There’s a moment on ‘Cruise Ship Designer’, one of the more playful tracks on Dry Cleaning’s third album, where it seems like singer Florence Shaw is finally getting something off her chest, something that might be deeply relevant to the band’s creative process. It’s a declaration that she makes just as the song clangs to a standstill, almost obscured by the grinding guitars: “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” she states boldly.
Ever since the London four-piece released their debut EP Sweet Princess in 2019, there has been a temptation to approach Dry Cleaning’s records as a puzzling cryptic crossword or surreal Wordle cut-up, turning each song into a breadcrumb trail (as their distant spoken-word ancestors Slint might have it). “It’s a Tokyo bouncy…
Category: indie-rock
…features three remix bonus tracks.
The Charlatans are one of those bands with little following in the United States but a massive fanbase in the UK. The rare American who happens upon them is likely searching for artists associated with Oasis or Blur before digging into Inspiral Carpets, Manic Street Preachers, or Ocean Colour Scene. That’s how far we are removed from the Cheshire band, now boasting 14 albums, 22 top 40 singles, and three number one albums.
Despite our collective ignorance, the Charlatans have returned after an eight-year hiatus with a certain amount of fanfare. The band, which features Tim Burgess (vocals), Martin Blunt (bass), Mark Collins (guitar), Tony Rogers (keyboards), and Pete Salisbury (drums), entered the studio with…
Along with the lucky hundreds in attendance at north London’s Unit 58 and the car park of Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, NME first heard Yard Act’s new album in May. At these free last-minute gigs, the Leeds quartet surprised fans by playing ‘You’re Gonna Need a Little Music’ from top to bottom – instantly after it was announced. A power move that perhaps indicates the confidence they harness, now three albums in, but one that also mirrors the approach that birthed it: four live musicians under one roof at their most instinctive.
Following the bitty writing process that characterised their Mercury Prize-nominated debut album ‘The Overload’ (2022) and its playful successor ‘Where’s My Utopia?’ (2024), Yard Act assembled their own studio space in…
The leaders of Hew have been around for a long time. Your Version might technically be the debut album for this band, but Mercy Harper and Lindsay Minton have been making pristine second- meets fourth-wave emo for 20 years.
Their original college band, Tin Kitchen, crafted unsteady, introspective indie rock. Their longest-running group, football, etc., released a string of excellent yet underrated emo records that blended Rainer Maria with Braid to tremendous effect. They followed that with Overo, which introduced some post-hardcore flair to their sound. Suffice to say, this duo has experience and songwriting chops to spare.
And yet, Harper and Minton refuse to rest on their laurels with this new 11-song album.
When Twisted Teens broke through with their second album, Blame the Clown, only five months ago, the New Orleans duo’s southern-fried mix of garage rock, early punk, rockabilly, and country screamed both “First thought is absolutely best thought” and “Wait until I show you what else I can do.” But if their last album presented the band at their most gleeful and cocky, ready to call the world as they saw it, then Florida Water Blues takes place the morning after: a touch more vulnerable now that the liquid courage has subsided and the hangover is setting in. Blame the Clown may be where the makeup was first put on, but Florida Water Blues is where the tears start to show.
That’s not to say that Twisted Teens have suddenly upended their approach.
Drakulas are a Texas punk band, three of them veterans of the Riverboat Gamblers, all native to the same Denton nexus that birthed the Marked Men, Radioactivity and Bad Sports. (The great, now sporadically active Dirtnap Records released records from all these bands as well as this one.) Yet while Riverboat Gamblers were frenetic but straightforward Ramones-style garage rockers, Drakulas has a bit more new wave in its DNA.
“Going Going Gone Gone” thumps and pillages, true, but with style and a certain amount of decadence. The hammer of drums, the giant guitar chords are block simple, but the vocals vibrate with lurid romanticism, and the keyboards gleam with futurism. Sophistication goes slightly rotten, grand gestures turn theatrical, and all…
Toward the end of “I’ll Let You Finish,” the rollicking opener of his second record Fire from the Hip, Finn Wolfhard does something unexpected. After affecting a nineties indie rocker drawl and doling out charmingly rambling lyrics, the twenty-three-year-old singer/actor finishes the song by singing Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 VMAs. It’s an odd moment, one that would come off as a pretentious cop-out in another’s hands. And in a way, it does have a quality of randomness for its own sake, but Wolfhard somehow makes it work. Part of that is due to how much crackling personality he suffuses into the song itself, but Wolfhard’s recontextualization of that soundbite offers a strangely compelling parallel to his own difficult…
Forty-two years into a career that has quietly defined the underbelly of American neo-psychedelia, Seattle’s The Green Pajamas return with When Fever Let Me Dream. Led by the ever-prolific singer-songwriter Jeff Kelly, the band delivers a record that feels like a lucid, late-night transmission from a bygone era-yet it remains completely timeless.
When Fever Let Me Dream captures the band at their most atmospheric. Heavily indebted to the experimental studio sorcery of the Beatles’ Revolver and the pastoral whimsy of early Pink Floyd, the album floats seamlessly between melodic baroque-pop and hazy, nocturnal rock. The brief opening instrumental “Intro: Pastyme With Good Companye” immediately sets…
Over the course of his career, Will Sheff has released 10 albums that have given the frontman of esteemed indie rock band Okkervil River a reputation as one of the greatest working songwriters in the country.
