opening track shows you a band picking up right where they left off. In 2024, Philly indie rockers 
In 2019, Anne Helen Petersen published her widely shared BuzzFeed essay, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”. It examined the exhaustion of a generation expected to thrive in every area of life while taking on more debt, enjoying less security, and working harder for increasingly uncertain rewards. Even basic tasks could become insurmountable as the promised returns on all that effort slipped further from view.
Everyone Says Hi return with their second album 
The Howlers return with their sophomore album Heavy, following on from their debut, What You’ve Got to Lose to Win It All. The opening couple of tracks stay in fairly charted indie-pop territory, with lyrics focused on romantic encounters, relationship trouble, and mistrust, though the group do a good job of keeping it catchy and to the point. That being said, the track ‘Late Nights’ is where some of the lyrics are too on the nose to allow the listener to consider their own impressions of the song; “You never knew love could make you feel sad” is the most pertinent example of this. The Howlers could benefit from some further use of metaphor in their writing process and leave a bit more to the imagination.