One for the Road is the title of a new album by the artist Passenger (Mike Rosenberg), featuring songs from the musical The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Adapted by Rachel Joyce from her best-selling novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry features music and lyrics by Passenger (aka Mike Rosenberg), whose chart-topping hit Let Her Go became a global sensation. The production is directed by Katy Rudd.
Passenger said: “I am so so happy to announce that my brand new album – ‘One For The Road – songs from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry musical’. “We’ve been beavering away on this for the last year or so and I have to say I’m absolutely thrilled with how it turned out. This album is a selection of my favourite songs from the show…
Category: indie-pop
“I never will stop grieving.” When Leith Ross sings the first line of their sophomore album I Can See the Future, it isn’t angry or defeated or pleading. Instead, it’s calm, quietly accepting grief as an unavoidable part of the human condition that sticks itself to all corners of life and never gets unstuck. On “Grieving,” the Winnipeg-based indie singer-songwriter puts a country-folk spirit to a common feeling that is often difficult to describe; to mourn things that haven’t happened yet alongside the things that have: “I think I’ll love after I’m dead / And I’ll grieve while I’m alive.”
Joined by in-demand producer Rostam on the follow-up to their 2023 debut album To Learn, Ross doesn’t always place the past, present and future into three separate categories…
Running with Scissors immediately cuts through the gauzy chiffon of the glossed-over sound that Afternoon Bike Ride have become known for. Opening with the languid, back-pocket bass groove and key flourishes of the sparse, soul-indebted “20 Seasons,” frontwoman Lia Kurihara laments the end of an era of her life, while simultaneously beginning another for both herself and the shapeshifting Montreal-based trio.
Kurihara has been through a lot. She started writing the band’s sophomore album, 2022’s Glossover, after becoming the primary caregiver for her father amid his Alzheimer’s diagnosis — a five-year endeavour ahead of his death in recent months. Everything she and co-conspirators David Tanton and Éloi LeBlanc-Riguette have…
…Limited Edition Digital Album includes the full album, album instrumentals, and two demos.
…Deluxe includes the bonus disc ‘Live in Paris & London’.
As its title may suggest, Neil Hannon’s 13th studio album as The Divine Comedy is a mile away from jaunty songs about woodsheds and National Express coaches. After the joy and whimsy of his soundtrack to Wonka, Rainy Sunday Afternoon finds him far more contemplative and wistful.
It’s certainly Hannon’s most personal album to date. There are songs about family, loss and grief, as well as pot shots at a world seemingly falling to pieces around us. Bolstered by some truly gorgeous orchestrations by long-term Hannon collaborator Andrew Skeet, even a simple piano…
NewDad’s debut album Madra, released only 20 months ago, made the Galway dream-pop band’s dreams come true. In the time since that record’s release, the former NME Cover stars have toured the world and gained acclaim from across the music world – including from their hero, The Cure’s Robert Smith. So, their second album should be a pretty cheery listen… right?
Largely written before Madra was released, Altar isn’t quite bursting with joy. Instead, it finds singer and guitarist Julie Dawson deep in homesickness and trying to figure out if the band’s move to London to give them better access to opportunities to help them grow was all worth it. Here, Galway is the altar at which she’s worshipping, and the thing she’s had to sacrifice…
Toro y Moi’s 2024 album Hole Erth was one of the more interesting albums in a long career of genre shifts and explorations. On it, Chaz Bundick looks back at his younger years lyrically while unveiling a mix of cloud rap, nocturnal trap, chillwave, shoegaze, and emo pop that encased his alternately rapped and sung vocals like tendrils of a dream. While he was working on that, he also envisioned a companion album inspired by Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in NYC that stripped back the arrangements to something less dreamy and more grounded, while giving new context to the words. In 2025, Unerthed (Hole Erth Unplugged) was released and it definitely provided a different sonic experience. It’s still kind of dreamy – loads of swooping pedal steel guitar…
Mitch Rowland doesn’t write as someone chasing a hit single. He writes like someone chasing time. Since becoming a father, Rowland talks about midnight with a kind of fear, as if the days are slipping out from under him before he even has the opportunity to catch them. On Whistling Pie, his second album, he’s trying to pin down those flickering moments-a half-melody hummed on a walk with his kids, a grocery store run that sparks an instrumental sketch. In doing so, the album invites us into the mind and feelings of Rowland.
What makes Whistling Pie work isn’t that Rowland writes about the countryside or family life-It’s that he doesn’t dress it up. He leaves the songs delicate and fragile, almost too small for the room. And somehow, that makes them bigger.
