There’s a charming spit-and-sawdust quality to Linda’s Head, the new album from Helen. It’s easy to catch incidental parts of the recording process that studio polish might otherwise have erased, like clashing frequencies, room sound, and messy reverb tails. Songs often open with the fading end of the preceding number, as if the album were one warts-‘n’-all live set haphazardly divided into ten. And yet a finely wrought songcraft lurks just below the surface.
Linda’s Head is the second album by Helen, a trio from the Pacific Northwest comprising Liz Harris (also known as Grouper, the by-now legendary experimental folk artist), Scott Simmons, and Jed Bindeman. This album builds on the sounds first explored on their 2015 debut, The Original Faces.
Category: indie-rock
The Smashing Times do one thing and they do it really well; make catchy, jangling guitar pop that sounds like it was recorded in the bottom of a well. Inspired by other fidelity challenged bands like Guided by Voices, Television Personalities, and Times New Viking, they add some freshness to the bloodline. Their 2019 debut cassette EP Come Along with Me is full of hooky, heart-felt pop tunes that sacrifice crisp, clear sound in favor of immediacy, but don’t submerge the singing and playing in so much clatter that the emotions are blunted. Much of the album has the autumnal wistfulness of the Byrds at their most elegiac, only recorded on a beat box instead of a state-of-the-art studio. All seven songs on the record all dig deeply into this mood…
Over the years, Imperial Teen’s brand of high-sass, joyfully brash power pop has kept rolling on without losing any of its potency. The group began in the ‘90s as an outlet for the more melodic tendencies of songwriters Roddy Bottum and Lynn Perko-Truell to contrast the aggressive sounds of their other bands Faith No More and Sister Double Happiness, and over time they grew into an identity of their own.
Their seventh studio album All Over You arrives as part of an established pattern at this phase of Imperial Teen’s lifespan, one where the band- members all live in separate cities and don’t get together often, but put together a new album in intervals of six or seven years, checking in on where they’re at personally, as a group,…
Los Angeles garage punk rockers Death Valley Girls have always mixed elements of irreverence, revolution, and compassion in their music, but their 6th album, Welcome to Earth, is an especially community-minded one. It follows the loss of bandleader Bonnie Bloomgarden’s home and belongings in the Southern California wildfires of early 2025, which she escaped thanks to a ride and a place to stay from her landlord, an offer she accepted while leaving even her phone and her car behind. Although they can sometimes be hard to discern on the noisy, group-sung LP, some of the collaborators here include former member Laura Kelsey, fellow garage punker Seth Bogart (Hunx & His Punx), Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Gretchen Parlato, and a children’s chorus.
BODEGA have spent the past decade being filed under post-punk and art rock, a label that made sense when the Brooklyn band made wiry, rhythm-heavy records that seemed to have one eye on Talking Heads, Devo, and the artier corners of punk. With All Inside Aquarium, BODEGA have turned toward straight-ahead rock.
The guitars are bigger, the melodies are more prominent, and the performances have a looseness that makes this feel like a genuine change of direction for the band.
The album opens with Ben Howzie fronting the titular track and immediately signals that this isn’t the same sound found on past albums like Endless Scroll or Our Brand Could be Yr Life. The track features a slightly hazy, guitar-driven…
How to persuade men to open up about their feelings has long been an issue that has perplexed mental health professionals, an intractable problem leading to a range of outside-the-box solutions: men’s sheds, cycling groups, even, you suspect, the repeated commissioning of Mortimer and Whitehouse’s Gone Fishing. After hearing Do Not Dare To Dream, however, any future campaigns should think about signing up Teenage Fanclub as musical figureheads. Their thirteenth album might have been recorded in an isolated environment – the current quintet of Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley, Euros Childs, Francis Macdonald and David McGowan gathering on the Scottish island of Great Bernera – but it’s far from remote, its songs of sadness, alienation and creeping…
Whatever’s in the water in Ireland right now needs to be studied. Gurriers are one of the many stellar acts to have arisen from this fertile milieu, five lads from Dublin with a lot of ambition and a lot to say. Their 2024 debut ‘Come and See’ took aim at the world’s many woes, while their tense, exhilarating follow-up digs even deeper into the dark, searching for signs of light.
These 10 tracks creak, judder and detonate, riding fuse-like guitar scratches and claustrophobic drums. Nowhere are these doom-laden soundscapes better realised than the monstrous title track, which groans like an iceberg calving. Gurriers have landed on an oppressive, surprisingly groovy (see the percussive funk of ‘Party Lines’) brand of grand, dark post-punk…
About a decade passed between the release of Australian artist Spike Fuck‘s breakthrough 2016 Smackwave EP and his debut studio full-length, Evidence, and he lived several lifetimes in those ten years. From the beginning, Spike Fuck’s songs were visceral and intense, and they reflected his lived experience — struggles with addiction that included cycles of relapse, mental health issues, conflicts of identity with gender, religion, and more — and all of it bled through in songs that sounded somewhere between some lost New York Dolls material and the heaviest Patti Smith record never made. After releasing Smackwave, Spike got signed to a label and dropped from that label, lost his father, struggled with addiction, transitioned to living as a trans woman for…
Amid the praise lavished on their roistering live shows, Fat Dog drew a small number of doubters with their 2024 debut album, WOOF.. Some dubbed their dance-punk eruptions “trite”, others one-note. Tight, fresh and frequently expansive, the south Londoners’ second album issues often jubilant answers to such doubts. While a US tour left the band faintly frayed at the edges, a quick return to recording has maintained their momentum. Better yet, they channel a gathering capacity for connection into the tunes and lyrics of Cancel Me (I’m Tired), scoping out room to roam within their well-honed good-time vigour.
