Earlier this year, Cheekface “broke containment,” as the youths say. The Los Angeles trio had spent seven years self-releasing albums of quirked-up indie rock and amassing a following of “Cheek freaks,” loyal fans who revere their playful hooks and meme-poisoned humor. But in March, after revealing that they had rejected an opportunity to appear in an AT&T commercial due to the company’s contracts with ICE, Cheekface drew a surge of attention for their politics — which, like their lyrics, lean lefty and anti-corporate. Then a clip of their jittery deep cut “I Feel So Weird!” blew up and became a TikTok trend in the furries community, and suddenly this humble DIY band was the subject of “discourse” and “quote dunks” and Needle Drop videos and other…
Category: indie-pop
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, The Darling Buds made a trio of very fine albums that flirted with noise pop, dance rock, and trip hop while ultimately coming across like first-class guitar pop. Since their return in the late 2020s they’ve continued making fine music, first with the Evergreen EP in 2017, now on 2026’s Same Sun/Same Sky. The band are in fine form, sounding tight and energetic with guitars that alternately jangle and bite. Andrea Lewis Jarvis’ voice doesn’t sound like it has aged a day; she presides over a batch of peppy rockers and swooning ballads like she’s been doing it non-stop for decades. As nice as it is that everything sounds really good, what’s even better is that their songwriting is on par with what it was in their prime, and maybe even…
Presenting a local music scene to a wider audience can be an arduous task if it is a scene that has already made a name for itself.
Den Tapes (yes, just cassette tapes and Bandcamp) is one of those outlets that tries to go deeper into a better-known local scene that is Seattle, Washington, digging up a serious twee/jangle/lo-fi/bedroom pop gem that is Super Honey Teaspoon! by Soda Gumball.
If the name of the project might hark back to the days when bubble gum rock ruled, then Jealous Yellow (one Benjamin Rea), the name of the person behind the project, might be a bit left field too.
Yet, make no mistake, Jealous Yellow, who doubles as a music instructor, obviously knows every big or small sub-genre where pop and…
Pinning down what – or who – Lucia & The Best Boys are has, since their emergence in the late 2010s, been more difficult than perhaps it should. Emerging from a fertile synth-led Glasgow scene that gave us Walt Disco and The Ninth Wave – artists whose sonic and visual identities appeared fully-formed from the off – between name, line-up and sound changes, it hasn’t seemed to fully ‘click’ for the outfit. And, thankfully, at points on this debut, it does: opener ‘Butterflies’, ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘So Sweet I Could Die’ brim with the kind of bombast usually seen with shoulder pads and voluminous perms. When they amp up the ‘80s theatrics – think Bonnie Tyler after a few Snakebites and an accident with black eyeliner – the crystal-clear nature and range of…
Litvar is an alternative band formed in Willimantic, Connecticut in 2020. The band is made up of Rex Thurstan (vocal, lead guitar), Joe Lemieux (drums), Violet Falkowski (vocal, guitar), and John Blues McCarthy (vocal, bass). The band’s name is a compound word of ‘light’ and ‘variation’.
…Thurstan describes the band’s third studio album, Being Here, as “a bare, stripped-back folk record.” Yet, that might be stretching it a bit.
Of course, Thurstan might have in mind what counts as folk in these modern times, or he might have a broader meaning of the term bare, as most of the album is inspired by the loss of his father. What he also might have in mind is a prevailing languid tone of the songs here and sparse, or better said, sustained, but…
Simply put, the Trash Can Sinatras never let their fans down. Starting with 1990’s Cake they’ve released a string of excellent albums featuring their smartly structured, literary-minded songs played with a nimble touch, arranged like a souffle, and sung with the perfect blend of wit and soul by Francis Reader. As the years rolled by the pace slowed more than some might like, to the point where the appearance of 2026’s Ever the Optimist came as something of a brilliant surprise to those wondering where the band had been since the release of 2016’s Wild Pendulum. As one might hope, the record is made up of songs that touch on adult situations with the group’s usual deftness, sometimes coming across almost bitterly melancholic, other times warmly…
Perhaps you’re familiar with Star Moles, the ultra-prolific recording project from Philadelphia musician Emily Moales. Perhaps you’re also familiar with Rubber Band Gun, the similarly ultra-prolific project from regular Star Moles contributor Kevin Basko; Rubber Band Gun and Star Moles dropped the song “Frodoboy” a couple of months ago. Perhaps you would also like to know about Sam and Louise Sullivan, a sibling duo who make a ton of music with Moales and Basko and who have a new album Love & Devotion.
Sam and Louise Sullivan grew up around the US, and they started playing folk music together as kids. These days, they both live in Philadelphia, where Louise runs her own ceramics business and Sam works as a teacher.
Alex Cameron probably didn’t mean to release his album right after the trailer for Digger dropped, but it’s mighty good timing. Digger is a Tom Cruise venture and appears to be halfway between Tropic Thunder’s gonzo work and Christian Bale’s Oscar angling in Vice. Both Vice and Digger ogle like a carnival barker at the transformation of a usually chiseled Hollywood star getting fat, as if the gravitas and comedy simply spring from calories and discrepancy.
