With the band garnering more and more acclaim with each album as Ian Devaney and associates expanded their somber synth pop sound to include more experimental ’70s touchpoints alongside vintage inspirations ranging from goth to the New Romantics, Nation of Language’s third album, Strange Disciple, became their most highly lauded yet, even topping Rough Trade’s list of best vinyl albums of 2023. The group re-enlisted Strange Disciple producer Nick Millhiser (Holy Ghost!) to record their Sub Pop label debut, Dance Called Memory. Still experimenting with recording techniques as well as their style spectrum – Strange Disciple, for instance, found them incorporating more live instrumentation than before – Dance Called Memory includes what Devaney…
Category: indie
Kieran Hebden, the electronic musician/producer best known as Four Tet, first collaborated with boundaryless guitarist William Tyler remotely, resulting in a breakbeat-driven interpretation of “Darkness, Darkness” by the Youngbloods. The two artists booked time in a Los Angeles studio and recorded material together, then Hebden gradually tinkered with it for a couple of years, with Tyler sometimes adding overdubs and additional sounds. When the two first began talking, they bonded over a familiarity with ’80s country and folk music, as both their fathers were fans of Americana during that time period — in fact, Tyler’s parents worked as songwriters in Nashville. 41 Longfield Street Late ’80s is informed by this nostalgia, but it’s also a forward-thinking record that…
Mike Campbell knocked on the dressing room door and brought in a friend to meet Los Straitjackets. It was the late 1990s and through a chance encounter with Campbell, the band found themselves opening a series of shows for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Mike introduced his friend: “You gotta meet these guys. They sound like the early Beatles… if they didn’t sing.”
It was a high compliment because everyone in the band understood exactly how to take it. He wasn’t calling them the equal of Lennon & McCartney and company, just acknowledging that the band were high practitioners of the ‘combo’ sound: an early sixties line up of two guitars, bass and drums playing rock n’ roll music best exemplified by the Cavern Club-era Beatles.
Primed by London Calling for the reluctant genre to open itself up to its place in the grand rock’n’roll lineage, the 1980s opened it up to folk traditions and fantastical lyricism, while punk opened up traditional music to the delight of slurred singing and unthinkable abrasions.
This was the time when Kathleen Brennan implored Tom Waits to dig a much deeper hole in Captain Beefheart’s quarry and Nick Cave to magnify the gothic elements of “Long Black Veil” and “Hey Joe” rather than the tunes. The richness of roughness was revitalizing tradition, and this trick still very much works; just check Lankum’s 2023 thrill-horror version of “Go Dig My Grave.” The rowdy speeds of traditional Irish folk and blistering punk proved to be indistinguishable from each…
Can a self-portrait be a collage? Can empathy be autobiographical? What’s the point of living if we’re not trying to understand all the horror and humor that surrounds everything? These are a few of the questions lurking under the bleachers of Wednesday’s new album Bleeds, an intoxicating collection of narrative-heavy Southern rock that-like many of the most arresting passages from the North Carolina band’s highlight reel so far—thoughtfully explores the vivid link between curiosity and confession.
Bleeds is not only the best Wednesday record-it’s also the most Wednesday record, a patchwork-style triumph of literary allusions and outlaw grit, of place-based poetry and hair-raising noise. Karly Hartzman-founder, frontwoman…
Mitch Rowland doesn’t write as someone chasing a hit single. He writes like someone chasing time. Since becoming a father, Rowland talks about midnight with a kind of fear, as if the days are slipping out from under him before he even has the opportunity to catch them. On Whistling Pie, his second album, he’s trying to pin down those flickering moments-a half-melody hummed on a walk with his kids, a grocery store run that sparks an instrumental sketch. In doing so, the album invites us into the mind and feelings of Rowland.
What makes Whistling Pie work isn’t that Rowland writes about the countryside or family life-It’s that he doesn’t dress it up. He leaves the songs delicate and fragile, almost too small for the room. And somehow, that makes them bigger.
