Have you ever stuck your head inside a speaker just to see what it feels like? That’s SCALER’s Endlessly. It’s ugly-beautiful, claustrophobic, and oddly addictive once your ears give in to the ringing. At times it hums like a neon sign at 3am, glowing cold against the silence of a deserted street. At others it comes down like a barricade, as if the band have taken over a derelict building and refused to let go.
SCALER are inseparable from Bristol’s heritage, and Endlessly wears that DNA with pride. The album is heavily inspired by the city’s cornerstones – trip-hop’s brooding atmospherics, drum’n’bass’s precision breakbeats, the noise scene’s corrosive edges, and the experimental pop underground’s knack for reshaping familiar forms. SCALER’s brand of experimental dance…
Category: indie
Atlanta hardcore punks Upchuck had already made two excellent albums full of buzzsaw guitars, pummeling rhythms, and fire-starting vocals before they hit the studio with producer Ty Segall to record their third, and first for Domino. Segall had already worked with them, helping to hone their sound to a fine point and capturing all the wild intensity of their live shows. The combo of the live to tape recording and the band’s vigorous performances help I’m Nice Now to hit even harder than their previous efforts and the increased variety in the songwriting helps give it a boost up and over the hardcore wall to land firmly in top notch rock & roll of any stripe territory.
While the record is stuffed with paint-peeling rockers like “Plastic” and “Kin” where vocalist…
Širom’s approach is contradictory. Their music is rooted in the traditional, yet never becomes a prisoner of what’s gone before. It is expansive, playful, seemingly always looking for a way to spiral upwards and outwards, into the future.
The group’s preferred term for what they do is “imaginary folk”. The term was first coined by the French musicologist Serge Moreux to describe the creative approach to Hungarian traditions applied by composers like Bartók and Kodály. Like their forebears across the Pannonian Plain, Širom’s relationship to the customs and rituals of Southeast Europe is ‘idealised’, chimerical – and all the better for it.
But how do you explain Širom’s music? The sounds you hear on the band’s remarkable fifth…
dodie’s latest album, Not for Lack of Trying, stands as an intimate and tender follow-up to her 2021 debut, Build a Problem. Soft piano and muted guitar strokes thread throughout the record, accentuating her wistful vocals. The production is immaculate, but many of the songs follow a similar arc: gentle strumming on acoustic guitar swelling into a fuller sound of strings and vocal harmonies. Over time, this predictability undermines the album’s impact, especially in the slower second half.
Amid this, ‘Smart Girl’ establishes itself as an early highlight, an emotional rollercoaster with intense and explosive string tremolo. ‘Tall Kids’ is a melancholy ballad where dodie’s emotive vocals reach their peak, accompanied by a pulsing undercurrent of warm piano.
In a vanitas painting, life is captured in ephemera. Popular with Dutch Baroque painters during the 16th and 17th centuries, the style used the still-life format to comment on the frivolity of earthly possessions. Artworks showcased scattered — and for the time, pretty mundane — stuff: a lute, a conch shell, a half-drunk glass of wine. The old masters didn’t include descriptions of why each item mattered or what historical memory they were meant to evoke. But they rendered them in vivid detail nonetheless.
The French producer Malibu, whose debut album Vanities draws its name from the vanitas movement, imbues her New Age-inflected ambient with a similarly sharp eye for the totemic. Past records, like 2024’s Essential Mixtape…
It’s getting hard to keep up with Peter Buck’s various music projects. The legendary R.E.M. guitarist has now teamed up again with veteran indie-rock singer/songwriter Joseph Arthur two record a second collaborative album under the Arthur Buck moniker. Arthur Buck 2 is a follow-up to the duo’s self-titled 2018 debut album. The new record, which features 10 tracks, was produced Jacknife Lee, who also worked on R.E.M.’s final two studio albums.
Buck and Arthur recorded the album with a backing group that featured Scott McCaughey on bass, Linda Pitmon on drums, and Gregg Foreman on keyboards and other instruments.
