Dent May has released many fine albums, most of which have a sweetly chewy soft rock center and all were made by May himself at the computer. He might have invited over the occasional guest, but otherwise he did everything himself. On 2026’s The Big One, May made the decision to change up his way of making records and went into an actual recording studio. Once there he invited in several of his friends to add instrumentation and vocals to the tracks. The result is the warmest, most expansive record he has made yet. The songs are the usual melange of Nilsson-esque baroque pop, gently percolating disco, and sun-bleached singer/songwriter-style ballads, with none of the power pop that crept into the previous album. It’s a predictably nice batch of tunes that…
Category: indie
The ’60s gave us many artistic firsts from pop and performance art to psychedelic rock and free jazz to interspecies music-making between humans and whales. From saxophonist Paul Winter’s Common Ground to Judy Collins‘ Whales and Nightingales to pioneering synthesist Bernie Krause’s Ocean Wonders, musicians have engaged in and recorded a call-and-response with these massive sea mammals that has produced some singular sonic wonders and oddities. With his cheekily titled new album, Orcas’ Greatest Hits, Jim Nollman is adding what may be the most varied and expansive chapter to this tiny but intriguing corner of the musical universe.
Nollman is an avant-garde sound artist, guitarist and naturalist whose work stands at…
There are inherent pitfalls for a band when they set about recreating a sound from the past with exacting precision. It’s far too easy for their work to sound like a hollow pastiche if they don’t play with undeniable energy or come up with a brilliant batch of songs. On their second album Was It Always This Way, Real Numbers do everything they can to sound exactly like a band who would have recorded for Sarah Records in 1989. Except for when they sound like they wanted to be signed to Creation in 1986. The order of the day is echoing guitar jangle, vocals that express powerful amounts of melancholy, synths that moan like faraway ghosts, and a rhythm section that sound like they studied every move the Cure made in the early ’80s. They have the sound down dead to…
In the last few years, Getdown Services – the duo of Ben Sadler and Josh Law – have gone from being an underground outfit with a cult following, to selling out entire tours, playing Later… With Jools Holland and being selected to perform as part of Harry Styles’ Meltdown festival. Since forming “accidentally” in lockdown, the pair – originally from Minehead and now based in Bristol – soon grew a reputation for playing raucous high-octane shows, usually shirtless and dripping in sweat, while performing a concoction of genre-fluid tunes that range from slick electro to lo-fi garage rock, with lyrics that are ironic and irreverent, as well as surreal and silly.
Given the project was originally based as much on trying to crack each other up as on musical…
How to honor women? Nina Winder-Lind, the Swedish songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, follows that exact question throughout her debut album, Wild Love. Comprised of songs so ephemeral that they refute their own existence, as if they had emerged ex nihilo and could disappear again. Like an interlocutor, Winder-Lind listens to her ancestors’ tales, tracing a lineage from them to her to the past she will become to someone else. When performing as a member of the Brighton-based, post-punk band the New Eves, Winder-Lind inveighs against a patriarchal society, backed by three other steadfast Eves. What you will hear is her guttural, quivering vibrato reverberating over a bowed cello, played with such verve and stridency it could be the rumbling of earth…
In the music industry, rawness is a commodity. Struggle and hardship alone are not enough. They have to be tapped into. They have to be shaped. This process of shaping is sometimes called art, but it also results in a product fit to be sold and consumed, however ragged, however scratchy it may seem. Some artists understand that they are trapped in this paradoxical bind, but they don’t necessarily know how to escape from it. Elliott Smith and Kurt Cobain fall into this group. Others have successfully learned to laugh at it from the outside, using surreal humour as a distancing technique even as their music leans into the lo-fi. Think early Stephen Malkmus.
Sometimes a new artist emerges, a fresh voice with a fresh take on confession and…
In 2024, Hovvdy released their most ambitious album yet, a nearly hour-long eponymous double LP that experimented further with the duo’s combination of earthy, earnest lo-fi pop and reality-bending atmospheric effects. It was produced by Hovvdy’s Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, along with Andrew Sarlo and longtime collaborator Ben Littlejohn. It was also their most personal album to date, with Martin remarking that he could be heard crying on some of the songs. While still inhabiting the intimate spaces and loose performance style they’re known for, Hovvdy took a distinctly different approach to the follow-up, Big World, which was recorded with Littlejohn. The album, their sixth, reflects a deliberate attempt by the duo to make something…
t would be hard to find a more arresting opener to any album of 2026 than the jarring discordant flutes and blast of brass which announce Grace Cummings’ fourth LP, Bloodhorse! In fact, let’s push that further and boldly say it would be impossible. Opening track ‘The Hills are Alive …’ arrives with a sudden impact of unusual sounds from all directions; there’s no chance of giving this music only half your attention. If you had hoped to press play, sit back and let the music fill your background, you’ll be disappointed. Cummings belts out “The hills are alive with the sound of – ” and, as the subject of the song appears, the music develops into a big, bold orchestral journey; it’s a clichéd epic presented in an entirely serious juxtaposition with the subject matter.
