After the Numero Group released a comprehensive look at the American Analog Set’s 1990’s recordings on the New Drifters box set, it only makes sense that they would do the same for the combo’s 2000’s output. Destroy Destroy Destroy is another beautifully packaged retrospective that gathers up the three albums they released during the decade — 2001’s Know By Heart, 2003’s Promise of Love, and 2005’s Set Free — plus two discs of stray singles, EPs, compilation appearances, and rare tracks.
The set captures the evolution of the group from a more abstract musical group dedicated to repetition, space, and subtlety to one that utilized that same basic template while applying it to songs that were more narrative and concise.
Category: indie-pop
Two years ago, Carla J. Easton co-directed and narrated Since Yesterday, a documentary examining 60 years of all-girl bands in Scotland. You can tell, too; her latest album plays like a paean to the effervescent pop of the likes of Strawberry Switchblade, His Latest Flame and The Twinsets. There are more contemporary influences, too, with Alvvays – Easton’s one-time shipmates on Belle & Sebastian’s Boaty Weekender – hanging particularly heavy over this sparkling set of guitar-pop songs, which are made all the more impressive when you consider that Easton learned to play the guitar specifically for this record.
There is real depth and variety on I Think That I Might Love You, which runs the gamut from the glam-pop stomp of…
Look for Your Mind! is the 6th album from brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario, aka The Lemon Twigs, following on from their career highs of 2023’s Everything Harmony and 2024’s A Dream Is All We Know, both of which had elevated their music to a new finessed, sophisticated level. On this latest outing the formula hasn’t really changed in that the songs still have their roots in the 1960s and ’70s and arrive with a refreshed vibrancy, although there are moments where the brothers tread a fine line between authenticity and pastiche.
The first half of the album features several standout moments, some of the best of their career to date. The title track comes out of the blocks fast, the sound of 1965 guitar-pop distilled into the finest of essences. The motifs may be familiar…
Heavy Stereo, Hurricane #1, Arnold, Kevin Rowland in suspenders… it’s generally accepted that Creation Records did not invest their Oasis windfall wisely. Yet amid the frenzy of the mid-’90s guitar-band goldrush, they did make one very shrewd acquisition, swooping in to sign Super Furry Animals after only the band’s second show proper outside Wales – even if Alan McGee subsequently let slip that this may have been more a case of luck than judgement.
“Initially I just heard Super Furry Animals as being similar to Blur,” McGee told SFA biographer Ric Rawlins. “So I thought, ‘Well, fuck! Blur sell lots of records, I could have my version!’ Little did I know that I was signing The Beach Boys meets fucking Gong meets Isaac Hayes on a fucking…
Following the release of their debut, The Haunted Youth return with their second studio album, Boys Cry Too via Play It Again Sam. Beginning as the solo project of artist Joachim Liebens, the band today reveal the first single to be lifted from the record, deathwish, featuring fellow collaborator and Orlando-based singer-songwriter, Max Fry.
On Boys Cry Too, Joachim Liebens abandons the fragile, bedroom-pop innocence of Dawn Of The Freak – a debut that has since earned cult status back home – in favour of something far more confrontational and emotionally charged. From the towering eight-minute opener in my head to the closing track ghost girl, the album lets go of restraint in favour of something more raw, blending fragile melodies…
Behold, the first new Young Sinclairs LP since 2019’s ‘Out Of The Box’. After a lengthy period of inactivity and time spent focusing on other projects, the band reunited and resumed performing live in October, 2023 featuring a freshly revamped lineup. Momentum gathered, creative wellsprings began flowing again, and new songs slowly emerged. Core members Samuel Jones Lunsford, Daniel Cundiff, and Seanmichael Poff found themselves invigorated by the addition of newcomers Ben Hudson and John Pence – longtime friends and bandmates within kindred musical endeavors. The genesis of Cycles Turning began in 2025 when Samuel recorded a handful of songs in his attic on a newly purchased Tascam 488 8-track cassette Portastudio.
Stephen Becker loves to find poetry and eloquence in the inane activities of everyday life. “Bad Idea”, the first song on his new album, Gravity Blanket, begins: “Had a bad idea again / So I remain uncertain for a while / Took some time to breathe again / And thrift a collared shirt to find my style.” In the lazy, midtempo “Emergency”, he asks a practical question: “Why’d you get a car in New York City? / The train goes far enough.” A fascinating bedroom-pop songwriter and musician, his musical approach may come off as occasionally naïve and “normcore”, but there is deep sophistication and unique textures in every song.
