Boundary-pushing electronic duo and technological pioneers the Future Sound of London have charted a magnificent, unpredictable course throughout their multi-decade career, ranging from early rave staples to ambitious excursions into ambient soundscapes, psychedelic rock, modern classical, and more. Prodigiously releasing club records under various pseudonyms since the late ’80s, Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans launched FSOL with the breakbeat house classic “Papua New Guinea” in 1991, following suit with the Accelerator full-length. After signing with Virgin Records in 1992, the duo began releasing more experimental, atmospheric material, including the highly regarded 1994 double album Lifeforms. They also sidestepped traditional methods of touring…
Category: indie
Born in Peru but currently based in Buenos Aires, Jorge Espinal has spent more than a decade touring and collaborating, participating in projects such as Ricarda Cometa and Calato, developing a musical approach in which body and instrument function as a single unit. With his debut solo album, Bombos y Cencerros, he uses prepared electric guitar, bass drum, cowbell, pedals, and a laptop to trigger samples, build loops, and freeze sounds. As his official bio states, “the guitar becomes a source of rhythm rather than harmony.”
The album, which took shape after a 16-date European tour in 2023, was recorded in a single session in December 2023, simultaneously played using hands and feet, but comprised a series of pieces that condensed years of…
Newton Faulkner’s eighth studio album, Octopus, marks a bold new chapter for the multi platinum selling singer-songwriter – his most authentic and adventurous to date. Over five years in the making, the album sees Faulkner stepping into a new era with a refreshed sense of artistic freedom, blending unexpected influences from funk and R&B to soul and Latin grooves. Swapping his trademark acoustic guitar for a distortion-charged Hofner Violin Bass, he unlocks a fresh songwriting approach that fuels standout tracks like the anthemic lead single “Alright, Alright, Alright.”
Rich in collaboration,Octopus features contributions from Lissie, Los Bitchos and Bloom Twins, bringing new textures to his sound. It’s a record that celebrates creative reinvention…
As a member of the hardcore outfit the Armed and the atmospheric jazz collective Fuubutsushi, Patrick Shiroishi has proven that he can handle both aggressive thrash and evocative ambience with finesse. For his latest solo project, he balances both, and creates something fraught and angry, yet strangely serene.
Forgetting Is Violent begins with a voice speaking in Japanese. Other voices join the speaker, forming an overlapping chorus. “To protect our family names,” at first reflective, grows more urgent and insistent, one narrative turning into a litany of laments. Shiroishi enters with a rapid-fire series of chromatic high notes, all texture and tension, highlighting the rising tide of distress. Shiroishi’s sax increases with the number of voices, his…
Being best known as the ghostly melodic heart of Dean Blunt’s tales of wounded masculinity has often overshadowed Joanne Robertson’s brilliant, similarly idiosyncratic solo work. On Blurrr, her strongest and most focused work to date, she continues to build a gorgeous world of solitary melancholia. Sonically, it’s largely as sparse and haunted as Robertson’s previous work; simply recorded acoustic songs that seem gently smudged, words difficult to make out, all elements drifting into something that seems to ache through the fog. There’s something of early Cat Power about how unadorned and downcast it all is, but, perhaps owing to the simplicity of its recording, its atmosphere feels more domestic, less constructed, as if it’s something private overheard…
New Yorkers Native Sun deliver debut album Concrete Language, a keenly anticipated release via new label tastemaker label TODO. Comprising Colombian-born Danny Gomez (vox/guitar), Justin Barry (bass/vox), Jack Hiltabidle (guitar), and Argentine-born Nicolas Espinosa (drums), the quartet have produced an album oozing garage rock and roll at various speeds and styles.
Opener ‘Down My Line’ sets out the albums stall. It careers out the gates at pace with a vocal full of gritty rock and roll, it never lets up. With a mid-track drum roll to die for and guitars packed with feedback, things get deliciously spikey towards the end. ‘Down My Line’ is allowed to slowly peter out, the instrumentation coming to its own glorious natural conclusion.
