Who is GB? When Danish record label Posh Isolation called it quits in early 2025, one of the final records in its 16-year run was a mysterious album of savvy post-punk by an unidentified artist whose initials were scrawled in blue across its cover, with very little other identifying information. GB later turned up in The Guardian’s profile of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory — the educational institution that has attracted recent media attention for producing renowned graduates including ML Buch, Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne, Smerz, Molina, and Clarissa Connelly — and was later revealed to be one Gustav Berntsen, a recent graduate of the program who has been active in Copenhagen for many years.
As frontman for the band Pardans, he’s…
Category: indie-pop
As a fearless thought leader named Todd once argued, Weezer have had a far more interesting career than fair-weather fans who stopped listening after their first two albums realize. It’s been a turbulent ride through beautiful highs and brutal lows — sometimes within the same song, as on 2022’s wildly uneven SZNZ EP series. It’s not always been fun, but it’s certainly been interesting.
The missing ingredient, even throughout Weezer’s best post-millennium moments, has been the production. Increasingly, it sounds like frontman Rivers Cuomo makes albums sitting in front of a laptop with his guitar plugged directly into the interface with an amp sim in his DAW. Heavier rock material like 2021’s Van Weezer and the following year’s SZNZ: Summer has never hit quite…
After releasing six albums of varying heft under his Melaina Kol alias between 2016 and 2022, Nashville’s Logan Hornyak has taken longer over this one, time spent adding strings to a sometimes literal bow. Up to now, his output’s been decidedly loose and unbuffed indie pop, like an even lower-fi Sufjan Stevens combining a fragile voice, acoustic guitar and cheap electronics, all held together with paper glue. For Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then, he’s learned cello and harp, remembered some ancient piano lessons and found inventive ways of making solid song-like shapes out of them. The results are still small and delicate, but the focus is new.
First, the fibs: Hornyak claims to have moved away from guitar and electronics for this, but…
When you run a record label, no matter how big or small it is, and you are an artist yourself, you have the possibility to spread your wings as wide as you can, no matter how good (or not) it is.
Philadelphia’s Douglas Dulgarian has such capabilities. He runs an up-and-coming indie label (Julia’s War), plays in tagabow and They Are Gutting a Body of Water, but also spreads his ideas, along with Scott Turner (hooky) and Sam Silbert (hooky, circle of fire) in a project that goes by the name of god of war, which just released its second album molly picture.
When you have the freedom to abandon any restrictions it can often lead you to excess, but this trio of musicians seems to have found quite a good balance between…
A running theory: The youth yearn for breakbeats. The frenetic electronics of Nineties dance music have rumbled beneath the surface of indie rock and pop for some time now. The current wave of new acts — think Fcukers, Underscores, and of course, PinkPantheress — wield the sound with an uncanny magnetism, as if communicating from a post-digital future. Ear, the London- and New York-based duo comprised of Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, who met while students at Bard College, have become the type of buzzing indie band you used to hear about in the mid-2000s, fitting as the renaissance of that era’s sounds points to a more spiritual than aesthetic concern.
Following the release of their debut single, “Nerves,” in 2024, the pair have built…
Martin Newell has been releasing wonderful, distinctly British psych-pop as The Cleaners from Venus since the early ’80s. He’s kind of like the UK’s Robert Pollard or R. Stevie Moore, with a seemingly endless well of earworms, all recorded at home on whatever equipment is at hand. (He’s actually written a book on home recording.)
Beryl & Ruff Go Shopping is the umpteenth Cleaners from Venus album, made on an 8-track Portastudio, and it’s pretty hi-fi as far as their records go.
At this point, Newell’s got a signature sound — jazzy, orchestral pop influenced by The Kinks, The Beatles, and other sunshine psychedelia — and a vocal delivery that leans into the Britishness of it all and is as distinctive as his melodies.
The key track gives the album its title. “Where the Fades Meet” opens with swelling strings, which are swiftly underpinned by groovy, shuffling, percussion. The lyrics are carried by a chorale singing of a “fading signal”, “stillness” and “shadows.” It seems to about what lies in the gaps between the perceivable. The melody has a vaguely eastern Mediterranean lilt. Overall, it leans into evoking an exotica-inclined Rotary Connection – the late-Sixties/early Seventies outfit that was a core influence on acid jazz.
“Where the Fades Meet” is the sixth track on the seventh album – there has also been a compilation – that Andy Dragazis has recorded under his Blue States guise. The first, Nothing Changes Under the Sun, was issued in 2000.
