To listen to a new release from Geneva-based label Bongo Joe is to have a twofold reaction. On the one hand, the Bongo Joe catalog is so eclectic that each new direction it takes is a surprise. On the other hand, the albums that come out of it tend to be so good that it seems only logical for the latest interesting release to be a Bongo Joe production. An inarticulate harmony and a tasteful eclecticism hold their discography together.
Now, the imprint celebrates its first full decade with a vivid compilation that makes the extent of the Bongo Joe palette clear. In 23 tracks, 2015-2025: Les Disques Bongo Joe – 10 Years of Sonic Explorations tells the story its subtitle promises, moving through space and time with an ear for quality. It’s unquestionably…
Category: indie
Growing up, Gabi Gamberg’s yard was lined with buttery-yellow daffodils. Even now, as the seasons shift and the bounty of springtime subsides, Gamberg’s daffodils are unremitting, living in infamy in the form of their stage name, Daffo. It’s no wonder Gamberg chose a name that signals their youth’s germination — their career charts the trajectory of an artist from their impetus, one willing to parse through the knots of adolescence and search for coherence. The Daffo presented on 2023’s Pest EP had a penchant for killing spiders, but at twenty-one, they look now with more compassion toward the unwanted pests of their earlier music. With indie-rock hits like “Good God” and “Poor Madeline,” Daffo put down roots that flowered into their debut…
After years of sending club spaces into chaos and soundcloud into overdrive, Irish producer and DJ, KETTAMA, unleashes his long-awaited debut album, Archangel, with the release a genre-smashing, emotionally rich body of work that cements his status as one of underground music’s most vital new voices. Best known for his high-octane sets, raw cuts, and galvanizing club anthems, the Galway-born artist has taken his time crafting Archangel, and it shows. A decade in the making, the 15-track collection is more than just a debut, it’s a defining statement. Blending hard-house energy, trance elation, breakbeat chaos, and a bold step into introspection, the album solidifies KETTAMA’s rise, and cements him as one of the best currently around.
In the midst of a career writing, creating, and recording music with a wide array of influential popular artists and for television and film, Grammy award-winning Nashville-based producer and musician Emery Dobyns is releasing his debut album, Improvs, on Hammock Music Label.
A series of 16 improvised works, Improvs sees Dobyns step from the fast-paced environment of the studio and into a world of glowing ethereal ambiance, where time slows and rays of hope and poetry illuminate life’s quiet moments and days full of wonder and promise.
…Improvs is Dobyns’ first album, but he’s racked up over two decades on the other side of the mixing desk, producing and engineering for multiple artists from Mary J Blige, through…
Should music academics ever require evidence as to how a singer-songwriter/musician matures and develops over a short period of time, then there could be no better artist to use as a case study than Katie Spencer. Leaving aside an impressive and increasingly formidable catalogue of live work, in respect of her recorded output alone, the journey, from the release of a highly praised debut album, Weather Beaten in 2019, followed by 2022’s The Edge of the Land, which reached Number 14 in the Official Folk Charts, to What Love Is, her third and latest stunning release, provides more than ample material to satisfy any of those abovementioned scholars.
