…includes a bonus disc of demos and two previously unreleased B-sides from the original sessions, “Comin’ To You” and “Harpsi Chords”.
The third solo album by K Ishibashi under his Kishi Bashi moniker, Sonderlust comes with a tweak to his sound, a footnote on the title, and some emotional baggage. The title is a play on the recently invented word sonder from the Web’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Essentially, it refers to the realization that any random stranger has a life experience as vivid as one’s own. As for the baggage, Ishibashi has admitted to suffering marital woes while working on the album, a fact that affected its tone and especially lyrics, which are often colored by uncertainty. It may also have altered his creative process, given…
Category: indie-pop
There’s an undertone of disappointment in Heavenly’s happy, peppy, tootling power pop, a sense of vulnerability and ache even in the bubbliest cuts. “Excuse Me,” an early single, is about as affirming and positive as garage pop can get, with bashing drums and ecstatic bursts of guitar strumming, but it centers around the wistful lyric “Excuse me, I thought you were someone else/they’ve been on my mind.”
This is the fifth album from the Oxford twee-pop mainstays, a band that formed out of the remnants of C86 outfit Talulah Gosh, around songwriter Amelia Fletcher, her brother Matthew on drums, Peter Momtchiloff, Cathy Rogers on keyboards and Rob Pursley on bass. Heavenly’s main run happened in the early to mid-’90s, the first…
The complete 19-track collection combining both installments of Yungblud’s album ‘Idols’, which adds 6 brand new songs and a re-imagined version of the GRAMMY® nominated single “Zombie” with The Smashing Pumpkins to the tracks released June 2025.
Since emerging in the late 2010s, the British yelper Yungblud — a.k.a. Doncaster, England-born Dominic Harrison — has become an anti-pop hero. His songs channeled the angst and agitation of youth into frenetic mini-anthems that musically reflected the on-shuffle mentality of the 21st century. Yungblud’s voice — a piercing yelp that exists somewhere between Gerard Way’s wail and Brian Molko’s sneer — slotted him in the alt-rock world, but his aspirations seemed…
On her sophomore album Speed Kills, Ally Evenson revels in the ecstasy, longing, and anger that comes at the end of a relationship. Following up her debut record, Blue Super Love less than two years later, the LA-based singer-songwriter has a lot to say about love and moving on.
Evenson is a multi-talented songwriter, vocalist, and guitar player, and is also credited as a producer on the record. Her songs feature distorted electric guitar riffs, sleek synth production, and even acoustic guitar on the pensive final track “Stoic”. She shows off her guitar skills on the track “Blame it on You”, which starts with an electric guitar riff based on the opening of Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy”. The whole record feels inspired by this spunky 90’s culture, and…
These days the term singer songwriter has grown in its scope from just a solo artist with an acoustic instrument and introspective lyrics to a solo artist that basically has a mind of their own and goes anywhere where their fancy, inspiration, and inventiveness take them.
You can add to the latter Delaney Bailey, who after millions of streams has readied her debut album Concave, an album where she seems to care very little about neat musical labels and genres, covering a vast ground between dream pop and everything else, keeping that introspective music and lyrics concept fully intact.
And she may be doing it all instinctively, but she seems to have a deep musical background that she has transformed into music of her…
Born in Argentina and raised in London, Malena Zavala earned critical plaudits for the DIY bedroom pop of her 2018 debut album Aliso. Her 2022 follow-up effort La Yarará found the singer-songwriter exploring her roots across a variety of Latin American styles.
This third album returns to the guitar pop of that first salvo but with a more mature, fleshed-out sound. While South America is still an ongoing inspiration in her work, here its influence is more thematic. Inspired by a road trip from Chile down to Patagonia in Argentina, the music has a softly melancholic tone.
The spare guitars and echoed vocals of ‘Only Thing That’s Right’ and ‘Lost in the Depths of the Andes’ are enlivened by the lusciousness…
Ten thousand years ago, a man died in what would become Somerset. His bones waited in a cave until 1903, when they were discovered and given a name: Cheddar Man. Now he’s the subject of a song by Voka Gentle, who use his story to contemplate what we’re doing to the places where people have lived for millennia. “Let’s say the sea levels rise and we lose north Somerset, which, by the way, is looking increasingly likely…” William J Stokes’s voice is dry, conversational, with the studied neutrality of a local news presenter. Beneath it, the music shuffles and twitches, glassy and off-kilter; post-punk refracted through Laurie Anderson’s deadpan intelligence.
