Omnivore Recordings and The International Pop Overthrow Music Festival present International Pop Overthrow: Volume 27, a three-disc compilation featuring 68 tracks by artists from all over the world who have played the International Pop Overthrow (IPO) festival, along with some who haven’t — at least, not yet! The IPO compilations go back as far as the festival, to 1998 when Volume 1 was a single disc. Since then, the collection expanded to two discs the following year, and then three discs in 2002 for Volume 5, and it has remained a three-disc set since. International Pop Overthrow: Volume 27 showcases artists from across the globe, doing just about every sub-genre of pop music, including power pop, pop/rock, folk/pop, psychedelic pop, garage,…
Category: indie
…this new deluxe edition contains two additional discs inclusive of rare remixes and a complete previously unreleased live show recorded on the Meso-America tour in 1982.
In 1982, the B-52’s teamed up with David Byrne for an album and ended up putting out the Mesopotamia EP instead. Rumors swirled that the band didn’t like working with the Talking Heads frontman, but Kate Pierson told us a few years ago that their manager had been “pushing us, pushing us, to get the next record out” and they “felt rushed.” The deluxe edition arranges the tracklist as originally intended, pairing newly remastered versions of the original six songs with three outtakes: unreleased recordings of “Big Bird” and “Adios Desconocida,” plus…
If dream-pop and shoegaze colliding with ’90s grunge, noise, and garage rock sounds like your bag, dollhouse, the debut album from New York five-piece Slow Fiction, is a pretty compelling proposition. Following three sparkling EPs and a run of singles, including the excellent “When” for Speedy Wunderground, the band have crafted a record that shifts from hazy and dreamlike to abrasive, strident, and propulsive, yet remains threaded throughout with a wistful, often hypnotic beauty.
Previous single “junior year” opens the album with a restless bass line and shimmering, twisting guitars, as frontwoman Julia Vassallo asks, “Who are you when no one’s looking back or through?” It’s a question that hangs over much…
August 4th marks the 449th anniversary of the most notable recorded appearance of the East Anglian hellhound Black Shuck. It’s unlikely to be an anniversary that’s made it into your Google Calendar. But for Chris Spalton, aka The Breedling, it’s the chief inspiration behind his new album, A Straunge And Terrible Wunder.
This is music designed to disturb. Using a jet-black palette of drones, synths and field recordings, Spalton drags one of Britain’s oldest parazoological phenomena into the present day. It feels as though the album has been dredged up out of some Fenland bog. Like the most effective horrors, it leaves you with a knot in the pit of your stomach, and a self-flagellatory desire to go through it all again.
Akira Kosemura‘s second volume of archival works testifies to the Japanese composer’s inexhaustible creativity. Since making his recording debut in 2007, Kosemura has produced a prodigious amount of work, not only solo recordings but scores for video games, television, and movies. It’s safe to presume that the nineteen pieces featured on Diary 2020-2022 are but a sampling of the total amount of material he created over that span. It’s a Kosemura project full stop, as it was composed, arranged, produced, and performed by him. One comes away from the release amazed at the seeming effortlessness with which music emerges whenever this entirely self-taught artist places himself in front of a keyboard.
That the pieces have been issued under…
Florian Stoffner is a Swiss guitarist whose work encompasses composed jazz, free improvisation and genre-disregarding song. His associates include trumpeter Manuel Mengis, drummers Paul Lovens and Michael Griener, singer Anna Frey, and saxophonists Hans Koch and John Butcher. On his last solo album, Norman (Veto, 2014), he displayed a breadth of technique and a slippery sense of time, which he occasionally seemed to put in reverse with the tap of a pedal.
But Stoffner seems to be aiming for something very reduced and specific on bijou, his latest solitary outing and first release on an American label. Its name, the French word for gem, conveys the recording’s concentrated nature. The CD, which lasts just 33 minutes, does not…
Over the past several years, Maris O’Tierney established herself as an engaging, evocative songwriter and musician as one half of Maeve & Quinn, the duo she formed with her twin sister, Bryce. The pair released exquisite records such as the EPs Something Overheard, Something Overhead (2018) and Star-Crossed (2021), as well as 2023’s full-length release, Another Door, drawing inspiration from multiple points of origin: where they grew up (Alaska), the country of their heritage (Ireland), and their current hometown (Chicago). While Maris has stepped out with her first solo album under the moniker Park Hills Circle, she still retains the sensibilities of that duo, along with additional sonic layers that give this debut a warm uniqueness.
Listening to abracadabra’s peel away EP is a little bit like scrolling through Instagram reels, minus the crushing ennui. The beats are fidgety and liable to change. There’s a sense of something whizzing and spooling. A new vocal style might emerge, or a bonkers effect could be layered over something else for a few seconds. Sometimes, in that time-honored 1960s tradition, abracadabra might just use a weird sound — a train whistle, a dub siren — only for it never to crop up in the song again. And why not? Abracadabra build songs like Kevin McCallister builds booby traps: intricate feats of imagination rigged with surprises.
