Twelve years have passed since we heard from Howling Bells – a lifetime in pop music, let alone in the world. The band, having toured themselves into the ground, took a self-enforced break after the release of Heartstrings in 2014, and this marks their first music together since that decision. Singer Juanita Stein has been busy in the interim, releasing four well-received solo albums, and the reunion with brother Joel (guitar) and fellow founding member Glenn Moule (drums) appears to have been an easy one.
Life has intervened, of course, and the recent death of Juanita’s father has been a key event, along with her return to Melbourne. These things come together on the emotive heart of Strange Life, Melbourne being an honest and…
Category: indie-pop
Bug Teeth’s debut full-length arrives softly, building and scrutinising loss down to its fine veins, even as it gazes upward to the skies.
With a title drawn from Robert Hooke’s 17th-century scientific text magnifying the minutiae of living forms, Micrographia zeroes in on the subtleties of grief, familial memory and the burden of loving someone who is gone.
At the heart of the album is the rupture of PJ Johnson’s life when their mother died suddenly in 2021 which left them unmoored and desperate to make sense of the absence. “Tapeworm” questions if her mother would prefer no children if she were to live her life over, “With time again would you give it up / A sacrifice / Would you give me up?” It’s a crippling place to begin.
Hard-won sobriety has its advantages, especially when it’s practiced as a couple. For LAPêCHE’s Dave and Krista Holly Diem, clearing their heads has equated to clearing the creative decks, allowing them to explore new sonic vistas with a renewed clarity and focus.
The subversively melodic Autotelic (Tiny Engines) overhauls their rugged Brooklyn DIY aesthetic with lethally precise rhythms and power chords, airtight excursions into ramped-up shoegaze and synth-washed art rock, and shimmery shades of female-fronted college rock. This time, they have ample help from producer Alex Newport (At the Drive-In, Mars Volta), tracking the album in Joshua Tree, California, with guitarists Drew DeMaio and new drummer Colin Brooks (Samiam).
Sometimes a record just lands at exactly the right time. “I think too much, I’m all out of f****s, the world’s on fire, I’m just getting drunk,” sings Ellur on the opening track of her debut album At Home in My Mind.
Later, “God help me now” is the eponymous refrain. Whether it’s a cry for help, a shout of despair or a statement of acceptance is up for debate, but it’s very well tuned with the zeitgeist. This is the sound of an artist truly finding her feet in the world, and echoing that world back to us.
With the first song, the album begins to reveal itself with a careful, hazy charm. A few bars of sonorous synths and muffled bass, then Ellur’s voice remaining in a low register and warmly inflecting her Yorkshire roots. A sudden…
The Go! Team celebrated 20 years of their debut album Thunder, Lightning, Strike with a sold out Roundhouse show in February 2024. Capturing a band still at the height of their powers, this limited edition contains all the kaleidoscopic chaos and energy that make The Go! Team live such a unique experience.
Kicking off the performance with “Panther Dash,” an instrumental track from Thunder, Lightning, Strike, The Go! Team showcased a blend of influences ranging from indie, funk, hip-hop, folk, and mysticism. The track’s glorious trumpets elevated it to a status reminiscent of Beck’s “Sexx Laws.” Following this opener was the iconic “Ladyflash,” the song that introduced the world to The Go! Team. Reflecting on the setlist, one couldn’t…
Since debuting in 2022, Dina Ögon have maintained a remarkable consistency, releasing a trio of smart, tightly crafted pop albums infused with Tropicalia, soul, and indie pop with a slightly retro feel. What’s more, they’ve done so on a schedule reminiscent of the ’60s, delivering a new LP annually through 2024.
That Människobarn, their fourth outing, is a double album is likely the only reason for their absence in 2025, and it’s worth the wait. Over 13 tracks, the Swedish quartet hones their signature mix, pairing intricate, sometimes cerebral melodies and grooves with a warm hi-fi sheen that recalls the heyday of ’70s studio craft. Highlight “Där huden är tunnast” is a perfect distillation of this, with its propulsive soft rock feel and…
Railcard is the meeting of some great musical minds who forged a union when they realized they were all born a few days within each other. The perpetrators in question are bassist Peter Momtchiloff, drummer and vocalist Ian Button, and guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist, Rachel Love. Momtchiloff is well known as the guitarist in Talulah Gosh and Heavenly, Button fronts Papernut Cambridge and drums for a large number of bands; it’s nice that these two are working together. What makes the band something of an even is the continuing return of Love, who was one third of ’80s indie pop legends Dolly Mixture. She’d been making records under her own name for a few years — very good ones — before teaming up with these other legendary figures in Railcard.
