Even the most manufactured pop stars are given the option to reinvent themselves.
Gia Margaret, however, really had no say over the circumstances that led to her breakthrough. The Chicago native started fast as a slowcore singer-songwriter who blew away South By Southwest. Then, somewhere around 2019, after coming down with laryngitis, she lost her voice. While the injury lingered, she went viral by turning herself into, of all things, an ambient artist. Now, at 38 years old, Margaret can finally sing again. Her new album occasionally falls flat, but Singing still hits plenty of high notes.
Margaret was never the type of singer to show off. On her first full-length, she sang softly and discreetly, coaxing meaning from each syllable.
Category: indie-pop
The writer and poet Jonathan Swift began writing poems for his dear friend, and possibly secret wife, Esther Johnson (known as to him as Stella) every year on her birthday, starting in 1719. The works are small treasures, full of love and life even hundreds of years later. Trash Can Sinatras’ singer Francis Reader and producer/Noonday Underground leader Simon Dine are both big fans of the poems and decided to set excerpts from them to music. The two had worked together before so they already knew that Reader’s warm and woody vocals would fit well with Dine’s mixture of loops, orchestral samples, and trip hop-inspired production. They called the band Fellow Mortals and their 14-song 2026 album Stella’s Birth-Day melds tricky wordplay…
For their second full-length album, Under My Umbrella, Miss Grit has lifted the lid on their internal world, lasering in on the anxieties and heartbreak of the past two years, following their acclaimed debut Follow the Cyborg.
On this album, Margaret Sohn – aka Miss Grit (they/she) – channels the noirish atmosphere of classic trip-hop bands, while adding a hefty dose of maximalism and a dream-pop sensibility. The title is a nod to the iconic Rihanna song and embraces Sohn “…letting people in more on this record and trying not to shy away from that. I’m leaving the cyborg behind, I’m letting it all out.”
This record started to take shape when Sohn returned from an intense touring schedule where they’d driven themself around…
Since 2019, The Reds, Pinks & Purples has served as Glenn Donaldson’s primary outlet for mulling over fears and insecurities to the tune of ’80s college rock. It’s the most personal and renowned of the thirty-odd aliases and bands he’s worked on in his prolific career, initially envisioned as a means of turning his long, ambling walks around San Francisco into songs, with trains of thought sharpening into angsty, deadpan verses.
His tenth album under the moniker is Acknowledge Kindness (2026), and he puts extra emphasis on the instrumentals: It’s the most atmospheric and detailed Reds, Pinks & Purples record to date, weaving influences from alt-country and 4AD goth rock.
…It’s hard to believe just how much music…
The landmark 1996 album reconstructed from BBC sessions and live recordings! Suede’s commercial high watermark came in 1996 with Coming Up. The 1995 addition to the line-up of lead guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboard player Neil Codling had given the band a new impetus and focus. At the very pinnacle of ‘Britpop’ – a scene they’d helped inspire but fiercely operated outside of – roared back with an adrenalin rush of new Suede classics.
The first missive from ‘Coming Up’ was the trailblazing ‘Trash’, which reached No. 3 in the UK chart – a joint career-best for the band. That was followed into the Top 10 over the next twelve months by four more hit singles from the album – ‘Beautiful Ones’, ‘Lazy’, ‘Saturday Night’, and ‘Filmstar’.
Frog were reclusive until they weren’t. The Americana band’s mastermind, Daniel Bateman, put the project on hold for four years before bringing his brother, Steve, into the previously one-man-band in 2023. The subsequent record, Grog, kicked off a prolific streak: Frog for Sale is the lo-fi alt-country duo’s third album in 14 months, a pseudo-sequel to 2025’s 1000 Variations on the Same Song. Playing with the textures of bossa nova, jangle pop, and twee folk in his signature falsetto, Bateman tears through a songwriting spree inspired by fellow creative compulsives, from Lil Wayne to Mozart, plunking away on piano, strumming guitar, and delivering goofy anecdotes like a homespun cabaret act. Getting lost in the whirlwind is half the fun.
