Category: indie


…The expanded collection features 13 extra tracks, consisting of 7 brand-new original Daphni productions — including the lead single “Catch 23” — alongside remixes from artists like Kelbin, Aasthma, Peder Mannerfelt, and BRUX.
Dan Snaith’s evolving relationship with dance music has been fascinating to watch over the years. As Manitoba — renamed Caribou after a legal snafu in 2004 — he incorporated all manner of experimental electronics alongside dreamy, band-based psychedelia. Sometimes those aspects were woven together, which loosely aligned him with the folktronica movement at the time; but more frequently, as on early anthem “If Assholes Could Fly This Place Would Be an Airport” or his remix of Seelenluft’s “Manila,” he would make…

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Radiator Hospital has taken many forms since it began as a home-recorded solo project for the emotionally driven songs of Sam Cook-Parrott. The sound moved from heartbroken bedroom punk poured directly out of Cook-Parrott’s heart into his four-track on his earliest releases into the tightly wound full-band experience that toured often and collectively tracked some of his most memorable songs. There have even been dips back into solo material and expansions on the full band sound along the way, such as the Eno-esque synths and cantankerous drum machines of 2023’s Can’t Make Any Promises.
With Distorting Time, Cook-Parrott is on his own again, back at home with the four-track, but he also brings some new ideas in as he…

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As Jawdropped tell it, Los Angeles isn’t such a bad home for aspiring musicians. Practice spaces are generally easy to come by. Transporting gear to the gig is no problem — you’re already used to sitting in your car all the time. For every DIY venue that shutters, there’s a new one ready to pop in another neighborhood just a touch less gentrified. And most importantly, cutting your teeth in such a sprawling creative hotbed means there’s a good chance of crossing paths with likeminded people who each have their own complicated feelings about what it means to “make it.”
That creative hotbed is where Jawdropped met, anyway, and its characters serve as the nexus for the quartet’s debut album, Secret to Spare. Vocalist Kyra Morling, vocalist/guitarist…

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On their sophomore effort, Ontario-based trio Among Legends keep the punk rock tradition alive for another generation. Drawing influence from classic American bands like Bad Religion and Alkaline Trio, Lose My Grip is steeped in blistering tempos and melodic vocals.
The opening track and first single, “H/A/C/K,” kicks off with a steady bass line and rapid-fire drumming before the aggressive chants of “Make it hurt, make it ache, make it burn, lacerate” make it clear that the fuse has been lit within the record’s opening seconds. Clocking in at under two minutes, the song delivers a concentrated burst of adrenaline, propelled by surprisingly strong vocal harmonies. “Sound the Alarm” maintains that relentless pace with circle-pit rhythms and…

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Better Living Through Chemistry wasn’t just Fatboy Slim’s breakthrough – it helped redefine what electronic music could be in the mainstream. Released in 1996, the album arrived at a pivotal moment in UK club culture, fusing big beat, acid house energy and sample-heavy experimentation into something irreverent, accessible and unmistakably British. Tracks like “Everybody Needs a 303,” “Going Out of My Head,” and “The Weekend Starts Here” captured the anarchic spirit of the era while laying the foundation for a sound that would dominate late-’90s pop culture.
Three decades later, Norman Cook remains one of dance music’s most enduring and influential figures. From the Brighton Beach Boutique…

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Originally released in September 1996, ‘Coming Up’ represented the creative and commercial peak for a rejuvenated Suede… some debut indeed for new band members guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboardist Neil Codling. A UK No. 1 album which spent just shy of an entire year in the album chart, the vivid, electrifying ‘Coming Up’ spawned five UK Top 10 singles – ‘Trash’, ‘Beautiful Ones’, ‘Saturday Night’, ‘Lazy’ and ‘Filmstar’. Elsewhere, grimy glam stompers met elegiac ballads and stadium anthems… and 30 years on, ‘Coming Up’ still packs all its original punch.
For the anniversary, Coming Up has been expanded into an all-encompassing 5CD edition, in Deluxe 7”X 7” packaging. On CD1 ‘Coming Up’ has been newly mastered from the original…

