Piotr Kurek plays it stone-faced. His music teems with strangeness, yet even his most outré pieces have a lulling effect; it’s uneasy listening that casts a blissful spell. Make no mistake: The Warsaw composer’s music is way out there. His records are miniature worlds where the usual laws don’t hold. Kurek loves to blur the line between authentic and ersatz, natural and synthetic, cause and effect; resolutely tactile instruments like vibraphone are balanced by ethereal wisps of Auto-Tune. Drop the needle anywhere, and you might hear cybernetic bagpipes; holographic harps; voices that might be cellos, or vice versa. For someone who frequently writes for theater — an art form based on real people moving around in three-dimensional space — he’s got an uncanny knack…
Category: indie
Los Angeles-based trio Automatic are known for playing synth-based, danceable post-punk with dystopian lyrical themes. Is It Now?, their third album, expresses the same sort of late capitalist paranoia and dark, subtle humor as their previous efforts. However, the three bandmembers have undeniably improved as musicians, and the record is easily their best-sounding and most accomplished effort to date. While their music previously resembled stripped-down, ESG-style dance-punk with droning Suicide synths and occasional New Order-esque basslines, here they’ve streamlined their sound a bit, coming closer to ’90s alternative dance. Opener “Black Box” has shuffling bongos and buzzing, swooping synths along with coolly detached, echoing vocals.
…includes five bonus tracks – music made during the ‘Talk from Home’ sessions, alternative versions as well as a live version of Renee Sleeping, recorded at Japan’s FFTK festival in 2023.
In 2011, an L.A. producer blipped into view thanks to a well-received debut EP on Gerd Janson’s Running Back imprint. Credited to Suzanne Kraft, an alias of dublab DJ Diego Herrera, Green Flash did nu-disco infused with a low-slung pacing and a warmth not unlike a cassette tape left on the dashboard at midday. It was soon followed by the Horoscope EP and a handful of more Balearic cuts from Herrera’s other band, Pharaohs, suggesting that more floor-filling tracks lay ahead.
But when Missum, Kraft’s next release for Running Back, came out last year, it showed…
In 2023, while the singer/songwriter/composer was touring in support of the previous year’s Better in the Shade, Patrick Watson woke up after a show in Atlanta and couldn’t speak. It turned out that he had hemorrhaged a vocal cord while singing. Uncertain, per his doctors, if he’d ever be able to speak or sing again, he continued to work on music in the months to follow and eventually had the idea to invite some of his favorite singers to perform the songs he was writing. With Watson slowly regaining limited use of his voice after several months of silence, the resulting set of hushed chamber pop, Uh Oh, consists of two solo songs and nine duets, each with a different guest vocalist. Using only two microphones and a laptop, Watson traveled to places like Paris, Mexico City…
On the heels of their 2024 full-length Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes try several different applications of their emotionally driven songwriting on the eight-song EP Kids Table. Centered as always around Conor Oberst’s dense lyrical landscapes, this release touches on some of the band’s best-loved styles while also swimming into unexpected waters. Songs like the title track and the folky strumming of “Cairns (When Your Heart Belongs to Everyone)” have the same maxed-out arrangements as some of Bright Eyes’ most celebrated work, with layers of organ, percussion, vocal harmonies, and even some spooky samples. These songs feel in line with a lot of the band’s previous work, but the sunny ska instrumental of “1st World Blues” throws a curveball.