Slowly coming into view over the past two years through a succession of intriguingly diverse singles that stylistically ranged from doo-wop to ’70s troubadour balladeering, Tyler Ballgame gradually revealed himself, through both his songs and videos, to be a magnetic presence with an octave-vaulting voice.
His backstory proves to be equally compelling and unusual, involving stasis, depression and subsequent epiphany. During the pandemic, close to hitting 30, Tyler Perry was stuck living in his mother’s basement in New England, his early musical promise having led him to Berklee College of Music and then to flunk his course due to marijuana indulgence and poor attendance. After a period of singing in covers bands…
The fact that the London-based singer-songwriter Alice Costelloe, the great-great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, is, on her debut album Move On with the Year, probing into her unconscious to conjure up memories of her estranged father might seem too on the nose or a send-up.
Don’t worry, it isn’t either. Instead, it’s a gallant portrayal of a child of a parent battling substance abuse — in other words, it’s an indie pop record with a subject matter barely acknowledged, let alone expressed with such finesse and stoicism. Yet, despite the heaviness of its themes, you could be floating.
The post-war English poet Philip Larkin wrote, in his customary sardonic tone, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean…
A year on from Puma Blue’s low-key releases ‘antichamber’ and ‘extchamber’, and almost three from previous full-band record Holy Waters, Croak Dream comes with studio-based lore: that he – aka multihyphenate Jacob Allen – and production collaborator Sam Petts-Davies introduced parts of songs to the full band to work with in the room. Not a unique scenario, of course, but it just might be in this switch-up of Jacob’s working methods that the most interesting parts of his latest full-length lie.
For while his often melancholy, occasionally pretty, singing voice excels in projecting an inward-looking ennui (see ‘Heaven Above, Hell Below’ in particular for the OG jazz vibes, his use of vibrato and tone sitting in a cross-section…
“Femcels! Femcels! Femcels!” Rowan Miles and Gabriella Turton cry over speedy video-game bleeps, sounding like they’ve just won the lottery. “You are listening to The Femcels, we don’t have sex ever!” In this deranged parody of the life of two sexless young Brits, having greasy hair and scuzzy teeth sounds like so much fun. I Have to Get Hotter is an audio cartoon — with charmingly disheveled, pixelated production and doofy spoken-word passages about feeling like the “indiest girl at school.” In “You’re Gay and You’re in Love With Me (Please Let Me Touch Your Boobs),” only the second-longest song title, the girls reminisce on an afternoon at a Counter-Strike tournament, with its fetid odor of “incels and hotdogs.” “Rowan, if you want a girl to like you, you just…
Caitlin & Brent don’t initially sound like a natural pairing. Singer-songwriter Caitlin Sherman released her debut, sure-to-be-breakthrough album Death to the Damsel in early 2020, just in time for the world to shut down and her career to go sideways. A dark, artsy record between pop and Americana, the album wasn’t fit for its time and didn’t get the attention it warranted.
Brent Amaker has been playing with his band, the Rodeo, for 20 years. He sings with a deep baritone, and it’s hard to tell just how much of the act is tongue-in-cheek. The band plays strong country & western music (heavy on the western), but the whole project has the feel of performance art. Amaker’s greatest strength might lie in merging his authentic country music with…
Kiss Big is an album about the end of a long-term relationship (classic, really) and the disorienting aftermath of losing the person you built a life around. It explores feeling untethered from them, yourself, who you thought you were and the world. As well as how, with time, everything rearranges and restarts. The cyclical nature of love and endings. The way we keep beginning again, regardless of how we say we won’t.
Ailbhe Reddy is a Dublin-born songwriter whose music captures the quiet intensity of life’s in-between moments. Her third album Kiss Big is a breakup record – but not in the traditional sense. It explores what happens after the fallout: the numbness, the confusion, the brief flashes of clarity. How identity slips, rearranges…
Lia Braswell’s Rising is forceful and expressive. Each song sounds an individual statement without there being any real sonic outliers (or weak points, for that matter) in the bunch. This makes for an intense listen, but a rich and engaging one too. The musical backbone is a relentless dance rock, mixing the thundering beats and assertive electronics of Pet Shop Boys or the Eurythmics with the breakneck, organic rush of Florence + The Machine and the complex, artful freedom of Wye Oak.