The album circles power from multiple angles: a photoshoot, a Greek tragedy, a preacher…
A record that swaps love language for religious language every few bars should, in theory, settle on one or the other. Petal Rock Black never does, and its refusal to pick is what keeps it from curdling into wellness music or collapsing into a diary entry.
George Clinton starts the title track by reciting a strange devotional poem over silence, “storm-smeared picture,” “rust be the delirious scream,” “dreams a symphony we all soar on,” his voice old and enormous and arriving from no identifiable tradition, and by the time WILLOW enters, she brings a complaint that could have been left on a voicemail: “I don’t know why I have to Be just who you want me to.” Clinton is building a cathedral. She is trying to leave a room. The distance between those two impulses covers most of what this…
A lot can change during the fraught time between when a musician finishes recording an album and when it’s released, often months later, per a label’s schedule. For Mirah, everything changed. In the summer of 2018, two weeks before her sixth album, Understanding, came out, the indie rock songwriter lost her beloved father. Four months after that, she gave birth to a son. A year after that, she attempted to resume life as a touring musician, only for the pandemic to nix her plans and intensify her postpartum anxiety.
All this heavy stuff — death, birth, grief, joy, “the whole turn of the earth,” as she sings on “The Beginning of Time” — beats inside the impossibly tender heart of Dedication, Mirah’s first album in seven years, a lifetime of change.
…features five new bonus tracks.
Coming off an extended three-year hiatus, the Neighbourhood deliver a hushed yet hooky fifth album with 2025’s Ultrasound. The LP is the group’s first since 2020’s Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones and finds them moving away from that previous production’s glittery, conceptual sci-fi David Bowie intimations and back toward the shadowy alt-pop of their early years.
Notably, it finds them reunited with producer Justyn Pilbrow, who helmed 2013’s I Love You. and 2015’s Wiped Out!, as well as Jono Dorr, who contributed to the band’s 2014 mixtape #000000 & #FFFFFF. Consequently, many of the tracks have a soft, dreamy quality, recalling the late-night beach party melancholy of the group’s early…
Arriving two years after Women, which found the quasi-instrumental psych rock combo expanding their nostalgic, style-shifting sound with string arrangements and guest vocals, Pur Jus is so named because it gets back to basics.
Inspired by near constant touring, the album was entirely written, performed, recorded (live in the studio), and mixed by the Bergen, Norway-based trio, using only guitars (Øyvind Blomstrøm), bass (Chris Holm), drums and percussion (Kim Åge Furuhaug), keyboards (Blomstrøm and Holm), and the occasional vocals. The results may be less diverse and dramatic than their predecessors by comparison, but grooves and chill-out feels are still in plentiful supply.
The album kicks things off with a drum fill…
On Julia, his fifth studio album, acclaimed Icelandic folktronica musician Ásgeir steps outside of his comfort zone and eschews his father’s voice. The poetry of Einar Georg Einarsson and Júlíus Aðalsteinn Róbertsson, a friend, had provided the lyrics — sometimes via translators — of Ásgeir’s previous compositions. Now, at 33, he’s standing on his own.
It’s evident from tracks such as “Quiet Life” that Ásgeir can be a capable lyricist. “Stare into the water/ See myself swimming in the sky/ Every part of me comes to light,” it begins. It’s a song that could be about a romantic partner or a parent: “I’ve been tossed around by every wind/ Trying to fit into what you want me to be.” Far from lacking poetry, Ásgeir seems to have…
On November 1, 2024, The Cure released Songs of a Lost World and that same night, they performed the album in full at London’s Troxy for 3,000 fans, while more than a million others tuned in via a free global livestream.
That performance has now been transformed into The Show of a Lost World, a recut, remixed, and remastered concert film that presents all 31 songs from the night across a generous two hours and forty-seven minutes. Directed by Nick Wickham, with a new surround sound mix by Robert Smith, the film upgrades the original broadcast into a cinematic experience that does justice to both the intimacy of the venue and the scale of the band’s legacy.
Beyond the novelty of premiering their first…
The pearl of Aotearoa, Bic Runga, returns with her sixth album Red Sunset, an aesthetic blend of the familiar with a lively, blossoming charge.