Growing up in Inverkip, Scotland, sisters Eva and Grace Tedeschi learned to play multiple musical instruments, and in their mid-teens, they decided to start their own band when none of their peers were as into the ’80s and ’90s indie pop of C-86 and Sarah Records as they were. With younger sibling Eva singing lead and playing guitar, and Grace preferring drums, they dubbed themselves the Cords. The duo’s first proper show was an opening slot for the Vaselines in Glasgow in the latter half of 2023, and they quickly sold through pressings of a debut cassette single and later a flexi-single in 2024. Indie pop tastemakers Skep Wax (U.K. and Europe) and Slumberland Records (U.S.) signed on to release their debut album. Produced by Jonny Scott…
When attempting to provide an overview of a big story – one that encompasses both the myriad achievements of its subjects over a span of several decades and the impacts of those achievements – you can take two routes. There’s the “just the facts” approach, where you list off the people, places, and things that populate the tale, and then there’s another road that winds through the hows and whys behind the names and numbers. Looking at the story of Canadian indie rock institution Sloan, the temptation to look through both lenses is strong.
For those who prefer the factual take, there are certainly enough noteworthy events and experiences peppered through the band’s over 30-year history to make for a good yarn.
Have you ever become so immersed in a piece of art that you never want to leave its world? On their fourth full-length, Canadian electronic duo Purity Ring are drawing on a specific variation of this sensibility, conjuring up an anime and video game-inspired conceptual stunner that will grasp your heart in the palms of its gentle hands.
But fear not, casual fans of anime and games. Even if you haven’t watched a Studio Ghibli film or played a Zelda or Final Fantasy game, the emotional language of ‘purity fing’ will fill you with the same sense of poignant satisfaction.
Along with their warm characters and compelling narratives, the literal worlds that these works of art exist within are often heart-stoppingly beautiful: colourful, magical and…
It’s been over 25 years since Kathryn Williams self-released her debut album Dog Leap Stairs and began a career that would see her become one of the most enduring British folk artists.
The ‘folk’ tag is a bit misleading though – she’s more of a contemporary singer/songwriter than anything else, while also collaborating with artists as diverse as Withered Hand and punk artist Anna Spencer (with whom she made a children’s album). That’s all in addition to being a published novelist and a successful podcast host.
Mystery Park is Williams’ 15th solo album and is a record bathed in memories. She’s described it as her most personal record to date, and it’s certainly the sort of album that seems to be bathed in nostalgia. The fact that all of her…
The list of “bitchin’” things in music is select: Camaros, summers, pretty lives. Meditative, drone-filled music built on synths, drum machines, and woodwinds usually does not fit the bill. Yet the Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas (possibly named after the late, lamented Subaru coupé utility vehicle) makes a strong case for the bitchin-ness of their aggressively subdued sound. Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan may not shred, but they can carve, shaping layers, loops, and live instruments into dazzling, dizzying constructions.
Inland See, the Bajas’ ninth album not counting some collaborations and a soundtrack, continues the band’s heavy-duty minimalism, with closing track “Graut” clocking in at over 18 minutes while barely breaking a low boil.
Let’s face it: even Richard D. James has probably lost track of all the aliases he’s forged during his decades-long career. There are the ones we are party to — Aphex Twin, Caustic Window, Polygon Window — and then there are the thousands about which we have undoubtedly been left in the dark.
…Apparently, the electronic music trickster dons his many hats “for a laugh,” as he told Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne in a rare interview back in 2014, “And I might keep doing it, just keep being anonymous and doing different names.” You only need to glance at Aphex Twin’s ridiculous Warp Records bio for living proof that we will likely never know the truth about the smarty pants “fartist” with a silly sense of humor, and one of the most revered, peerless catalogues in the canon.
Since Dublin’s Sprints exploded out the gate with the stunning Letter to Self at the start of last year, they’ve proved a relentless force across the live touring circuit.
Matching their furious off-kilter racket with an equally poignant and powerful performance, their schedule recently climaxed with an early afternoon set at Glastonbury, fittingly pairing their political punk with matching backdrops calling the amped up crowd to action. Time on the road, it seems, has done little to quash their outrage – a time that has also birthed All That Is Over, their second album in two years and one that carries much of the visceral frustration that its forebearer began, rolled out at breakneck speed.