Peter Stampfel is a name that should mean something to you, that is, if you are into folk music. Robert Christgau wrote, “Next to Bob Dylan, Stampfel is the closest thing to a genius that [the folk scene] produced.” First moving from Wisconsin to New York City in 1959, at age 20, Stampfel, along with Steve Weber, established the psychedelic and puckish folk group the Holy Modal Rounders, progenitors of freak-folk and psych-folk.
Their debut self-titled LP (1964) was produced by Samuel Charters, who, the year before the publication of his pioneering 1959 book, The Country Blues, had started the Orange Blossom Jug Five with the folk hero Dave Van Ronk. Moreover, the Holy Modal Rounders’ first album includes a rewrite of the traditional…
With a patchwork recording process that’s worth acknowledging because it can be heard in the final product, Golden Apples’ fifth album, Shooting Star, was captured with a variety of collaborators, at multiple locations, and with a selection of headspaces and inspirations. Consistent, however, is the welcoming, raw-and-ready delivery of bandleader Russell Edling, along with his world-weary lyrics and his melodic and jangly, college rock-informed musical sensibility. So fans need not despair, even if the resulting album is on the capricious side. Sounding something like a reverb-heavy slow dance, opener “Another Grand Offering for the Swine,” for instance, is a brief, demo-like entry having something to do with the food chain and a deliverance that sets one…
…Limited Edition Digital Album includes the full album, album instrumentals, and two demos.
…Deluxe includes the bonus disc ‘Live in Paris & London’.
As its title may suggest, Neil Hannon’s 13th studio album as The Divine Comedy is a mile away from jaunty songs about woodsheds and National Express coaches. After the joy and whimsy of his soundtrack to Wonka, Rainy Sunday Afternoon finds him far more contemplative and wistful.
It’s certainly Hannon’s most personal album to date. There are songs about family, loss and grief, as well as pot shots at a world seemingly falling to pieces around us. Bolstered by some truly gorgeous orchestrations by long-term Hannon collaborator Andrew Skeet, even a simple piano…
Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Tom Meikle – known by the moniker Mappe Of – first emerged with the highly acclaimed, self-produced debut A Northern Star, A Perfect Stone in 2017.
The album immediately captivated listeners with its sonic landscape, an ethereal avant-folk tour de force that belonged to no time or place. The high-concept full-length The Isle of Ailynn followed in 2019, showcasing Tom’s skill and talent for songwriting and production. After a long hiatus forced by the pandemic, Meikle and Mappe Of are poised to re-enter the music scene with fresh works that promise to continue his journey of musical exploration and boundary-pushing creativity.
Black Lips return with a brand-new studio album, Season Of The Peach, a 40-minute rock and roll odyssey, tripping through DIY genres where garage rock meets new wave pop, and disgruntled country shakes hands with epic western soundtracks. The 14-track album captures the energy and spirit of early Black Lips while simultaneously applying new approaches to songwriting.
The album is a musical merry-go-round, a journey featuring road-weary tales from the underbelly of a lights-out America. It’s bookended by “The Illusion” parts one and two: a barroom quest for hope, fear, and hate, thwarted at each turn by a sense of resignation, “you reach for the sky / but it’s an illusion.” Elsewhere, “Wild One” plays out like a Morricone romp through another day in Hell.
NewDad’s debut album Madra, released only 20 months ago, made the Galway dream-pop band’s dreams come true. In the time since that record’s release, the former NME Cover stars have toured the world and gained acclaim from across the music world – including from their hero, The Cure’s Robert Smith. So, their second album should be a pretty cheery listen… right?
