…newly remastered and features six bonus tracks that were previously unreleased or hard to find.
The members of Vermont’s Guppyboy went on to form Ladybug Transistor and the Essex Green. With their 1997 debut on Sudden Shame Records, they experimented with their poppy variety of folk/country indie pop. The disc starts off with the slow and reflective “Washington Square,” which is followed by “Trouble,” which includes a healthy dose of banjo and could easily be mistaken for Wilco. “Avalon Ballroom” is a duet that has an awkward pause in the middle. Once the song finds its pace again, it’s an enjoyable and relaxed collaboration. “Affection” includes bittersweet and distant vocals, creating a haunting feeling throughout the track.
Category: indie-pop
Some artists turn up on the music scene as rough diamonds, so to say, with talent showing, but with some edges that need to be finely honed through time to make their music sound great and probability of that happening always somewhere in the middle.
On the other hand, there are artists that appear suddenly as a full-fledged, well, artists with their talent up to the fore and their music presenting itself as fully rounded pieces of art. You can count Eliza Noxon and her debut album Good Monsters with Bad Habits in the latter group for sure.
With only two sole singles officially released, Noxon’s music sounds fully complete, with all the elements in their rightful place and no hiccups. Whether it is just pure talent or…
“Feels like all I ever do is try / And try again,” Kerrin Connolly sings on “Try”, the first track on her latest album, Simpleton. While the song seems like a monument to self-doubt, the album by the Boston-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist shows an artist overflowing with chops and dedication. While there are plenty of similarities between Simpleton and previous albums like Almost (2020) and Transitions (2024), Connolly has stepped up her game on her latest record, with smart, sophisticated arrangements and an arsenal of pop songs that are a quantum leap from those already-great earlier works.
Connolly describes Simpleton as “a concept album which explores the themes of a hero’s journey – some classic, others modern and…
Not everything is Twin Peaks, but Rockie does kinda feel like the album Donna Hayward would make if she could pursue her musical ambitions: She’d be influenced by Julee Cruise, for sure, and probably Chromatics, and Sky Ferreira, and what could be more Badalamentian than the cloudburst of synth that opens “On Our Knees”? Maybe you feel like you’ve seen this show before, but it’s actually the spooky and charming debut from New York songwriter Cate Osborne, aka Rockie Rode, an unassuming indie-pop record with the aura of a vintage cult classic.
In Rockie’s New York, there is no traffic, every jukebox is stocked with Sharon Van Etten records, and the road to heaven begins with a U-turn to Queens. Osborne produces on…
Now 20 years since the start of the project, The Winter Sounds has an international sensibility and a distinct global vision. Formed by Patrick Keenan in Athens, GA, the group now includes a few European members and has Prague as its home base. The group hasn’t necessarily adopted a world music sound, but instead maintains its roots in indie pop and new wave. Despite this, the band has articulated a global outlook, drawing specifically on the ideas of the solarpunk literary movement, with a focus on grassroots movement toward a sustainable future. With The Winter Sounds’ seventh album, Jupiter, the band puts forth a positive and encouraging message supported by bright and optimistic sounds.
With single “Kaleidoscope,” the album opens…
Hater wrings a lot of intensity and drama out of a standard guitar-bass-drums-vocals lineup. Their 2022 album Sincere was a mini-masterpiece of tightly coiled emotions, menacingly jangled guitars, thundering bass, precisely thumped drums, and sparsely wrought production presided over by the taut to the point of snapping in half vocals of Caroline Landahl. It was a Swedish cousin of the Wedding Present’s Seamonsters and marked the group’s giant leap into the upper echelon of indie rock. Fast forward a couple of years and Mosquito appears. It’s another gut punch of an album, full of bitterness, bleak desperation, and gnarled emotions, this time delivered with a softer, less intense touch.
The band dial back the violence just a bit on…
When Stockholm-based musician Kendra Egerbladh started sharing her music under the handle waterbaby in the early to mid-2020s, she was noted for a sophisticated alt-pop that combined light touches of jazz, hip-hop, downtempo, and atmospheric bedroom pop on songs with highly personal lyrics.
