The four words no one thought they would ever see appeared last year. They were “GRAMMY nominee Jon Spencer.”
But that’s what happened when Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton’s 2023 album Death Wish Blues was up for one of those iconic awards. And by extension, so was producer Jon Spencer.
It’s worth noting that his career spans over four decades crafting some of the edgiest, most frictional and at times discordant roots music ever appearing on major or indie labels. A variety of sonically boundary-pushing outfits such as Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, Heavy Trash, Jon Spencer & the HIT Makers and, probably the most popular one, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion were all helmed by Spencer.
Category: indie-rock
Much of the publicity surrounding Deadlights refers to it as Lauren Lakis’ debut, but surely her releases have been appearing fairly regularly since Ferocious in 2018, making this her fourth album? Whatever; the cover photo of Deadlights appears to be a messy, witty and possibly dark homage to the cover of the Cars’ 1978 debut.
There is sometimes a pop sensibility lurking at the heart of Lakis’ songs, but although powerful, it’s definitely not “power pop,” as its melodies are generally submerged in surging and ebbing distorted guitars. Deadlights is essentially a shoegaze record with some strong ‘90s alt-rock inflections, and much of it trudges along disconsolately with Lakis’ dreamy, reverb-masked voice riding the waves of guitar and…
…includes two bonus tracks: Mitski’s covers of One Direction’s “Fireproof” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool to Want You” previously only available on compilations.
Based in Brooklyn but with an unsettled background that called over a dozen countries on multiple continents home before she reached her twenties, Mitski Miyawaki makes her Dead Oceans debut with her fourth album, Puberty 2.
Her background is not irrelevant here, as the album reflects her own, very personal — and intentional or not, her generation’s — crisis of belonging as she recounts stories of navigating young adulthood in the City. A visceral work that shares the immediacy of classic punk and confessional singer/songwriter fare at once, Puberty 2 takes…
Devlin and the Harm sits in an intriguing place somewhere between widescreen indie rock and shadowed americana. There are moments here that feel vast; songs opening into towering choruses, drums crashing, powerful guitars, melodies that make you think of open skies, but the emotional landscape beneath them is far darker and more intimate. Across these eleven tracks, the band returns repeatedly to themes of collapse, inheritance, addiction, memory, and the uneasy possibility of redemption. It is an album concerned less with escape than with what remains after illusions fail.
The opening track, ‘Kingdom Comes’, immediately establishes the album’s central tensions. Built around a slow-burning atmosphere…
If you were going to go looking for rough but melodic bands, you might very well start in Ohio. That’s where the granddaddy of them all — Guided by Voices — got its start, not to mention the Greenhornes, New Bomb Turks, Times New Viking, Cloud Nothings and many, many others. There’s something about flat, fertile, churchy Ohio that encourages rebellion, even oddity — remember Pere Ubu and Devo came from here. But there’s also a midwestern full-hearted-ness in even the most confrontational of bands. There’s ragged soul in ragged riffs here, and if you want evidence, look no further than Smug Brothers.
Smug Brothers, out of Dayton, have been at it for two decades, garnering modest success but an engaging catalogue. The band formed…
San Francisco trio Midrift are one of alternative music’s fastest-rising names.
Arriving at a time where shoegaze is at its commercial peak – and where almost anything drenched in reverb and emotional ambiguity gets labelled as such – Silhouette finds Midrift stepping directly into that conversation. But as the album buckles beneath the weight of its influences, it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what the band themselves are trying to say.
The group have already amassed millions of streams through viral singles like ‘Twin Flames’ and ‘Unrequited’, building momentum through support slots with Fleshwater and Angel Du$t, and even landed on the NME 100 earlier this year. What makes their rise more striking is their age.
