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…
Category: indie-rock
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…
If the sepia-toned photograph of a house on a hill is any indication, proun’s debut LP Maybe Luck is about revisiting memories, working through them and standing on the other end with a different perspective. The Austin-based trio’s main songwriter, Jamie Weed, also the band’s guitarist and singer, works through the tumultuous feelings that came with her gender transition.
Originally written solo on a nylon-string guitar, when mapped out with bassist Dante Zatto and drummer/engineer Alex Peterson, the songs on proun’s first album become a touching exploration of what it means to accept yourself, even if that means pushing past others’ expectations of who you should be.
Weed began writing this album with the title…
There’s a certain charm to an after-school band. In an age of industry plants and X Factor it-boys, listeners still crave the intimacy of bedroom pop and the rough authenticity of garage rock.
Atta Boy has carved out a home between the two homegrown genres, and no wonder: the LA band’s four members met in middle school, formed the group in their early teens, and released their debut album, Out of Sorts, around the time of their high school graduation.
After an eight-year hiatus spent pursuing other interests — one of them being a starring role in Yellowstone and another in Top Gun: Maverick — the band reunited in 2020, returning with a tighter, more layered version of the sound that made Atta Boy a cult favorite in the first place.
Las Robertas make a move away from the surf and garage influences of the past on 2026’s All We Need is Now, adding a third guitar player, and diving headfirst into dream pop. The Costa Rican band were very good at raucous garage rock and moody psychedelia, they also prove to be really adept at big, bouncy dream pop. They splice it with shoegaze, Brit Pop, Madchester, and indie rock, while still keeping a little bit of swirling psych in the mix. Not surprisingly with three of them in the band, the guitars are the star of the show. They are huge, taking turns jangling, chiming, crunching, and threatening to rip the speaker cones to shreds, but never overshadowing the wide-open melodies or the vocals. Mercedes Oller’s lead vocals are the calm inside the storm and when…
Recorded live in April 2025, Vol. 2 – Transmissions West joins Vol. 1 – Transmissions East for a complete record of the two incredible nights spent in Berlin’s Funkhaus.
Don+t Settle is a studio album, yet recorded in front of a live audience. Looking both forward and back, East and West, it’s a retrospective of sorts that showcases some of Glen’s best loved songs and encapsulates the energy Glen is known for as a performer.
“I’ve always been more comfortable on stage than in a studio. I love making records. I love the proces But the song lives before an audience. A song needs witnesses. It’s where I feel like I can really grab hold of it. And know it – the way that it’s meant to be known.
“My Ice Queen” immediately makes its case. A mid-to-low tempo chugging rhythm underpins choppy guitar, a contemplative, distant vocal and a general air of disassociation. Brief sections of the song feature – albeit muted – guitar mangling and feedback. The lyrics tell of a “heartbreak machine, coolest girl you’ve ever seen.” Icy? Absolutely. Then take the similarly restrained “Life Goes on,” so hazy a rumination it seems to have materialised from the mists enveloping Venus.
It isn’t all so crepuscular. “Song for John” – seemingly an elegy for John Lennon – has a gentle bossa nova sway. It’s small-combo, guitar-centred pop at its most lean, most understated. Elsewhere, the airy “Even if” is yet another arresting example of the sometimes buoyant but mostly…
Knitting, the Montreal-based rock outfit, has had one of the more interesting trajectories in the burgeoning contemporary scene. From their humble beginnings dating back to 2021 to the defining moment that placed them in front of their now-cult fanbase, 2024’s Some Kind of Heaven, the four-piece has exercised the limits of modern rock through cathartic sonic calisthenics and a raw, fearless vulnerability. Now, on their highly anticipated new album, the dense, dark, and emotionally complex Souvenir, knitting is already showing signs of restless creativity. This is not the follow-up we expected, but the one the band needed to make, an evolution of sound that is as familiar as it is alien, and the band is holding nothing back in terms of both brutal…