One significant change sees founding guitarist…
Previously, Carmarthenshire-born Cate Le Bon has interspersed recording with learning carpentry in the Lake District and taking pottery classes in Los Angeles. She made mugs for people ordering 2013 album Mug Museum.
Her new album, however, was preceded by the end of a relationship, by heartache and ill health. But if this suggests a tormented record, it’s not there in the music, which is a sweetly meditative expanse, coloured with effects units – a warm bath infused with rare essences of chorus, reverb and perhaps Le Bon’s EarthQuaker Hummingbird pedal, where the product information promises “choppy sawtooth tremolo”.
Opener ‘Jerome’ leads into the reverberant studio-verse of the Cocteau Twins.
After some turbulent late teen years in her former pop punk band, Mixtapes, Maura Weaver needed a break. Months became years and the songs still weren’t coming. It wasn’t until being thrust into personal heartache in 2020 that she began to write songs again and the result was her 2023 solo debut I Was Due For A Heartbreak.
The record was a personal breakthrough for Weaver, characterized by Weaver’s distinctive emotional intelligence, the record was intimate and relatable-filled with quiet moments counterbalanced by big ideas about love, loss, and life. Weaver’s sophomore effort Strange Devotion continues in a similar vein.
Written and recorded over the course of 2024 with longtime collaborator John Hoffman…
When your musical identity changes, are you still you? This is the question faced by Erol Sarp and Lukas Vogel, whose first ten years of recording as Grandbrothers were marked by a singular approach: every sound in their music, direct or indirect, came from a grand piano.
“We Collide,” the first single of their transitional period, sounds less like a shift than an evolution. Amassing a collection of vintage analog synths and drum samples, the duo decided it was time for a change. Thankfully, live audiences responded well to the new sound, from the opening beats (yes, that is a drum!) to the euphoric, club-centered sound. The piano is still there, quickly introduced, but no longer stretched to the limit. If an instrument could exude feelings, one might even say that…
DUG is the debut project from Jonny Pickett and Lorkin O’Reilly. The latter moved to New York state from Scotland as a teenager, and he coaxes rather than bellows his lyrics in an accent which recalls other American folkies like Jeffrey Lewis or Iron & Wine.
Opening instrumental ‘Cold Frost’, with its fiddle and drone, sets the mood for an album of folk tunes which sometimes employ woodwind and brass. The title track is as welcoming as you’d expect for a song that describes “a never-ending party in the sky”. It has a stomp-clap beat and call-and-response choruses with gang vocals, while the mention of “ketamine and beer” helps position the album as alt-folk rather than folk of the straight and gentle kind. The similarly…
Marja Ahti’s music rarely commands attention. Depending on the context in which it’s played, whether listening on speakers or headphones, during a time of day bustling with activity or in the dead of night, the Turku, Finland-based Swedish sound artist’s pieces may easily slip into the background and disappear completely beneath the threshold of perception. At the same time, her subtle electroacoustic strokes contain an invitation to listen deeply, leaving behind a trail of found sound, field recordings, synthesizers, amplified objects, and inchoate effects to be assembled into a rewarding sonic narrative.
Ahti’s recent collaboration with kindred sound artist Manja Ristić, Transference on Erstwhile, is a lovely example of this approach: a collage…
Being a driven and prolific writer, making records since the early 1990s, Jeff Tweedy has on occasion enjoyed a song splurge. The Wilco frontman and bandleader is already responsible for no less than three double albums – ’96’s sweeping twin-disc statement Being There, 2022’s genre-corrupting Cruel Country, and 2014’s Sukierae, his literal dadrock LP with son Spencer on drums.
Even so, a triple album is quite the stretch, Twilight Override boldly joining the exalted/dubious company of All Things Must Pass, Sandinista!, Prince’s Emancipation and, more recently, Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me (2010) and Kamasi Washington’s The Epic (2015). Especially in this age of ever-lowering boredom thresholds, it’s a decidedly chin-first artistic statement.