If there were an award for artists with the most consistent bodies of work, Widowspeak would surely be among the winners. Since their 2011 self-titled debut album, their Americana-meets-grunge-meets-shoegaze fundamentals have barely changed; when they do wander, as on 2022’s quasi-concept album Jacket, they always return to their comfort zone – which is exactly where Roses resides. If anything, Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’ seventh album doubles down on classic sounds and imagery. The thumping kick drum and twang that begin “The Hook” have more in common with Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones than Mazzy Star, while its longing for the one who got away could hardly be more ageless. Widowspeak’s reverence for the time-tested…
Zoh Amba has been making waves recently as a free jazz saxophonist in the same vein as Peter Brötzmann or Albert Ayler. With a reputation built on incendiary live performance, a list of high-profile collaborators, and a handful of critically acclaimed albums (the first of which, O, Sun, was produced by fellow avant-garde traveller John Zorn), you would be forgiven for expecting a certain kind of career trajectory, one that features heavily in the pages of The Wire and on the stages of the most outré jazz festivals. But Amba has other ideas. They are, in baseball parlance, a genuine two-way player, someone who excels equally in two disciplines that are so different that at first there appears to be no link between them.
The other string to Amba’s bow…
Modest Mouse has long been a band of wild contrasts and combinations that shouldn’t work, but do. Centered around the emotionally and cerebrally unfiltered character of Isaac Brock’s songwriting, the sound of this longrunning Pacific Northwestern indie group often finds tormented yelps delivering accidentally profound philosophical truths, while the musical backing waffles between chaotic noise and blissfully melodic sweetness. The eighth studio album from Modest Mouse, An Eraser and a Maze, comes thirty three years into their practice of organizing these unruly feelings and sounds, five years after their last album, 2021’s pop-forward The Golden Casket, and four years after the death of drummer and founding member Jeremiah Green.
One of the more enigmatic bands of the classic 4AD era, Swallow was formed by Louise Trehy and Mike Mason, who met in early 90’s Camberwell, London. both were deeply involved with the independent music scene of the time; Louise co-founded Setanta Records (home of The Divine Comedy, Edwyn Collins and Into Paradise with whom Mike would occasionally play), and Mike traversed between bike courier, video director, and lighting designer for Spacemen 3, Slowdive, Spiritualized, Curve and Chapterhouse. Prompted by Louise, they started writing songs together, drawing inspiration from a healthy mix of sources: CAN, noise, post-punk, and American forces of nature like Captain Beefheart and Butthole Surfers. Their first songs quickly surfaced and were recorded…
To say that history looms over Horror is just another way of saying that it’s a Mekons record. The globally scattered collective, which originally convened in Leeds, England, in the late 1970s, has long drawn lines connecting the warmongers of our time to the dominant creeps of centuries past. The first words they sing on Horror depict the departure on Christmas 1654 of the frigate Gloucester. Tasked with vanquishing Spanish control of the West Indies, the warship gave up and settled for conquering Jamaica. Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher, pick your present villain — they all work for the same company.
Horror, released in April 2025, maneuvers in vintage Mekons fashion between the planting season of our discontent and the present,…
The ninth studio album from the alt-rock/folk outfit Deer Tick is inspired by their hometown of Providence, RI. The group dug into the city’s shady past and crafted musical tales based on gangsters, religion and the immigrant experience, as the wide-ranging record finds Deer Tick at their most creative. The band (singer/guitarist John McCauley, guitarist/singer Ian O’Neil, drummer/singer Dennis Ryan, and bassist Christopher Ryan) self-produced their album for the first time in their career, and that was key to the musical freedom found on Coin-O-Matic. The title itself comes from a cigarette-vending-machine company that served as the headquarters of Raymond Patriarca, a crime boss from Providence, setting the tone.
The stout “Dog Years” opens with acoustic…
Going two-for-two with John Congleton, indie stalwarts Death Cab for Cutie built upon 2022’s excellent Asphalt Meadows to create something even more timeless with their 11th full-length, I Built You a Tower. Back on an indie label and reinvigorated by sold-out, arena-packed anniversary tours, Tower benefits from a simpler, more direct approach that was achieved by the band locking in to record the album in less than a month. Without overextending or relying on too many production tricks, it’s a refreshing and surprisingly pure experience that harkens back to those early-aughts days when the band first blew up in the mainstream.