The post-January 7th period of Ariel’s creative output was possibly just as chaotic as the immediate aftermath of his dropping from Mexican Summer, his Haunted Graffiti bandmates breaking off from him quietly and the subsequent blacklisting from basically every record label and performing venue across the United States. While Ariel is no stranger to outlandish media soundbites and over-dramatic moments, there is clearly a major evolution in his public perception when looking at, for example, the Coachella rage out versus going to a Trump rally with the message that the “election was stolen” and obvious anti-democratic bull***tery contained in that entire ordeal. While I am someone who can separate the art from the artist, a lot of Ariel’s views…
At the time of Greatest Hits release, Metronomy had been around in one form or another for over 25 years, with a discography brimming with witty, creative songs to show for it. The distinct viewpoint within Metronomy’s music flourished as the project grew from Joe Mount’s solo home studio experiments into a full-fledged, celebrated electro-indie pop group, but Greatest Hits avoids strict chronological order. Instead, the set puts the focus on the band’s vivid pairings of light melodies and deep feelings, synthetic sounds and very real emotions, and limitations and innovation. All of these qualities were abundant on 2011’s breakthrough The English Riviera; unsurprisingly, it’s one of the most-represented albums on the collection. “The Look” begins Greatest Hits…
…Jens Lekman is an accidental wedding singer. But he’s also a wedding singer for a reason. Ever since his 2004 song “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” he has had a side gig fielding requests from strangers to sing at their weddings. For over twenty years, he’s had a particular vantage point from which to see the role love songs can play in our lives. In 2020, he and novelist David Levithan co-conceived a novel-with-music, Songs from Other People’s Weddings. Originally this album was meant to contain the songs from the weddings in the book, but as the novel came together, Lekman began to imagine what happened between the book’s chapters. The book and the album eventually became intertwined but also found their own paths.
With lives as cynical as all those born between 1990 and 2010 are predestined to have, and as tragic as our short-lived beauties often find themselves, it’s a wonder some people find the time to uplift each other. On jasmine.4.t‘s debut record, You Are the Morning, it’s often accomplished by Jasmine Cruickshank uplifting herself first. In a sad world that expresses its hopes in oblique ironies, my soul leaps out for the simple sincerity of her music. The forces encircling her messages of gender acceptance and self-actualisation may be moustache-twirlingly evil, but jasmine.4.t is a righteous silver bullet.
The record proves to be slightly more interesting in its lyrical content than its musical content, but that’s more a compliment than a dig.
After working on their previous album remotely due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, Bombadil‘s Daniel Michalak and James Phillips met up in person at Phillips’ recording studio in Durham, North Carolina, in April 2025 to track a concept album about the moon. Joining them was new member Madison Rivis, a dancer/choreographer/multi-instrumentalist who’d been adding some choreography to their live sets, and who wrote the fable that served as the basis for an album about a group of friends who try to help the fallen moon get back in the sky.
While knowledge of this overarching plot isn’t necessary to enjoy tuneful acoustic songs about friendship, adventure, existential reflection, and needing help, it will aid in making sense…
After landing in the Top 30 in their native Australia as well as charting across Europe with their second album, Day/Night (2021), Parcels remain deeply indebted to the sounds of the ’70s on LOVED, an album guided by the theme of unity. What makes Parcels so irresistible here — at least if one is open to some wholehearted brotherly love — is that their particular touchstones seem to include funky disco in the celebratory tradition of Chic, certain civil rights-era classic soul, and the vestiges of harmony-driven West Coast hippie folk-rock, all tinged with modern indie and electro-pop. Not entirely party-hearty, a good half of the album succumbs to a yearning bittersweetness, although it’s relentlessly affectionate throughout, and LOVED kicks off with a dance-funk…
With her second album, Dark Sky Reserve, Dutch musician Robin Kester continues to explore the gloomy, mysterious atmospheres she fortified on 2023’s Honeycomb Shades. That album saw her adding vintage organs and keys, woodwinds, and various other instruments (vibraphone, autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, and more) to a core palette of guitars, modular synths, bass, and drums that she had established on earlier short-form releases. The album was recorded with producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding) in Bristol, England — her first time tracking outside of the Netherlands — and a handful of similarly celestial-minded musicians, such as Portishead’s Adrian Utley and This Is the Kit affiliate Rozi Plain. The idea of exploring is an apt one for a track list with titles…
…The ‘gay church folk’ project began back in 2001 when Canadian singer-songwriter Joel Gibb wrote Ecce Homo, The Hidden Cameras’ first album. He gathered up a group of musicians, singers and go go dancers to perform his lush queer pop live. Sometimes two dozen bodies – wearing only tight white pants and balaclavas or gold sequin bikinis, playing harps, plinking xylophones, strumming guitars – would sway and writhe around Gibb. Backed by a choir, soaked in soft string music, the Hidden Cameras became legendary for their eccentric, transcendent shows in churches, parks, art galleries, porn cinemas. Members of the audience – their congregation – would be wrapped in ribbons, invited into the loosey-goosey, loved-up throng. The fluid troupe of…
There is a reason Emma Swift calls The Resurrection Game, her first full-length collection of all original material, a “bummer of an album,” as it took coming back from a mental health crisis for the singer-songwriter to develop these ten tracks.
The Sydney, Australia-born, Nashville-based Swift had a major nervous breakdown, leading her to be hospitalized for weeks and work for over a year to recover from her fragile state. Dealing with this mental pain, she somehow managed to turn these feelings of fear and helplessness into works of art. Teaming up with producer Jordan Lehning (Kacey Musgraves, Rodney Crowell) Swift gathered some of Nashville’s brightest and decamped to Chale Abbey studio on the Isle of Wight.
The island’s sense of isolation fed into…