Abracadabra are Hannah Skelton (vocals, synthesizers) and Chris Niles (bass, synthesizers). Although they’ve been active…
There comes a point in every great electronic artist’s career where reinvention stops being a statement and simply becomes instinct. Steve Rachmad has spent the best part of 45 years refining a language built on Detroit soul, Dutch precision and the endless possibilities of analogue machinery. On Light and Time, however, he steps beyond the dancefloor almost entirely.
Few figures have cast a shadow over European techno quite like Rachmad. Through aliases including Sterac, Parallel 9 and Sterac Electronics, his influence has become inseparable from the evolution of Dutch electronic music itself, while his enduring relationship with Detroit’s melodic sensibilities has shaped generations of producers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Between 1799 and 1804, Alexander von Humboldt, a German environmentalist and the father of modern geography, traveled across Latin America, mapping the terrain, discovering the sources of the Orinoco River, cataloging animal and plant species, and gathering stories he heard along the way. Two hundred years later, American experimental duo Hourloupe — writer, painter, and guitarist Frank Menchaca and guitarist and producer Anar Badalov — retells and retraces one of the stories Humboldt collected during his travels.
It’s a cryptic tale of a tribe pursued by cannibals to “the cliffs of the cataracts,” where they became extinct. The only proof of their existence is a bird speaking in a dead language. This story inspired Menchaca to write his own version,…
Singer-songwriter Bird, otherwise known as Janie Price, has released a new full-length album. Held Here Together is made up of her two recent EPs, 2025’s Heads Or Tales and Strange As Folk from earlier this year.
This can be a risky strategy as reusing material again quickly can put off existing fans. On this occasion it may well be a marketing masterstroke as she has a tour supporting Ward Thomas to expose her to a whole new audience, and 3 new songs to keep her current crowd happy.
Bird’s trademark sound is rich, swelling strings building what would otherwise be relatively bare folk songs into something that Van Dyke Parks would be proud of. The song order on Bandcamp is different to that sent to us, pulling…
For a songwriter whose career has been built on melody rather than spectacle, Melody Boy feels less like a debut than the natural next chapter for Andy Crofts. Its ambition lies not in grand gestures, but in the detail, revealing a songwriter who trusts his instincts and knows when to let the songs speak for themselves.
Best known for his work with The Moons and as a longstanding member of Paul Weller’s band, Crofts has spent years refining an approach rooted in timeless songcraft. Echoes of Buddy Holly’s emotional directness and Brian Wilson’s lush sense of arrangement drift through the record, yet they never feel like signposts.
They are simply part of Crofts’ musical vocabulary, creating a layered sonic landscape…
Chicago’s Cel Ray specialize in a frantic, jackhammering form of post-punk, which they play at hardcore speeds. Cel Ray released their first two EPs Cellular Raymond and Piss Park in 2023, and they’ll follow those record with their full-length debut Cel Rayzer
Modern post-punk’s yappiest frontmen leverage comedy like it’s a pillar of the genre: sardonic vocals as an auditory plot device, parody as critique, roasts of their fellow man as feminist credentials. But when Cel Ray frontwoman Maddie Daviss resorts to comedy, it seems to come from an entirely natural place. Like fellow Chicago-reared women whose wit pours forth from diminutive frames, Daviss is loud and loose in a literal sense, with limbs that swing around onstage…
The musician known as Gi Gi understands the magic of a slow burn. In his chillout room, sounds waft from unseen corners into the middle distance, hovering like smoke illuminated by a flashlight. Each of the Texas-born, Melbourne-based producer’s albums has the hazy quality of a sense memory, the unexpected pleasant feeling of deja vu on a spring morning. His tunes seem to curl outward until they take up the whole screen, dazzling, pastel-tinted arrays that organize themselves without drawing attention to the process. Suddenly, it’s there, as are you, and everything feels locked into a specific but fleeting place.
For the better part of a decade, Gi Gi has been a reliably prolific source of foggy downtempo…
Two of Britain’s most exciting folk musicians, both of Hebridean heritage, are behind Donn/Dubh (Black/Brown), an album inspired by Saltair na Rann, a 10th-century Celtic collection of cantos in which sacred history is foretold, and winds are given colours. Angeline Morrison and Arun Sood expand its spectrum of northerly and westerly shades, soldering together traditional Gaelic texts and tunes with distortion, drone, dream-pop and post-rock.
The pair have the chops for such a project. Morrison, co-founder of the Black British Folk Collective, has brilliantly brought forgotten Black histories into the folk canon for years, including on 2022’s The Sorrow Songs. That same year, Sood’s Searching Erskine used sonic collage…
Japanese band maya ongaku’s second album Nothing Space Music unfolds as a quietly textural journey, balancing stillness with subtle movement to create an atmosphere that feels intimate. Opening track ‘Vanishing Waves’ sets the tone immediately. Metallic and silvery synths interweave with acoustic guitar and gentle piano while understated vocals sit in unison. The song is reminiscent of ’70s Japanese rock bands like Happy End, with a touch of psychedelia in the spacious arrangement.
‘Thinkingscape’ breaks the haziness with a foreboding string opening, but the tension rapidly resolves into something more circular and grounded than the previous tracks. It’s the most structurally distinct track on the album,…