Katie’s musical history has been well-documented, raised by music- loving parents in…
It would be all too easy to reach for cliché and cast Marta Złakowska as muse to the much older and more established Adrian Thaws, aka Tricky. He did, after all — to use another cliché — “pluck her from obscurity,” taking her from small-town hopeful working in bars to international stages in 2017. Ever since then, he has been on a creative hot streak, despite harrowing personal tragedy with the death of his daughter in 2019. But you only have to listen to their work together to understand that there’s way more to it than simple ideas like “artist and muse” or “mentor and protegé.” They’re now on their third-and-a-half album together (Out the Way and When it’s Going Wrong are credited to Marta as main artist with Tricky as producer; Fall to Pieces gets Tricky’s name but with…
Have you been paying attention to Bill Orcutt? For the last dozen-plus years, or since the 2011 release of the splenetic acoustic marvel How the Thing Sings, the San Francisco-based guitarist has been on one of the great creative tears in his chosen instrument’s vaunted history. Whether alone, with a scattered cast of brazen collaborators, or quadrupling his own playing in an astonishing guitar quartet of one, Orcutt has been reshaping the emotional and technical terrain typically associated with instrumental guitar music. He cuts rage with wonder and laces joy with doubt as he splinters melodies and rebuilds them in uncanny new shapes, like a random-number generator that knows exactly what it’s doing. Orcutt’s music sometimes feels like some…
“Care”, the first song on Laveda’s new album, Love, Darla, opens appropriately with gritty feedback noise. It’s a suitable way for this four-piece band to start the record. Originally from Albany, the quartet – Ali Genevich, Jacob Brooks, Dan Carr, and Joe Taroune – have since relocated to Queens, and the gritty urban setting is crucial to their makeup. The thrashing riffs and Genevich’s vocal declarations – “I don’t care, I don’t care” – beautifully evoke a nihilistic New York City punk aesthetic.
Laveda are a band that contains multitudes. The simple groove of the bass line on “Cellphone” evokes the tuneful yet primal feel of vintage Pixies, and the ringing guitars of “Heaven” and the moody “Highway Meditation” are fine examples of dream pop at its finest. While their first…
Léna Bartels made a terrific debut album, Preservation, in 2022. Now, after a split release with regular collaborator Nico Hedley (It’s Gonna Be a Wonderful New Year, released in February), she’s back with a new full-length album. It’s not a surprising departure or change of pace for the Brooklyn-via-Portland singer/songwriter; it does, however, build on that excellent debut.
Many of the same musicians appear on Bartels’ new record, The Brightest Silver Fish, particularly the core trio of Izzy Oram Brown on guitar, Micah Prussack (Youbet) on bass, and Andrew Emge (The Big Net) on drums (Bartels plays mostly guitar and keyboards). The songs are uniformly stellar, but the arrangements are also crucial, mainly because they contain a surprising amount of…
Erica Dunn plays an unhinged guitar in Tropical Fuck Storm and leads the rowdy pop-tinged punk band Mod Con, but the Palm Springs project has a whole different vibe: acoustic, unvarnished, a bit somber, and emotionally revealing.
This is a mostly solitary, inward-looking endeavor that has to fit in between the artist’s other obligations. As a result, Palm Springs releases have been somewhat widely spaced out: debut Palm Springs & Friends in 2018, a rarities compilation A Collection of Songs in 2021, and now the eight-song Turning Yr Back on the Dolphin.
Here, Dunn’s songs are framed by low-toned, agile guitar picking, rooted in folk but slipping off, sometimes into jazz. To this, she adds the barest of additional elements: occasional…
Grounded in personal loss and the trauma that accompanies such an experience, sound artist Arvin Dola presents eight mid-length tracks of experimental ambient music. As suggested by the title, the album explores the concept of ghosts – not necessarily in a literal or supernatural sense, but in how both the past and unrealized futures can haunt the present.
These ideas are based on the works of Mark Fisher and Jacques Derrida, and are commonly referred to as “hauntology.” The latter has a rich recent history in the darker side of modern ambient music, with entire albums dedicated to exploring its aesthetics of memory, absence, and grief.
Dola’s take employs a typical set of building blocks – droning synth chords,…
In early September in a basement room in Oxford Street’s underbelly, sandwiched between conversations about fogous and creeps, Alexander Tucker sat and strummed an acoustic guitar. For those more familiar with his Nonexistent, Brood X Cycles, or Microcorps output, the notion of him fingering a fretboard might appear quite novel. But this is the Alexander Tucker who wailed on banjos and violins during his early 21st century work and moved in similar circles to Jackie-O Motherfucker. That evening, Tucker united these supposedly opposing approaches by playing his guitar through an array of modular synthesisers and effects pedals, transforming struck strings into heaven-shattering drones that surged up against a ceiling too low to contain them. His mutations…
As well as making atmospheric electronic compositions, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based musician Dania also works night shifts as an emergency doctor. These nocturnal hours are the influence behind her new album Listless: all seven tracks were composed and recorded after midnight, while the artwork features the spindly flower of the Japanese snake gourd, a plant that only blooms after dark. But there is little trace of the chaos of her late-night schedule here: instead, the record embodies a quiet calm that is sometimes blissful, sometimes eerie.
