The Cat’s Miaow started in 1992 as a home-recording duo, Bart Cummings and Andrew Withycombe knocking out songs on Withycombe’s four-track. Soon joined by Kerrie Bolton and Cam Smith, the quartet spent the next five years quietly, slowly working away in the suburbs of Melbourne. They’ve long been spoken-of in hushed tones in pop circles for their perfectly unadorned nuggets of gentle indiepop mastery, put to 4-track tape and drip-fed to the world a few decades back via 7” singles, cassettes and compilation appearances.
Following a pair of recent and *very* well-received compilations on the excellent World of Echo label, The Cat’s Miaow were inspired to regroup to play some shows and begin working on new material. The result is When You Smiled and Turned Away…
Category: lo-fi
Olivia Tremor Control’s 2026 album The Same Place is a melancholy triumph for the always brilliant, now defunct psychedelic collective. After the band reformed in the early 2000’s, they began working on music in fits and starts while never getting to the point of completion and weathering some tragedy along the way. Both guiding lights behind their ambitious, murky, and delightfully hooky sound passed away; Bill Doss in 2012, Will Cullen Hart in 2024, just before this album was finished. Producer Jason NeSmith plus a bunch of band members and others worked together to put the album together the way Hart wanted according to the notes he left behind. Thanks to everyone’s efforts the record works both as a stunning return to form and a tribute to Doss and Hart.
In the early ‘90s, Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer were living in Olympia, Washington, barely out of high school and finding themselves in the very heart of the just-forming riot grrrl scene. Inspired by the feminist politics and exciting rethinking of what punk rock was capable of that defined the riot grrrl movement, the duo formed Heavens to Betsy, an emotionally furious and musically raw group consisting of Sawyer on a spartan drum kit and Tucker on guitar and vocals.
From 1991-1994 Heavens to Betsy performed and recorded steadily, disbanding after releasing multiple singles and a sole album, with both parties quickly forming new bands (Heavens to Betsy was Tucker’s first band before co-founding the wildly popular and influential…
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…
…Originally self-released in 2023 as an ultra-limited cassette run of about 50 copies, the album received a wider official reissue on vinyl, CD, and digital formats on September 4, 2026 via Perennial and K Records.
Sharp Pins‘ Mod Mayday 23 is a cute concept; the band’s Kai Slater picks his favorite tracks from the Mods Mayday ’79 collection, which was recorded in at a live 1979 concert featuring the cream of the U.K mod revival crop. Bands like Squire, Secret Affair, the Merton Parkas, and Small Hours were all formed in the wake of the Jam’s ascendance and followed a similar path of pairing the hopped-up R&B sounds of the original mod scene with the feisty aggression of punk. Slater captures the intensity and hookiness of…
The 2020s have been a decade marked by loss. We’ve lost faith and trust in institutions that were already slowly collapsing. A whole generation lost out on formative experiences without the turbulent disruption of the pandemic. And in the music world, we’ve largely lost the kind of artists who could emerge organically without the noxious influence of algorithms or million-dollar spends. It’s a miracle, then, whenever a legitimate gain comes along, and for the music industry in particular, someone who could both draw from the traditions of American rock and bring them to newer, deeper, unexpected places. Although his success was partly engineered by a digital marketing agency, Cameron Winter has proven to be a vital addition to this increasingly endangered species of performers…
Radiator Hospital has taken many forms since it began as a home-recorded solo project for the emotionally driven songs of Sam Cook-Parrott. The sound moved from heartbroken bedroom punk poured directly out of Cook-Parrott’s heart into his four-track on his earliest releases into the tightly wound full-band experience that toured often and collectively tracked some of his most memorable songs. There have even been dips back into solo material and expansions on the full band sound along the way, such as the Eno-esque synths and cantankerous drum machines of 2023’s Can’t Make Any Promises.
With Distorting Time, Cook-Parrott is on his own again, back at home with the four-track, but he also brings some new ideas in as he…
Communication often has multiple angles: at the beginning of Is affect real?, the third song on Frances Chang’s new album, she sings “Sometimes I want to wear / A head of light blonde hair / I don’t care if that’s unfair / Or makes me ordinary”, and she’s being vulnerable while also putting up a defence against being judged. It’s an interesting mix of defiance and insecurity, and Been Thinking Bout Confession sees Chang delivering this kind of lyrical material over idiosyncratic, contemplative instrumentals.
The piano melodies that run through I can feel the waves are sweet and playful, contrasting nicely with the song’s rickety, distorted drum machine loop. Strings add some harmonic layers, sometimes lush, sometimes uneasy, and Chang’s…
After releasing six albums of varying heft under his Melaina Kol alias between 2016 and 2022, Nashville’s Logan Hornyak has taken longer over this one, time spent adding strings to a sometimes literal bow. Up to now, his output’s been decidedly loose and unbuffed indie pop, like an even lower-fi Sufjan Stevens combining a fragile voice, acoustic guitar and cheap electronics, all held together with paper glue. For Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then, he’s learned cello and harp, remembered some ancient piano lessons and found inventive ways of making solid song-like shapes out of them. The results are still small and delicate, but the focus is new.
