After spending 2024 wrestling with that classic second album syndrome, Hotel Lux have returned, having finally pinned writer’s block down on the mat. Named after a Billy Childish song that inspired the band’s formation, The Bitter Cup is a rough and ready LP that marks a new creative direction for the five-piece.
Hotel Lux’s well-received debut, Hands Across the Creek, was laced with politically charged vitriol, and fans will be relieved to hear that the band refuse to shy away from tackling tricky topics on their second full-length offering. From ‘Costermonger’, a musical interpretation of a BBC documentary about the fall of Deptford Market, to ‘Another One Gone’, a lament for those the band have lost to suicide, The Bitter Cup reflects myriad issues in…
Category: indie
Boston-based Brendan Wright has been releasing music – first as Tiberius Wright and more recently just Tiberius – since 2015, when they were still a teenager. Recently, the Tiberius moniker has come to represent a full band rather than a solo project, and the music has shifted too, from dreamy, reverb-drenched slacker indie pop to a tighter, crisper sound that Wright calls ‘farm emo’. 2023 mini-album was a minor masterpiece of small-town catharsis and city alienation, where twangy guitars shared space with power chords and Patsy Cline sentimentalism traded blows with post-hardcore or shoegaze dynamics. It was a winning combination, and a highly original one.
Luckily for us, Wright has chosen to continue down that route with the new full-length…
Golden Brown’s Stefan Beck was inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series as he wrote this suite of songs, and he encourages listeners to read the books while absorbing Patterner. His interpretation isn’t especially literal; the title comes from a master wizard in the trilogy and a couple of the track titles are place names from the world LeGuin built. However, the books have a wonderful down-to-earth naturalism, spiked with the glitter of occasional magic, and massed, sometimes, into epic contours. That’s something this music has as well, a cosmic Americana made of ordinary sounds — guitar picking, cello predominate — polished to a heightened, semi-surreal clarity.
Beck has made three previous albums as Golden Brown. He’s also a member of Prairiewolf,…
An in-demand headliner in dark rooms worldwide and one of techno’s most distinctive producers, Wata Igarashi has achieved a perfect harmony between his work as a musician and a selector. Born in Tokyo in the late ’80s, with significant parts of his youth spent in England and Spain, he spent time in skate punk and avant-garde jazz circles before taking to DJing and production. His earliest explorations of Detroit textures and Villalobos-esque minimalism were released on buzzy labels like DJ Nobu’s Bitta, Midgar in Berlin, and long-standing New York label/party booking company the Bunker NY. His debut record, 2023’s Agartha, veered into Krautrock-tinged explorations of hazy ambient, Space Age easy listening, and the Moogsploitation of Wendy Carlos…
…Originally released on 11th September 2000, Leila’s acclaimed second album Courtesy of Choice followed the success of her Rephlex Records debut Like Weather and felt like a broadcast from a futuristic radio station no one else could tune into. Twenty-five years on, alongside collaborations with the likes of Bjork, Aphex Twin and Terry Hall and iconic performances at the likes of the V&A and Venice Biennale, more and more listeners have found the frequency.
This new version, Courtesy of Choice… asides and besides, re-presents the original 14 track album — including the previously vinyl-only “Relax the Pleasuredome” — alongside a wealth of unreleased material. Leila chose to re-edit rather than remake the album (she has all the original data…
A frequent collaborator of a diverse array of artists – including Laurie Anderson, Jessika Kenney, Bill Frisell and Sunn O))) – New York composer/violist Eyvind Kang presents his first solo recording on viola d’amore, an instrument he came to explore during the pandemic. An Italian bowed instrument used primarily in the Baroque period, the viola d’amore has a set of sympathetic strings that create a resonance not unlike that of Indian classical instruments.
Drawing upon his prior study in spiritual jazz and Indian raga, Riparian is Kang’s self-created means of improvising within modes of his own devising – one that alternates between arco and pizzicato (bowing and plucking), giving the impression of an organic dialogue between the two.
About two minutes into “Burn,” the second track on Black Eyes’ Hostile Design, Daniel Martin-McCormick yelps “Kill your shitty parents/let their blood flow free”: a signal that, in the two decades since the band last released new music, it has lost none of its anger. Born at the start of the century in the D.C. punk scene, Black Eyes — with two drummers, two bassists, two singers, and a guitar that sounded like Rowland S. Howard possessed by the ghost of Sonny Sharrock — upended the genre’s norms, melding no-wave noise and funk, percussive assault, and obtuse but guttural screeds against Bush-era America. By the time their second album, Cough, came out, a free-jazz influence had taken center stage, with songs that sounded like the work of a band ripping…
Recorded live in their hometown of Nottingham on 30th November 2024 to a sold-out crowd, this incredible show was part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of the iconic Bodega venue. It’s rare for Sleaford Mods to perform for such a small crowd, which made this show feel even more intimate and memorable.
Combining the revolutionary fury of punk and hip-hop with the bleakness of austerity-era Great Britain, Sleaford Mods capture the spirit of their time with blunt eloquence. Andrew Fearn’s minimalistic, intentionally cheap-sounding loops, guitars, and keyboards provide a fitting backdrop as Jason Williamson rants about politics, injustice, and pop culture with outrage, scathing humor, and occasionally, rough-edged poignancy.
…newly remastered by Josh Bonati and includes the entire five-hour suite that Basinski originally captured while looping analog tape as it actively deteriorated in the process.