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For more than four decades, Antietam have occupied a singular place in American underground rock. Formed in New York City in the mid-’80s by guitarist and vocalist Tara Key and bassist Tim Harris, and joined in 1990 by drummer Josh Madell, the trio have built a body of work that spans punk, indie rock, experimental music, and guitar-driven improvisation while remaining fiercely independent and unmistakably their own.
…Antietam has continued more or less ever since, making 14 records over a 40 year run. This latest missive, the Counting Game, is less wild and more melodic, tinged with folk and alt.country, but still forceful. It veers much further into indie rock and even pop than Antietam’s early recordings did, and incorporates Americana sounds…

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On the cover of Furlongs is an illustration of a young man with not a whisper of a beard on his smooth chin. The hair is a W H Auden-era short back and sides with an unruly cowlick fringe. He is dressed neatly, in a shirt and tie, waistcoat or possibly sweater vest, a sketch pad and pencil in his hand. The man is framed by a pebble-dash wall and a slated windowpane from which he peers out at the world. Reflected on the glass are the green downland hills and the white chalk figure of the Long Man of Wilmington. Though that chalk has since the 1960s been augmented by concrete kerbstones to help prevent its outline from fading away, and long before had assistance from mortar and brick. Just as Avebury’s ancient stones are propped up on b-road bollard-like plinths.

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There is a particular kind of light that only exists after rain has finished falling but before the sun has arrived – a grey-gold hour where the wet ground holds more colour than the sky. Space Afrika has always made records that live inside that hour. Honest Labour, the pair’s breakout 2021 statement, was full of it: shortwave murmur, tower-block wind, the feeling of being simultaneously inside a crowd and entirely alone. Five years on, Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang return with Quiet Storm, a record that doesn’t so much follow Honest Labour as walk out of its shadow into wide open air. Theirs has always been a music of texture and grit – ambient hiss, trip-hop’s slow pulse, techno’s drive, classical’s structure – folded into dubscapes built from wherever they happen to be living.

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Affection, issued in 2024, trailed the first proper Bullion LP by eight years, making the 2026 follow-up Nearly rather unexpected. Its arrival was likely closer to a shock for those who track Nathan Jenkins’ behind-the-scenes activities. During the two-year interim, Katy J Pearson, Meg Mac, and Avalon Emerson released albums co-written and/or produced by Jenkins, who concurrently had a hand in songs by Oliver Sim and “Rare” duet partner Carly Rae Jepsen, and also mixed an album by Orlando Weeks. All of this outside work perhaps inspired Jenkins’ more openly collaborative approach – akin to that of a production job – yet Nearly comes out sounding just like a Bullion project. While bearing some strong resemblances to Jenkins’ most commercially successful productions…

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Leeds, England’s Adult DVD reignite the ’90s rave bonfire on their 2026 eponymous debut. The group, lead by singer Harry Hanson and keyboardist Greg Lonsdale, has garnered buzz for their swaggeringly irreverent, throwback style of indie dance music. It’s a vibe that fits nicely next to more contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem and Soulwax (the band have intimated as much), but which cannily evokes the brash, Dayglo aesthetic of classic ’90s acts like 808 State, Happy Mondays, and Prodigy. Much of this is due to Hanson’s thick Yorkshire-accent and brash, rap-like delivery. He’s the perfect conduit for the kind of cocky, Madchester-esque, British two-finger salute energy Adult DVD bring in spades. It also doesn’t hurt that Lonsdale and the rest…

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Los Angeles-based pianist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Kiefer Shackleford has appeared on the Blue Note label twice in 2026. In July, he was part of the eponymous debut by FATHERS, a jazz quartet that also includes drummer Nate Smith, bassist CARRTOONS, and producer Kenneth Blume (aka Kenny Beats). Memory Bomb is his 13-track leader debut for the label. It presents a sound he calls “Over the Breaks,” after a J Dilla concept balancing modern jazz warmth with the rhythmic pull of hip-hop, improvisation, and neo-soul. Memory Bomb showcases many collaborators, but there isn’t a moment where Kiefer doesn’t shine through and hold everything together. He shares production duties with best friends and creative partners CARRTOONS…

