The third solo album by New Orleans D.I.Y. musician Urq (Spllit, W-9), This Dismal Village marks his Exploding in Sound label debut.
It’s his first to be recorded entirely on a four-track cassette Portastudio, almost ditching any digital elements in the process (although some chords from a phone app were looped into “Kings in Bed,” for instance). A dingy, lo-fi blend of playful prog-pop, druggy psychedelia, angular punk, and alternate tunings, it’s a dystopia-themed concept album that travels through time with stops in the Dark Ages, the 1950s, and the present, and each track represents a location in the village. While not recommended for those in a dour or earnest mood, cynicism is welcome.
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have…
Category: lo-fi
Frog were reclusive until they weren’t. The Americana band’s mastermind, Daniel Bateman, put the project on hold for four years before bringing his brother, Steve, into the previously one-man-band in 2023. The subsequent record, Grog, kicked off a prolific streak: Frog for Sale is the lo-fi alt-country duo’s third album in 14 months, a pseudo-sequel to 2025’s 1000 Variations on the Same Song. Playing with the textures of bossa nova, jangle pop, and twee folk in his signature falsetto, Bateman tears through a songwriting spree inspired by fellow creative compulsives, from Lil Wayne to Mozart, plunking away on piano, strumming guitar, and delivering goofy anecdotes like a homespun cabaret act. Getting lost in the whirlwind is half the fun.
Winston Hightower is indisputably punk. That’s not just because he’s been a touring bassist for hardcore bands like Soul Glo, Minority Threat, and Twompsax. The Columbus-born musician first began self-releasing his music over a decade ago, and across countless releases — most of them hard to find these days — Hightower’s career so far has seen him subtly incorporate post-punk, rap, and jazz into his ramshackle indie pop. He’s accrued the type of vast, elusive catalog that seems requisite for a DIY legend in the making. Judging by his songs, he’s an outsider, but he’s also a deeply connected player in the Midwest’s underground scene. His fringe appeal and defiant spirit together position him to be a celebrated cult favorite in the future. A few decades from now,…
Jed Bindeman’s ears hurt. As a co-founder of reissue label Freedom to Spend, he acquired some 1,200 cassettes from the archive of ND, an influential Austin-based magazine from the ‘80s and ‘90s, and began systematically working through the stacks of tapes. What he found made all the effort worthwhile: a home-recorded, self-illustrated cassette by someone called Larrison, entitled Connecters [sic]. When he pressed play on this mysterious tape, Bindeman heard a warbling, lo-fi keyboard, amateur yet sophisticated, unlike anything else he had encountered.
It turns out that Bindeman’s tape was the only copy of Connecters in existence. Its creator, Larrison Seidle, had moved from Indiana to Austin and recorded the entire album on…
In January of last year, Dagmar Zuniga uploaded her debut album to YouTube. By the serendipitous workings of the algorithm-perhaps boosted by the cryptic title and album art in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music took off with surprising speed; within months, she’d hit hundreds of thousands of views and was touring with Mount Eerie. Comment sections and message boards couldn’t contain her, and now in filth is seeing a much-deserved official release through experimental indie powerhouse AD 93.
Zuniga’s songs are alluring largely thanks to their otherworldly patina: simple compositions built around voice, guitar, and synth, filtered through tape hiss so they feel like alien transmissions. (In reality, the songs were captured between…
The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects.
Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of ’80s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into…
In the past couple of years, Spanish experimental label Rusia-IDK has released great avant pop for the chronically online: unsettling yet moving beat changes from Ralphie Choo, raucously tender-hearted production by Rusowsky, and some of the most gleefully deranged live visuals in recent memory. With slow songs from the heart and thrashing experiments that deconstruct and glitch flamenco, reggaeton, rap, and breakbeat, the collective has gained a following in Spain’s underground and even rubbed shoulders with its mainstream.
They were bound to drop the bola at some point. Enter MORI, rolling in from stage left. The Madrid-based artist’s doleful piano ballads and lo-fi torch songs were already some of…
…newly remastered and features six bonus tracks that were previously unreleased or hard to find.