Becker is an in-demand New York sideman, working with artists as diverse as Rubblebucket, Vagabon, Katie Von Schleicher,…
There’s a sense in Misty Coast’s fifth album Always Sun that the Norwegian band has opened the curtains a little. Just enough to let the light in more easily this time around.
The familiar elements are all still there, with arrangements that drift and blur their soft-edged melodies, but now they’re put together with more space and less gauze. It’s not a seismic shift in their sound, but it changes what it’s like to sit with: unusually textured, more gently outlined and, ultimately, not quite as intense.
That softer instinct has been there from the beginning of this project. Formed by Linn Frøkedal and Richard Myklebust after their time in The Megaphonic Thrift, Misty Coast has always worked by easing melody out from beneath…
After releasing two albums of eclectic and textured lo-fi indie rock under the solo project handle youbet, Nick Llobet found a musical kindred spirit in fellow Brooklynite Micah Prussack (Trace Mountains) and invited her into the lineup.
Produced by prior youbet collaborator Katie von Schleicher (Frankie Cosmos, Market), their first album as a duo, youbet, is even more heterogeneous, adding disgruntled punk, damaged folk-rock, and more to the project’s shape-shifting palette. Although there are no direct tributes to these on the album, the band even namechecked influences as far-flung as flamenco and Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo. They open the record with the buzzy, laid-back slacker rock of “Ground Kiss,” a distortion-punctuated…
Although the band have experienced a complete turnover in backing personnel since their 2018 debut, San Franciso’s Cindy have stayed remarkably loyal to their distinctive sound thanks to leader Karina Gill’s devotion to a haunted, melancholy vibe constructed around simple guitar progressions, detached vocals, and a slowcore sensibility. Featuring a lineup that’s been steady since 2024 and that includes members of Now, Violent Change, and Children Maybe Later, the project’s fifth album, Another Country, adds to this legacy, where, more specifically, emotionally numbing neglect, dingy reverb, tragedy, and slightly out-of-tune guitars evoke the incorporeal ghosts of girl groups, sad teen idols, and Nico.
With a title that seems to revel in these…
California sounds revival? Not called as such yet, but that line leading from The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield through the ‘70s scene seems to be being revived and modernized by the likes of The Lemon Twigs and a number of other artists. Judging by Entropy, its new album, San Diego trio Foxtide should definitely be included in any such revival list. You can add to that revived term modernized one, as Elijah Gibbins-Croft, Oey James, and Ian Robles, who comprise Foxtide have that modern touch to songwriting and production, as they filtered their digest of all sounds California through current concepts of pop/rock music. The key lies in an excellent songwriting that relies on that well-proven concept ‘let’s write and sing something that sounds like…
Adam Kyriakou’s Department is a one-man band in the style of Neil Hannon’s Divine Comedy and Matt Johnson’s The The; others may pass in and out, but Kyriakou steers the ship.
Audacity Files proves to be the maiden voyage for what should be an interesting and impressive career in sonic development. “Shadow Play” embodies the freneticism of the Lennon-McCartney opus “A Day in the Life”: brass, loops, and percussion lunging at the unsuspecting listener. Incidentally, “Shadow Play” is the longest tune on the record: despite pushing the boundaries of pop, Department wisely keeps the runtime to a palatable two-minute average.
Purportedly inspired by a voyage to his ancestral Macedonia, Department incorporates…
The release of Mitski’s concert film The Land and its accompanying live album last autumn consolidated her status as a kind of art-school Taylor Swift: glancingly elusive but still capable of grand emotional spectacle.
Recorded with her live band, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me showcases Mitski’s gift for cutting vintage musical theatre stylings and half-lit Americana with acerbic art-pop, the jaunty list-song ‘Rules’ or the chaotic evil ‘Where’s My Phone?’ almost sharing a theatrical moment with current-day David Byrne.