The cover of Sean Solomon’s solo debut features humanlike cartoon animals, drawn by Solomon, who’s provided animation for videos by Odd Future and Run the Jewels, among others, in the style of children’s author Richard Scarry. Scarry’s work, of course, formed the basis of a ’90s cable cartoon show that imprinted the fictional metropolis of Busytown on the minds of Solomon’s generation. Solomon’s own animation style skews more toward the surreal and twisted — think Daniel Clowes mixed with Lisa Hanawalt — but with a covert whimsicality suggesting that the good-natured innocence of Huckle Cat, Lowly Worm, and company is buried in there somewhere. As a singer-songwriter, the L.A.-based musician favors disillusion over delirium, but his…
To behold Stonehenge is to bear witness to the human capacity for ingenuity. For songwriter Nate Amos, who records as This Is Lorelei, an encounter with the megalithic structure was life-changing: It convinced him to stop smoking weed.
The prospect of giving up a habit he’d indulged nearly every day for 15 years was daunting, but Amos decided to channel his subsequent restless energy into songwriting. Maybe it was the lack of weed; maybe Amos was building off the recent success of his various other projects; maybe those Neolithic rocks transmitted something magic to him — regardless, the resulting album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, is a keenly crafted and wonderfully adventurous set of songs, both earnest and appealingly funny.
Out on his own after making music with bands like Veronica Falls and Ultimate Painting, James Hoare has gone further down the rabbit hole in pursuit of the most understated, most intimate version of melancholy guitar pop possible. Under the name Penny Arcade Hoare plays his tender tunes softly in front of a tape machine, though really it sounds like he’s on the bed right next to you the listener the whole time.
His first record under this banner was 2024’s Backwater Collage and it was lovely in its preciseness and calm, mixing catchy melodies and production that never reached the red on the dials. Taking that sparse template and breaking it down even more, 2026’s Double Exposure is just as true and blue, even more so at times.
Despite its sound owing much to late-‘90s alternative – and that it’s coming two years on from her initial breakthrough – there’s something so beautifully ‘now’ about Little Miss Sunshine, this debut full-length from Eaves Wilder. Not the ‘now’ that one might imagine rapacious, cartoonish A&Rs to seek – that’s already been and gone, despite their efforts, if it even existed. But a ‘now’ that, among other things, has digitally-literate teens metaphorically crate-digging in a way that’s seen many a veteran act performing to audiences younger than their biggest hits; Olivia Rodrigo using her stage as a pseudo mixtape, Hayley Williams spilling her own guts across new material, and acts like Mitski, Wolf Alice and Wet Leg crossing over into pop spheres…
‘No Time for Poetry (Easy Listening Edition)’ is a reimagined instrumental version of the 2025 album ‘No Time for Poetry’ by the Oakland-based duo The Saxophones. This edition replaces the original vocals with saxophone, bass clarinet, and alto flute lines to create a smooth, “easy listening” experience.
With their first three albums, The Saxophones — married couple Alexi Erenkov (vocals, woodwinds) and Alison Alderdice (drums, backing vocals) with multi-instrumentalist Richard Laws — have established a haunting and dreamy, lightly jazz-inflected style of minimalist indie pop that evokes smoky back rooms, seaside reflection, romance, and the analog era.
Their fourth LP, No Time for Poetry, finds them…
Straddling the fringe of melancholy and optimism, Irish singer-songwriter A.S. Fanning’s fourth and latest record Take Me Back to Nowhere is awash with an abundance of solemn introspection, journeys into fractured belief systems and ever-evolving, conflicting realities.
Born from traditional Irish literary works and folk tales, Fanning’s sonic playground both swings skyward into interstellar textures and frolics between pillars of grounded, wistful lyricism. Bearing witness to a battalion of contradictions, he toils between conflicting concepts, questions solutions to the modern world, and grapples with the turmoil and tenderness of love.
Take Me Back to Nowhere is a raw, unfiltered foray into creative freedom and an ode to…
Although she slightly narrows the eclectic range of influences exhibited over the years by colorful Elephant 6 affiliate Dressy Bessy, fans of the long-running band won’t want to miss the solo debut of their leader, Tammy Ealom, now operating under the moniker the Tammy Shine. Landing on a freewheeling indie pop injected with the spirits of strutting glam, punk, and outsiders in general, the 12-track OK Shine OK was written, recorded, and mixed entirely by Ealom, who also D.I.Y.’d the artwork, and promotional material like music videos and portrait photography.
The resulting album sounds like it was all a lot of fun as she kicks things off with the clap-along tune “Shaky Shaky” and the spoken sentiment “Hey, it’s springtime, let’s go.” The hooky riffs,…
It is hard to believe that Oxis, the marine-based electronic singer/songwriter/producer, only started her series of self-titled releases three years ago. Her music reaches a level of intimacy and vulnerable storytelling that makes listening to it feel like a chat with an old, prophetic friend, someone you never forget but can never pin down for too long. All this, despite her production percolating with alien-like textures derived from nimble drum patterns and palpable ambiance. Oxis’s pop-tinted, experimental approach has been stretched out across seven projects so far, and the next installment is finally here.