Buck has played with McCaughey and Pitmon in multiple projects, including Filthy Friends…
John Ross hasn’t been hiding, exactly, but the Wild Pink mastermind has often taken cover behind music that evokes other music. He’s an inspired enough writer that his personality has tended to show through anyway, though there was always a sense that we weren’t getting the full picture of what Ross could do. Wild Pink’s latest album clears that up.
Dulling the Horns is the band’s most distinctive release so far. It is beholden neither to the hushed piano arrangements and whispery vocals of 2022’s ILYSM, which Ross finished writing after he was diagnosed with cancer (he has since recovered), nor to the lush, indie-adult alternative sound of 2021’s A Billion Little Lights. If there’s an antecedent in the band’s catalog, it’s…
Leading up to the release of her debut album, singer/songwriter Kate Bollinger issued no less than four EPs, signing with Ghostly International for the fourth, after her gentle, jazz-inflected pop attracted the attention of Kanye West, resulting in a songwriting credit on his Donda LP.
For her full-length coming-out (also on Ghostly), she not only remains loyal to a crafted, sophisticated, and soft-footed presentation but maunders even further into soft, pillowy textures, including a vocal delivery sometimes so gossamer as to barely uphold the melodies. She also takes her EPs’ 1960s and ’70s singer/songwriter inspirations to the next level with help from contributors including Matthew E. White, Sam Evian, Adam Brisbin (Katie von Schleicher,…
They started as a neighbourhood group, The Dwarfs of East Agouza, with ex-Sun City Girl Alan Bishop, Karkhana member Maurice Louca, and Sam Shalabi (of Land of Kush, Shalabi Effect, among others) all living in the same apartment block in Cairo, Egypt. It’s tempting to import a kind of “community of sound” ethos onto their collective work; over the decade-or-so that they’ve been together, The Dwarfs of East Agouza have certainly found a voice, a mood, a tone. But surprising things always happen on their albums, whether recorded in the studio or in live performance.
Prior Dwarfs of East Agouza albums have tended toward the sprawl: side-long pieces on albums like Rats Don’t Eat Synthesizers (2018) and High Tide in the Lowlands (2023), and…
A is for Apple, R is for Rocket, et cetera; the stuff we learn in kindergarten can guide our lives far into adulthood’s scary unknowns. And as it happens, kindergarten is where Alithea Tuttle and Cooper Ladomade — half of the Los Angeles band Rocket — learned that they liked the cut of each other’s jibs and became fast friends. It probably took a few years before they graduated from pat-a-cake to bands like my bloody valentine, Ride, and Fugazi, but here was the foundation of their future band, unwittingly established over juice boxes and fruit roll-ups.
The title of their debut, R is for Rocket, feels like it could be a subtle nod to those roots, an endorsement of the “you spend your whole life writing your debut album” aphorism…
The brainchild of drummer Connor Cummins and vocalist Blair Tramel is the epitome of speed. Snooper‘s songs run at a blistering pace, with angular riffs sneaking in one ear and out the other, propelled by frenzied percussion. The Nashville five-piece – completed by bassist Happy Haugen, drummer Brad Barteau, and guitarist Conner Sullivan – squeeze in as many ideas as possible in tunes shy of two minutes, this off-the-cuff musicianship making their 22-minute 2023 debut album, Super Snõõper, feel twice as long and substantial. The wild silliness of abandoning a groove for a totally different one halfway into a barely minute-long song, just for the sake of it, is what makes them addictive.
On Worldwide, Snooper have smoothed out…
…The new edition has been fully remastered and includes unreleased live tracks, plus the lost single ‘Don’t Leave Me Alone’.
Supergrass have a hard time coming down from their musical highs. Every time they release a giddy, irresistible pop album, they repent on the next record, crafting a moodier response. This happened with their 1995 debut, I Should Coco, which engendered two hangover records: the sprawling, ambitious, yet thrilling In It for the Money and its hazy, unfocused 1999 Supergrass, which, despite the instant glitter classic “Pumping on Your Stereo,” was so scattered it sounded as if the guys weren’t sure if they wanted to be a band at all anymore. They sprung back with 2002’s Life on Other Planets, a truly wonderful pop album…
…feature a remastered edition of ‘Z’, plus 14 key outtakes, previously unreleased songs and demos.
