It’s taken Sealed records more than five years to put this release together but finally it’s here. The one and only Bikini Mutants. The Bikini Mutants were from Yeovil, Somerset and part of the All the Madmen world. In their short life as a band they recorded two demos at Monitor Studios, Milborne Port in Somerset in 1982.
Let’s Mutate collects these two demos on one LP, along with a 20 page booklet featuring photos, lyrics, reviews, interviews and much more. The band played mostly in Yeovil and the West Country along with the Mob and the Review, and even though they were part of the West Country anarcho scene, the sound was a mix of scratchy post punk and indie pop. Members of the band went on to be in My Bloody Valentine and the Chesterfields.
Category: indie-pop
The ousting of Bassvictim from Berghain feels like a Biblical prophecy: Of course these electroclash expats, who fucked around and crystallized a fried twee-pop resurgence, would be banished from the Garden of Eden. Just two years ago, Maria Manow and Ike Clateman were heirs apparent to “indie sleaze,” a catch-all whose constraints, musically and aesthetically, boiled down to “kinda Crystal Castles coded.” Here was a photogenic boy-girl duo with two wonderfully wubby albums, a vague air of disaffected cool, and a very active Instagram account. “I’m not joking/I’m being hella serious,” Manow had drawled on “Air on a G String,” their silly-sexy breakout hit. Even with the explicit clarification, the canon they seemed to be entering — sleaze first, sincerity second…
One of the clearest examples of an album that crafts a strange and beautiful world not quite like any other is Rocketship’s 1996 full-length debut A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness. Even upon arrival, this was an experience unto itself, and 30 years later, these eight songs of bittersweet bliss still feel new.
Rocketship spiked their deliciously melodic indiepop with buzzing organs, spacey interstitials and motorik repetition, aligning them with mid-90s peers like Stereolab and Unrest. “A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness” is an album of unrepentantly vulnerable melodies, unusual seventh chords, lingering ambient interludes, and soft sentiments released at a time when unfriendly, self-conscious punk rock was the order of the day…
Otracami, the project of Brooklyn-based songwriter and composer Camila Ortiz, releases her album Runoff, via Figure & Ground.
Across the eleven tracks of Runoff, Otracami layers intricate vocals, field recordings, and samples into full-band arrangements that feel overfull with life, mirroring the album’s central tension between containment and overflow. “I was trying out leaving for the first time—people and jobs and situations with family,” reflects Ortiz. “It was real trial and error—sometimes that really worked and felt liberating and other times I had to turn around and go back. It was a period of big experimentation.”
On Runoff, Otracami draws from both the landscapes of her life in New York and her childhood in Northern California, which…
Girl Scout tweak Scandi indie pop’s rich tradition to match the singularity of their stories. They do so by referencing the zenith of 90s jangle-pop and elements of the Cranberries’ cathartic output to engineer a scuzzy alt-rock coded exploration of ennui, parallel possibilities and existential longing amidst the flux of upbringing.
Since their inception six years ago, the Swedish trio have established a solid footing in alternative circles via a lauded debut EP, with Soccer Mommy producer Ali Chant on board, and a much-vaunted European tour with Canadian indie stalwarts Alvvays. Formed during their days as students of jazz at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music, lead vocalist and guitarist Emma Jansson alongside Per Lindberg, on drums, and…
Across numerous releases since they formed in the mid-2000s, London’s The Leaf Library have experimented with everything from a gentle fusion of indie pop and post-rock to experimental indie electronica, noise, and drone minimalism. With their fourth studio album, After the Rain, Strange Seeds, the group wanted to prioritize more-traditional, structured songwriting over sounds and atmosphere. Longtime fans will likely be happy to learn that the results are still notably textured and adventurous. To start, they combine distorted, slowcore-adjacent rock timbres, strings (by guests Iskra Strings), and lightly bouncy, sweet vocal harmonies on the deceptively tuneful “Colour Chant,” a song inspired by shifting weather. As the album title implies, the great…
Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats — the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, the 9 to 5 — into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them.
She trades in stories of glamorous disarray, all bruised egos and Irish exits and rambling thoughts. By Ives’ own estimation, she spent the three years after the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, crashing out: drinking too much, pushing people away, falling down, etc. Eventually, she ditched booze, made for Los Angeles, and learned to drive, soundtracking her rides with Peter Gabriel, Mitski, and her personal top-ranked song of all time, Kesha’s “Die Young.”
