…newly remastered and include five bonus tracks: rare single edits, alternate versions, and legendary electronic remixes from the archives.
It was pretty hard to guess what Primal Scream would do with a follow-up to their bombastic 2000 release, XTRMNTR. That record broke all kinds of ground for a group that had consistently shifted with popular culture since their Madchester/acid house success of Screamadelica. XTRMNTR offered up a maddening scope of aggressive beats and screaming politics that the group had not previously tackled. Jarring and off-putting at times (albeit a stroke of brilliance), the record is a tad difficult to sit all the way through. Evil Heat seems to attempt to bridge together the two worlds of their past club psychedelia and…
Category: indie-rock
For anybody still convinced that Geese’s explosion in popularity was a fully botted psy-op rather than the natural byproduct of present-day digital marketing in a culture starved for new rock’n’roll saviors (and, you know, an album that’s actually good), allow me to offer Heathers as an analogue study. The solo project of one Heath Michael Thomas, a 23-year-old kid from the town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Heathers until now has primarily existed as a TikTok page where Thomas performs a constellation of various crunchy covers: Big Star, Ween, Frost Children, music from Earthbound, Kings of Leon, Gram Parsons, and, naturally, Geese. His page has a respectable few thousand followers, but nothing stratospheric. Nevertheless, his debut album,…
The cliffsides of Big Sur, California are rugged, romantic, and seemingly endless. The shimmering coastline stretches both outward and upward, as the rocks the waves crash against hold the roots of the redwood trees, some of the tallest and most ancient in the world.
Mimicking the rough splendour of its namesake, this debut album by Big Red – a solo vehicle turned trio from Joe Scarisbrick of UK band The Orchestra (For Now) – builds from quiet hums to a torrential storm, flitting between melancholy and heartbreak along the way.
As a songwriter, Scarisbrick already proved nimble on the Orchestra EPs Plan 75 and Plan 76, where the seven-piece band oscillated between tenderness, detachment, and anxiety,…
Cold War Kids have released Robbers & Cowards / Complete Cowards (20th Anniversary Edition), revisiting their debut with four songs completed from the album’s original era and six live recordings captured in 2007. The original album’s breakout singles included “Hang Me Up to Dry,” “We Used to Vacation” and “Hospital Beds.”
The Digital Deluxe Edition adds Phantogram’s reworking of “Hang Me Up to Dry,” which reshapes the song with electronic beats, layered atmospherics and vocals. The collaboration is the first part of a broader anniversary project, with more reinterpretations of songs from Robbers & Cowards planned for 2027. The four completed songs are “Loyalty,” “There Goes The Night,” “Jesse Latour” and “She Can Do No Wrong.”
The Big Moon‘s music has always been a personal, introspective affair. The London four-piece’s last album, 2022’s Here Is Everything, concerned lead singer Juliette Jackson’s pregnancy and how she’s negotiating the early days of motherhood. Four years later, Forever has a very different backstory. In 2024, Jackson discovered, during a routine check, that she’d developed a benign cyst in her ear – one that, although not cancerous, would kill her if not removed. The resulting surgery also meant that Jackson would permanently lose some of her hearing. It’s the sort of life-changing diagnosis that could push someone into the depths of despair. However, Jackson was determined to make her band’s next album a joyous affair – imagining a hopeful…
Radio Free Alice’s debut album What’s in Between has the most surprising of starts. It kicks off with ‘Crying with You’ which initially tinkers experimentally with sound before the fierce drum beats of Lochie Dowd and vocals of Noah Learmonth jump in and effortlessly pull the whole together. And what a whole it is. The track encapsulates everything about this Australian band who have seen a meteoric rise in the last couple of years. The vocals dance all over the track as it soars, creating such an expansive soundscape.