A work of minimal, process-based tape music, experimental composer William Basinski‘s Disintegration Loops series achieves astonishingly moving and evocative states through relatively simplistic means. In the process of transferring aging reel-to-reel tape loops to a digital medium, Basinski found the reels (originally recorded in 1982) were so old and decrepit that the tape would shed slightly with each pass of the loop. This gradually affected the sound coming through, blurring the short, pastoral phrases of sound into an increasingly ghostly and…
Yves Jarvis’s Polaris Prize-winning record, All Cylinders, is expanded upon with 5 extra tracks.
“Polymath” is one of the misused words of music journalism, cousin to the even more hyperbolic “genius”. In pop coverage it usually gets applied to musicians who play more than one instrument and do not fit neatly into a genre bracket — impressive, perhaps, but hardly the same as translating Sumerian while extracting DNA from an apple.
A recipient of this overblown term is Canadian singer-songwriter Yves Jarvis. Born in Montreal as Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet, he plays all the instruments on his new album All Cylinders, which he has also produced. Its songs are filled with switches in direction and doublings back. “If this trail bifurcates, then I just have to choose,”…
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…
Those silhouettes on the cover of Big city life? That’s you and me! Smerz’s latest and best album feels like it was made for projection.
It’s not designed to be relatable, that most cursed descriptor of meaningless contemporary pop, but to be lived in, tailored to your body, snagged on the pedal of a Lime bike. In that sense, it lends itself fabulously to a remix album, and so arrives Big city life EDITS, an album of sinuous reinterpretations that highlights the endless plasticity of Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s voices and songwriting.
Across these 14 reworks, 18 acts write artful Smerz fan fiction: For the most part, the duo’s voices are left intact, but layered atop sounds far removed from the original record’s arch,…
Artifact marks a new chapter in Parov Stelar’s creative career. For the album, the Austrian drew inspiration from fragments of memory, parallel worlds, and the fleeting nature of the moment. The tracks range between sweeping pop and electronic concepts, late-Romantic grandeur, and cinematic power.
Musically, this results in a very open and emotional language: electronic sounds merge with classical orchestration, strings, piano, and expansive soundscapes unfold alongside pulsating beats and grand melodies. It’s a sound that relies less on hooks and more on atmosphere, on musical associations rather than linearity – and culminates in hits such as Rebel Love, Falling Into Time, and the Artifact Version of Lana Del Rey’s Art Deco.
In JJJJJerome Ellis’s magical compositions, their stutter is a guiding light. Pauses and repetitions spark new life, new ideas, new possibilities, as Vesper Sparrow explores their “dysfluency” in the context of Black musical traditions. The Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist and former Yale lecturer is heady, intellectual company: in the manner of Alvin Lucier, they gently talk the listener through the sonic and political reverberations of their work. “The stutter … (cc)can be a musical instrument,” Ellis announces, before an exhilarating rush of tiny noises – made from hammered dulcimer, flute, piano, voices – fizz into being.
To create Vesper Sparrow’s soundscapes of ambient, jazz, spoken word and reimagined gospel, Ellis works with granular synthesis…
Delivering their debut album soon after forming, Sister Ray Davies is the duo of guitarist Adam Morrow and engineer Jamie Sego, who runs Alabama’s Portside Sound, a studio housed in the former Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. They became fast friends when Morrow played sessions there for John Paul White, Donnie Fritts, and others, but anyone expecting music from them in the territory of rhythm & blues or country is going to be very, very surprised. An outlet for their shared love of shoegaze acts such as Slowdive and Ride as well as related sounds like late-’60s fuzz and the noise pop of Yo La Tengo, Sister Ray Davies (a fusion of the Velvet Underground song and the Kinks’ singer) was chosen off an old list of Sego’s, in part because they thought it captured…
For years, the most consistent thing about Constant Smiles was their name. Singer/songwriter Ben Jones surrounded himself with shifting collaborators and sounds that spanned Lost’s moody outbursts, Paragons‘ folk-pop, and Kenneth Anger‘s shimmering electronics. Given that history, Moonflowers‘ musical and emotional openness comes as a surprise — but a welcome one. The album’s search for connection and growth is reflected in Constant Smiles’ own trajectory: Late in 2022, drummer Nora Knight joined Jones and longtime bassist Spike Currier, completing the band’s first-ever permanent lineup. This stability has done wonders. Bolstered by warm, immediate production, Moonflowers‘ sophisticated yet lived-in songs bloom as they balance…
…includes four new songs. There are a pair of fuzzed-out rockers, “Cross Your Heart” and “Not Sacred,” as well as two acoustic numbers, “Sunrise” and “Seattle,”
Momma deliver their fantastic new album Welcome to My Blue Sky just in time for a whole new Summer of Grunge.
Momma’s Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten are longtime friends who met as high school Pavement fans in Southern California, now raise hell in Brooklyn, and cram their guitars full of youthful sex-and-romance pangs along with a mommalode of slacker angst.
Jams like “I Want You (Fever)” are for anyone who’s ever heard the chaos in their heart translated into euphoric guitar ruckus.
‘Another Picture’ is the deluxe edition of Blondshell’s acclaimed 2025 album. More than your typical deluxe release, ‘Another Picture’ features a new song plus covers by Conor Oberst, Folk Bitch Trio and more. – an expanded, reimagined look at a record that’s already become essential.
For her second album as Blondshell, L.A. singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum is figuring out how much of her life story she wants to tell the world — how much she needs to tell — and how much to hide away for herself. On her acclaimed 2023 self-titled debut, she was really letting it all hang out, in searing confessional indie-rock.
But on If You Asked for a Picture, Teitelbaum’s more ambivalent, more questioning, reckoning with her painful past, from childhood…