‘That White Cat’ simmers with jarring anger at parasitic forces who seek to commodify and consume while ‘Dead Women’s disturbing Lana Del Cohen transmission features the lyric…
A project established by two veterans of the Stockholm indie scene to delve into (circa) 1980s inspirations like post-punk, new wave, jangle pop, and indie pop, Salt Lake Alley combined these styles while favoring post-punk on their 2020 full-length debut. While they leaned more heavily into jangle and indie pop with the follow-up, their third album, Always Out of Time, finds them expanding their lineup to four and committing almost fully to a giddy, bittersweet indie pop veiled in shimmer and echo. Members Gustav Tranback, Mikael Carlsson, and later personnel Fredrik Jalker and Thomas Aherne hail from like-minded and not-quite-as-like-minded Swedish acts such as the Honeydrips, the Garlands, and Paper Hearts, among several others.
Until recently, Riya Mahesh’s biography nailed nearly every beat of all-American academic achievement, following a familiar arc from early piano lessons to being crowned prom queen, like Olivia Rodrigo’s well-adjusted Wario. But after hitting a snag and failing to get into Juilliard (happens…), the musician regrouped during the pandemic with a SoundCloud account, a trial run of Logic, and nothing to lose.
As Quiet Light, the Texas-born, Boston-based producer has gone on to release multiple albums of increasingly accomplished art pop, along the way nabbing opening spots for Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Ana Roxanne, and Hovvdy. Naturally, she’s managed all this while also powering through medical school.
With members from various groups in the Melbourne indie rock underground on board, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Season 2’s first album, Power of Now, would be a low-key, off-kilter delight. The band – which features drummer Carolyn Hawkins (Parsnip, School Damage, and Chook Race), bassist Charlotte Zarb (the Snakes, Phil & the Tiles), guitarist Matt Powell (also Phil & the Tiles), keyboardist Claudia Serfaty (Stroppies), and guitarist Freya McLeod (herself) – whip through a half-hour of jangling indie pop gems, angular post-punk mood pieces, and jittery bedroom punk rockers along the way to making a record that stands with the best work of the groups they are associated with. The songs are all quite catchy, sometimes in a sideways…
Sunflower Bean singer and bassist Julia Cumming blooms into her pop self with 2026’s gorgeously realized Julia. Her solo debut, the album captures both a personal and creative transition for Cumming who wrote many of the songs over a two-year period, traveling between her childhood home in N.Y.C. and living rooms in Los Angeles where she worked closely with bassist, guitarist, and producer Brian Robert Jones and producer/engineer Chris Coady.
During the same time, she was busy with Sunflower Bean, releasing both 2023’s Headful of Sugar and 2025’s Mortal Primetime; albums that found the indie trio expanding their sound, balancing edgier alt-rock leanings with Cumming’s love for the lyrical, ’60s and ’70s AM pop she…
With every successive album she makes, Carla dal Forno‘s songwriting becomes clearer, more upfront, and more emotionally direct. She actually intended her fourth solo effort to be more abstract, perhaps closer to the mystery-shrouded experimental work of her earlier group F ingers, but as she was writing the songs, she found that they only made sense when she wrote about her emotional experiences in plain language. Her recording environment also helped shape the directness of the songs. Instead of living in a busy city, she had relocated to a small country town which offered stillness and solitude, making it easier to reflect on her life situations and focus on the truth. That said, even though Confession lays deeply guarded feelings bare,…
Angelo De Augustine returns with his fifth album, Angel in Plainclothes — a deeply felt rendering of his multi-year journey of healing and renewal. The first single is a standout psychedelic country piece, “Mirror Mirror,” and offers the first look at Angelo’s multi-year healing journey and the renewal that followed.
“Usually when I make music, I’ll sit down with one instrument and write the song,” states Angelo. “In ‘Mirror Mirror,’ I didn’t stick to this principle and was messing around with the tape machine’s varispeed function—seeing what would happen if I slowed down what I’d recorded on the bowed psaltery, creating an unusual droning noise. The song came from experimenting with layering sound in a very free way and watching…
There’s an air of celebratory nostalgia around Metric at the moment. Last year, the Canadian quartet played their 2009 album Fantasies in full on tour and that seems to have lit a bit of a creative spark. The band’s 10th studio album, Romanticize the Dive, sees them reunited with Fantasies producer Gavin Brown, and even saw them return to the legendary Electric Lady studios in New York. From the outset, Romanticize the Dive seems like a return to Metric’s roots. While there was much to enjoy on Formentera and its 2023 sequel, you did sometimes long for that intoxicating spark to be lit again.
Opening track ‘Victim of Luck’ immediately seems to recreate that energy with a chiming guitar riff from Jimmy Shaw, while lead singer…