Romance is a funny old game. One minute, you’ll be in the trenches of heartbreak, swearing off love forever. The next, you’re down bad for someone new and do a full 180 into living in a swoony movie in your head.
Suki Waterhouse’s third album, Loveland, captures some of the feelings of that latter experience, mining her relationships and infatuations past and present to build a world you’ll want to immerse yourself in whether you’re coupled up, on the hunt or convinced you’re destined to be alone.
“Picture this, it’s innocent / ‘Cause I haven’t even held your hand yet / Do you know that you’ve been coming up in my dreams?” she asks over the Strokes-y guitars of ‘Almost’, diving into a fantasy that plays out in her head alone.
Category: indie-pop
Aaron Lee Tasjan’s version of outsider-ism began as a 13-year-old, when his family moved from California to Ohio. It turned out to be the first of many times he’s used music to bridge a gap between folks who seemingly had little in common, and it’s one of the stories found on his latest album, Get Over It, Underdog. For this record, though, music nearly abandoned Tasjan, returning just when he needed it most.
That Ohio story, “Ballad of an East Canton Lowlife,” falls smack-dab in the middle of Get Over It, Underdog, but serves to reintroduce us to Tasjan a bit, even a half-dozen albums in, as, well, a bit of a teenage misfit – “Born a white boy/I don’t know why/I was raised up to never even try” – even as he knows, as he proves a moment later…
…features three remix bonus tracks.
The Charlatans are one of those bands with little following in the United States but a massive fanbase in the UK. The rare American who happens upon them is likely searching for artists associated with Oasis or Blur before digging into Inspiral Carpets, Manic Street Preachers, or Ocean Colour Scene. That’s how far we are removed from the Cheshire band, now boasting 14 albums, 22 top 40 singles, and three number one albums.
Despite our collective ignorance, the Charlatans have returned after an eight-year hiatus with a certain amount of fanfare. The band, which features Tim Burgess (vocals), Martin Blunt (bass), Mark Collins (guitar), Tony Rogers (keyboards), and Pete Salisbury (drums), entered the studio with…
The deluxe edition features 15 additional tracks: rare remixes, live versions and instrumentals.
On their sixth album, the increasingly prolific neo-psych outfit Portugal. The Man look to the past for inspiration on In the Mountain in the Cloud. The album represents a breakthrough for the band on a couple of levels, the most obvious of which is their signing to major-label Atlantic, which comes as a big step up after years of quietly working their way through the indie circuit. The other is the less tangible artistic breakthrough. With such a rigorous release schedule, Portugal. The Man has been a band that listeners have been able to watch hone their craft step by step, slowly tinkering and adjusting things and growing into a band that’s not only hit their stride, but is in full…
Melodi Ghazal’s debut full-length finds the Copenhagen-based artist tracing a path through cultural inheritance and sonic exploration. Raised by Iranian parents and shaped by everything from pre-revolutionary Persian pop to VH1 balladry, her sound was honed at the illustrious Rhythmic Music Conservatory – the same stable as left-field contemporaries like ML Buch and Astrid Sonne.
The opener ‘Heart on the Loose’ drifts in on cyclical grooves and devotional lyricism, Ghazal’s voice hovering over soft-focus electronics and darkening daf rhythms, while ‘Miracle’ is a swirl of delayed synths and sultry bass.
‘Fariba Forever’ sets spoken word against manipulated melodies, ‘Numb’ pairs shimmering guitar with a muted sense of release,…
If there’s one thing you can be sure of with The Last Dinner Party, it’s that they’re not short of confidence. After releasing a debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, that debuted at Number 1 and was nominated for the Mercury Prize, and playing a succession of gigs that successfully combined camp theatrics with magnetic stage presence, you wouldn’t be surprised to see the London five-piece put their feet up for a while.
Not a bit of it. The band’s second album, From the Pyre, follows just 18 months on from that planet-straddling success story and already sounds like an instant hit. It has all the elements that made Prelude to Ecstasy such a success, and seems to refine them. Abigail Morris’ voice swoops and soars magnificently, Emily Roberts launches…
Toward the end of “I’ll Let You Finish,” the rollicking opener of his second record Fire from the Hip, Finn Wolfhard does something unexpected. After affecting a nineties indie rocker drawl and doling out charmingly rambling lyrics, the twenty-three-year-old singer/actor finishes the song by singing Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 VMAs. It’s an odd moment, one that would come off as a pretentious cop-out in another’s hands. And in a way, it does have a quality of randomness for its own sake, but Wolfhard somehow makes it work. Part of that is due to how much crackling personality he suffuses into the song itself, but Wolfhard’s recontextualization of that soundbite offers a strangely compelling parallel to his own difficult…
Forty-two years into a career that has quietly defined the underbelly of American neo-psychedelia, Seattle’s The Green Pajamas return with When Fever Let Me Dream. Led by the ever-prolific singer-songwriter Jeff Kelly, the band delivers a record that feels like a lucid, late-night transmission from a bygone era-yet it remains completely timeless.