James Ellis Ford’s second solo album joins a small and exclusive list of records that were made in hospitals. There’s J Dilla’s Donuts, there’s The Wind by Warren Zevon, and now there’s Lost in Another World, in this case recorded at Saint Barts in the City of London between intensive sessions of chemotherapy over a nine month period. At times it’s heartwrenching, but never mawkish, and throughout there’s a sense of dignity that often comes with the knowledge that death could be just waiting around the corner. Given a less than 30% chance of survival, it’s heartening to report that Ford is still with us and seemingly making good progress.
Perhaps most striking is the stark honesty of these songs, where irony falls away and there’s…
There’s something so refreshing about Sweeping Promises. A Kansas-based two-piece, Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug specialize in short, sharp slices of punk-inflected garage-pop. Their first two albums cut through the pandemic-induced uncertainty of early-2020s US underground music almost by sheer force of will, their hooks too insistent and their performances too committed to be ignored. On You Say I Romanticize, we pretty much get more of the same, with some minor developments; it reflects well on them that, for the most part, this is a very good thing.
Sweeping Promises’ lean, unapologetic style revives certain elements of the US post-punk tradition in a remarkably vivid and straightforward way. There’s so much gusto and verve in their…
The giddy, clever Canadians in Kiwi Jr. named the the first song on their fourth full-length “Photos of the Reenactment” which has to be an R.E.M. reference (i.e. Fables of the Reconstruction), however subtle. And yes, pinwheeling 12-string licks frame this surrealist fantasy and jangle hems in its ebullience, and early, punk-y R.E.M. is a fair enough reference.
…Cheerful mayhem balances precariously against angsty uncertainty in these tracks, which wobble and keen as much as they bang on forward. There’s a bit of Canadian self-effacement at work — “You are here as the first class entertainment/You are here because it’s Drag-your-daughter-to-work Day” warbles Jeremy Gaudet — and existential angst tucked carefully into bopping…
The Everything But the Girl reissue campaign continues with 2CD deluxe editions of Walking Wounded and Temperamental.
Originally released in 1996, Walking Wounded peaked at No 4 on the UK Album Chart and includes two Top 10 hits, the title track and ‘Wrong’. The 2CD deluxe sees the album mastered at Abbey Road Studios by Miles Showell, with a tracklisting that follows the out-of-print Edsel 2015 deluxe edition with album and bonus tracks on CD 1, plus remixes and demos on CD 2. It’s actually not identical because for, some reason, the new reissue loses the Dilinja Remix of ‘Before Today’ (29 tracks in total versus 30 on the Edsel).
Temperamental was issued in 1999 and was Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s ninth studio album.
It’s absolutely normal to expect the weird and the wonderful each time those prolific Australian psychedelicists, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard release a new album. Yet, guitars are also pretty much expected to be somewhere in the mix. Not so with Alien Metal: their 28th album in 14 years.
Fuelled by Joey Walker’s recent synthesizer obsession, Alien Metal apparently evolved from an extended seamless Eurorack jam that took in techno, breakbeat, house and the electronic end of prog rock to make something that is part thumping hardcore foot-stomper and part tripped out hard-spinner. However, while this may be something of an unexpected left turn for the Melbourne six-piece, the sound on this new disc is still very much their own. So, it’s unlikely to…
Interviewed by MOJO around her 2020 album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers admitted she nearly quit high school through sheer lack of motivation. “Then I found something that I would do forever,” she said, explaining how music changed her life. Six years after her last solo record, however, fans of her reflective, raw-nerved songwriting might have wondered if she was having second thoughts. Boygenius, her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, explained a couple of years, but there was still a sense Bridgers was in retreat.
Partly that seemed a result of the intrusions that come when an artist’s acute gift for articulating difficult emotions leads people to think they know them. There was also the unhealthy fascination with her personal life (she dated…
In retrospect, Laura Veirs‘ 12th album Found Light was something of an artistic turning point for the Portland musician. It was a break-up album, contemplating the end of her marriage, but also her first album that she co-produced. An album of demo tracks recorded on her phone followed in 2023, and now we have Temple Songs, the very definition of a DIY album.
Temple Songs is the first album that she’s written, recorded, produced and performed entirely on her own. It was quite literally recorded in Veirs’ backyard. She’s built her own studio and recorded this album using just a laptop and two microphones, and the entire album is simply Veirs’ voice, some delicate acoustic guitar and the odd instrumental embellishment.
Josh Martin’s Western Mind operates within the mythology of the American West while carefully sidestepping the clichés that usually flatten that landscape into postcard romanticism. The album understands that the West is not merely a geographic region but a psychological condition, shaped equally by physical enormity and emotional projection. Across these eleven instrumentals, Martin transforms highways, abandoned towns, mountain passes, and flickering roadside relics into reflections on solitude, memory, and the uneasy relationship between freedom and isolation. What could have become a simple ambient guitar record instead emerges as a deeply atmospheric meditation on place and perception, rich with emotional nuance and sonic detail.