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Back in 2018, Kaia Kater‘s third album Grenades sent a ripple through the folk and roots music world, earning her Polaris and Juno nominations and helping to reinvigorate the mesmerizing quality of banjo-focused music. The album was raw and stripped back, employing a more traditional western folk style for Kater to sing about her Caribbean heritage and her father’s struggles as a young political refugee.
Now, six years later, Kater is back with Strange Medicine, which feels more like a cinematic odyssey than a straight folk album. The songs on Strange Medicine feel fully realized, featuring strings, melancholic horns, R&B synth work, frenetic jazz drumming and of course, some expert banjo playing from Kater. Kater’s vocals…

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…The digital deluxe version adds 5 exclusive acoustic tracks.
It’s almost unbelievable to think that it’s been seven years since YONAKA released their debut album, considering the Brighton trio have shared two EPs and a mixtape in the time since. But on this second full-length, the band appear to be making a much more definitive statement. A record that – according to vocalist Theresa Jarvis – delves into matters of the heart in all their gory glory (or “the dirty bits and the harsh bits”), Until You’re Satisfied picks up where the grand ambitions of their debut left off, but this time, manages to make a return to the attitude and intrigue of their earlier works. Granted, there are still humongous, widescreen rock moments: take the stadium-sized…

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When the speakers are throbbing and rattling, spitting a filthy squeal, threatening to split open-do you bolt out of the room or step closer? If you ever attend a Gilla Band show, you will know instantly which their fans prefer. Discomfort is the baseline goal for a band that weaponizes its instruments to such earsplitting magnitudes that they rarely resemble the tried tools of rock music: guitar, bass, drums. “The trick,” bassist Daniel Fox said in a recent interview with Pitchfork, “is to be louder than everyone else.” This is a wild but typical understatement from the humble Irish quartet, which also comprises vocalist Dara Kiely, guitarist Alan Duggan Borges, and drummer Adam Faulkner. Volume-blown out to extremes or dampened before a deafening blast…

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Megiapa’s nutritive first album for Chicago’s International Anthem label would have made equal sense on progressive Los Angeles imprints such as Stones Throw and Brainfeeder. In a way, the Midwest native, who writes, arranges, and produces her material, is a child of the L.A. beat scene that gave rise to the likes of Georgia Anne Muldrow and Flying Lotus. Although she established herself in the Windy City while building up a considerable catalog of self-released material over the course of a decade, Megiapa has been in L.A. since 2023, allying with a host of players, many of whom joined her in the making of Intentions. A mix of live instrumentation and Megiapa’s progressive beatmaking, this set is laid out like a considered mixtape slash refined jam session…

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Oren Ambarchi’s Cooked brings together a wide cast of avant-garde luminaries, shaping improvisations into two sprawling, side-long pieces. The roster includes frequent and longtime Ambarchi collaborators such as Jim O’Rourke, Johan Berthling, James Rushford, and Will Guthrie, in addition to Eiko Ishibashi, Michiko Ogawa, Isak Hedtjärn, and others. “Hidden Tableau” starts the album out on a rather discomforting note, with an abrasive synthetic voice (courtesy of Konrad Sprenger) that brings to mind a malfunctioning, bit-crushed version of Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing. This unnerving vocal texture continues to creak over sustained pianos and faintly glowing drones, with other instruments gradually taking form in the mix.

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Even some of the most obscure musical movements have their lesser-known players. One such example is the incredibly unseen group the Catburgers, a band from Edinburgh, Scotland who existed in the margins of the C-86 scene during the late ’80s, playing sparingly and recording a few times without ever officially releasing any music in their time. Galashiels represents the Catburgers album that never was when they were first active, recorded in 1989, shortly before they disbanded the following year, and then mixed in 2025 by Archie Moore from tapes that had sat in storage for decades. Like many of their peers of the time, the band’s sound sat in a conflicted place between melodic rock and punk abrasion. As the story goes, the band began in a burst of inspiration…

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