As Sheff and his shifting lineup of players have traveled the world many times over, they’ve made fans ranging from Lou Reed to Barack Obama. Praised as one of indie-rock’s most ambitious thinkers, Sheff released his debut solo album Nothing Special in 2022 to critical acclaim. Extra Mile follows in the path of Nothing Special – patient and alive and breathing and musical. With collaborations and contributions from friends and musicians like Griff Goldsmith of Dawes, Zac Rae of Death Cab, Peter Silberman…
Holy Wave‘s evolution from laid back neo-psychedelic reverb freaks to a more experimental group who folding shoegaze and dream pop into their sound began on 2020’s Interloper, took flight on 2023’s Five of Cups, and comes as close to perfect as possible on 2026’s enthralling i’m DADA. Working with longtime engineer Joo Joo Ashworth and the duo behind Lorelle Meets the obsolete (Lorena Quintanilla and Alberto González) in the latter’s Mexican studio, the band have left behind almost all their garage rock influences, instead trafficking in heavily overloaded shoegaze, billowing dream pop, echoing dub reggae, and deconstructed indie rock, while also taking a swing at their own take on the charmingly retro futuristic pop Stereolab invented back in…
The Temper Trap conjure an elemental love on their fourth studio album, the shimmeringly moody Sungazer. The follow-up to 2016’s Thick as Thieves, the album is the Australian band’s first LP of new material since going on hiatus in 2018. It also arrives on the heels of singer Dougy Mandagi’s own solo project, the Blood Moon EP, which found him recording in Berlin and exploring a more electronic sound. Also during his time away from the band, he deepened his Indonesian roots, settling in Bali with his family. All of this experience informs Sungazer which finds Mandagi and his bandmates reinvigorated, leaping with abandon into the soaring falsetto and guitar-based balladry that made 2009’s Conditions and their 2012 eponymous album so compelling.
Sartre said that hell is other people, but hell is actually being stuck in the company of someone of a certain age banging on about the TV they used to watch as a kid. Thankfully, Luke Haines has previous where it comes to reanimating what could potentially be seen as nostalgia fodder, always bringing an intelligent twist, as 2011’s 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s attests. Fifteen years after that cult classic, we’re back predominantly in the 1970s, a fertile period for the Haines’ imagination where the Baader Meinhof gang are still bringing some much needed glamour to domestic terrorism (Haines also recorded the 2014 concept album New York in the ‘70s featuring songs about Alan Vega and Lou Reed, among others).
…includes remixes from horsegiirL, The Dare and FDC DJs (aka Carlos O’Connell and Tom Coll of Fontaines D.C.); three songs previously unreleased on streaming comprising “hi from me” which was originally only available on the Japanese CD, a demo of “don’t speak” recorded by Hester at her home studio and “u and me at home intro/outro”.
From The Rolling Stones to Robert Palmer, love as a medical emergency is a perennial theme for songwriters. Well, sound the alarm and send out the paramedics once again, because Wet Leg are in love. It’s all over their second album, but explicitly ringing out as a klaxon call on current single “CPR”. “Hello 999, what’s your emergency?” asks Rhian Teasdale with call handler calm before making her orgasmic self-diagnosis:…
Plenty of people turn to punk seeking an escape; Nick Vicario needed distance from the thing itself. As a player in West Coast bands like Crisis Man, Cower, and Public Eye, the Oregon-born musician has spent most of his life abiding by hardcore ethos both onstage and off, for better or for worse. When he relocated to Los Angeles and launched his mostly-solo project Smirk with 2021’s scuzzy, lo-fi LP, he was indulging in the reckless, destructive behaviors that tend to be more alluring in song than in practice. In a breakthrough moment he says came to him as a gradual epiphany rather than a dispatch from rock bottom, Vicario realized drugs had taken too much control over his life. With his third Smirk album, Speculative Fiction, he’s on the side of recovery — but it…
Lynn Blakey was not a name that gained a great deal of traction commercially but she was an influential figure in the indie rock and alt-country scene in her home state of North Carolina where she DJ’d on college radio in the early ’80s; this was before forming Oh Ok in Athens Georgia with Michel Stipe’s sister Lynda (driven by the inspiration of seeing REM at a small local gig). She collaborated with others such as guitarist Mitch Easter in The Royal Opposition and guitarist Michael Chumbris in Glory Fountain, but her most well-known group experience was with Tres Chicas, a band formed in the late ’90s in Raleigh, NC, with Blakey, Caitlin Cary (from Whiskeytown) and Tonya Lamm (from Hazeldine). The group sang together for a few years before releasing Sweetwater in…
Fire Man’s Caio Brentar has a warbly, emotion wracked tenor, a way with melody and an affinity for loud, distorted guitar. His first full-length (following three cassette EPs) explores the same nervy, amplified but vulnerable and ultra-anthemic/romantic neighborhood inhabited by Cloud Nothings and the Japandroids. He works here with just one other musician, drummer and producer Kiyoshi Chinzei, alternating between naked confessional simplicity and blaring garage rock, sometimes within the space of one song.
“Marry Me,” for instance, fluctuates from clanky, post-punk bass and drums to fey, indie pop verse to an exhilarating blast of guitar riffage. The verse extolling the loved one’s virtues is quiet, but the storm of angst and hormones she…