Category: indie


…The deluxe album feature acoustic versions of every song from the original release as well as bonus covers of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” and Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.”
If Winona Fighter had nothing else going for them, they’d still have an all-time great celebrity pun band name.
Their chosen handle is immediately memorable, the right amount of goofy and ties the band to an enduring and endearing public figure. But what really puts the name a cut above the Chet Fakers, Joy Orbisons and Been Stellars of recent music history is that the Winona Fighter moniker also speaks to the abundant, not name-based positives the Nashville trio do have going for them.
My Apologies to the Chef, the band’s debut…

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It’s been three years since Girlpool, the DIY indie-rock duo fronted by Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad, went their separate ways. Though their breakup was amicable, their disbanding is still deeply felt. The two built a niche yet passionate following since their start, emerging with compellingly lo-fi and small-scale ambitions on 2014’s Before the World Was Big and 2017’s Powerplant before evolving into more serious and exploratory territory on 2019’s What Chaos Is Imaginary and 2022’s Forgiveness. Keeping everything glued together was Tucker and Tividad’s ironclad bond as vocalists, songwriters, and friends. Even when Tucker transitioned in 2017 and his voice subsequently dropped, such a change managed to give even greater…

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Prewn’s Izzy Hagerup follows up to 2023’s Through the Window with a noisy, nasty, powerful slice of feedback-addled rock, a primal wail that sits alongside howling classics like PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love and the Throwing Muses Limbo.  Like Hersh, she makes disruptive use of bowed strings; the discordant cello in the title track goes about as far into rock anarchy as an orchestral instrument can do.
As the title implies, Hagerup has social ills, not personal ones, on her mind for this sophomore disc.  In a ragged voice that vibrates with angst, she nails an exploitive industry in one quatrain:  “Just give your life away/Turn on your lights baby/Give them a show/It won’t be long you say/But it’s a system and/All that you know.”

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Maybe you thought you knew what you were getting from a Pulse Emitter album called Tide Pools. Limpid ambient miniatures lapping against the speakers, right?
Turns out Daryl Groetsch got all that out of his system with his 2022 album Dusk and the run of synth albums he’s put out under his own name since then; now, he’s ready to play in spikier territory. More challenging than Dusk or Swirlings, his 2020 debut for the trippy Chicago label Hausu Mountain, Tide Pools suggests not so much the shimmering surface of its namesake as the strange denizens that might be found within, pulsating and flexing their spines for whatever beachcomber is lucky enough to find them.
Still drawing from the array of vintage synths…

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Marta Forsberg’s new record Archaeology of Intimacy is something of a surprise. Things are kept short and simple, and sometimes ever so slightly sharp. Forsberg’s languorous, quietly investigative style is now attuned to a trickier yet still seductive line of attack.
The listener’s relationship with Archaeology of Intimacy soon becomes very clear: we are here to be still, and actively listen to these quiet but often surprising songs. This injunction is not a bad thing – a lot of what makes this album so moreish is only revealed with patience and attention. Archaeology of Intimacy is not demanding your opinion. But neither should it be consumed piecemeal or in passing.
The opening two tracks are there to call us to…

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Prolific multi-diamond artist and producer SYML invites listeners into an intimate space with his new live album, Paris Unplugged.
Recorded while in Paris, France, this past summer at Le Consulat, the album distills his emotional songwriting into an unfiltered performance that feels deeply personal and universally moving.
Accompanied by Brian Eichelberger, Zawadi Morrow, and Kyle Moore, the songs are stripped of excess production, revealing the fragile heart at the center of his music and offering fans a chance to experience the closeness of his live shows-where silence, melody, and emotion intertwine. This is SYML at his most human: present, unguarded, and profoundly connected to those listening.
Brian Fennell adds, “I was on the roof three…

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…contains 12 new songs written, recorded, and produced by Keery and Thein at Electric Lady Studios while they worked on ‘The Crux’, and completed months after the album’s release.
Musician and actor Joe Keery stakes his claim on the pop world with his third album as Djo, 2025’s swoon-worthy The Crux. The album, which follows 2020’s Twenty Twenty and 2022’s Decide, once again finds Keery indulging his pop passions while offering a fresh creative window on his persona as the loveable former high school jock-turned-righteous cool dude Steve Harrington on Stranger Things merely hints at.
Just as Keery’s trademark mullet and devilish smile as Steve conjure a kind of ’80 throwback charisma, his music as Djo has an equally evocative…

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…featuring alternate versions, live recordings, and a searing cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.”
The Vices belong to an increasingly rare class of band. The Dutch four-piece are hyper-competent musicians but rarely flashy. They put out music at a workmanlike pace with three albums since 2021, but are too baroque and brainy to come off as working class. They frequently work within the confines of mature, electronic-tinged rock deeply indebted to OK Computer, but they can also convincingly rock out in the mold of the Hives.
They’re the exact sort of band that used to land a single on an AAA sports videogame soundtrack or Cadillac commercial and make new fans. In other words, the Vices are modern rock music’s vanishing middle class, and their new…

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There’s a special kind of magic that emerges when a band decides to forgo the relentless pursuit of perfection and instead embraces the rawness of their craft. That’s the essence of Talking Machine, the fifth album from Brighton’s The Wytches. This album marks a return to their roots, as it was recorded live to analogue tape, the first time they’ve done so since their 2014 release, Annabel Dream Reader. The result is an album bursting with immediacy and instinct, brimming with a wonderfully human touch. The sound is rough around the edges, saturated with a thick atmosphere, and carried by an undeniable swagger.
The title track opens the album with a striking introduction. “Talking Machine” exemplifies the band’s gritty, stripped-back sound…