The members of Vermont’s Guppyboy went on to form Ladybug Transistor and the Essex Green. With their 1997 debut on Sudden Shame Records, they experimented with their poppy variety of folk/country indie pop. The disc starts off with the slow and reflective “Washington Square,” which is followed by “Trouble,” which includes a healthy dose of banjo and could easily be mistaken for Wilco. “Avalon Ballroom” is a duet that has an awkward pause in the middle. Once the song finds its pace again, it’s an enjoyable and relaxed collaboration. “Affection” includes bittersweet and distant vocals, creating a haunting feeling throughout the track.
“Hypnagogic” is a word that refers to the unique space between sleeping and dreaming, and it’s not surprising that the term has been used to describe the music of Greg Jamie. Hailing from Portland, Maine, Jamie’s music is often an odd, woozy, and unsettling place, but his songs also contain warmth and comfort, as if he’s your guide through a dark place just before dawn. His debut album, Crazy Time, was a seductive, lo-fi gem, and the follow-up, Across a Violet Pasture, covers much of the same territory, but with a broader scope and greater ambition.
Jamie, who sings and plays guitar and synth, is joined primarily by Colby Nathan, who produced the album and also contributes bass, synth, guitar, and vocals (and was also a crucial….
The original lineup of LA post-punks Wall of Voodoo are one of the most unsung groups of their era. Marc Moreland rivaled Gang of Four’s Andy Gill for his ability to pack tension into minimal riffs — and added Morricone flourishes that set him apart from all the other angular guitarists of the time. Joe Nanini was an equally inventive drummer with a massive arsenal of percussion instruments and rhythm boxes at his disposal. And frontman Stan Ridgway brought a distinct noir element, thanks to his use of synthesizers, paranoid lyrics, and a vocal style like no one else’s. Together, nobody sounded like them, and their debut EP — with its spine-chilling cover of “Ring of Fire” — and first two albums are all great.
Wall of Voodoo had a breakthrough with…
Pastor Chris Congregation – West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up Serpents” (2025)
High in the mountains of West Virginia lies McDowell County. Formerly a hotspot for American coal mining, technological advancements and outsourced labour crept through Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century, leaving communities like McDowell destitute. From 1950 to 2020, the county saw its population fall by over 80%, and by 2015 it had the highest number of drug-related deaths of any county in the United States.
Alongside abandoned buildings and burnt-out cars, McDowell County is dense with churches. Typically Pentecostal, these have become a refuge for a community on the fringes of a zombified American dream clinging to bygone prosperity. One is The House of the Lord Jesus, also known as the last remaining snake-handling…
…Peanut is the sixth-ish album by New York-based musician and engineer Otto Benson, and the first with vocals. He shed a lot of skin before arriving at this album’s dusky, dusty sound, which is defined by gentle nylon-stringed guitar and shivery Rhodes piano and lands somewhere at the intersection of Frankie Cosmos, Hayden Pedigo, and Let It Die-era Feist. A scan of his meticulously maintained website reveals a trove of hyperactive vaporwave under the name Memo Boy; ambient music as Ronnie P; puckish hyperpop under the name OTTO; a tingly beat tape with Mietze Conte; and at least a handful more experiments with different forms of contemporary electronic pop.
…All of this is to say that form is clearly important to Benson; although Peanut is his…
Mel, the second East River Pipe album released by Merge Records, will be reissued on vinyl this January as the label’s first entry in the Secretly Society. Going beyond bringing a long out-of-print classic back to wax, the reissue represents the first time Mel has been available in full on any physical format, as “Spotlight,” exclusive to Merge’s 1996 LP and CD, is joined here by “The Way They Murdered Me” and “Miracleland,” which were exclusive to the Shinkansen CD issued outside of North America.
Like all of East River Pipe’s output, Mel was written, performed, recorded, and mixed by F.M. Cornog on a Tascam 388 mini-studio at his home, which was then a small apartment in Astoria, Queens.
Within that space, he conjures nothing less than the fullness of life beyond it, the characters…
“Oak Parks” is an entropic blues, its sweet, heart-tugging hook corroded by murk and echo, the slash and clamor of guitars paced by a slack-gaited drum machine. Fuzzy, sleepy, faintly dissonant vocals slip and slide over the melody.
Consider it an acoustic, home-spun version of Bardo Pond’s most shamanic moments, or a Linda Smith cassette left to warp in the afternoon sun.