First, the fibs: Hornyak claims to have moved away from guitar and electronics for this, but…
When you run a record label, no matter how big or small it is, and you are an artist yourself, you have the possibility to spread your wings as wide as you can, no matter how good (or not) it is.
Philadelphia’s Douglas Dulgarian has such capabilities. He runs an up-and-coming indie label (Julia’s War), plays in tagabow and They Are Gutting a Body of Water, but also spreads his ideas, along with Scott Turner (hooky) and Sam Silbert (hooky, circle of fire) in a project that goes by the name of god of war, which just released its second album molly picture.
When you have the freedom to abandon any restrictions it can often lead you to excess, but this trio of musicians seems to have found quite a good balance between…
A running theory: The youth yearn for breakbeats. The frenetic electronics of Nineties dance music have rumbled beneath the surface of indie rock and pop for some time now. The current wave of new acts — think Fcukers, Underscores, and of course, PinkPantheress — wield the sound with an uncanny magnetism, as if communicating from a post-digital future. Ear, the London- and New York-based duo comprised of Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, who met while students at Bard College, have become the type of buzzing indie band you used to hear about in the mid-2000s, fitting as the renaissance of that era’s sounds points to a more spiritual than aesthetic concern.
Following the release of their debut single, “Nerves,” in 2024, the pair have built…
Presenting a local music scene to a wider audience can be an arduous task if it is a scene that has already made a name for itself.
Den Tapes (yes, just cassette tapes and Bandcamp) is one of those outlets that tries to go deeper into a better-known local scene that is Seattle, Washington, digging up a serious twee/jangle/lo-fi/bedroom pop gem that is Super Honey Teaspoon! by Soda Gumball.
If the name of the project might hark back to the days when bubble gum rock ruled, then Jealous Yellow (one Benjamin Rea), the name of the person behind the project, might be a bit left field too.
Yet, make no mistake, Jealous Yellow, who doubles as a music instructor, obviously knows every big or small sub-genre where pop and…
Key to World Peace, the second album by Australian musician Sam Perry, aka Prophetic Justice Ministry, is an odd bird: Sometimes it rattles and churns, synth and drum machine scraping up against each other like ungreased pistons; at other points, it floats like fog, sounding a little like the creeping, elegant scores of Angelo Badalamenti. It frequently feels like a DIY folk record, not least when Perry, who was raised in New Zealand, faithfully covers Lana Del Rey’s “Mariners Apartment Complex” with a distinct Kiwi lilt. Uniting these decidedly disparate moods is a keen sense of atmosphere: Key to World Peace sounds like it was recorded live in some kind of emptied swimming pool, Perry standing at one end and his recording equipment at the other. The resulting…
Lowertown’s Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg almost didn’t survive themselves. After signing to Dirty Hit as teens, they were strapped into the up-and-comer indie rock grind, touring and churning out EPs and an eventual debut album, I Love to Lie, in 2022. The problem wasn’t that they drifted apart, but rather that they got too close. Co-dependently close. After a four-year “break” (three, if you’re counting the Skin of My Teeth EP), Osby and Weinberg have re-emerged with Ugly Duckling Union, their long-awaited sophomore record. Back in Weinberg’s basement, where they cut the earliest Lowertown tracks, the pair return to their blunt yet lyrical writing and unraveling song structures. The result comes with a little more grit and a little less studio polish, which is perfect…
Between their 2021 debut full-length In This Town and 2025’s Whispers in the Speed Machine, Ohio band The Laughing Chimes moved from a shiny, jangly type of pop into slightly darker waters by adding a post-punk edge to their sound. Between these two albums, however, the band was working on new material that was a little closer to the sunny pop of their earlier work, demo’ing song ideas on cassette four-track.
Behind Your Blue Fields collects some of these lo-fi sketches from this in-between period, offering documentation of their development from the vantage point of insulated home recordings and exploring what it might have been like if these happier songs had been worked through to completion for their second album.
‘Blue’, one of the singles from Deb Never’s debut album, tells a story of unexpected meetings and chance-encounter love. “It’s the way you creep into my life,” she sings in its hook. “Like your favourite out of the blue.” It’s an apt description of Deb’s own aesthetic: songs that arrive unannounced and unfurl gradually and patiently.
Arcade has been a long time coming. Following a breakthrough appearance on Brockhampton’s ‘Ginger’ in 2019, the Seattle-raised, LA-based musician spent years working through a series of EPs before arriving at her debut proper. Now, ex-Brockhampton member Romil Hemnani returns to executive produce and feature, while Dominic Fike (who supposedly passed through the studio at various times during its recording)…
A tribute to a tribute? During the final mix sessions for Peggy Suicide, Cope invited some musicians to Ramport Studio to celebrate the album’s completion. He called this late-night-party recording session E-Man Groovin’ – a tribute to the Jimmy Castor Bunch song of the same name, and the album’s mascot. Since Cope’s old digital tapes were damaged, this new tribute was created using recycled loops and samples from the original. Fifteen grooves imbued with the distinctive Peggy Suicide spirit – Kraut, Baggie, On-the-One – rescued from the archives of Oblivion! Yowzah!
Tracklist shows 15 tracks. However, CD only has 14 tracks. This is due to two of the tracks segueing together as one track. Track 12 is 5:55 long. “Rizla Deutschland” actually lasts…
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…