“Out of Sight” belongs to the 1980s, with a thudding, dead-eyed beat, glancing, urgent bleeps, and big burns of synthesizer that curl into a spacious instrumental bridge. “One Too Many” is another for the Less Than Zero crowd with some Duran Duran menace programmed…
Ben Cook, the pilot behind the controls for Young Guv, now known as GUV, has never shied away from trying his hand at a musical style. Previous works found him digging into new wave, country rock, glam, chillwave, and most impressively power pop. No matter the style his unerring way with a melody, his note-prefect production skills, and overall way with a song has mean that every record he’s made has been well worth hearing, and even sometimes bordering on brilliant.
For 2026’s Warmer Than Gold Cook swerves into the sound of the U.K. guitar rock scene of the first half of the 1990s. Taking inspiration from the Stone Roses — most notably “Fool’s Gold” — along with My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, and other paragons of baggy, shoegaze,…
…Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime is Beck’s first compilation since 2000’s B-sides set Stray Cat Blues and features two previously unreleased recordings – solo acoustic covers of Hank Willams’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and Daniel Johnston’s ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’.
The rest of the album is made up of covers, with the exception of a Beck original, the swoonsome ‘Ramona’ (from the soundtrack of Edgar Wright’s 2010 film Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). The title track – his take on The Korgis’ 1980 hit – was first released on the soundtrack of the 2004 Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has gone on to become among Beck’s most popular songs. The cover of Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ originally featured…
Yumi Zouma are breaking up with dream pop. After a decade together, the New Zealand four-piece have honed an airy, lush, lightly melancholic sound – but now they want change. “More extreme everything, more boldness,” guitarist Charlie Ryder has said of fifth record No Love Lost to Kindness, written during the band’s “most friction-filled creative period” to date. While it’s true that their latest singles are faster, louder and more distorted, these bright, pretty tracks will rattle only their longest-serving fans.
‘Bashville on the Sugar’ locks eyes with an ex on the subway and rushes with Olivia Campion’s breathless drumming, while ‘Blister’ flips the band’s knack for whistleable melodies into pogoing, enjoyably predictable pop punk…
The ’90s revival is in full swing, and it’s in no small part thanks to Oasis. The Gallaghers’ long awaited reunion last summer was a huge success, and it was notable that their songs seemed to appeal across the generations. It was a regular sight at those gigs to see children born long after the group’s initial split, singing along word-perfect with their parents.
The gigs also served to introduce this new generation to Cast, who acted as support on the UK and Ireland leg of the Oasis tour. For those of us who remember the tail-end of Britpop, it’s curious to see John Power’s band undergoing a revival; while they had some decent songs such as ‘Fine Time’ and ‘Walkaway’, they never really seemed to seize the public imagination as…
British indie pop musician Lande Hekt dug deep into personal experiences for her first two efforts — 2021’s Going to Hell and 2022’s House Without a View — singing about childhood trauma, sobriety, and exploring her queer identity.
Working alongside producer Matthew Simms (Wire, It Hugs Back), she continues that mix of confessional songwriting and ethereal singing on Lucky Now, wrapped in swirling guitars and occasional distortion. The result is another powerful collection of songs, this time boasting a growing sense of comfort and confidence.
Press kit bios often namecheck bands that sound aspirational at best, but citing such disparate musical touchstones as The Sundays and The Replacements comes across as…
Marta Del Grandi is in a liminal space between the past she always has one eye on and a future she consistently encourages herself to move towards. Her third album, Dream Life, feels like grappling with a reality check where you’ve put in the work but things don’t look the way you expected and there are untold peripheral problems beyond your control.
In the great indie pop tradition, Dream Life masks melancholia with whimsy, whether it’s fantasy land synths, syncopated programmed beats, or slide guitar. The dreamy, brooding, and vaguely foreboding synth arrangement of ‘20 Days of Summer’ touches broadly on a feeling of not being able to laugh at the chaos, as Del Grandi reminds herself “to keep going / try to breathe”.