Since their debut album, 2014’s Sun Structures, established them as neo-psychedelic rockers in the first degree, Temples have made a point of never repeating themselves. The albums that followed have taken all sorts of creative left turns, from Volcano‘s synth-heavy modern pop to Hot Motion‘s stripped-down jangle to Exotico‘s stadium indie grandeur. The shift they make on 2026’s Bliss is their most drastic. Influenced by the electronic music and rave culture of the ’90s, the band trade out guitars for synthesizers, pump up the beats, and do their best to add some psychedelic mystery to a very retro dance-rock sound. The album is loaded with slamming beats, huge-sounding synths, jagged sound effects, and dancefloor vibes. Tracks like “Revelation” and…
The iconic backdrop of California – from the Hollywood hills to its gnarly mountain trails – has always been a particularly evocative source of inspiration when it comes to art, so it’s not all too surprising to learn that Joe Newman, frontman of alt-J, felt so drawn to its confines for his first solo foray. His first venture proper outside of the band since their formation almost 20 years ago now – under the moniker of his former screenname JJerome87 – The Canyon is a bold offering that comes dripping with a sultry California spirit. Opener ‘Mr Alligator’ swaggers to life in a bluesy manner, before ‘Green Velvet’ hazily saunters in, bathed in the kind of enveloping warmth that only Los Angeles could help conjure up. An assembled cast of session musicians and…
Sister Gemini is one Remy Jean, supported on her debut album Screaming Crying Laughing Sighing by a quite select collaborative crew, with musicians and producers that have worked with the list of likes that reads as a sort of ‘who’s who’ list of currently hip artists, from Father John Misty to Phoebe Bridgers, to Blake Mills, among others. So why would such a hip list enlist their services for a relatively new artist’s debut? Well, Remy Jean has got that, as French would say je ne sais quoi that covers an intriguing ground as if Camera Obscure was covering Liz Phair and Throwing Muses at the same time.
It all comes down that Remy Jean is coming out with her debut album with a fully formed, personal sound that was shaped by her…
The spirit of Liz Phair, Fiona Apple and the late great Jill Sobule emanates from this fantastic first record, and these 11 songs show Emma Gerson (aka lucky break) is a name to look out for. The album was mixed and mastered by Grammy-nominated Jessica Thompson and was recorded with Gerson and her friend and co-producer Elliott Woodbridge in a studio in Burbank. They did all the instrumentation together; Gerson was on acoustic guitar, Woodbridge did everything else. And what a confident and truly enjoyable listen it is.
It opens with ‘Big Swing’, a dreamy, guitar-drenched ode to the challenges of reaching adulthood. This new feeling is a difficult one, and she’s voicing her feelings of being all at sea. An opener that captures the imagination…
The first album in 17 years from Belgian alternative rock stalwarts Ghinzu can be a cause for celebration. W.O.W.A and its driving initial salvo of the groove-laden “When Other Worlds Await,” “Snow White,” and “Out of Control” explodes out of the speakers as an enigmatic and propulsive take on the early 2000s indie rock.
Think Interpol if they played their songs faster and took in elements of the atmosphere The Strokes sought to create at their peak. Three songs in and you’re hooked. W.O.W.A feels like a debut album and, given the gap in releases for the band in a sense it is something of a rebirth, but to find that this is merely the latest stop in an increasingly creative and robust discography is all the more satisfying.
The San Diego via Boston alt trio’s complete original studio recordings, remastered, restored, and compiled into one lavish box set. ‘Wait a Lifetime’ gathers the band’s peerless albums ‘Junk’ and ‘This Afternoon Malady’, plus ‘R.I.P.’, expanded to include their unfinished 3rd album, singles, splits, and comp tracks.
Jejune were never the Berklee-educated New England scene’s best band, but they proved their mettle all the same, penning a pair of albums that almost inadvertently steered the course of the emo underground. Those records aren’t without their faults, sure, but it’s hard to get an accurate read on the US scene without them. And they’ve never sounded better; with a fresh lick of paint, ‘Junk’ and its superior, if way more…
Once written off, the ’00s indie movement has proved to be remarkably enduring. Just look at Hard-Fi – the band took time out after 2011 album Killer Sounds, but have rebounded in fine style. Last summer saw some of their biggest headline shows to date, while a 20th anniversary (when did we get so old?) re-issue of debut album Stars of CCTV stormed the charts.
New album Sweating Someome Else’s Fever is their first in 15 years, and it leans in to their live prowess. Each song feels tailor made for those rousing performances, the crisp production aimed at presenting the work in a natural, high-energy way.
‘They Ain’t Your Friends’ is a storming introduction, before Mike Kalle and Bajo Del Sol…