Echo & The Bunnymen return to the fore with Apples for Isaac, their thirteenth album and their first in 12 years following 2014’s ‘Meteorites’. It would be fair to say that the group have had a shift in tone since their last effort, though, which maintained a darker, more forlorn sound than the recent record. In contrast, this new album maintains a cheerful-sounding, yet well-considered and balanced range of tracks which provide a thoughtful yet optimistic atmosphere – one that, gloomy news cycle aside, which leaves you feeling pretty good about things. The production is the work of frontman Ian McCulloch, who has put together a bright-sounding mix, featuring masterful arrangement of the band’s instruments along with smartly used orchestral arrangements.
Category: indie-rock
People like to say that artists who have little left to lose, either by virtue or lack of past success, have “zero fucks to give.” Usually, this means that an artist has either reached a point at which they no longer care what kind of impression their work makes on the general public, or, taking a more wide-angle perspective, they see no appeal in anything the world and future have to offer, and wash their hands of the whole thing. Colin Newman and Malka Spigel, formerly of post-punk legends Wire and Minimal Compact, respectively, have certainly earned the right to rest on their laurels, cruise on autopilot, follow their fancies, or indulge in score-settling. They owe the world nothing, but the world owes them plenty. Yet their latest album as Immersion is a work of craft…
…features previously unreleased tracks, B-sides and remixes from The Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack, Jagz Kooner, and Two Lone Swordsmen.
Whenever indie music seems lost in its own self-righteous, unchallenging, inoffensive fundament, Primal Scream rides in to try and save it all. So just as Screamadelica tried to encapsulate the importance of ecstasy culture, or Vanishing Point tried to exorcise their own insanity, here XTRMNTR is a nasty, fierce realization of an entire world that has also lost the plot. The album starts with a gloriously vindictive sample of a kid commanding “Kill All Hippies,” and this roughly states the album’s modus operandi. There are songs shouting with furious, feedback-splayed anger (“Blood Money,” “Exterminator”), songs…
…The digital deluxe version features 3 exclusive bonus demo tracks that are not available on the physical standard vinyl or CD pressings.
Where in the past Bloc Party have dealt in emotional ambiguity, on this seventh effort all metaphors are discarded. Described by Kele Okereke as the most personal work of his career, Anatomy of a Brief Romance is a chronological account of a relationship from first glance to final goodbye, operating as a memoir over 14 songs.
Given the autobiographical content, it’s a surprise that Okereke chose to release this under the Bloc Party name rather than as a solo record. Yet the presence of guitarist Russell Lissack, drummer Louise Bartle and new bassist Harry Deacon — making his recording debut with…
…includes the recently-shared “World’s Always Burning” featuring Mannequin Pussy along with previously unreleased songs “I’ve Said Too Much” featuring Dazy, “3 AM,” and “Thought You Were Waving [Anthony’s Version],” which is a cover by Anthony Green (Circa Survive, L.S. Dunes, Saosin).
“I want to make pop rock music for people who are fucked up,” Militarie Gun frontman Ian Shelton said in a recent interview for the band’s new album, God Save the Gun. Shelton comes from hardcore punk, a world where fucked-up-ness is transmitted through vein-popping screamed vocals and antagonistic riffs. But with Militarie Gun, he’s always been more interested in spinning catharsis and confrontation into the biggest songs he possibly can. He spits and snarls, for sure, but then comes…
In his 20s, when Nate Amos was uploading his every musical impulse to Bandcamp, he released a particularly out-there tranche of songs focused on “technology corrupting nature,” he told the Guardian recently. He soon came to understand this noisy spell as a symptom of anxiety and depression: “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.” The newer work that’s made his name as This Is Lorelei is tellingly lucid by contrast, the work of someone who can now look discomfort dead on and make it beautiful.
It doesn’t take a leap to connect that to Amos’ recent sobriety. His official debut album, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star — a crystalline pop record that stealthily acquired…
The expanded edition features the original 9 tracks alongside 4 brand-new songs recorded with producer John Congleton and 2 raw demos.
In the process of burgeoning Chicago duo Friko (singer/songwriter/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger) playing out in support of their electric debut LP — including a 2025 tour with the Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse — they added guitarist Korgan Robb and bassist David Fuller to their official lineup. This four-piece version of Friko then headed to Los Angeles to record their sophomore album with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Sleater-Kinney, Mogwai). While the band had been very hands-on in all aspects of preparing their debut, including co-producing,…
Iridescent jangle nirvana. Visceral punk energy. Mournful folk-accented vocalese. Stinging oaths of love and hate, with occasional chipmunk harmonies. The third Tubs album contains this and more, to the delight of all who enjoyed the first two Tubs albums for the abundance of said qualities. One of its 12 songs, however, breaks new ground. Opening with a groovily offbeat drum pattern, ‘Do Yourself a Favor’ bops onto the dancefloor amid frantic guitar downstrokes and an incessant keyboard riff deserving of its own hand-jive routine. This is actually a Prince song, albeit one with complex provenance and never released in his lifetime. The Tubs infuse it with their Celtic-tinged shimmer, while the lyric could almost be one of Tubs songwriter Owen Williams’…
Atlanta’s Ultra Lights are a nostalgia act, if only because they make scuzzy millennial garage rock in the year 2026, when not even the Strokes seem very much interested in sounding like the Strokes. This shit is classic rock now: Is This It is 25 years old, Brooklyn is no longer the hipster center of the universe, and those Converses you used to wear now need insoles. Atlanta may not be an obvious hub for upcoming indie rock acts, but on their debut, Pleasure’s All Yours, Ultra Lights are doing their damn best to make Atlanta sound like early-2000s New York City in a way that would make John Rocker’s head explode.