It tracks that Girlfriend, her resplendent and…
There should be no lingering doubt that Avalon Emerson has fully arrived, on a mesmering album that has to be heard to be believed.
It’s been a colourful journey for the Californian electronic pioneer so far, even on 2023’s debut album & The Charm the sheer scale of ideas radiating from the album were mesmerising, if that was Emerson in cocoon form then there is no doubt that Written into Changes is a blossoming, and a victory lap for an artist that has grown into a fully realised songwriter, which was never ever going to wobble on uncertainty.
Playful, emotional pop that captures the feeling of an artist in motion, The album is a memoiristic album and the product of five years of constant travel – including multinational…
Sydney’s Itchy and the Nits are back with their sophomore album, chronicling the joys of telling lies, stinky stinky men, and nudie beaches. For a taste of summer in the darkest of times, look only to Itchy and the Nits to toss you a swimsuit and make a splash.
Following their scrappy debut EP and two years touring across the US, EU, and Japan, the Nits have amplified the charm, crisped up production, and continued on their mission of spunky, fast punk akin to the Ramones meeting Courtney Bartnett at a beachfront concessions stand. Greetings from Itchy and the Nits is rife with hits and slam-danceable classics. Boasting only 22 minutes of runtime, the 12 track album is endlessly repeatable.
The Nits are full of fun, but there’s also…
All Are Welcome In: A Return to Maraqopa is a redux album by Damien Jurado, released on March 16, 2026. The record features reworked versions of songs originally from his “Maraqopa” trilogy — Maraqopa (2012), Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Sun (2014), and Visions of Us on the Land (2016) — a series of concept albums produced in collaboration with the late Richard Swift.
The project was co-produced and engineered by Lacey Brown at J&B Studios in Edmonds, WA. According to Jurado, the release fulfills a vision he and Swift had discussed years ago — revisiting and reshaping songs from the trilogy after its completion. Many of the tracks featured on this release were performed live during Jurado’s “All Are Welcome In” tour in the autumn of 2025.
Being a composer in a modern sense of the term has gone way past a singular artist sitting down (or standing up) next to their main composing instrument and music staff paper, writing down the notes. The creative process is, these days, enriched by so many other tools available to music creators that enable them to go beyond what was possible in previous centuries, decades, even days. At the same time, the composing process doesn’t limit itself to what is considered classical music as such, but moves into other musical genres, as far as the imagination of the author can take them.
Take the example we have here – Claire Dickson and her third album Balance. A Metropolis Ensemble commissioned composer, Dickson is working mainly as a vocalist and…
In the past couple of years, Spanish experimental label Rusia-IDK has released great avant pop for the chronically online: unsettling yet moving beat changes from Ralphie Choo, raucously tender-hearted production by Rusowsky, and some of the most gleefully deranged live visuals in recent memory. With slow songs from the heart and thrashing experiments that deconstruct and glitch flamenco, reggaeton, rap, and breakbeat, the collective has gained a following in Spain’s underground and even rubbed shoulders with its mainstream.
They were bound to drop the bola at some point. Enter MORI, rolling in from stage left. The Madrid-based artist’s doleful piano ballads and lo-fi torch songs were already some of…
One of the strengths of Hot Chip is the way they encourage individual band members to plough their own musical furrows. The approach has yielded six solo albums for Alexis Taylor, the singer free to explore musical directions in which his band have not yet travelled. For his latest long player, Taylor relocated to Paris – presumably in the spring – alighting at the studio of a good friend, Air’s Nicolas Godin.
While Alexis has an instantly recognisable voice, the music on Paris in the Spring paints a very different picture to the club-based yearnings and dancefloor celebrations of his band, which appear only intermittently. Now the layers are peeled away, the listener given an unexpectedly searching portrait of Taylor’s soul.