Largely written before Madra was released, Altar isn’t quite bursting with joy. Instead, it finds singer and guitarist Julie Dawson deep in homesickness and trying to figure out if the band’s move to London to give them better access to opportunities to help them grow was all worth it. Here, Galway is the altar at which she’s worshipping, and the thing she’s had to sacrifice…
Electronic pioneers Propaganda follow up their acclaimed 2024 comeback with Remix Encounters, a broad and brilliant remix album featuring Moby, Tangerine Dream, Rhys Fulber, Schiller, and more.
After the widely praised release of their self-titled comeback album in October 2024, Düsseldorf’s legendary art-synth auteurs return with Remix Encounters, a thrilling reimagining of their latest work.
Released on Bureau B, this remix collection reflects the enthusiasm Propaganda’s return after three decades of silence has ignited among contemporary artists, who approached the project with fresh energy and creative freedom.
Since breaking new ground with their seminal 1985 debut A Secret Wish and its pioneering…
Skim through my concert bucket list and find Johnny Marr, most likely sitting between some random all-acoustic folk singer who last wrote a good song in the late Seventies and an Indie band that the NME tried to push to popularity in the mid-Noughties. A personal guitar hero and one of the few cool people to once be friends with Morrissey, Marr and his music carry this sort of indescribable presence. The intricacies of his genius fall into the seams of each song, whether that be his role as guitarist of The Smiths, as member of supergroup Electronic or amongst any one of the many musical collaborations Marr has added his musicianship to. And just over forty years later, he continues with impressive appeal, with his solo work declaring his ability to not be confined by the definition…
Toro y Moi’s 2024 album Hole Erth was one of the more interesting albums in a long career of genre shifts and explorations. On it, Chaz Bundick looks back at his younger years lyrically while unveiling a mix of cloud rap, nocturnal trap, chillwave, shoegaze, and emo pop that encased his alternately rapped and sung vocals like tendrils of a dream. While he was working on that, he also envisioned a companion album inspired by Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in NYC that stripped back the arrangements to something less dreamy and more grounded, while giving new context to the words. In 2025, Unerthed (Hole Erth Unplugged) was released and it definitely provided a different sonic experience. It’s still kind of dreamy – loads of swooping pedal steel guitar…
An evocative, scene-setting project from its inception, Wilder Maker take their world-building to another level on The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, the band’s third studio album. Heavily inspired by film noir as well as by albums by Eiko Ishibashi, Mark Hollis, Oren Ambarchi, and recent demos collections by Broadcast, among others, the group’s founder and main songwriter, Gabriel Birnbaum, decided to switch up Wilder Maker’s recording process for the first of a planned concept trilogy of albums. The sessions involved the same core personnel – Birnbaum, guitarist Adam Brisbin, bassist Nick Jost, and drummer/percussionist Sean Mullins, with contributions from Katie von Schleicher – on a more experimental, improvisation-based set, which represents…
When Icelandic ensemble Múm first appeared at the turn of the century they immediately stood out for their unique blending of organic and electronic sounds. It may not have translated into a similar level of commercial success enjoyed by fellow compatriots such as Björk and Sigur Rós but early albums like Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK and Finally We Are No One confirmed them as a proposition to watch out for.
Over the years they continued to release music that upheld their enchanting, twinkling aesthetic (on albums like Summer Make Good and Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know). History of Silence is their first album since 2013’s Smilewound, and the time away has had a refreshing effect, giving them a chance to hone their sound while…
In a world that incessantly pressures artists to be “productive,” Yasmine Hamdan takes her time. Considered a pioneer in Lebanon’s modern indie music scene, Hamdan first made waves in October of 1997, with the debut of her electro-pop group Soap Kills. Over a decade later, she decided to embark on her own journey, debuting with Ya Nass in 2013 and performing on NPR’s Tiny Desk a year later. In 2017 she released Al Jamilat, and fans have spent the last eight years quietly wondering if she would ever release another project. To their relief, she surfaced with new singles early last year, ahead of her latest album, I Remember I Forget, orبنسى وبتذكر.
In the near decade of her absence, the world endured a global pandemic, dozens of…