The post-January 7th period of Ariel’s creative output was possibly just as chaotic as the immediate aftermath of his dropping from Mexican Summer, his Haunted Graffiti bandmates breaking off from him quietly and the subsequent blacklisting from basically every record label and performing venue across the United States. While Ariel is no stranger to outlandish media soundbites and over-dramatic moments, there is clearly a major evolution in his public perception when looking at, for example, the Coachella rage out versus going to a Trump rally with the message that the “election was stolen” and obvious anti-democratic bull***tery contained in that entire ordeal. While I am someone who can separate the art from the artist, a lot of Ariel’s views…
“We may sound angry, but our message is one of peace,” is a line that you’ll regularly hear from Harry Wilkinson, Maruja’s magnetic frontman – and it’s an effective microcosm for their sound. The Manchester jazz-punk quartet create tense, improvised anthems of rage with extended passages of introspection, and caught the attention of Sony-backed label Music for Nations.
…Narrated through their bombastic stage presence, Maruja cover every corner of the vast spectrum of human emotion, whether they’re slamming the negligent, exploitative rich through noise-punk (‘Look Down On Us’) or urging you to open up about your feelings over humming jazz rhythms (‘The Invisible Man’).
Pain to Power, the title of their debut album,…
If you dare to enter the void, expect to hear Heartworms soundtracking the journey. Jojo Orme has set the UK DIY circuit aflame with her singular performance style, while NME hailed her as “your new favourite band of the year” upon the 2023 release of her debut EP A Comforting Notion. Now, teaming up again with Speedy Wunderground producer Dan Carey, Heartworms has unleashed her tightly written, pulse-raising debut album, Glutton for Punishment.
In this survey of man’s most masochistic impulses, Heartworms expands on the gothic dance-punk that first garnered her acclaim. Let’s be clear, she can still absolutely rip a riff like she did on ‘A Comforting Notion’ – the sheer physicality of the guitar on ‘Jacked’ will have…
At the time of Greatest Hits release, Metronomy had been around in one form or another for over 25 years, with a discography brimming with witty, creative songs to show for it. The distinct viewpoint within Metronomy’s music flourished as the project grew from Joe Mount’s solo home studio experiments into a full-fledged, celebrated electro-indie pop group, but Greatest Hits avoids strict chronological order. Instead, the set puts the focus on the band’s vivid pairings of light melodies and deep feelings, synthetic sounds and very real emotions, and limitations and innovation. All of these qualities were abundant on 2011’s breakthrough The English Riviera; unsurprisingly, it’s one of the most-represented albums on the collection. “The Look” begins Greatest Hits…
Swell Maps – The John Peel Sessions pressed on limited edition red vinyl for Record Store Day. Remastered and available officially for the first time in over 40 years.
Noisy, chaotic, and defiantly experimental, Swell Maps may not have found commercial success in their time, but their impact on music is undeniable. An inspiration to bands such as R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement and Nirvana, with Kurt Cobain famously being a fan and often seen sporting a Swell Maps T-Shirt. A democracy within the confines of punk’s anything is possible, members Biggles Books, Jowe Head and brothers Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks—helped shape the landscape of post-punk and DIY music. Now, for the first time in over 40 years…
F.S.Blumm and Nils Frahm share their fifth collaborative album, Handling. Containing three tracks but 40 minutes long, it finds the duo advancing from 2021’s dub-influenced 2X1=4, deploying its lessons in ambitious new territory that also nods to earlier collections. Recorded at his studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus, the album will be released by Leiter on vinyl and via all digital platforms on September 19, 2025.
Handling’s three exquisitely detailed pieces are each entitled ‘Leuchter,’ German for ‘candlestick,’ encapsulating the LP’s luminescent glow and rising inner energy. Its scrupulous arrangements exploit a magic cabinet of instruments, among them pianos, celestas and cristal baschets, glockenspiels, guitars and multiple forms of percussion.