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Hearing the sound of this big, brash, loud band, one wonders if there are five musicians or only four.  The correct answer is two. Since 2014, Finland’s NYOS has been rocking out, creating an illusion of the ears. The combination of guitarist Tom Brooke and drummer Tuomas Kainulainen creates this illusion with reverb and loops, sculpting live jams in the studio until they sound like full-fledged compositions. Honoring its title, Growl is even more upfront and abrasive than its predecessors, the duo delving into dissonance while maintaining its melodic edge.
The album follows a loose arc, from “Get Ready” to “Alright, Goodnight.” One can see these tracks as the beginning and end of a concert, with catalog songs joining the others to lengthen…

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“The beep test” is probably a familiar and horror-inducing term to anyone who’s taken a gym class at some point in the last few decades. For those unfamiliar: The whole class lines up against a wall and runs 20 meters in the time between two beeps sounding. The beeps get closer and closer together until you’re frantically running back and forward, fearing that you may collapse at any minute. This mental image is appropriate to accompany Irish band God Alone.’s third album, The Beep Test. That’s not necessarily because of the speed or intensity of the music — although there’s plenty of that in places — but rather how relentlessly it throws a listener into new and unexpected vibes with no chance for a breather.
The record starts in a fairly conventional, if…

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The Sheer Action of Fini Tribe is a colossal retrospective anthology curated and designed by the band. Compiled from the years 1982 to 1987, it includes a wealth of archival photographs, an essay by original member Andy McGregor, who also designed the sleeve, and essays by longtime friend Shirley Manson (Garbage, Goodbye Mr. MacKenzie) and author Alastair McKay, an early champion of the band. The release features the first legendary John Peel Session, produced by Dale Griffin and originally broadcast in May 1985. “This compilation was a long time in the making, a labour of love for the band, showcasing our most productive years as a six-piece. The compilation of tracks – from professional BBC recordings to live performance and rehearsal room demos – gives as…

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Ellen Fullman’s long-string instrument is the stuff of legend.
Developed in the early ’80s, it consists of roughly 100 90-foot strings and is generally played by walking the length of said strings, rubbing them with rosin-coated fingers. The experience of hearing it in person has been compared to standing inside a gargantuan grand piano.
For her latest album Elemental View — a live recording of a collaborative installation with Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson’s Living Earth Show — she developed new approaches to her invention, using novel devices that allow her to play three (the box bow), six (the shovelette), and nine (the shoveler) strings at once, thus achieving unprecedented sounds with the instrument.

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Memories of conflict are very much on the mind of Yara Asmar, who splits her time between Beirut and upstate New York and tries to make sense of it all. Or perhaps there is no making sense, only a box of pieces from many puzzles. “There is no future to yearn for,” Asmar writes. “There is a big, sprawling, horrifying present that eats everything in its path.” Pouring her grief into instrument-making and playing, she creates an elaborate musical tapestry of deconstruction and reconstruction. One of the symphomioms she builds is large enough to sit inside, and she invites listeners to “sit inside the sound” with her.
The white noise and whirring that open the album connote absence, swiftly countered by the sounds of traffic and chimes.

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This third album from the Lebanese duo Snakeskin vibrates with intention from its opening seconds, trembling on the blocks with an eagerness to surge forward. In the opener, “Ready” electronic distortion buzzes around Julia Sabra’s crystalline voice, which undulates, ever so slightly with an Arab tonality; you can discern, but just barely, her Lebanese origins. The piece trembles with anticipation, and swirls up with organ-like overload, a hymn, a prayer, a plea for justice. We Live in Sand took shape in 2024, as Israel’s war on Gaza spread north.
Sabra lived close enough to hear and feel the impact of an August 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut. She and her partner Faddi Tabal have had a close-up view of the destructive currents…

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With his score for Yorgos Lanthimos’s gothic fantasies Poor Things and Kind of Kindness, Joscelin Dent-Pooley (aka Jerskin Fendrix) has proven that his skills in sonic storytelling are excellent. His quirky and elaborate instrumentals capture the restless nature of the former’s protagonist, Bella Baxter, a woman with the transplanted brain of an infant, who explores the good and bad of the world.
Composed largely between the artist’s film score work, Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire is an attempt to soundtrack Dent-Pooley’s own life story. Raised in the West Midlands, the songs are infused with references from his formative years, restoring the memories in detailed lyrics on the opening ‘Beth’s Farm’: “We kiss beneath the apple tree…​

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HAAi‘s music is always uplifting and euphoric, but the title of her second album, HUMANiSE, seems appropriate for something that seems a little more down-to-earth than her previous releases. There are far more vocals and fewer banging kick drums on this record, and it’s closer to art-pop than straightforward club music.
HAAi’s own voice takes center stage, joined by two choirs and several guests, and the lyrics are generally hopeful and encouraging, even as they acknowledge life’s struggles. Past collaborators Jon Hopkins and Obi Franky return for opener “Satellite,” which begins with Burial-like crackling ambiance before HAAi assures her presence as the beats gradually heat up. “All That Falls Apart/Comes Together” builds up…

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With each successive release, Blawan has always started from scratch and come up with a different template for his sound, never producing the same record twice. He’s gone down an especially strange path since signing with XL, however. Instead of delivering techno club bangers, he’s made scuffed-up, grimy post-industrial mutations closer to the likes of the Bug and Andy Stott than Surgeon or Perc. Concurrently, he’s also made harsh electro-industrial metal as part of the duo Persher. SickElixir is what he deems his first proper full-length, and he uses it to process personal traumas. Most of the tracks feature unsettling distortion and demonic vocals, as well as lurching, quasi-dancehall rhythms. It seems like he’s designed every sound for the purpose…

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