In 2004, a dreamy cover of “Rocket Man” concluded My Morning Jacket‘s first volume of rarities. Which was prescient, because it’s Elton John that Jim James’ songs for 2005’s Z first bring to mind. From the wistful recollection of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” to Honky Chateau’s melodic and genre explorations, John’s ability to mesh styles and take detours within his sturdy pop songwriting applies to James here, particularly in the expansive opener, “Wordless Chorus,” or the initial happy-go-lucky lilt of “Off the Record.”
Z is My Morning Jacket’s fourth full-length (and second for ATO), and it’s the one that might finally jump-start the reaction that James’…
…The British rock icons offer a slightly expanded edition of 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, pairing a 2014 remaster of the album (which initially came with additional bonus material) with a bonus EP of new unplugged mixes of four of the album’s tracks (plus a non-album B-side, “Acquiesce.” The group’s songwriter/guitarist Noel Gallagher and Callum Marinho built these new versions from the original multitrack recordings in Noel’s London studio.
After the much-hyped blockbuster Definitely Maybe (1994) established the Manchester band (led by the volatile brothers Noel and vocalist Liam Gallagher) as England’s hottest new rock outfit, Oasis sought to go even bigger with Morning Glory, swinging for the fences with their songcraft…
Brooddark (Yaroslav Gavrilyuk) releases his second album on Cryo Chamber this year, following an excellent collaboration with Tsarewitch. On Overvoltage, he employs some of the same sounds – dense drones, roughly-hewn textures, and a wealth of background elements, from sculpted static to broken percussion and rhythmic lines. Chromatic sweeping takes thick chords up or down a few notes in pitch, providing a dramatic feel.
Indeed, these pieces are quintessentially cinematic. Described as “futuristic and industrial” in the liner notes, there is a strong science fiction theme with dark overtones. One can easily envision the spaceships being infiltrated by alien life forms.
After starting off in a more busy and unconventional direction, Brooddark brings…
XEXA’s debut album, Vibrações de Prata, was an anomaly for Príncipe. The Lisbon label made its name releasing batida, a percussive strain of dance music that rewires Angolan styles like kuduro and kizomba with jagged synths and samples. But you probably wouldn’t dance to Vibrações de Prata. Album closer “Clarinet Mood,” with its field recordings of squawking seagulls and splashing water, transports you to a haunted space — imagine Brighton pier shrouded in Silent Hill 2’s impenetrable fog. The track has more in common with the moody improv sets you’d expect from a midweek night at London’s artsy Cafe OTO than Lisbon’s raucous MusicBox. In fact, XEXA made “Clarinet Mood” in London as part of her course at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Solar Eyes are an indie dance two-piece from Birmingham’s Hall Green. With a sound that binds together psychedelic guitars, foot stomping beats and trippy lyrics, their sophomore album Live Freaky! Die Freaky! exudes a wild-eyed exuberance that echoes the 90s’ marrying of electronic dance music and floppy-haired indie tunes.
Their opening salvo of singles may hark back to a time when indie kids finally plucked up the courage to get onto the dancefloor and shake a tailfeather, but they are tasty and engaging with a spirit of their own. “Time Waits for No One” and “Set the Night on Fire” are especially intoxicating and aim straight for the hips. “Murdering Hippies” is, likewise lively and hypnotic and is obviously much indebted to the shadow of Charles Manson’s…
In the two years since their debut album KILLJOY, Coach Party has been rather busy. On the heels of their moody, brash exploration of the mid-twenties’ blues, the Isle of Wight quartet went on their first international tour, performed at South by Southwest and Glastonbury, and opened for Queens of the Stone Age and Wet Leg. Their second record, Caramel, is a breakup album — though the post-mortem analysis is happening in a dingy, punky bar, and who (or what) exactly frontwoman Jess Eastwood has been torn asunder from remains pleasantly vague.
The record maintains a joyous, party-rocking vibe not in spite of but alongside this upset. Coach Party explores the peaks and nadirs of a fuzzily-defined, oft-drunken life with touching…