This new collaboration between Miranda Spatula and her West Coast sometime bandmate Lila Jarzombek is beautifully, dizzyingly unstrung.
Miranda Spatula is much loved around here for her rough but charming work with The Spatulas. Lila Jarzombek sometimes plays guitar in Spatulas, but her primary project is Nowhere Flower, a low-fi guitar and beat machine ditties.
Digging up information on lo-fi pop entity Great Area feels almost counterintuitive, given her sparse online presence and succinct promotional materials accompanying her latest record, Good Coding, courtesy of fellow absurdist Lolina’s Relaxin label. The musical project by London artist Georgie Nettell presents itself in the form of brief, laconic pop songs which tread the line between social commentary and disillusionment, chronicling moments of city life with little apparent enthusiasm, and yet all the more entertaining for their honesty.
The two-minute bop “100% enthusiastic”, from last year’s sample-heavy LP light decline, might be the perfect introduction to the Great Area treatment: a recalcitrant beat and a wistful bassline conjure a sense of mischief, until…
Kai Slater is obsessed with the past. For those of us who share his interests, that’s working out splendidly. Slater, a 21-year-old Chicago singer-songwriter, first gained renown as a member of Lifeguard, a trio whose noisy, melodic post-punk songs turn ’70s and ’80s classics into rocket fuel. He dresses like a mod dandy and publishes a handmade zine titled for NEU!’s krautrock classic “Hallogallo.” It’s not just that he devours the stylistic palette of the 20th century underground; he’s also keeping the flame for its DIY ethos, gritty and grounded in community.
Some of the leading figures from that world have taken notice. Lifeguard signed to Matador Records, one of the current indie landscape’s most direct links back to the years before…
Even in the most deeply personal narrative records, you can only know so much of an artist’s story by what they choose to tell you. Maybe the picture only adds up to 75% once you’ve had your fun pushing pieces together on the countertop. More likely you only get a curated chunk, the rest safely banked in the artist’s head forever. Maybe they don’t even have it all put together themselves. It’s all fragments, the way memories can be.
A Fear of Open Water is, in the words of its creator Mike James, “sort of an anthology of opaque memories from my childhood” and deals with an attempted coming to terms with a traumatic event from those years. He speaks of sifting through social worker reports trying to piece together the whole of it, this thing unspoken to us…
Saul Adamczewski, co-founder of Fat White Family and frontman of Insecure Men, endured a harrowing personal collapse in 2024, spending months in a cupboard in Tulse Hill amid severe psychosis and opioid addiction. After calling his mother and undergoing withdrawal, he began rebuilding his life, reconnecting with family and bandmates. This recovery led to A Man For All Seasons, the second Insecure Men album and a creative rebirth.
Recorded in the spring of 2025, at Ray Davis’ Konk Studios in Hornsey, North London with producer Raf Rundell, the album reflects Adamczewski’s shift toward collaboration, with a band lineup including Marley Mackay, Victor Jakeman, Fat White Family’s Alex White and Steely Dan Monte.
Guitar, the Portland-bred indie rockers, centred around songwriter and producer Saia Kuli, have always been up for a challenge. From fighting for their spot in a burgeoning art scene in their home city, to toying with the limits of their lo-fi aesthetics to achieve colorful compositions, Kuli has never shied away from the complexity of creating something unique.
The first two projects from the band were tight snapshots of what the band has to offer, quick listens that act as an outline for Kuli’s nuanced fusion work and fearlessness. While those albums are fantastically hazy and intricate, they felt like stepping stones leading up to something greater, and that finish line has arrived on We’re Headed to the Lake.
The post-January 7th period of Ariel’s creative output was possibly just as chaotic as the immediate aftermath of his dropping from Mexican Summer, his Haunted Graffiti bandmates breaking off from him quietly and the subsequent blacklisting from basically every record label and performing venue across the United States. While Ariel is no stranger to outlandish media soundbites and over-dramatic moments, there is clearly a major evolution in his public perception when looking at, for example, the Coachella rage out versus going to a Trump rally with the message that the “election was stolen” and obvious anti-democratic bull***tery contained in that entire ordeal. While I am someone who can separate the art from the artist, a lot of Ariel’s views…