With her 2023 album Love as Projection, Frankie Rose pushed the electronic elements that had been hanging out quietly in the background of her songs all the way into the spotlight. Rose’s music already had a dense and evolving history by then, with time spent laying the foundation for a certain era of indie rock with her work in Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and her own reverb-heavy guitar pop in the late aughts and 2010s, and solo work that grew increasingly more synthetic with each new album. Hila continues the complete dive into electronic pop that manifested on Love as Projection, but takes Rose’s digital sound to places that are darker and more abstract. The gorgeous “Can’t Be Wrong” layers synth melodies over a steady pulse, with thick, strutting bass and Rose’s…
Category: indie-pop
When it comes to venting about heartache, doubt, and mid-twenties angst, it’s hard to beat midwest emo and the heavier side of alt-rock. For her fourth album, Beabadoobee’s Bea Kristi needed that heft and firepower to navigate her quarter-life crisis, so she recruited some of the best possible collaborators: Hayley Williams of Paramore, Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, and Title Fight’s Shane Moran – in other words, her heroes when she was a teenager writing songs in her bedroom. From its scrapbook-collage artwork to its crushing riffs and choppy rhythms, Pylon is as authentic and cathartic in its own way as any of their music.
With its jerky riffs, huge drums, and shout-along choruses, “Sun Has Set” delivers…
Fans will be happy to know that Lizzy McAlpine’s fourth album, Angel, is filled with sounds reminiscent of her decade-long career; however, this time, there’s a coating of something evolved. Instead of brutal, gut-wrenching heartbreak, this fifteen-track record explores acceptance and closure, and instead of self-reflection that tears you apart, there’s self-discovery that evokes freedom — the musicality may sound similar at times, but this addition to her discography is McAlpine’s most devoted yet.
The folk-heavy album swoons listeners with the opener and first released single, ‘The light in the painting’, a declaration of love in the form of peaceful poetry and soothing melody. The song reminds listeners of a previous opening…
All those reinventions, genre-clashes, breakdancing and Gen X irony can take it out of a person. So it’s little surprise that every twelve years Beck returns to a safe place, a familiar terrain, where he can work through difficult emotions with trusted musicians. There’s no pressure to show off, innovate or get crazy with a processed cheese spread.
Sea Change, Beck’s eighth album, established this more sombre space in 2002. It was folky like 1994’s One Foot in the Grave and ’98’s Mutations, but different too: a dead serious, dead slow, dead melancholy mix of acoustic guitars, strings and a Gallic-funk rhythm section, it found a bruised Beck channelling his heartache over the end of a nine-year relationship. Sea Change confused…
People like to say that artists who have little left to lose, either by virtue or lack of past success, have “zero fucks to give.” Usually, this means that an artist has either reached a point at which they no longer care what kind of impression their work makes on the general public, or, taking a more wide-angle perspective, they see no appeal in anything the world and future have to offer, and wash their hands of the whole thing. Colin Newman and Malka Spigel, formerly of post-punk legends Wire and Minimal Compact, respectively, have certainly earned the right to rest on their laurels, cruise on autopilot, follow their fancies, or indulge in score-settling. They owe the world nothing, but the world owes them plenty. Yet their latest album as Immersion is a work of craft…
The journey to Sylvan Esso’s fifth studio album was a cross-country trip, with a storm on either side. Quite literally — Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn left their longtime home in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene in late 2024; shortly after they settled in Los Angeles, they found themselves surrounded by the January 2025 wildfires. The duo was already mourning the loss of their close friend Jessica, who died of sudden liver failure in 2023.
If there is a single throughline on Ow ∞ (pronounced “Ow Infinity”), it’s grief. It’s not an album about death, per se, but about living in the wake of unimaginable loss, overcoming the pain that keeps piling up — “the suffering of suffering,” as Meath calls it on “Flood Season.”
…expanded digital edition featuring 11 additional b-sides and live recordings.