Dent May has released many fine albums, most of which have a sweetly chewy soft rock center and all were made by May himself at the computer. He might have invited over the occasional guest, but otherwise he did everything himself. On 2026’s The Big One, May made the decision to change up his way of making records and went into an actual recording studio. Once there he invited in several of his friends to add instrumentation and vocals to the tracks. The result is the warmest, most expansive record he has made yet. The songs are the usual melange of Nilsson-esque baroque pop, gently percolating disco, and sun-bleached singer/songwriter-style ballads, with none of the power pop that crept into the previous album. It’s a predictably nice batch of tunes that…
There are inherent pitfalls for a band when they set about recreating a sound from the past with exacting precision. It’s far too easy for their work to sound like a hollow pastiche if they don’t play with undeniable energy or come up with a brilliant batch of songs. On their second album Was It Always This Way, Real Numbers do everything they can to sound exactly like a band who would have recorded for Sarah Records in 1989. Except for when they sound like they wanted to be signed to Creation in 1986. The order of the day is echoing guitar jangle, vocals that express powerful amounts of melancholy, synths that moan like faraway ghosts, and a rhythm section that sound like they studied every move the Cure made in the early ’80s. They have the sound down dead to…
In 2024, Hovvdy released their most ambitious album yet, a nearly hour-long eponymous double LP that experimented further with the duo’s combination of earthy, earnest lo-fi pop and reality-bending atmospheric effects. It was produced by Hovvdy’s Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, along with Andrew Sarlo and longtime collaborator Ben Littlejohn. It was also their most personal album to date, with Martin remarking that he could be heard crying on some of the songs. While still inhabiting the intimate spaces and loose performance style they’re known for, Hovvdy took a distinctly different approach to the follow-up, Big World, which was recorded with Littlejohn. The album, their sixth, reflects a deliberate attempt by the duo to make something…
The giddy, clever Canadians in Kiwi Jr. named the the first song on their fourth full-length “Photos of the Reenactment” which has to be an R.E.M. reference (i.e. Fables of the Reconstruction), however subtle. And yes, pinwheeling 12-string licks frame this surrealist fantasy and jangle hems in its ebullience, and early, punk-y R.E.M. is a fair enough reference.
…Cheerful mayhem balances precariously against angsty uncertainty in these tracks, which wobble and keen as much as they bang on forward. There’s a bit of Canadian self-effacement at work — “You are here as the first class entertainment/You are here because it’s Drag-your-daughter-to-work Day” warbles Jeremy Gaudet — and existential angst tucked carefully into bopping…
Listening to abracadabra’s peel away EP is a little bit like scrolling through Instagram reels, minus the crushing ennui. The beats are fidgety and liable to change. There’s a sense of something whizzing and spooling. A new vocal style might emerge, or a bonkers effect could be layered over something else for a few seconds. Sometimes, in that time-honored 1960s tradition, abracadabra might just use a weird sound — a train whistle, a dub siren — only for it never to crop up in the song again. And why not? Abracadabra build songs like Kevin McCallister builds booby traps: intricate feats of imagination rigged with surprises.
Abracadabra are Hannah Skelton (vocals, synthesizers) and Chris Niles (bass, synthesizers). Although they’ve been active…
For a songwriter whose career has been built on melody rather than spectacle, Melody Boy feels less like a debut than the natural next chapter for Andy Crofts. Its ambition lies not in grand gestures, but in the detail, revealing a songwriter who trusts his instincts and knows when to let the songs speak for themselves.
Best known for his work with The Moons and as a longstanding member of Paul Weller’s band, Crofts has spent years refining an approach rooted in timeless songcraft. Echoes of Buddy Holly’s emotional directness and Brian Wilson’s lush sense of arrangement drift through the record, yet they never feel like signposts.
They are simply part of Crofts’ musical vocabulary, creating a layered sonic landscape…
Following a pair of companion albums — Tender and the more energized Spiral Your Way Out — that captured different stages of post-breakup emotions, Zahara Jaime broadens the topics at hand while still navigating the deeply personal on their fourth album, Distant Lands. Lending Zzzahara a hand in wrangling their rangy sound spectrum — one that integrates post-punk, giddy dream pop, driving indie rock, and murky shoegaze — is Casey Lagos (Stick to Your Guns, Cold War Kids), who less polishes than reinforces the songwriter’s knotty sound. They pull listeners to their feet with the swirling, squalling opener, “Whispering Tree,” a song whose mismatched multi-tracked vocals, warbly injected guitar hooks, tonal percussion, and wall of strummed guitars…
As We Once Were is the third studio album from twice Welsh Music Prize nominated artist and producer The Anchoress aka Catherine Anne Davies. This new record is the long-awaited follow-up to the UK Top 40 album The Art Of Losing, which received wall-to-wall critical plaudits upon its release in 2021 and scooped up a raft of Album of The Year nods from The Sunday Times, to Prog, to the Mail on Sunday. With Sir Elton John naming it “one of my favourite records of the year” and Caitlin Moran calling it “the inadvertent, beautiful and truthful soundtrack to this moment”, it went on to sell over 10,000 physical copies via the power of word of mouth.
Featuring an all-star cast of guest vocalists, including vocals…
CD 83-track box set tracing the development of indie music from the height of the Britpop explosion in 1995 through its aftershocks to the post-Britpop period in 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium. This box continues the story of indie/Britpop from Cherry Red’s Popscene: From Baggy to Britpop 1989-1994.
…1995 was the year that Britpop exploded into mainstream consciousness due to the infamous Blur vs Oasis chart battle that was even covered on the national News at Ten. Both bands had already scored UK number one albums in 1994 but going head-to-head in the singles chart ensured maximum media coverage. Their success focussed attention on a revolution in music that included acts such as Elastica, Paul Weller,…