Thriving in this space, their trademark tender yearning elevates highlights like the soaring…
Black Editions presents the expanded and definitive edition of White Heaven’s brilliant third album Next to Nothing. Originally released in 1994 by Tokyo’s Noon Disk, the full album was only ever available in a limited vinyl pressing of 250 copies. Since then, it has become one of the most sought after artifacts of the 90’s Japanese underground and is regarded as a highpoint of Japanese psychedelic rock. Led by vocalist, songwriter and conceptualist You Ishihara, the album finds the group in a phase of refinement. Taking a more intricate and open approach, the music is buoyant and light yet at the same time, nocturnal and introspective. Next to Nothing marks the first time guitarists Michio Kurihara and Soichiro Nakamura appear together on record after having separate turns as lead…
Above all else, Widemouth’s debut LP, No Gasoline, is a record about friendship. Born out of the basement of a Northwestern University dorm where two/fourths of the band would meet to play Paul Simon and Big Thief covers, the band approached this album as a team, writing all of the songs together. And thematically, it sounds like an oral history of a foursome building a chosen community, with the songs brimming with emotions and shared inside stories.
Throughout the dozen tracks that make up this LP, the Chicago band manages to offer hints of everyone from Phoebe Bridgers and Bright Eyes to local band Ratboys. There is a moodiness to the mellow opening track, “I Wish You Passed On a Little Anger,” with Mak Carnahan…
The onetime solo project of Columbus, Ohio singer/songwriter Mark Allen Scott, villagerrr officially became a band with the project’s fifth album, 2024’s Tear Your Heart Out. That record’s five-piece lineup — which includes three guitarists — allowed Scott to expand villagerrr’s reflective mix of ambling alternative country-rock and atmospheric shoegaze into something at once more open and organic and more texturally layered. The album landed the group on Winspear (Slow Pulp, Wishy, Barrie), which reissued Tear Your Heart Out before presenting villagerrr’s proper debut for the label. The subsequent long-player Carousel is an even more collaborative record, whose development involved Scott sharing newly penned songs with some of his musician friends,…
Fall of 2023, Andy Hull & Robert McDowell took up residency at Union Chapel in London for 3 nights of unprecedented, intimate duo performances spanning the history of Manchester Orchestra. Andy’s voice paired with Robert’s meticulously plucked strings, eerie instrumentation, & understated harmonizing echoed against the gothic walls & stained glass windows of the chapel. A liturgical experience of introspection & sound community, transforming their most beloved songs into an iconic piece of music.
Recorded live during the band’s sold-out three night residency at London’s historic Union Chapel during the fall of 2023, the sweeping 21-track collection is a raw, vocally-centered liturgical experience of introspection…
L.A. band Dogstar (guitarist/vocalist Bret Domrose, drummer Robert Mailhouse and bassist Keanu Reeves) return with their fourth album All In Now, produced by Nick Launay (IDLES, Amyl And The Sniffers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds).
“The album really sets up the energy at the heart of this album and the fun that we’ve always had playing together,” Mailhouse shares. “We couldn’t fucking wait,” Reeves says about Dogstar’s collective desire to get right back to the studio. “Personally, I loved it all. For me, the attitude was like, ‘let’s work hard and let’s GO.’ ” “It felt like our last album was our ticket into a party,” says Bret Domrose. “And now we’ve shown up to the party – the three of us.”
…Featuring two acoustic, warm takes of her songs “Champ” and “I Just Do!”, an emotional cover of Charli xcx’s “I Might Say Something Stupid”, and a new original track “Sweetness”.
Throughout the early 2020s, singer/songwriter Rebecca Harvey made a name for herself under the music alias girlpuppy with her moody blend of midtempo indie rock, floatier dream pop, and sparer intimacy, including on her debut LP, When I’m Alone. That album was produced by Sam Acchione (Alex G, Tomberlin), mixed by Slow Pulp’s Henry Stoehr, and released on Royal Mountain Records. For the darker, heavier-textured follow-up, she adds washes of shoegaze, grungier alt-rock, and catchy 2000 indie pop/rock for her Captured Tracks label debut.
…includes 3 bonus early demo versions.
Toronto duo Ducks Ltd. wasted no time issuing their mission statement on debut album Modern Fiction. The first sound on opening track “How Lonely Are You?” is a wall of bright multi-tracked guitars firing off a barrage of nervous, ever so slightly melancholic chords. It’s jangle pop excellence from the first few seconds, opening up into a powerful but compact rush of simple drum machine rhythms, melodic basslines, and layers of smart vocal hooks. The song is here and gone in less than three minutes, beginning an album of thoughtfully constructed tracks that take notes from some of indie pop’s best artists.
Over the course of Modern Fiction‘s streamlined runtime, Ducks Ltd. channel…