Opener ‘Smile & Wave’ implies as much, eschewing the portentous overtures of WOOF. as it kicks off as if out of nowhere, a band caught in…
It’s not a coincidence that Wishy interpolate both “Femme Fatale” by the Velvet Underground and a Bible class singalong within the same track. They never sing the actual words to “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, down in my heart” — that Sunday school staple you may know from The Simpsons — but the sentiment is heavily implied when the melody tumbles over the outro of “Mona Lisa.” Nature’s Pill, Wishy’s second album, is all about love’s dangerous intoxication (fatale of course meaning deadly) and how, when it goes south, you’ve got everything you need within yourself. The track’s final lyric: “Still life so incomplete now / I’m filling it out myself.” Another case in point, from the record’s closing moments: “Heaven is a state of mind.”
The Indianapolis quintet hasn’t turned to…
…includes 3 intimate acoustic tracks (“Fall in Fall Out”, “I’m Breaking Out”, and “A Black Moon”)
It is always fascinating recognising influences in a band or artists style, but noting how they have been adapted, morphed into something different and new. For the Brighton based three-piece rock band Tigercub, influences like Nirvana and Queens of The Stone Age are easy and obvious to grasp, but it is also apparent how the trio push through into their own style and making.
For those not in the know, Tigercub consist of Jamie Stephen Hall (vocals/guitar), Jimi Wheelwright (bass) and James Allix (drums). For the last 15 years they have honed and refined their alternative rock sound, and their albums so far – particularly with 2021’s As Blue As Indigo – have seen…
A molten extension of Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth, the Stooges’ drill-press rhythms, and early Dinosaur Jr., Raise should have been made by young record shop rats from the Midwest. Adding to this is a fascination with the open road; only two of the album’s nine songs do not directly reference cars or driving. It’s no real surprise, then, that this Oxford, England-based band found a home on Stateside turntables that were otherwise Anglophobic, despite being pigeonholed as shoegazers. In all fairness, the band was about as exciting to watch as any actual shoegaze band, and Adam Franklin’s vocals were buried deep within the studio and live mixes. (Flying leg kicks, windmills, and eye contact couldn’t have been all that possible with an unwieldy battery…
In the seven-year gap between her second LP, Midnight, and her next album, Stef Chura broke off an engagement, left her home state and roots in the Detroit indie scene for places south, gave birth to her first child, and then eventually returned to Detroit. In the meantime, she headed back to the studio with songs in hand that bear the bruises of someone who has a few hard-won life lessons under their belt but is still trying to make sense of it all. The album was recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia with none other than the Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider, celebrated for his production work with Neutral Milk Hotel, among others. He both produced and played on the album. (Schneider had long been teaching theoretical math…
We are living after the end of the end of history—both in the sense that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 theory of a democratic finish line has come and gone, and that it feels disconcertingly like we’re living through the end times themselves, alive after everything and left to make a life in the wreckage that optimism left behind. We are living post- everything: post-liberalism, post-language, post-hope. On “Culture,” Greg Freeman adds two more to the list: post-culture and post-rock-and-roll. The current moment, he says, is simply beyond analogy. When all our words are “plagiarized before they’re written,” as he puts it on “Loser’s Prize,” even art itself begins to feel mind-numbingly futile. Everything that’s worth saying has already been said, but if we say nothing at all…
For a band who were together for only five years, The Smiths left quite the cultural footprint. It seems as if Johnny Marr has spent the nearly 40 years since the band’s split throwing himself into everything – whether it be joining Modest Mouse or The Cribs, recording with fellow Mancunian legend Bernard Sumner in Electronic and even appearing on the panel show Would I Lie to You.
When it comes to Marr’s solo material though, there always seems something slightly missing. The Age of Everything is his fifth solo album, and one that the man himself has called the first record that he feels completely comfortable with. It definitely contains some of his best solo material to date, and while there may be no surprises contained within, it’s a very solid record all in all.
London-based Swedish singer-songwriter Josefin Öhrn (previously of Grammy nominated Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation) is set to release her debut album Cherry featuring vocals from Bobby Gllespie (Primal Scream) and Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre), with guitar from Andy Bell (Ride).
Josefin’s most intimate and self-defined album yet, Cherry explores themes of fresh starts, desire, love and grief. It taps into a new and very interesting phase of music, seen on recent releases from Robyn (Sexistential) and Lykke Li (The Afterparty), where the experiences of women are put out there without shame in colourful candidness, such records tap into a fascinating period of raw, intense and highly transformative self-actualization.
After following up her alienated alt-rock debut with the darker, more existential If You Asked for a Picture, Blondshell (singer and songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum) headed to the studio for the third straight time with producer Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Cherry Glazerr). The resulting Violins — so titled to capture the coexistence of violence and beauty in the world, its overarching theme — is her most ruminative set of songs yet. While the album includes quite a few fuzzy rockers, they’re of a midtempo, melancholy nature, including the opening title track, a borderline power ballad about the slow nature of healing from trauma (“It takes all my focusing/It’s like watching paint/Wait, what’d you say?”). Also falling in this category is lead single “Heart Has to Work So Hard,”…
Smidley, the project named after Conor Murphy’s childhood dog, is back with its third LP, Murphy Horse. The project is a blend of genres and styles, emphasizing his creativity and experimentation. He masterfully dances between jazz, indie pop, acoustic music, ’80s new wave, and more, creating a tension that draws you deeper into the record, wondering what will be revealed on the next track.
Take the opening song, “Corpse Flower.” It has so much texture and tension. Just when you feel like you have its direction pinned down, it switches and swaps. Beginning on saxophone with elements of jazz, a subtle genre undercurrent that runs throughout the album, it braids into this hazy, atmospheric blend before settling into a beautiful moment on the keys.