Listening to a new Solex album is a bit like being suddenly and completely immersed in a foreign language. At first it sounds alien, unpredictable, and impossible to decipher, but as time goes by, its rhythms become natural, and charming idioms and turns of phrase slowly reveal themselves. Elisabeth Esselink’s third Solex album, Low Kick and Hard Bop, could be considered a primer in advanced Solex — it’s an evocative and wildly creative, but not immediately accessible collection. Listeners not already fluent in Solex Vs. the Hitmeister and Pick Up may be bewildered by the strange, ever-changing melodies and arrangements, which Esselink crafts from samples of…
In his 20s, when Nate Amos was uploading his every musical impulse to Bandcamp, he released a particularly out-there tranche of songs focused on “technology corrupting nature,” he told the Guardian recently. He soon came to understand this noisy spell as a symptom of anxiety and depression: “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.” The newer work that’s made his name as This Is Lorelei is tellingly lucid by contrast, the work of someone who can now look discomfort dead on and make it beautiful.
It doesn’t take a leap to connect that to Amos’ recent sobriety. His official debut album, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star — a crystalline pop record that stealthily acquired…
The deluxe edition expands on the original February 2026 release with added bonus tracks like “Heartbeat,” “Hunter,” “Skýjaborg,” and “Infinity”.
On Julia, his fifth studio album, acclaimed Icelandic folktronica musician Ásgeir steps outside of his comfort zone and eschews his father’s voice. The poetry of Einar Georg Einarsson and Júlíus Aðalsteinn Róbertsson, a friend, had provided the lyrics — sometimes via translators — of Ásgeir’s previous compositions. Now, at 33, he’s standing on his own.
It’s evident from tracks such as “Quiet Life” that Ásgeir can be a capable lyricist. “Stare into the water/ See myself swimming in the sky/ Every part of me comes to light,” it begins. It’s a song that could be about a romantic partner or…
Michael Barker spends a lot of his time playing guitar in garage punk bands in his Sydney hometown scene; he also records under the name 1-800-Mikey, which is a reference to his job in a call center. Under that name he makes lo-fi bedroom punk and garage that’s self-assured, confident, hooky as can be, and full of jangling, slicing guitars. IN YUN is the second album he’s released and it’s a sugar sweet confection that will appeal to fans of the Ty Segall and O Sees school of rock, the one where they teach that the sweatier and more immediate the sound the better. Barker certainly got top marks in class because the album is super punchy and full of the kind of hooks that sink in deep on first listen. Most of the songs are revved-up garage rockers…
If it is a truth universally acknowledged that a singer-songwriter in possession of a large songbook must be in search of a band, then Oisean Burnett has gone about things in the right way. Following a move from his native Scotland to London in 2024, he papered the musicians’ hangs with posters seeking bandmates, and Starter Car is the happy result.
Their debut album, Afterlight, follows the release of four previous singles, with opening track ‘Throwing Down’ serving as the fifth.
A busy live band, Starter Car have built a following in relatively quick time, and videos of gigs at places like The Windmill in Brixton and The Shacklewell Arms show a core band of guitars, bass and drums. The album was recorded in…
The name was an explicit signpost. Maryland’s Velocity Girl named themselves after the B-side of Primal Scream’s May 1986 second single “Crystal Crescent.” At this point, Bobby Gillespie and Co were still a Byrds-leaning, Sixties-inclined, polkadotted jangly pop outfit. There were no hints of what came later.
Velocity Girl formed in College Park, Maryland in 1989 but were embedded in the Washington, DC music scene – one which, for much of the outside world, was defined by hardcore punk and the various flavours springing from it represented by bands like Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses. Looking to any British indie archetype was atypical. As the liner notes for new compilation 1989-1992 put it, “Velocity Girl arose from a new…
Melbourne-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Ned Collette collaborated with some notable names on his last release, 2024’s Our Other History, including Dirty Three’s Jim White and Mick Turner, Leah Senior and The Necks’ Chris Abrahams. The collaborations continue on his new album, Mixed Light, with Senior and Abrahams once again, plus long-term band members Joe Talia (drums) and Ben Bourke (bass).
