Indie rock outfit Office Dog came out of the gate with a rare sense of self-assurance and individuality. While their music typically leans toward the downtrodden, exploring loneliness and loss, the lo-fi mosaics they craft on their releases reflect confidence in a sound they can call their own. Finding this sense of singularity so early in their career made them an immediate standout in a burgeoning scene, with their place as rising stars in the genre cemented by releases like their debut LP, Spiel, and the short yet potent, texture-driven Doggerland. While this uniqueness is refreshing, it raises the question all bands like Office Dog face: Do they stick to the winning formula they quickly cultivated, or do they lean on the daring and dive deeper into their distinctiveness,…
Category: indie-rock
Following up on their expansive 2024 double album Stung!, the Western Australia-based psychedelic rock outfit Pond wanted to tighten things up. The result is the much more focused Terrestrials, a collection of synth-heavy rockers that shine with a neon gleam.
The group – Nick Allbrook, Jay Watson, Joe Ryan, Jamie Terry, and James Ireland entered the studio with three rules: no fuzz pedals, no ballads, and, as they say, “no Pink Floyd shit”. The resulting ten songs are supremely focused on an early-80’s electro-pop sound. The opening “Skyworks” successfully sets the tone for what is to follow as the New Wave-laden synths, tight, revved-up riffs, and drum machine get the dance floor packed in rousing fashion.
Can we get a “WOO-HOO”? For “lost” albums to see the light of day during an artist’s lifetime is something of a rarity. Fortunately, Graham Coxon is very much alive and kicking and has gifted us with his ninth solo LP Castle Park. Recorded in 2011 during the sessions for A+E, it fell by the wayside as Coxon found himself occupied with another Blur reunion tour and album. It was then further buried by his soundtrack work on The End of the Fucking World, his graphic novel and accompanying music for ‘Superstate’, his life as half of The WAEVE with partner Rose Elinor Dougall, and then another roll of the dice with his old Britpop chums for some mega Wembley and festival shows and the sublime ‘Ballad of Darren’.
Now, in a rare moment of calm, Coxon is…
Turnover have made a habit of shedding their skin with each new record. The Virginia Beach outfit, led by brothers Austin and Casey Getz, came up in an early-2010s emo and pop-punk scene that had long abandoned the mathematics of its Midwest enclave and the theatrics of its biggest stars. Their debut Magnolia basically refused any classification beyond “alternative rock,” a sound hardly built to last. Nevertheless, Turnover garnered enough of a following to whisk fans into the world of dream pop with their 2015 breakout Peripheral Vision, and they’ve only continued to evolve since then, pulling from sunbaked vineyard rock, lazy background music and vocoded disco with varying results. Their sixth album, Down on Earth, looks back on that consensus masterpiece with…
…featuring 8 bonus tracks including rare studio recordings + iconic live performances.
Kaleo (a Hawaiian word for “the sound”), are a group of talented young rock/blues musicians from (where else would you expect?) Mosfellsbaer, outside Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik, and only recently relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2015.
Having riled up a significant following in their home country as well amassing a horde of streams on Spotify, the band signed with Atlantic Records, and now we have their first complete gift to American listeners.
A/B sounds like a greatest hits album. In a way it kind of is, as it draws from Kaleo’s Icelandic self-titled debut and the handful of singles that have been released in America.
The four words no one thought they would ever see appeared last year. They were “GRAMMY nominee Jon Spencer.”
But that’s what happened when Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton’s 2023 album Death Wish Blues was up for one of those iconic awards. And by extension, so was producer Jon Spencer.
It’s worth noting that his career spans over four decades crafting some of the edgiest, most frictional and at times discordant roots music ever appearing on major or indie labels. A variety of sonically boundary-pushing outfits such as Pussy Galore, Boss Hog, Heavy Trash, Jon Spencer & the HIT Makers and, probably the most popular one, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion were all helmed by Spencer.
Much of the publicity surrounding Deadlights refers to it as Lauren Lakis’ debut, but surely her releases have been appearing fairly regularly since Ferocious in 2018, making this her fourth album? Whatever; the cover photo of Deadlights appears to be a messy, witty and possibly dark homage to the cover of the Cars’ 1978 debut.
There is sometimes a pop sensibility lurking at the heart of Lakis’ songs, but although powerful, it’s definitely not “power pop,” as its melodies are generally submerged in surging and ebbing distorted guitars. Deadlights is essentially a shoegaze record with some strong ‘90s alt-rock inflections, and much of it trudges along disconsolately with Lakis’ dreamy, reverb-masked voice riding the waves of guitar and…
…includes two bonus tracks: Mitski’s covers of One Direction’s “Fireproof” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool to Want You” previously only available on compilations.
Based in Brooklyn but with an unsettled background that called over a dozen countries on multiple continents home before she reached her twenties, Mitski Miyawaki makes her Dead Oceans debut with her fourth album, Puberty 2.