By the time they released Lotus Bridge in 2026, The Monochrome Set had been making records off and on for almost fifty years. Most bands in a similar situation are either nostalgia acts or have been reduced to making records that chase trends or come off as pale imitations of their best work. The group have avoided all these fates and since they reformed in the mid-2010’s, they’ve been making one excellent record after another that have all the spark and invention of their early work, plus an extra layer of confidence and wisdom. This album is no exception. It’s a thoughtfully written, perfectly produced, wonderfully played, and open-heartedly sung listen presided over by the evergreen voice of Bid. The songs revolve around recurring dreams the singer/songwriter had been…
When Chicago five-piece Brigitte Calls Me Baby released their debut album in 2024, they offered up an alluring mix of yearning new wave and heartbroken retro-rock made all the more evocative by lead singer Wes Leavins’ towering vocals, which split the difference between Elvis Presley (whom Leavins has portrayed on-stage) and Morrissey (who himself was influenced by Presley and “the U.K. Elvis,” Billy Fury).
On the follow-up, Irreversible, Leavins and band lean fully into the lush, pining sound of ’80s New Romantics while leaving Elvis behind but bringing along a strong Smiths sensibility. While the Morrissey comparisons are inevitable this time around, Brigitte Calls Me Baby put their own soaring, lovesick twist on influences…
Anjimile (ann-JIM-uh-lee) Chithambo has forged a distinctive musical path characterised by unflinching introspection and deep honesty. Emerging from Boston’s vibrant indie scene while studying at Northeastern University, Anjimile captivated audiences with earnest songwriting, delicate sonic textures, and performances that felt like prayer and celebration.
Critical acclaim quickly followed; 2020’s Giver Taker, hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the year’s best albums, positioned him as a compelling voice exploring enduring themes of spirituality, identity, and liberation. With The King (2023), Anjimile intensified his examination of Black and trans existence amid personal and societal turbulence, reaffirming his courageous…
Blending indie pop, rock, post-punk and elements of other genres, Halifax’s The Orielles have built a dedicated fanbase since releasing their debut LP Silver Dollar Moment in 2018. The eclectic trio now returns with their fifth studio album, another beguiling blend that is hard to categorise.
Opener ‘Three Halves’ encapsulates this melange with a swaggering opening that quietens down with Esmé Dee Hand-Halford’s vocals softly shining through. There are elements of shoegaze to it. There is a thunderous outro that makes it a fascinating track, with several pieces in one.
‘Shadow of You’ also packs plenty of oomph, Henry Carlyle Wade’s guitar licks jostling with Halford’s basslines and Sidonie B. Hand-Halford’s percussive, drumbeats providing fearsome…
The Vancouver-based musician Ora Cogan exists in liminal spaces, or, rather, her music does. It transcends anodyne signifiers — folk-gaze and psych rock — to reach an indeterminate realm, where her prayer-like songs float like mist. Ephemerality prolongs. Her songs are the stuff of dreams until they morph into a nightmare: the nymph-like Cogan will lure you to a river for ablutions before drowning you like Omie Wise, or something like that. Yet you’re happy to bear witness — in fact, ecstatic.
Yes, Cogan has a similar folksy gothic aesthetic to PJ Harvey‘s White Chalk era. You know, full of witchy incantations, where ghosts linger in the shadows. Spirits in the ether — all that normal stuff. Yet being a mystic will only…
Transmitter is the latest addition to the Cut Worms universe, but this is a very different artist from the one we’re used to. Led by singer/songwriter/musician Max Clarke and started as a solo home-recording project, Cut Worms was once a lo-fi outing with daring tendencies to stretch their limited recording equipment into universal moments of unifying rock.
…Produced by Jeff Tweedy at Wilco’s famous Loft Studio in Chicago, Clarke’s latest outing as Cut Worms is some of his most poignant work to date. The new, professional-level digs allowed the musician to put his lyrics and voice first, zeroing in on his range and current mindset to unlock new levels of honesty, almost as if Clarke is learning to trust the listener for the first time.
Last year, Tobias Jesso Jr. made an album with his former gardener. Now, Juliana Hatfield is sharing a surprise record she made with her contractor. It’s called Bets, and it arrives on the heels of December’s Lightning Might Strike.
…The beginning of the project is as fascinating as its music. While Hatfield was renovating her home, she found out that her contractor also loved music. This shared interest turned into a creative partnership and they created Bets. They spent several months working together, combining Hatfield’s unique style with new ideas from her collaborator.
Bets mixes Hatfield’s indie rock background with a variety of other styles, creating music that feels both familiar and new. The album…