Collette is back on Melbourne label It Records, who put out 2018’s masterful Old Chestnut, after releasing Our Other History on Ryan Davis’s Sophomore Lounge. Mixed Light feels decidedly more coherent than its predecessor, moving adroitly between musical styles and coalescing into a deeply satisfying album.
Thanks to Olivia Rodrigo’s wildly successful Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival last week, a new generation of fans is discovering Gen X alt-rock staples like The Breeders, Garbage, and Bikini Kill. On a much smaller scale (at least for now), Nashville’s Hannah Cole may be responsible for introducing Gen Z to the beauty of shoegaze bands like Ride and Lush.
On her debut LP, Switchbacks, she melds the swirling, fuzzed-out guitars of shoegaze and ’90s alt rock with sophisticated pop melodies that act as a Trojan horse for some powerful lyrics. The title track opens the album with screeching guitars and solid drumming, with Cole’s soft, measured voice fighting to be heard above the dissonance. The distorted, reverb-heavy guitar…
Guava Girl Summer is so 2025. The era of the “Chaotic Princess” is now. So reads the gospel according to Marci, whose rhinestone-crusted new album Mask Lady and Late Night Girl flicks through the glossy pages of power pop and soft rock with quips about getting baked at sunrise, chatting on the landline, falling on your knees, and making the devil cry. Co-written and produced with her TOPS bandmate David Carriere, Marta Cikojevic’s second LP reprises the disco-speckled all-or-nothingness of 2022’s eponymous debut, serving up a platter of glittery hooks and golden grooves styled with unashamedly retro trimmings.
Marci sounds like the name of the hot next-door neighbor in a John Candy film, but on this semi-autobiographical record, the Montreal…
…Deluxe 2CD with additional 11 tracks.
God Bless the Band feels like an unexpected encounter with your younger self. Compiling tracks from across Courteeners’ career, the collection revisits a period when British indie was less a musical category than a social world, sticky floors, packed festivals, late trains home and the optimism of believing the next weekend might be the best one yet. The nostalgia here is not simply for the music, but for the atmosphere that surrounded it. That sense of time passing gives the collection its weight. Early favourites sit alongside later material, charting how Courteeners have gradually moved from the rawer energy of their beginnings towards something broader and more polished. “Modern Love” still has that…
When reviewing Bayonne’s 2016 album Primitives, PopMatters described how “If Debussy and Phil Collins fell in love, Bayonne would be their baby. (That’s a good thing.)” The allusion remains apt. The Texan multi-instrumentalist has continually cited adult pop-rock luminaries such as Phil Collins and Enya, and that fascination with expansive, polished pop remains present on Bayonne’s fourth album, Filters. Yet Bayonne doesn’t simply recreate the sounds of the 1980s. He filters them — appropriately enough — through the loop-based production techniques of contemporary bedroom pop.
On Filters, as with much of Bayonne’s music, the dominant instrumental pairing is a resonating piano accompanied by vibraphone. The piano…
Arab Strap were full of middle-aged malaise from day one, at least spiritually. Now, 30 years on they’ve grown into the curmudgeons they were always destined to be, but their ninth album is just as funny and insightful as ever, as the grinding minutiae of life’s banality is contrasted with touching messages of hope and contentment.
Many of these songs are more or less an inventory of gripes on a given theme: internet slop, physical decrepitude, the manosphere etc. All backed with varied arrangements, like the no-wave skronk of ‘Dollar Park’, the old-school thrash finale on ‘You You You’ or the industrial jazz-rock bombast of ‘I Get Noise’. It’s a rich musical abyss for Aidan Moffat to shout into.
But while the one-liners and pop culture…