Her background is not irrelevant here, as the album reflects her own, very personal — and intentional or not, her generation’s — crisis of belonging as she recounts stories of navigating young adulthood in the City. A visceral work that shares the immediacy of classic punk and confessional singer/songwriter fare at once, Puberty 2 takes…
Devlin and the Harm sits in an intriguing place somewhere between widescreen indie rock and shadowed americana. There are moments here that feel vast; songs opening into towering choruses, drums crashing, powerful guitars, melodies that make you think of open skies, but the emotional landscape beneath them is far darker and more intimate. Across these eleven tracks, the band returns repeatedly to themes of collapse, inheritance, addiction, memory, and the uneasy possibility of redemption. It is an album concerned less with escape than with what remains after illusions fail.
The opening track, ‘Kingdom Comes’, immediately establishes the album’s central tensions. Built around a slow-burning atmosphere…
If you were going to go looking for rough but melodic bands, you might very well start in Ohio. That’s where the granddaddy of them all — Guided by Voices — got its start, not to mention the Greenhornes, New Bomb Turks, Times New Viking, Cloud Nothings and many, many others. There’s something about flat, fertile, churchy Ohio that encourages rebellion, even oddity — remember Pere Ubu and Devo came from here. But there’s also a midwestern full-hearted-ness in even the most confrontational of bands. There’s ragged soul in ragged riffs here, and if you want evidence, look no further than Smug Brothers.
Smug Brothers, out of Dayton, have been at it for two decades, garnering modest success but an engaging catalogue. The band formed…
San Francisco trio Midrift are one of alternative music’s fastest-rising names.
Arriving at a time where shoegaze is at its commercial peak – and where almost anything drenched in reverb and emotional ambiguity gets labelled as such – Silhouette finds Midrift stepping directly into that conversation. But as the album buckles beneath the weight of its influences, it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what the band themselves are trying to say.
The group have already amassed millions of streams through viral singles like ‘Twin Flames’ and ‘Unrequited’, building momentum through support slots with Fleshwater and Angel Du$t, and even landed on the NME 100 earlier this year. What makes their rise more striking is their age.
If there were an award for artists with the most consistent bodies of work, Widowspeak would surely be among the winners. Since their 2011 self-titled debut album, their Americana-meets-grunge-meets-shoegaze fundamentals have barely changed; when they do wander, as on 2022’s quasi-concept album Jacket, they always return to their comfort zone – which is exactly where Roses resides. If anything, Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’ seventh album doubles down on classic sounds and imagery. The thumping kick drum and twang that begin “The Hook” have more in common with Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones than Mazzy Star, while its longing for the one who got away could hardly be more ageless. Widowspeak’s reverence for the time-tested…
Zoh Amba has been making waves recently as a free jazz saxophonist in the same vein as Peter Brötzmann or Albert Ayler. With a reputation built on incendiary live performance, a list of high-profile collaborators, and a handful of critically acclaimed albums (the first of which, O, Sun, was produced by fellow avant-garde traveller John Zorn), you would be forgiven for expecting a certain kind of career trajectory, one that features heavily in the pages of The Wire and on the stages of the most outré jazz festivals. But Amba has other ideas. They are, in baseball parlance, a genuine two-way player, someone who excels equally in two disciplines that are so different that at first there appears to be no link between them.
The other string to Amba’s bow…
Modest Mouse has long been a band of wild contrasts and combinations that shouldn’t work, but do. Centered around the emotionally and cerebrally unfiltered character of Isaac Brock’s songwriting, the sound of this longrunning Pacific Northwestern indie group often finds tormented yelps delivering accidentally profound philosophical truths, while the musical backing waffles between chaotic noise and blissfully melodic sweetness. The eighth studio album from Modest Mouse, An Eraser and a Maze, comes thirty three years into their practice of organizing these unruly feelings and sounds, five years after their last album, 2021’s pop-forward The Golden Casket, and four years after the death of drummer and founding member Jeremiah Green.
One of the more enigmatic bands of the classic 4AD era, Swallow was formed by Louise Trehy and Mike Mason, who met in early 90’s Camberwell, London. both were deeply involved with the independent music scene of the time; Louise co-founded Setanta Records (home of The Divine Comedy, Edwyn Collins and Into Paradise with whom Mike would occasionally play), and Mike traversed between bike courier, video director, and lighting designer for Spacemen 3, Slowdive, Spiritualized, Curve and Chapterhouse. Prompted by Louise, they started writing songs together, drawing inspiration from a healthy mix of sources: CAN, noise, post-punk, and American forces of nature like Captain Beefheart and Butthole Surfers. Their first songs quickly surfaced and were recorded…
To say that history looms over Horror is just another way of saying that it’s a Mekons record. The globally scattered collective, which originally convened in Leeds, England, in the late 1970s, has long drawn lines connecting the warmongers of our time to the dominant creeps of centuries past. The first words they sing on Horror depict the departure on Christmas 1654 of the frigate Gloucester. Tasked with vanquishing Spanish control of the West Indies, the warship gave up and settled for conquering Jamaica. Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher, pick your present villain — they all work for the same company.
Horror, released in April 2025, maneuvers in vintage Mekons fashion between the planting season of our discontent and the present,…