Listening through for the first time to What’s in Between, it’s the imagery which grabs, each song a vignette of storytelling influenced by the band’s surroundings both in terms of relationships and environment. ‘Undressed’ is a gentle…
The first indication that DIIV were moving into more political territory came as they rolled out their last record, 2024’s Frog in Boiling Water.
The album’s release was marked by a hoax appearance on Saturday Night Live where they were introduced by Fred Durst, a chaotic website replete with conspiracy theories, and a live show punctuated by spoof announcements suggesting that the band had entered into a “creative partnership” with ExxonMobil. It was a tongue-in-cheek campaign that concealed broiling anti-capitalist anger beneath the surface, and that offset the murky, lyrically opaque set of songs they were promoting.
The Los Angeles four-piece have carried this approach into their fifth album, ZIRP!,…
Both an example and an explanation of a blending of two words, the fact that the name of Tommy Lefroy‘s long-awaited debut album is a portmanteau seems fitting.
While labour economist Guy Standing coined the term The Precariat takes its title from (referring to the precarious social class that began emerging in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century), almost everything about the project of Wynter Bethel and Tessa Mouzourakis exists in a perpetual state of “and,” not “or.”
Respectively from northern Michigan and Vancouver, BC, the singer-songwriters met in Nashville, but their project really got underway when both moved to the UK (“I had nothing, then I found you / Built an empire in…
For much of their career, Editors have explored a varied range of approaches to their music. From the stark post-punk urgency of The Back Room through the widescreen ambition of In This Light and On This Evening and the industrial-electronic experimentation of EBM, the Birmingham band have spent two decades repositioning themselves while retaining a distinctive identity. On this, their eighth studio album, Surface, Echo & Sound, they take what might appear an unexpected turn, back toward their fundamentals
Following the electronic intensity of 2022’s EBM, written in collaboration with Benjamin John Power (Blanck Mass), the new album emerges from a markedly different creative process. Frontman Tom Smith arrived with stripped-back…
A project built around lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Bobby Townson and his sister, singer and miscellaneous instrumentalist Emma Townson, who also does the band’s artwork, British Birds emerged from Chorley, England, in the early 2020s. The D.I.Y. outfit, which has rotated bassists and drummers, essentially hand-sold their first two albums at shows and few record shops. Their eclectic sound — which assimilates numerous vintage pop/rock styles (cool ones), from garage pop to ’60s mod music and Beatlesque hard rock, ’80s college rock, arty punk, classic indie pop, and more — as well as their witty, anti-establishment spirit, came to the attention of the U.K.’s Skep Wax Records, which signed on to release their third album. It features bassist…
Not everyone has heard Grumpy, but hundreds of thousands of people have heard Heaven Schmitt. The North Carolina-raised, New York-based singer-songwriter began lending backing vocals to Zach Bryan in 2024 after connecting through a mutual industry friend, and was later hired to the Americana megastar’s touring band earlier this year. With Bryan, Schmitt — whose output with Grumpy leans towards off-kilter, experimental indie pop — has belted mainstream country hits like the Kacey Musgraves duet “I Remember Everything” to sold-out stadiums full of beer-drinkin’, trucker-hat-wearin’ devotees; just call Schmitt “Theycey MusGayves.”
Maybe you’ve noticed that country music has been popular lately. In the past few years,…
On each album since In Standard Definition, Art d’Ecco‘s music has changed drastically, but his social commentary always felt like the perspective of a wry outsider.
On Scheele’s Green, it finally sounds like he has skin in the game. Named for a vivid, deadly pigment used in 18th and 19th century paint, toys, and food dye, his fifth album tackles the proliferation of AI data centers, climate change, corrupt politicians, and war — as well as humanity’s age-old compulsion to literally and figuratively foul its nest — with palpable rage and grief.
Where the precision of d’Ecco’s pop was one of the main strengths of his previous albums, on Scheele’s Green he colors outside the lines. On songs like “How Real Is Real,” which pairs…
Projecting energetic alt-rock across the globe, Sydney group The Buoys channel anthemic melodies and an unmistakable chemistry on their sophomore record Concrete Cowboy.
