After making a name for themselves, including charting on the Billboard independent, rock, and alternative lists, with their warm, mellifluous take on vintage folk- and country-rock, Whitney — singer/drummer Julien Ehrlich and guitarist Max Kakacek — experimented with lush electronics and even hip-hop beats on their fourth album, SPARK. Arriving three years later, Small Talk marks a glowing return to inviting organic textures on a philosophical album informed by breakups and broader lessons learned. It was recorded without an outside producer — a first for Whitney, at the encouragement of prior producer Brad Cook — in a barn in Newberg, Oregon, that contained recording gear collected over the years by Ehrlick’s father (also a drummer), including…
Category: indie
Hatchie, aka Harriette Pilbeam, has always had a knack for making melancholy sound strangely uplifting. On her latest album Liquorice, she leans fully into the sound that made her name, delivering a record that plays to her considerable strengths.
The album opens in understated fashion with “Anemoia,” all hazy vocals and wistful lyrics. Things really take off with the sublime “Only One Laughing” and “Carousel,” which both sparkle like The Sundays’ long-lost cousins, located firmly in “I Kicked a Boy” and “Can’t Be Sure” territory. Sandwiched between those two songs is the title track, which, oddly, is the only moment that doesn’t quite land. It feels both a little undercooked and, conversely, slightly overthought compared to the rest of the record.
Will Westerman thinks he spent too much time on An Inbuilt Fault. He’s still proud of it, but the British musician, who records under his surname, wanted to do something differently this time around. “Nothing is ever really finished if it’s a new idea,” he says. “It’s just an arbitrary line in the sand because there’s no template to judge it being finished, other than your own exhaustion.” He spent a long time tinkering with his sophomore album, which was released in 2023, so he decided on another course of action for its follow-up: capture something made in a short timeframe.
Maybe that’s why A Jackal’s Wedding, by contrast, sounds so much looser, not in the sense that it feels unfinished; rather, it’s far more spacious than its two predecessors.
What they lack in quantity, they make up for in a sonic prolificness, an unwillingness to be tied down to any one genre, or really any multi-hyphenate collection thereof. On their first two records for Domino, they race through grungey rock, glitchy trip-hop, twee pop, theatrical skeleton music, and plenty more besides.
With Cosplay, they show no signs of settling down, though this project has somewhat of a throughline. Its stylistic restlessness means it’s, by design, a chaotic experience, but the themes of longing and uncertainty, plus a few musical motifs, give the album a new level of cohesion.
As the title suggests, there’s a performative element to much of Sorry’s music, particularly in the vocal style of Asha Lorenz.
Circles Around The Sun returns with Interludes For The Dead: Volume 2, ten years since “Interludes For The Dead,” the music that resulted when Neal Casal was asked to create the set-break music for the now-legendary “Fare Thee Well” shows celebrating the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary, and assembled a team of musicians now known as Circles Around The Sun.
Recorded over four days with nothing written or rehearsed beforehand, all of the music was written on the spot and tracked immediately with little to no overdubs and every bit of the energy and verve that’s become CATS’ calling card, and the spirit of the first release.
Volume II was recorded at Dan Horne’s UHF Studios in Los Angeles and was notably conceived…
Frank Turner’s The Next Ten Years is a limited edition set which comes as a follow up to the highly coveted The First Ten Years (2015) box set.
Spanning 29 non-album tracks, including live and radio sessions, covers, acoustic versions, and collaborations, this collection fills the gaps between studio albums over the past 10 years with treasured rarities – some of which are previously unreleased, and many pressed on vinyl for the first time.
I write this from a car park in Glasgow, working my way through the warm-up shows before Lost Evenings hits Edinburgh for its 8th (eighth!!!) instalment this weekend. Band and crew are humming like a well-oiled machine, I’m tired and my head is full of words for obscure songs, but life is good.
…Steve Gunn recorded his new LP Daylight Daylight with one primary collaborator. James Elkington, much like Gunn, is a languid singer-songwriter and a master of acoustic folk guitar.
Gunn and Elkington are old friends, and Elkington previously produced Gunn’s 2019 album The Unseen in Between. The two of them recorded Daylight Daylight at Elkington’s Nada Studios in Chicago, and Elkington contributed string and woodwind arrangements, which makes for a cool new dimension on a Steve Gunn record. A press release mentions Mark Hollis, Ennio Morricone, the Fall, and Basil Kirchin as inspirations, and the album includes violins and viola from from Macie Stewart, cellos from Ben Whiteley, upright bass from Nick Macri, and woodwinds from…
Montreal’s The Dears were at an impasse after 2020’s Lover’s Rock. Frontman Murray Lightburn and his wife, Natalia Yanchak (keys, vocals), fulfilled rescheduled dates for the record and embarked upon shows celebrating the 20th anniversary of their renowned No Cities Left (2004). That is not to mention other media projects that grabbed their interest and took hold. As a result, over five years have passed since we last heard from the band.
Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! arose from a spontaneous moment at one of the No Cities Left shows. Lightburn said, “I was on stage surrounded by wonderful musicians, playing songs I wrote in my 20s. My kids and my mom were sitting up on the balcony of the theatre. Natalia was just to my right. I told…
“Climb upon a bridge to far, go anywhere your heart desires.” The key phrase from the title track of Midlake’s sixth studio album conveys the perception that anything is within reach should an appropriate mind-set be attained. However, later on the album there are references to a “lion’s den” and “war within the valley of roselesss thorns,” a setting where “power and glory were in store.”
It seems, then, that this is a realm where escaping to a place called “far” is necessary for self-protection. Midlake singer and frontman Eric Pulido has said of the album’s “The Calling” that the song “has to do with my own struggle with applying myself towards a given effort; denying or embracing that which we were made to do.” Another track, “The Ghouls,” concerns…
Portugal. The Man, the genre-agnostic outfit led by the multi-faceted John Gourley, is changing before our very eyes.