In the decade since her last album, the largely covers project Close Your Eyes, and the 15 years since her last album of all original songs, Belle, Runga has expanded her indie-pop palette even further. The subtle electronics, old-school R&B, and French exotica first introduced on Belle are now joined by elements of gritty, lo-fi funk, nu-disco polish, and bedroom synth pop, adding up to a greater depth of sound that feels recognisably hers, yet slightly alien in an appealing way.
Returning to Paris – the city that birthed her stellar 2005 album Birds – inspired Runga and her partner Kody Nielson to start work on…
Life feels a bit of a grind at the moment. Every news headline seems to suggest the world’s going to hell in a handcart, and rain has become an almost constant fixture during the early weeks of 2026.
So, as an antidote to indie navel gazing, here comes Brighton quartet Congratulations with a debut album that feels like a big day-glo shot of adrenaline. The four-piece have spent the last couple of years building a name for themselves as a band with a live show defined by chaotic energy – it’s not unusual to leave a Congratulations live show after witnessing frenetic ‘running on the spot’ dancing performed by a group in matching jumpsuits.
So can the frazzled, sweaty atmospherics of a Congratulations gig be accurately recreated…
Like so many 20 year olds before him, Zion Battle found something transcendent in Joshua Tree National Park. Since age 16, Battle had been working towards becoming a musician, studying for a time at CalArts and New York’s The New School. Then, in 2024, he left behind his academic training to begin making music as Katzin, exploring a more intimate sound shaped by a healthy love for the bedroom dream pop of early Orchid Tapes releases and the fuzz of 1990s indie rock. He linked with friend and producer Max Morgen, and the duo temporarily decamped to California and set up a makeshift DIY studio near Joshua Tree to fine-tune Katzin’s debut.
The bright and sweet Buckaroo radiates sincerity. Battle’s biggest strength is his…
In a musical landscape where the ‘indie pop’ label frequently masks a lack of melodic ambition and a reliance on tired tropes and recycled aesthetics, The Would-be-goods remind us that the genre can and should be a vehicle for high art. Their latest offering, Tears Before Bedtime, arriving this February via Skep Wax Records, is more than just a collection of songs; it is a curated gallery of human experience, painted with the finest brushes of wit, melancholy, and cinematic flair.
Jessica Griffin, the visionary behind this long-running project, remains one of pop’s most literate and idiosyncratic voices. Nearly four decades after the cult success of ‘The Camera Loves Me’ (Él, 1988), she continues to operate in a league of her own, blending the refined elegance…
Although they dropped the Cascading Moms moniker from the release this time around, Hungry Animal returns the Luke Temple-led trio that he debuted on 2024’s Certain Limitations. Here, the rhythm section of bassist Doug Stuart (Brijean, Toro y Moi) and drummer Kosta Galanopoulos (PWNT) lock in, with basslines seeming to guide the track list. The only other musician involved in sessions was Josh Mease (Fruit Bats, Lucius), who plays guitar on two tracks.
From the get-go, the rhythm section’s nonstop grooves nimbly navigate tracks including the dubby opener, “Clean Leaving,” an examination of the futile quest for purity; the more angular, proto-punk-injected “Shake Me Awake”; and the more-cosmic rock of “Love Means Light…
…This expanded reissue adds 8 songs recorded at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, VA, a few months after the album sessions. These sessions provided playfully experimental B sides to the album’s singles, two cover songs (the New Order cover “Your Silent Face,” and a Beach Boys cover) for a single on Merge Records, and a compilation track.
The problem with Copacetic was the dingy production, so for Simpatico, Velocity Girl hooks up with the Smiths’ first LP producer John Porter. Flaw corrected. Perhaps too much? Some have expressed the opinion that Porter has neutered them somewhat, and indeed, the rawer edges have largely been relinquished, but so what? They sound great now, much tighter, more convincing, more together. Constant touring has…
According to Sam Bielanski, frontwoman of Toronto indie-pop duo PONY, the idea for Clearly Cursed came from her first visit to a psychic. During this encounter, the psychic read Bielanski’s tarot cards and stated that Bielanski’s boyfriend was cheating on her — which turned out to be true — and that, more crucially, Bielanski had a dark spirit attached to her soul.
For the low, low price of $1,500, the psychic promised to exorcise this demon. Bielanski, 21 years old at the time, couldn’t pony up the cash, and she left her psychic visit realizing she’d have to coexist with this curse for the rest of her life.
But if Bielanski is indeed marked by a maleficent spirit, you can’t tell on Clearly Cursed — not with how bubbly and spunky its tracks are.