Her full-length and Sub Pop label debut, Memory Be a Blade, reveals a surprising evolution in sound that retains the influence of jazz and broader alternative inspirations while relying less on gloss and aura and more heavily on acoustic instruments like strings. The result is something physically closer, more delicate, and more diaristic while at the same time more intricate. The album was produced by Marcus White, her main…
The newest offering from the Fremantle, Australia-based GUM is a swirling collection of psych-pop as Jay Watson (Pond, Tame Impala) lets layers of synths and effect-laden guitars wash over the listener throughout Blue Gum Way.
Watson’s last offering as GUM found him partnering with Amborse-Smith Kenny (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Murlocs) for the more swaggering, glam-laden Ill Times. On Blue Gum Way, Watson has reigned in a bit of those funky dance-laden efforts in favor of more restrained, nuanced tunes. However, the first single, “Celluloid,” is the closest to that Ill Times sound as the pulsing tension builds winningly before cracking open and dripping out a warbling, effect-laden guitar solo that cooks.
Cancelled gigs, avoidant record labels, crackpot outbursts… for some time, things have been ‘complicated’ in the world of Morrissey. Yet if neurosis, despair and paranoia remain his materials, here he uses them well.
In as impressive voice as he’s ever been, with a polished rock/ funk-lite/ continental trip-hop production, it revisits multiple past phases: homesick, ‘The Monsters of Pig Alley’ reprises the Anglo-coshboy ’90s; the booze-sodden, priapic ‘Boulevard’ recalls noughties European visions; his more recent American sheen emerges quizzically from the Parisien cemetery-stalking title song.
Best is the stark ‘Many Icebergs Ago’, a soliloquy of East End pubs, suggestive “stirrings below” and the long dark corridor of his life as it…
“I wanna live on the wings of desire,” are the first words Hemi Hemingway sings on his new album, Wings of Desire. There’s a reference here, of course, to the 1987 Wim Wenders classic about an angel who gives up his wings so as to experience human love, the aesthetics of which all make sense within Hemingway’s universe: the grimy yet romantic pulse of 1980s Berlin, the way its detached black-and-white gives way to full colour, its post-punk soundtrack. But more than that, this opening line is a statement of intent which fuels the entire album. Grappling with the end of a long-term relationship and a relocation from London to New Zealand, Hemingway’s songwriting began to explore the possibilities of a new, uncertain future.
“A friend of mine described it as…
On their third album, Amaro, Bibi Club invites us to brave the dark beasts that shadow us beneath the surface, and to devote ourselves to the healing power of a fierce will to live. It explores the liminal spectrum between the here and beyond, pointing to love, nature, and community as the unifying purpose. The songs draw a map of a world of its own, following the trajectory traced by the Bibis in recent years.
Now out of the living room, we dance in a mental space overloaded with grief and fear in their rawest forms. Following the death of two loved ones in the last year, the mantra “I want to love, I want to live” resonates intensely in each melody; if the heart is a place that never dies, we must reach it as quickly as possible.
Brooklyn-based songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Alex Toth charts the wild permutations of emotion, both as one half of the indie art-pop duo Rubblebucket and across his solo work under the Tōth moniker. His strongest work turns compassionately toward the unsettled self while balancing a pop sensibility that is both danceable and honest.
Across his Tōth releases — Practice Magic and Seek Professional Help When Necessary (2019) and You and Me and Everything (2021) — Toth continues polishing this mode of musical catharsis, which he has also explored within Rubblebucket’s more kinetic, outward-facing framework. On his latest full-length, And the Voice Said, this instinct fully coheres. Here, it lingers longer,…
Slipping into a ghostly voice on the opening tune, Ritt Momney takes the audience into a country unbalanced by politics and unfocused in theme. These dreamlike, picaresque tunes take many different forms; a collage equal parts inventive and heroic. Jangly garage pop number “Lightshow” exhibits a singer beneath a torrent of swirling instruments: angular, opaque and eerie.
Ritt Momney (née Jack Rutter), on his third record, fearlessly tackles the ennui that envelops his generation. The 21st century has been a cycle of war, chaos and pandemic; that turmoil forms the skeleton of Base. Occasionally oppressive, the record holds a bittersweet undercurrent that should be readily identified by all who listen carefully. Organ-drenched ballad “Body”…
Every now and then a record comes around that just knocks you off your feet on the first listen. Floors you, insists to be played again, rinse and repeat. Carnival is one of those records. An album that demands one’s full attention for its entire duration. Which is testament to the tenacity and talents of its creators, Vona Vella.
