…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…
Category: indie
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…
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…
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.
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…
Continuing the series of archival live albums documenting German experimental rock legends Can at their mid-’70s creative peak, Live in Arles 1975 captures a set recorded in August of that year at an amphitheatre in Southern France. As with other volumes in the series, the tracks are numerically titled, as the group mainly improvised in concert, though they often touched on riffs, ideas, and rhythms heard in the songs contained on their studio albums. Also like some of the other live releases, it sounds like it was sourced from private fan tapes rather than professional recordings, but the energy of the musicians’ performances mostly makes up for the murky sound quality. The group sound strong and energetic as soon as the record button was pressed…
In the period following the release of her third album, PRE PLEASURE, and related touring, Julia Jacklin found herself no longer under contract to a label, and looking for a manager. Left to her own devices, she decided to record her next album in Melbourne for the first time (her home since 2017), with just a few friends. She called up Robert Muinos, the owner of Rat Shack studios, which is located upstairs from a local hangout from her earliest days in the city, a pub called The Gem. With Muinos as Jacklin’s co-producer as well as engineer and mixer, she recorded the album live in close quarters with the backing band of guitarist Jacob Diamond, bassist Mimi Gilbert, and drummer Jess Elwood. The resulting record, The Gem (which was ultimately released on 4AD)…
Titled simply 3, Penelope Isles‘ third album and first in five years follows the release of both Jack and Lily Wolter’s debut solo albums, with Jack recording under the moniker Cubzoa and his sister going by My Precious Bunny. Perhaps expectedly, both projects reflect characteristics of their band’s tender, psychedelic sound, although Cubzoa’s Unfold in the Sky leaned further into experimental realms for its lush, other-worldly sound, whereas My Precious Bunny’s A Moment in My Eyes landed in a more personal, dream pop-oriented space. These qualities come back together for 3, although it’s a bit quieter, more reflective album than their previous ones. Relatedly, it’s their first LP to be recorded live in the studio, and their first as only a trio with drummer Joe Taylor…
This expanded edition features six new recordings in total: four previously unreleased songs along with acoustic versions of two fan favorites from ‘Hen’s Teeth’.
For the best part of a quarter of a century North Carolina singer-songwriter Sam Beam has steadily released albums of depth and substance under his Iron & Wine guise, playing a form of indie-folk before that term was invented. Strictly speaking, Hen’s Teeth is the eighth Iron & Wine album but Beam’s collaborations with the likes of Calexico, Jesca Hoop and Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses comfortably takes him into double figures.
It sees him carry on from 2024’s Light Verse album with the songs broadly from the same period of writing and occupying similar…
…This deluxe version remasters the original album (or perhaps more accurately, masters it for the first time) and offers a whopping thirteen bonus tracks of never-before-heard songs, alternate versions, and demos.
Boston’s Horse Jumper of Love are a self- proclaimed “slow rock” trio that, despite declaring themselves a band, more strongly resemble a solo project. A few years into their career, the group’s already busted into the top tier of the Boston house show scene — a considerable accomplishment for any young rock band, considering the scene’s predilections towards snoozy folk and hostile hardcore. But while Horse Jumper of Love’s live performances recall the low, slow burn of bands like Silver Jews and Arab Strap,…
One aspect of the obsessive fascination surrounding Joy Division is the scarcity of their music. Though they were technically active under different band names as early as 1976, the finalized lineup of the group played under the name Joy Division for less than three years, becoming one of the most influential and game-changing entities to ever shift the tides with just two studio albums. In this brief time, the band played somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 or so live shows, which have also played into their legacy. Innumerable bootleg recordings and a smattering of above-board releases have cobbled together as much footage as possible of the band’s extremely limited time on stages, hoping to uncover a better picture of what made them so important.
A tenth album often serves as a way of resetting the clock, rediscovering something that has been misplaced or set aside, slowing down, reconnecting with ways of working that were there from the very beginning but may have gradually faded into the background over the years.