“I put on a ton of weight / For a role I didn’t get / Now I’m always late for set / Getting panned in the LA Times / Getting tanned on the internet,” Cameron snarls at the beginning of his new album, Late to Set. Pumped up and steely “Eye of the Tiger” guitars thud behind him, a warbly…
Welcomer’s Miles Sutton observes the world from a remove, delivering even intimate scenes from an ironic remove. Most of the time, he’s only half singing, through the verse injecting conversational lyrics with the barest tinge of melody.
Yet in the chorus, Sutton reveals a fascination with pop: the arrangements bristle with hooks and billow with strings, multi-voiced singing and rock instruments.
This is Sutton’s first full-length album as Welcomer, following a self-titled EP in 2022. The Wellington, New Zealand artist enlisted producer and engineer Jesse Austin-Stewart for this one, working with him to develop layered but buoyant orchestrations for these songs, which glisten and shimmer with trebly picking, swoops of…
Making guitar pop/rock (of any kind) work more often than not depends on the synergy of musicians involved, rather than the guitar expertise, and sometimes even the songwriting quality. That synergy seems to be the driving force for the guitar pop Manchester-to-London duo atmos bloom (Tilda Gratton and Curtis Paterson) create on their second album Everythingness.
The duo, who also became life partners, create the kind of guitar pop where that of every kind from above parentheses comes into play – it can be dream pop, it can be twee pop, it could be jangle pop or whatnot – the thing is Gratton and Paterson practically cover it all here. And they wrap it in some very good to excellent songwriting and equal quality harmonies, with high quality…
Josh da Costa imagined his solo debut album New Wave Graveyard as a “greatest hits from a parallel universe, classic songs from an alternate reality.” He says, “Instead of trying to home in on one specific vibe or sound and capturing it over the course of, say, a month of my life, I chose to sort of chameleon my way through my own taste and record collection and try out different approaches to songwriting – as if I were more than just one artist.”
Anyone who’s witnessed Josh DJ around LA or checked out his Confusing Mix radio show on NTS will be familiar with his curious blends of music – Brussels micro-labels, Flying Nun favorites, and leftfield post-punk – and how they all somehow make sense together.
…features twelve new songs widely available for the first time: stripped-back versions of songs written before the recording of ‘I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!’ had finished, live favourites heard on McRae’s recent headline tours and festivals appearances, a new version of “Mother Wound” featuring Maisie Peters as well as new tracks elsewhere featuring contributions from Brandi Carlile and Brittney Spencer.
Ever since the release of her stand-out ‘Who Hurt You?’ EP back in 2021, Jensen McRae has been marked out as a special songwriter. Even in that early foray, the Californian managed to effortlessly distil an array of powerful emotions into its six tracks in a way that felt, in moments, truly heartbreaking. So it feels more than…
The solo project of Kelly Truong, a producer/songwriter from Southern California, kelz joined the roster of Bayonet Records early on in her music career, with the label issuing her self-recorded debut album, 5 AM and I Can’t Sleep, in 2022. It established a gentle and airy yet dance-oriented sound that she created by combining shimmery synths with fingerpicked guitar, high, gossamer vocals, and simple looped beats.
While the follow-up was four years in the making, it can be described the same way with the caveat that it offers a softer and slightly more intricate version of kelz’s distinctive sound, a sound that never quite moves out of the bedroom headphones and into the club. Its cover design features a blurred photo of Truong.
Sometimes a solo project and sometimes a band, Jilian Medford’s IAN SWEET has switched up its sound from album to album, sometimes favoring bright guitar pop, sometimes shimmery, synth-aided noise pop, and other times applying heavier guitar tones and dissonance to the songwriter’s personal, melodic songs. With IAN SWEET’s fifth album, Shiverstruck, she delivers her most direct-sounding material yet, which is to say that she sticks with mostly full-band arrangements of amplified indie and synthy pop, but makes room for balladry, the occasional appearance of instruments like strings and piano, and a more vulnerable sensibility. The occasion is a breakup album that also carries the weight of a relocation from N.Y.C. to her hometown of L.A. and…
The newest offering from pianist/composer Marco Benevento, Glera, finds the artist expanding his sonic palette, working with different vocalists to score the retro Italian movies playing in his head.
Benevento was heavily inspired by Italian film scores and melody for this album, which uses cinematic lines on every track, providing emotion and depth to the mostly instrumental tunes. Benevento plays more of a role as composer/leader here; a jamband veteran, Marco lets the songwriting be the focus throughout Glera as the tunes run short, set the visual scene, and move on. Opening with the excellent “Frizzante”, the joyful instrumental bounces along with a sunshiny feeling and could have been a theme song to a 70’s television show with its bright,…
All the Beauty is Pete Yorn’s new album, arriving via Shelly Records. The 11-song release marks his third full-length collaboration with Jackson Phillips of Day Wave, continuing a creative partnership that has shaped Yorn’s recent run of records.
Built around Yorn’s signature mix of alternative rock and melodic indie songwriting, the album expands on the breezy, guitar-driven sound the pair established on Caretakers and Hawaii. The title track, released ahead of the album, sets the tone with a focus on staying present and recognizing moments of beauty in everyday life.
The record was produced by Jackson Phillips and Pete Yorn, with Phillips also handling engineering and mixing. Across its 11 tracks, All the Beauty balances understated arrangements…