Not in the way this band has been since they emerged in the mid-2000s, consistently shifting sonic terrains throughout their wonderfully colorful discography, but on a more personal level. Gourley is now a father, fully independent after leaving Atlantic following the band’s 2023 LP, and set up in a home studio, free to welcome in any number of collaborators and to curate a spacious environment for his lofty indie rock visions to flourish. With a new studio, outlook on life, and a catalog that has garnered critical acclaim, the latest Portugal. The Man LP finds Gourley at an interesting, scary, and exhilarating moment in his career.
For quite a while now, The Mountain Goats have established themselves as a sort of thinking person’s indie darlings, combining some stylish music with equally stylish and, at the same time, substantive lyrics. At the same time, they developed their music from a strictly folky, singer-songwriter style to something more detailed and elaborate.
Sticking to such a development line, Through The This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, their latest offering takes another step further. It turns out to be a concept album where John Darnielle, Matt Douglas (the album’s producer here), and Jon Wurster decided to go come in with more detailed musical structures, often with full orchestra backing, without slacking in their constantly excellent lyrics department.
Born and raised in Valldemossa, a picturesque village on the island of Majorca, singer Júlia Colom grew up immersed in a rich tradition of Spanish folk music. The first song she learned, at age six, was The Song of the Sibyl, a medieval chant performed on Christmas Eve. Passed down orally through generations of Majorcans, The Song of the Sybil is long and ornate — a melismatic tune with lyrics that foretell the Apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, it left a lasting impression on Colom.
This musical memory sparked Colom’s passion for singing. Curiosity soon became vocation, and at 18, Colom left Majorca for Barcelona, where she earned a degree in music and expanded her practice into composition and contemporary music. Still deeply connected to her Majorcan heritage,…
When Denver five-piece Destiny Bond perform live, they shed pints of sweat like any hardworking hardcore band. But every once in a while, they lose more than just fluids; vocalist Cloe Madonna Janzen busted a tooth at a recent gig in San Antonio, Texas, marking the second time she’s lost one at a show. Aside from being punk as fuck, Janzen’s dental mishap encapsulates Destiny Bond’s spirit of inversion: Pain can be liberating, anger can be productive, and hardcore can be vulnerable. On their new album The Love, Destiny Bond mine these dualities and hone their sound into something that’s somehow crisper and more ragged all at once.
On their 2023 debut, Be My Vengeance, Destiny Bond leaned into the more melodic…
Last year Peter Buck (R.E.M., the Minus 5) and Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees, Mad Season) unveiled the debut album from the Silverlites, their supergroup with the Black Crowes’ Rich Robinson and singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur.
Now Buck and Martin are announcing another supergroup called Drink the Sea with Alain Johannes and Duke Garwood.
Johannes is a founding member of the band Eleven and plays in the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures with Josh Homme, John Paul Jones, and Dave Grohl for live performances. Duke Garwood is a British multi-instrumentalist with six studio albums and has collaborated with Mark Lanegan and the Orb.
About the project, Martin explained on…
DOGA, new studio album by Juana Molina, the eighth full-length of her career and her first album of new compositions in eight years.
For DOGA she has been trying to master the furiously difficult world of analogue synths, hunching over instruments that resemble old-fashioned telephone switchboards to invent sounds that don’t rely on pre-programmed waveforms. She recorded everything she made but became overwhelmed by the hundreds of hours of tape. It prompted her to work with a producer, Emilio Haro, for the first time since her debut. DOGA is deeper and more spacious than its predecessor, with synthesised orchestral touches: the guitars on ‘Miro Todo’ (I See Everything), says Molina, sound like violins that “are somehow out of…
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
After the calm, measured beauty of Sakura, versatile Japanese producer Susumu Yokota followed a comparatively experimental and eclectic path on Grinning Cat.
The beats are more prevalent (though never as floor-friendly as his voluminous house, trance, and techno releases), the instrumentation is more varied, and the overall feel shifts markedly from track to track. Piano is the dominant instrument here, just as guitar was for Sakura. But Yokota’s skill with context finds him tailoring the sound of the instrument to suit each individual track. “Imagine” uses a hazy piano loop and vocal samples seemingly lifted from sacred music to achieve a thoughtful, meditative effect.
Every day is Halloween for Ship Sket. InitiatriX, the debut LP from the Dorset-born, Manchester-based producer (real name Josh Griffiths), weds freaky sampled dialogue to the kind of strings that almost always point towards impending doom. In other words, InitiatriX will leave you scrambling around for the light switch.
At times, the album’s tendencies toward horror feel explicit. Eerie, detuned piano segues into an ice storm of sub-zero grime on “Audition for the Part of the Killer,” making good on the theatrical shock value promised by the title. Things get even scarier on “Supermodel Mansion,” summoning a Southern Gothic scene that’s all shrieking crows and fire-and-brimstone ranting. On the bitcrushed “Desire 4 Stealth,” a demonic cackle…
Pop Will Eat Itself deserve to be more celebrated. The Stourbridge outfit were one of the first 1980s bands to realise the potential of smashing punky indie-rockin’ into hip hop and electronic dance.
They had hits, many great songs, and covered the same territory that later gave The Prodigy mega-success (Delete Everything contains a rackety reimagining of the two groups’ 1994 collaboration, “Their Law”). Unfortunately, a combination of their major label stabbing them in the back, and being perceived by some critics as cartoonishly adolescent, faded them out in the mid-Nineties. But they returned a few years ago and maintain an urgent liveliness.
They retain two original members, including Graham Crabb. Fellow frontman…