When Fever Let Me Dream captures the band at their most atmospheric. Heavily indebted to the experimental studio sorcery of the Beatles’ Revolver and the pastoral whimsy of early Pink Floyd, the album floats seamlessly between melodic baroque-pop and hazy, nocturnal rock. The brief opening instrumental “Intro: Pastyme With Good Companye” immediately sets…
Fabienne Delsol does modern garage psych as well as anyone; her handful of solo albums have been mysterious, magical delights full of drama and intrigue; it’s no wonder that one of her songs ended up on the soundtrack of Killing Eve. Any music coordinator looking for a song that combines the hooky pop of French ye-ye, the guitar and keys swirl of psychedelia, the stomp of Freakbeat, and the sweetness of the beat group era would do well to pick any one of her songs.
There are plenty of fine examples of Delsol at her best on her 2026 record Indigo Red. Co-produced by Ed Deegan and Delsol herself with a crack band of contributors (Thomas Gardner, Carwyn Eliis) on board, the record sounds typically good, coated in reverb and echo but still cracking…
The duo of multi-instrumentalists Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre, sundayclub started out in rural Canada as a way to process the emotions of growing into adulthood, having relationships that fade, and self-discovery. Framing their yearning, bittersweet songs in a shimmery, classic dream pop sound perfected by Carmichael’s gentle, airy vocals, they soon landed on Paper Bag Records (with help from the Weakerthans’ Stephen Carroll, who heard them and passed their music along to the label’s A&R) and based themselves in Winnipeg. Produced by Carmichael, St. Pierre, and Kris Ulrich (Boy Golden, Field Guide), the SUNDAYCLUB LP begins with the brief introductory track “Tune In,” which, while not fully orchestrated, establishes their dreamy, longing…
Parts & Labor were mainstays of the American noise-rock underground which flourished during the 2000s, and even if they never received the major critical acclaim or cult following of someone like Lightning Bolt or Black Dice, they toured constantly and released a sizeable discography of powerful, risk-taking records. Most significantly, they stood apart due to the way they combined freewheeling noise, triumphant melodies, and muscular drumming in equal measures. After making a few diversions such as a fully electronic EP and an attempt to make grindcore pop songs, they released their most accessible effort, Constant Future, before calling it a day around the band’s tenth anniversary in 2012. Dan Friel released solo electronic efforts which continued…
Before delivering their first album, South London-based Ebbb made waves with their live sets and a debut EP that merged seemingly divergent sounds such as rich, ’60s-inspired vocal harmonies, arty synth pop, and diverse, kinetic rhythms, many inspired by the underground club scene. Still evolving with their debut LP, Shallow Hits finds the trio — German producer/instrumentalist Lev Ceylan, Scottish drummer Scott McDonald, and English trained tenor Will Rowland — evoking the wistful, crystalline harmonies of the Beach Boys and the unpredictable electronic-organic textures and song structures of experimental pop groups like Animal Collective and Young Dreams alongside a wide range of mathy, pop, and U.K. jungle-informed rhythms.
The Temper Trap conjure an elemental love on their fourth studio album, the shimmeringly moody Sungazer. The follow-up to 2016’s Thick as Thieves, the album is the Australian band’s first LP of new material since going on hiatus in 2018. It also arrives on the heels of singer Dougy Mandagi’s own solo project, the Blood Moon EP, which found him recording in Berlin and exploring a more electronic sound. Also during his time away from the band, he deepened his Indonesian roots, settling in Bali with his family. All of this experience informs Sungazer which finds Mandagi and his bandmates reinvigorated, leaping with abandon into the soaring falsetto and guitar-based balladry that made 2009’s Conditions and their 2012 eponymous album so compelling.
…features new cuts ‘Emotionally Unavailable’ and ‘Medication’, as well as rarities ‘Dirty Looks’, ‘Sharpening Knives’ and ‘Overload’. The deluxe release is rounded out by a collection of demos and early mixes of tracks from the original album.
The story of Suede has never been one of steady linear progression, but even so, 2022’s Autofiction sent their needles zigzagging all over the charts, a tectonic reboot that shifted the direction of their already impressive comeback era.
Antidepressants plugs into similar post-punk energies – Killing Joke, The Chameleons, The Cure – but as the PiL-like title track’s untethered jolt and jeer shows, Suede’s emotional safety catches and musical circuit breakers are very much off.
Through a background chatter of mechanised…
Panda Bear is a team player. He’s been a part of Animal Collective since its inception, lending his distinctive vocals to indie anthems like “My Girls” and “Summertime Clothes.” He crossed over into the mainstream via Daft Punk’s hypnotic “Doin’ It Right,” on a journey that led to his first (and only) Gold-certified record to date. Essentially, the man born Noah Lennox is the secret ingredient that word got out about — and ever since, everyone’s been eating good.
For the last 15 years, Panda Bear has been steadily bonding with another prolific collaborator in Spaceman 3’s Peter Kember, a.k.a. Sonic Boom. That partnership eventually blossomed into 2022’s Reset: a kaleidoscopic, crystalline dismantling of vintage pop that served as…
Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman released Other People, Other Wedding Songs via Secretly Society. The album collects stripped-down acoustic versions of wedding songs originally written for David Levithan’s novel Songs for Other People’s Weddings, in which protagonist J composes wedding songs as a service to couples.
These 17 tracks were originally distributed exclusively via QR codes inside that book to enhance the reading experience. Due to high fan demand, Secretly Canadian officially compiled these tracks for streaming platforms and a special limited-edition vinyl release.
Several of the tracks appeared in fuller arrangements on Lekman’s 2024 album Songs for Other People’s Weddings; here they are…