Oxis 8, the latest addition to the multi-hyphenate’s beloved album series, is another quick yet potent and fun exploration into…
On their debut album One More Thing, Lime Garden‘s unapologetically messy, vulnerable chronicles of the highs and lows of their lives as early twentysomethings were a study in contrasts: irreverent, self-aware indie rock set against introspective ballads. On Maybe Not Tonight, their perspective has shifted. As they trace a night out from beginning to end — and the self-doubt and bravado in between — Lime Garden is bigger, brasher, and a lot more pop.
The band enlisted an A-list producer for their second album (Charlie Andrew, who’s worked with artists ranging from Wolf Alice to David Gilmour) and it definitely sounds like it: Maybe Not Tonight is a wall-to-wall collage of noisy rock and electronic sheen. “Cross My Heart” piles…
Although it still contains signs of the project’s distinctive blend of earthy folk-rock, woozy psychedelic pop, and whimsical electronics and effects, something feels more than a little more mature and serious on Johnny Lynch’s sixth Pictish Trail album, Life Slime. It turns out that it was born of a period of emotional turmoil resulting in his most personal album yet. In another adjustment, Life Slime was produced by first-time collaborator Mike Lindsay (Tunng, LUMP) at Lindsay’s M.E.S.S. studio in Margate, England, in addition to including contributions from longtime collaborators like Rob Jones and Joe Cormack.
Inhabiting a warm, synthy, midtempo soft rock, the album’s resigned title track includes a reference to the ubiquitous K.C. Green comic of…
“I hate this country, and I hate this island – but sometimes the people make it all worthwhile,” sings Simon Tyrie on ‘Space un the Cab’, the wonky disco banger that kicks off The Itch’s debut album It’s the Hope That Kills You. The track cuts decadent club euphoria with a general feeling of unease while calling out Britain’s slowly eroding nightlife scene. Across the ten infectious songs that follow, The Itch – Tyrie and Georgia Hardy – push back against everyday rage, disillusionment and frustration with party-starting electro-punk tracks that demand human connection.
The community celebration has been there since the start. After years of making music together, Hardy and Tyrie formed The Itch after taking part in the annual Byrne’s Night gig, which…
After Black Midi called it quits in 2023, bassist/co-vocalist Cameron Picton eventually started making music on his own. Although he was drawn to a more spacious, acoustic sound than that of his former band, his approach was still dramatic and unpredictable in nature. Not quite sure if he wanted to be in another band, he ultimately did bring in collaborators for his debut album, among them members of experimental London group caroline, singer/songwriter/composer Kiran Leonard, and veteran percussionist Steve Noble. Featuring shifting, often trippy narratives (he cited King Crimson as an influence), he named the project and the album My New Band Believe. Without offering much in the way of a through line other than the concept of “dream logic,”…
On the first two Fantastic Cat records, the quartet of singer-songwriters (Anthony D’Amato, Brian Dunne, Don DiLego, and Mike Montali) brought their own styles successfully into a band setting. However, on their third album, the cheekily titled Cat Out of Hell, Fantastic Cat feels like a long-running, well-oiled, veteran outfit.
Things are more fluid as individual contributions have melded, crafting an overall, interlocking sound. The extremely well-produced album adds sonic touches like strings, harpsichord, and tambourines to spruce up the group’s solid base of indie/folk rock tunes, all delivered with pristine harmonies and evocative lyrics.
Opening exuberantly with “Donnie Takes the Bus”, Fantastic Cat drops into a cheery,…
A flicker of light was the namesake of Lia Pappas-Kemps‘s first EP, 2024’s Gleam, but the Toronto singer-songwriter’s full-length debut Winged proves that she’s more than just a flash in the pan. The idea of depicting a new indie rock-adjacent local artist often conjures one blurry-edged, vague cipher with a pretty generic sound profile. While Pappas-Kemps is adamantly a deviation from the norm, depending on where you start with her already-chameleonic œuvre, that may or may not be immediately apparent.
The second half of Winged opens a portal that makes it undeniable. On a twisted, knotty tree trunk of a song called “Wound Up and Coiling,” Pappas-Kemps kicks the project’s mouth agape as the titular tension becomes too much…