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…
Category: lo-fi
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…
…Alexei Shishkin is a glutton for punishment. Good Times is his 11th album in an eight-year recording career. 2024 alone saw three releases. His DIY work ethic makes this possible, but there has to be some kind of creative drive there too, some intense need to populate a void with words and music. And while he is most definitely a DIY artist (the album went from absolute zero to twelve fully realised tracks in the space of four days), Good Times sees him add a layer or two of expertise to his working methods. Recorded at Big Nice Studio with Bradford Krieger, these songs are chaotic and whimsical and loose, but they are also richly detailed, layered, and thematically varied.
Lead single ‘Disco Elysium’ is a paean to the cult video game of the same name, and also…
For their fourth Pickle Darling album, New Zealand indie pop songwriter and recording tinkerer Lukas Mayo took an even more deconstructive approach than usual to their process. Their extensive stash of digital files containing things like voice memos, drum loops, and sampled guitar notes that had been chopped up, stretched out, and reversed for the album even caused Mayo’s laptop to peter out and refuse to open files.
Working with what they could recover seemed fitting for Bots, because the songs were about conflict, collapse, and things breaking down in general. The resulting effect is not as heavy-handed as this may sound, as, rather than sounding overtly chopped and screwed, it arrives at something much closer to a whimsical…
Music holds many forms, and for Jens Kuross, it’s a vehicle of inner expression, dotted with piano chimes. Curdled instrumentation decorates Crooked Songs, a record bristling with anguished vocals and pulverised piano patterns. Such is the frenzy that Kuross momentarily takes a break from singing during “No One’s Hiding from the Sun” to let out a ghostly whisper. This type of soulful searching is like a throwback to Roger Waters during the Amused to Death era, preferring fierceness over form.
In terms of sonics, Crooked Songs feels like a lo-fi record: many of the tunes, like “Stereotype”, open with an inhaled breath before banging through the song. Many of the songs purportedly flowed based on instinct, as the musician…
Donna Allen’s second song diary is just a shade softer and more florid than her other project Chronophage, an outfit that already fell towards the more lyrical end of the post-punk spectrum in the vicinity of Blue Orchid and Microdisney.
Recorded with clarity but without much fuss, these songs frame strong melodies with jangling guitar. Their forthright, unvarnished sincerity might link them to the lo-fi movement, but there’s not much fuzz in the tone.
Chronophage split the difference between baroque pop and slashing, banging rock and roll, but solo Allen tends more towards the former. “Nightmare of your Dawning,” picks radiant patterns on acoustic guitar and spins out an ear-wormy sing-along chorus, all sunshine in the music.
Like a late summer harvest, Mac DeMarco yields some of his most mature, sweet and ripe fruit on his most recent album. Written, recorded and mixed entirely by DeMarco, Guitar is a moving personal portrait of an artist navigating the realities of life in his mid-30s: “I think Guitar is as close to a true representation of where I’m at in my life today as I can manage to put to paper,” he remarked in the press notes.
Part of DeMarco’s charm has always been his humble, laissez-faire attitude, which has endeared him to millions of fans worldwide. His past is filled with outlandish, zany experiences — some good, some bad and some ugly — coupled with an impressive discography that has cemented his reputation as one of indie music’s…
Finn Wolfhard’s love of the indie rock of the ’90s is well documented to anyone who has heard his bands Calpurnia or the Aubreys, both of whom are very much indebted to that much-referenced decade. On his solo debut, Happy Birthday, Wolfhard leans hard into lo-fi recording techniques while running through a set of songs influenced by crunchy power pop, staticky late-night bouts of introspection, the Beatles filtered through Guided by Voices, the hushed strumming of Elliott Smith, and the singer’s own unique set of anxieties. Co-produced by Kai Slater of the band Sharp Pins, the record is loose without being ramshackle as it rambles along thorough a dynamic set of tracks that can be incredible hooky (the power pop gem “Choose the Latter”), painfully…
If A.R. Kane pioneered dream pop by merging cold, dub-influenced spatial explorations with C86 jangle, Taiwanese artist Yu Ching brings a warmer, twee approach to her lo-fi, spring-reverb atmospheres on The Crystal Hum.
Moving back to Taiwan after 11 years in Berlin, Yu Ching delves deeper into the kind of introspective soundscapes she crafts with Aemong; the result is one of this year’s best bedroom pop records. Her erratic melodies melt into air, guided by bending guitars and simple drum patterns, promising a gentle passage into that good night.
Musically, Yu Ching occupies a similar spectral realm as Night School labelmate Ela Orleans. Both of them are more interested in mood over melody — this is a good thing — and as such…
Gazebo is slack and wistful and beautiful, a lo-fi concoction of idle strums and slurry poetry. The songwriter Adam Schubert looks back on his suburban youth with a curdled nostalgia, finding a lyricism in urban alienation.
The single, “Secrets,” looks back as far as elementary school bookending an unstrung narrative about romantic disappointment with a child’s “nah nah nah nah nah-nah” taunt. And yet, how longing pierces the sharp twang of guitar and infuses Schubert’s shadow-haunted vocals. How cleanly the tangle of emotions resolves in the upward sweep of the chorus. The song sounds listless until it doesn’t, unexpectedly delivering a wallop as it opens wide.
This is Schubert’s second album as ULNA, after…