The British band is essentially the brainchild of songwriting duo Izzy Davis and Dan Cunningham, who initially started the project from their living room during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Originally from Loughborough, they finally settled in Nottingham via London. The (then) duo put out an EP in 2022 (Go Outside Forever) followed by a self-titled album the next year having been discovered then signed by…
In TV they talk of the “anthology series”: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits – Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes – as “anthology groups”: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song.
Gorillaz are, of course, the anthology group ne plus ultra. Just two threads hold the project together. One is the punky, cartoonish artwork of Jamie Hewlett; the other is the anything-goes sonic adventurism of Damon Albarn…
“Half of my whole life is gone,” Mike Hadreas sighed on the opening of Perfume Genius’ 5th album, the high-water mark Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. Though that may sound like an expression of regret, Hadreas sang it with a kind of guarded optimism — opening a door into a record that gleefully documented life’s contradictions through odes to connections to the self and others.
On Glory, Perfume Genius’ latest, Haderas is once again mulling the grand arc of his existence. He ponders “my entire life…” on “No Front Teeth” before pausing. Then, he confesses: “It’s fine.” On the nervy, agoraphobic “It’s a Mirror,” he admits, “My whole life is/Open just outside the door.” He’s isolated, stuck inside his own agonizing thought patterns, and he knows something…
Following a pair of albums that found Toronto’s cootie catcher developing and corralling a charmingly impulsive indie sound that draws on garage pop, lo-fi slacker rock, new wave, jangle pop, and more, Something We All Got marks the band’s Carpark Records and proper studio debut, and it’s their most accessible set of songs yet. Having said that, the group’s whimsical practice of injecting far-flung timbres and effects into their songs, as well as a certain flat-tire wobble in their performance style are both joyously still in play. The generous 14-song track list begins with “Loiter for the love of it,” which sets the stage with claves, woodblocks, and harmony vocals from two of the quartet’s three rotating singers (Nolan Jakupovski, Anita Fowl, and Sophia Chavez)…
When Voxtrot reunited in 2022, it didn’t feel like a nostalgia grab. The Texas indie band, which first gained traction in the mid-2000s with a pair of self-released EPs and a strong debut album,came back with renewed purpose. Dreamers in Exile is their first full-length in nearly twenty years, and instead of trying to recreate their early jangle pop sound, it shows what happens when a band reunites with more experience and a clearer perspective. Recorded at bassist Jason Chronis’ Haunted Air Studio in Lockhart and mixed by Dean Reid, the album is catchy and poignant.
Opener “Another Fire” lays out the record’s approach right away. The guitars still jangle, but there’s more weight behind the lyrics. Ramesh Srivastava reflects on identity, history,…
British singer/songwriter Bill Pritchard has been on a path just outside of the limelight since he began releasing solo albums in the late ‘80s. Occupying the time-honored role of “your favorite musician’s favorite musician,” Pritchard’s thoughtful, storytelling tunes have been championed by other artists, and placed by critics alongside the introspective and clever styles of Lloyd Cole, Robyn Hitchcock, and the like. Pritchard’s 1991 album Jolie was a landmark for him, as its pop-friendly arrangements and heightened production approach from the Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie made it one of his most well-received records. Though Pritchard never strayed completely from a pop sound, he’s also experimented with different sides of his songwriting; exploring somber piano balladry…
Lala Lala‘s Lillie West has come a long way from the DIY grunge-inflected debut Sleepyhead to her absolutely standout fourth offering, Heaven 2. Its club-ready, saxophone-led opener ‘Car Anymore’ evokes Destroyer alongside ‘Trans-Europe Express’, as if it’s carrying her away from the past on a high-speed train.
This metamorphosis began right at the end of her breakthrough sophomore album The Lamb back in 2018, on the closing track ‘See You at Home’, which sealed West’s personal shift. “So we’re working with water / I promise I’ll drink it ’cause it’s all I’m allowed to”, she sang under Sen Morimoto‘s tender saxophone, making one of many promises to stay sober after giving up drinking. As we can see now, it worked, and…