Meeting somewhere between trip-hop, shoegaze and ambient, with a touch of pop, the textured tracks slink along dreamily, propelled by washes of synths and, for the first time, drums.
Gazelle Twin has become a prolific scorer in the past few years; her latest project is written for the Welsh procedural drama Mudtown (Ar y Ffin). Viewing the trailer, one can tell that there’s a great deal of tension in the show; suffice it to say that the producers hired the right person for the job.
The title track, which we assume is played over the opening credits, is awash in bell-toned percussion, innocent at first, then savaged by a deep electronic drone. One can already sense the ways in which the plot may turn. Many of the pieces here are similarly short, but contain some segment of inner transition, refusing to be incidental music.
“Take the Hit” is the first piece to launch right into the listener. The drums are hard and harsh, the implication that something mean is…
Earlier this year, nomadic Texan instrumentalist Jason Dungan, who operates out of Copenhagen under the moniker Blue Lake, released Weft, a beautiful, shimmering short album of finely textured, intricate instrumentals. Although the record is in itself a significant piece of work, Jason considered it an interim project of sorts, testing his ability as bandleader and promising a full-length album by the end of the year.
So here we have The Animal, an LP that fully embraces the community spirit of music and a band sound. Before Weft, Blue Lake releases have been more solitary endeavours, with only 2019’s The Parrot splitting a solo structure with a collaborative sound. This makes the thinking behind Weft clearer, and that process immediately…
From the first track on You Want It! You Got It!, Berlin-based Lawn Chair establish the mood: snarky, sarcastic, brooding… yet somehow fun. There’s fantastic energy to “Fancy Car, Girlfriend and the Big House.” “So you’ve got life all figured out/ You’ve got the fancy car, girlfriend and the big house,” Seattle native, lead singer and lyricist Claudia Schlutius chants. “A man turning heads when he walks down the street/ Impeccably dressed yet always so modest/ So used to getting everything you ever wanted.” There’s a distinct Cyndi Lauper or Julie Brown vibe. “Well hello, it’s me again!” she reminds, and suddenly we have a broader picture of the subject of the song — his perfection is hollow: somewhere there’s a person who’s done waiting for his returned…
Shiner have a sound, but it’s not easy to classify. You can get close by mentioning their ’90s peers, such as Jawbox, who also balanced melody, heaviness, and precision.
Still, nothing ever feels complete – phrases like “heavy shoegaze” or “heavy alternative” seem apt, but don’t fully capture it. BELIEVEYOUME is a great place to start if you are new to the band. If you are a longtime fan, this is the follow-up to the masterful The Egg you have been waiting for. It’s Shiner at the peak of their powers, delivering a juiced-up version of the sound that has had fans enthralled for nearly three decades.
BELIEVEYOUME is their first release since 2020’s Shadenfreude, which marked their return after a nearly 20-year absence.
The city of Oxford over the past few decades has spawned the likes of Foals, Ride, and of course, Radiohead. Looking to emulate some of this high-calibre pedigree, alt-rock four-piece Kanadia have just released their intriguingly titled third album The Fire That’s Tearing Through Our Home.
After their self-titled debut in 2019 and impressive live performances, Kanadia’s music has been widely tagged as “stadium-ready”. Their latest offering certainly doesn’t shy away from that perception with an abundance of dense, anthemic sonics.
It finds vocalists, guitarist and chief songwriter James Bettis soul-searching about his place in life; reflecting on the past, the present, and the unknown, while dealing with severe anxieties. The deep themes and heavy…