For Anthony Gonzalez, I Wrote You a Letter became exactly that; a return to instinct. Written from demos begun in the summer of 2024, the record grew from a desire to rediscover the immediacy of M83’s earliest work, the bedroom recordings, the imperfections, the freedom of creating without expectation.
Twenty-five years after M83 first emerged from the south of France, that impulse feels surprisingly radical.
Even though Orbital had hit the Top 40 of the British singles chart several times by the time they took the stage at the 1994 Glastonbury Festival, they were still largely popular among ravers rather than rock fans or the general public, and some people still got them mixed up with the group that did “Little Fluffy Clouds.” That all changed when their set took place, especially since Channel 4 was providing extensive television coverage of the festival, giving British home audiences their first taste of live electronic music, and subsequently opening the door for the arena-conquering success of acts like the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, and Faithless. Orbital returned to the Glastonbury stage several more times, and the compilation Live at Glastonbury 1994-2004…
Protomartyr have never done things the easy way. From singer Joe Casey’s handmade album artwork to drummer Alex Leonard’s impish, kinetic inversions of classic post-punk rhythm, the Detroit band maintain a workman-like lack of compromise in everything they do. Cerebral, instinctive or otherwise, nothing in the Protomartyr canon is ill-considered or under-distilled. For many listeners, myself included, this sense of commitment and purpose made them instantly appealing on first exposure, yet it’d be easy to understand a certain reticence from others based on that same quality. This is austere, unflinching music, often as bleak to one person as it may be cathartic to another—and this has never been truer than on Protomartyr’s new album Hotel Usona.
Six solo albums into a career that also includes numerous collaborations, her work as a member of Red Sparowes, Marriages and more, Emma Ruth Rundle has amassed one of the most impressive back catalogues of any current musician.
These Killing Times is another beguiling set of songs that run the gamut from dark to delicate, crushing to sombre, and feel far more dynamic than the raw minimalism of 2021’s Engine Of Hell. This may partially be due to the subject matter, with Emma looking more broadly at the current state of the world, rather than reflecting on her own personal journey.
Opener Powerless muses on her fears and disdain of those who govern us and is gorgeously melodic, but the deep, distorted guitars…
Ohio’s punk scene is well-known for many things: hyperactive egg punk, indignant hardcore, and every style of jangle pop you can think of, just to name a few. Trippy, motorik-heavy meditations, not so much. But as the saying goes, there are always exceptions that prove the rule.
Enter Cincinnati-based Dylan McCartney, who’s spent more than half a decade exploring the outer fringes of guitar music with his band The Drin, embracing everything from krautrock and dub to field recordings and found sounds. The man’s unstoppable creative drive, reinforced by economical songwriting and easy, effortless intra-band chemistry, garnered them a cult reputation that’s snowballed further in the wake of their breakout 2024 album, Elude the Torch.
Perennial may be the only punk trio with an organist instead of a bassist. You could call what they do — “Motown-via-Dischord,” their promotional material accurately christens it, with a third ingredient of ‘60s mod chic — a gimmick, except it’s too undeniable: Perennial fucking rock. You’ll know this from the moment their new album, Modernism, kicks in. A very quick feedback squall; a very quick intro riff (no time is ever wasted on a Perennial song); then the whole band, with a cocky, amped-up, swaggering riff. It’s instant electricity, pure adrenaline.
The ingredients for each song are straightforward and no-nonsense: an elastic, mod-rock riff smothered in pugilistic distortion; snare drum hits that may as well be gunshots; organ…
Half studio recordings and with side B taken from a live set at City Winery, this finds ’80s Hoboken contemporaries and longtime friends Richard Barone (best known for The Bongos, but part of many other ventures as well) and Glenn Mercer (guitarist and vocalist of The Feelies) covering ’70s glam-rock songs that shaped their youth and part of the foundation of their musical education before starting bands of their own.
That Barone is doing this shouldn’t be a surprise to fans who have been paying attention. Not only did The Bongos cover T Rex‘s “Mambo Sun” on their debut LP Drums Along the Hudson, but Barone also wrote extensively about his love for T Rex and Marc Bolan (as well as some of their contemporaries) in his wonderful 2007…