Speaking on the origins of the nature of the album’s creation, the band state that “we were in the studio together when the phrase came to us: too many tabs open. That became the heartbeat of the record”. It is no surprise that the constant overload of information, lack of direction and social exhaustion of modern life drives a certain emotion to be produced in song. The Buoys’ new record aims to bottle these frustrations and release them in a song like ‘Kill You Back’ or ‘Alone in Vegas’ which speaks to modern day social fatigues in a remarkably succinct manner.
An adaptive sense of ‘post-punk’ may be the most ‘way’ to file Chicago’s Axis: Sova, the trio of Brett Sova, Jeremy Freeze, and Josh Johannpeter. That’s if post-punk’s understood as an organ, living roots and branches in the wilds of all music. Rock is rich krovvy that froths in Axis: Sova’s veins, and they enjoy progressive tactics when spilling it.
Ever since Blinded by Oblivion (prod. Ty Segall) knocked listeners out back in ‘23, the band have spent their meantime on Chi’s Northwest side looking for fresh shocks and patterns in sound, absorbing, taping and generally writing on the reg. These drafting sessions yielded an exciting new openness, in no small part due to the extensive touring they’d done together all across the U.S.A. and Europe.
Ween is digging deep into its archives with Boognish Provides, a sprawling collection of seven previously unreleased concerts recorded during the band’s Chocolate and Cheese tour. The collection captures a pivotal period when Gene (Aaron Freeman) and Dean (Mickey Melchiondo) were moving beyond their lo-fi four-track beginnings and establishing the strange, sprawling live sound that would become a defining part of Ween.
Boognish Provides arrives as a 14-CD box set featuring seven complete concerts, while a 2LP edition distills the collection down to 19 performances. The set documents shows from both sides of the Atlantic, including McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, The Metro in Chicago, First Avenue in Minneapolis,…
Olivia Tremor Control’s 2026 album The Same Place is a melancholy triumph for the always brilliant, now defunct psychedelic collective. After the band reformed in the early 2000’s, they began working on music in fits and starts while never getting to the point of completion and weathering some tragedy along the way. Both guiding lights behind their ambitious, murky, and delightfully hooky sound passed away; Bill Doss in 2012, Will Cullen Hart in 2024, just before this album was finished. Producer Jason NeSmith plus a bunch of band members and others worked together to put the album together the way Hart wanted according to the notes he left behind. Thanks to everyone’s efforts the record works both as a stunning return to form and a tribute to Doss and Hart.
For the last decade, Caroline Rose has garnered a reputation as one of indie-rock’s most unpredictable songwriters. They’re impossible to categorise, with albums like Loner and Superstar hopping from genre to genre – as Rose has said “I’m just trying to make music diverse enough that AI can’t reproduce it”.
On the evidence of the excellently titled Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, Rose has certainly achieved that. This is probably their best album since 2018’s Loner, and has the same air of unrestrained chaos running through it. Rose has always been at their best when they’ve completely slipped off the leash, and there’s a giddy sense of excitement which runs through the record from the very first track.
“We’re recording this, so we need you as loud as fucking possible please”, says Nicky Wire before “feel-good singalong anthem of the winter” ‘Mausoleum’. “Take it a-fucking-way”. An audience of Manics devotees at London’s Roundhouse responds magnificently. The chorus to ‘Mausoleum’, after all, is a humdinger. “No Birds!” they scream as one. “No Birds!” It’s probably the biggest, most naggingly infectious, poppiest chorus on the entire album. A knock-em-dead singalong. A moment of pure release delivered over a swaggering Chuck Berry groove. “No Birds!” they yell, like an Oasis crowd doing the “sooooooo Sally can wait” bit in ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’. It’s not that, though. “No Birds!” they sing, “No Birds! … Holy Mass … Of Dead Insects!”