A quarter of a century later, the zeitgeist has so far been reluctant to revive that early aughts indie rock sound. Ultra Lights arrive with…
Michael Barker spends a lot of his time playing guitar in garage punk bands in his Sydney hometown scene; he also records under the name 1-800-Mikey, which is a reference to his job in a call center. Under that name he makes lo-fi bedroom punk and garage that’s self-assured, confident, hooky as can be, and full of jangling, slicing guitars. IN YUN is the second album he’s released and it’s a sugar sweet confection that will appeal to fans of the Ty Segall and O Sees school of rock, the one where they teach that the sweatier and more immediate the sound the better. Barker certainly got top marks in class because the album is super punchy and full of the kind of hooks that sink in deep on first listen. Most of the songs are revved-up garage rockers…
The name was an explicit signpost. Maryland’s Velocity Girl named themselves after the B-side of Primal Scream’s May 1986 second single “Crystal Crescent.” At this point, Bobby Gillespie and Co were still a Byrds-leaning, Sixties-inclined, polkadotted jangly pop outfit. There were no hints of what came later.
Velocity Girl formed in College Park, Maryland in 1989 but were embedded in the Washington, DC music scene – one which, for much of the outside world, was defined by hardcore punk and the various flavours springing from it represented by bands like Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses. Looking to any British indie archetype was atypical. As the liner notes for new compilation 1989-1992 put it, “Velocity Girl arose from a new…
Lex Walton operates on the extremes of hope and despair; from the outside, it just seems like irony. She will reference cult director Vincent Gallo (as “Vinny Gallo”) and Owl City’s childlike 2009 hit “Fireflies” on the same EP. Her song titles, like “In This House, We Don’t Call the Cops; We Call Chosen Family” and “Preteen on Omegle Blues,” can be off-putting. Walton is prolific and, among a certain Brooklyn trans scene, ubiquitous — aside from appearing in lo-fi trans anthology series Castration Movie, she’s the bassist in Prairie Princess, and this summer, aided the band’s lead singer Emerson Borakove in staging Airy Foist at a Geese set. Her solo songs are anything from keyboard demos to 12-minute blown-out opuses. For Car Seat Headrest fans who…
…Lily Seabird’s third full-length, Lightspheres On Their Way, defies simple categorization. It’s the kind of record that breathes and moves to a rhythm all its own. It adopts a unique mythology (the idea of “lightspheres”), allows its songs to pick their own pain, and wonders and reckons in its own language and time about the deeply personal in a way that feels strikingly universal.
A warm, humming harmonium blows through opener “The Pulley,” soft-strummed guitars and Seabird’s searching voice are all that tether the skies to the ground. “Am I still allowed to pray / Even if I don’t believe anymore?” she asks on high. It’s the type of wonder that makes us poke at the stars as children; as adults, the questions have a way of following us back down…
Thanks to Olivia Rodrigo’s wildly successful Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival last week, a new generation of fans is discovering Gen X alt-rock staples like The Breeders, Garbage, and Bikini Kill. On a much smaller scale (at least for now), Nashville’s Hannah Cole may be responsible for introducing Gen Z to the beauty of shoegaze bands like Ride and Lush.
On her debut LP, Switchbacks, she melds the swirling, fuzzed-out guitars of shoegaze and ’90s alt rock with sophisticated pop melodies that act as a Trojan horse for some powerful lyrics. The title track opens the album with screeching guitars and solid drumming, with Cole’s soft, measured voice fighting to be heard above the dissonance. The distorted, reverb-heavy guitar…
Three years on from the last Hollow Hand album, Max Kinghorn-Mills delivers a fully harmonious union of folk and indie pop on Wish Road South, his best to date. On 2023’s Your Own Adventure, Kinghorn-Mills described the process of creating and recording as an archetype of the virtues of the DIY ethic: “About just doing everything yourself and not needing to rely on anyone. That’s the one thing I love about doing this: no one has any answers for you, you are your own boss, and it’s Your Own Adventure”.
On Wish Road South, the fourth Hollow Hand album, Kinghorn-Mills has clearly been invigorated by witnessing the creative powers of his peers, whilst collaborating with the likes of Aoife Nessa Frances, serving as the house…
Led by songwriter Willem Smit, Amsterdam’s Personal Trainer established a versatile, visceral sound that draws from styles including introspective indie rock, piano pop, arty post-punk, Britpop, slacker rock, and more with their first two albums. For their third long-player, Smit and his band took a different approach to writing and recording, initially penning the songs on just an acoustic guitar, then later recording them live together in the studio, a first for the band. They titled the resulting 15-track album (12 songs and three short instrumentals) Human Assholes. Prior collaborator Casper van der Lans (the Homesick, Pip Blom) returned to produce.
The record opens with the horn fanfare “Marvin’s Curtain Up” before launching into…