Tim Smith formed Cardiacs, with his brother, Jim, as a teenager in the late 1970s. Over the next forty years they would become one of the most distinctive and adored cult groups in the UK.
Noted for their complex, varied and intense compositional style, as well as their theatrical stage shows, they have been hailed as an influence by bands as diverse as Blur, Faith No More, and Radiohead.
Once again sweet listener it falls upon The Alphabet Business Concern to magnanimously spurn all praise and self-congratulation for bringing into existence yet another wondrous creation such as this splendid recording that you hold in your sweating, clasping hands and indeed, to mete out both thanks and appreciation…
Live in Europe 1992 is a 13 LP boxset archival release by the The Smashing Pumpkins released exclusively on Madame ZuZu’s featuring 90 live songs over 8 hours of soundboard recordings from 9 different shows during the 1992 European tour.
The boxset includes never before seen photos taken during the tour from Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin’s personal archives, as well as live concert photos by Paul Baines. Also, a personal essay from Billy Corgan on the highs and low of the tour with never before shared insights and reflections.
Featuring soundboard recordings from 9 different shows from Billy Corgan’s personal audio archive – all mastered by the band’s longtime friend and legend Howie Weinberg.
…Jens Lekman is an accidental wedding singer. But he’s also a wedding singer for a reason. Ever since his 2004 song “If You Ever Need a Stranger (To Sing at Your Wedding)” he has had a side gig fielding requests from strangers to sing at their weddings. For over twenty years, he’s had a particular vantage point from which to see the role love songs can play in our lives. In 2020, he and novelist David Levithan co-conceived a novel-with-music, Songs from Other People’s Weddings. Originally this album was meant to contain the songs from the weddings in the book, but as the novel came together, Lekman began to imagine what happened between the book’s chapters. The book and the album eventually became intertwined but also found their own paths.
Modeselektor have always seemed like an ideal candidate for a DJ-Kicks volume, as the series has always welcomed unconventional mixes rather than straightforward beatmatched sessions replicating club sets, and the German duo have always been far too eclectic to strictly categorize as techno. Their DJ-Kicks release (the series’ 86th, for those keeping track) reflects the personalities of both members, with Sebastian Szary leaning towards more experimental soundscapes (including a field recording-based ambient piece from his 2024 solo effort, Datei) and Gernot Bronsert bringing the dancefloor heaters. Deutsch club rap from Kitschselektor (the duo’s collaboration with KitschKrieg) leads into the polyrhythmic thump of original track “MEGA MEGA MEGA,” then…
Nine Inch Nails returns with over 70 minutes of new music for the motion picture Tron: Ares, the first soundtrack / score work from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that will live under the Nine Inch Nails moniker; consisting of all original music, complete at 24 tracks.
Reznor and Ross bring their Grammy and Oscar-winning sonic vision to the Grid, crafting a soundtrack that hums with menace, melancholy, and momentum. More than an album, its architecture in sound: pulsating synths, distorted textures, and haunting melodies that rewire the Tron universe from the inside out. It is the collision of analog soul and digital dread – a score that doesn’t just accompany the film, it possesses it. This release marks the first official film…
How in the world did composer/filmmaker Chris Hunt and Korn’s James “Munky” Shaffer wander into ACL territory? The answer is simple: they combined forces and honed their sound. Exinfinite has all the power of cinema, plus the energy of rock. Though the album is mostly instrumental, it is enhanced by a trio of guest vocalists, most notably FKA Twigs, making it a true crossover threat.
We’re impressed that the first two singles and videos are not the vocal tracks; Venera wants their second album to be received on its own merits. “Tear” begins with human whisper and robotic buzz, dissolving into a sci-fi drone. Darker tones soon enter, along with cybernetic beats and FLA-like guitars, making the track a slow-tempo industrial burner. “Asteroxylon” cements…