Waiting at a stoplight, there’s sometimes a brief instant when all the turn signals of the cars in front of you sync together. Maybe you were zoning out, watching your windshield wipers, listening to the soft murmur of the radio, but in that moment, you snap to attention. What might be even more satisfying is when they begin to pull apart from each other again, creating an increasingly complex sequence. It feels magical: Each signal drifts into its own zone before gradually locking back together for another few beats of synchronicity.
The members of Flur, the London-based jazz trio of harpist Miriam Adefris, saxophonist Isaac Robertson, and percussionist Dillon Harrison, understand this dance. Throughout Plunge, their spellbinding debut, there are stretches…
Category: indie
Ever lock your gaze on a fractal animation and have the dizzying impression you were tumbling into the screen? The British multimedia artist Lucas Dupuy’s recent exhibition One panoramic view after another will unfold operates on a similar principle. His artworks begin as airbrush studies, which he then photographs and rephotographs, zooming in on smaller and smaller details, drilling down to microscopic levels of granularity. Only at the end of this iterative process does he hit solid ground: Having achieved the desired tangle of lines, he pulls out his pigments and paints the ropy forms on heavy burlap, the fabric’s pits and threads giving the piece a three-dimensional, larger-than-life quality.
If Dupuy’s paintings are a way of removing…
Fans of Algernon Cadwallader during their original run claim lifelong bragging rights for having seen them play a late-2000s basement show with sweaty floors and a fisheye-toting Flickr photographer — and they probably have the blown-out YouTube video to prove it. Across the Northeast, the Philadelphia emo band paid its dues at every VFW hall, youth community center, and dilapidated DIY house that opened its doors. In the seven years before they called it quits, Algernon were a refreshingly haphazard and wildly fun live act. The longer the crowd bellowed like a football team to open “Serial Killer Status,” the higher scrawny teens flung themselves to “Katie’s Conscious”; the faster the drive home through pitch-black suburbs, the stronger the urge to burn…
January 2024 marks the beginning of a new era for leading UK pop-punks Neck Deep, their upcoming 10 track LP captures a moment of harmony between their global success and their dedication to staying true to their roots.
Following huge tours and top 5 records, the band opted to write and record their self-titled album in their own warehouse space in Wrexham, and from energetic opener “Dumbstruck Dumbf**k” all the way through to introspective closing track “Moody Weirdo”, Neck Deep expertly represents the band. It’s pop-punk perfection with a distinguishable Neck Deep stamp on it.
The familiar themes of failing romantic relationships and self-loathing are cushioned by the bouncy, upbeat music and sense of…
With lives as cynical as all those born between 1990 and 2010 are predestined to have, and as tragic as our short-lived beauties often find themselves, it’s a wonder some people find the time to uplift each other. On jasmine.4.t‘s debut record, You Are the Morning, it’s often accomplished by Jasmine Cruickshank uplifting herself first. In a sad world that expresses its hopes in oblique ironies, my soul leaps out for the simple sincerity of her music. The forces encircling her messages of gender acceptance and self-actualisation may be moustache-twirlingly evil, but jasmine.4.t is a righteous silver bullet.
The record proves to be slightly more interesting in its lyrical content than its musical content, but that’s more a compliment than a dig.
Dancer teased their fantastic new album with three singles that make heavy use of a greenscreen. On ‘Just Say Yes’, they play blowup instruments in fancy dress on a speedboat, on ‘Happy Halloween’ they’re perpetually spinning into a fiery vortex, while on ‘Baby Blue’, singer Gemma Fleet is a floating head in space, wearing a party hat. The videos feel like the Glasgow-based band are underlining a manifesto commitment to use small budgets to make something fun, attention grabbing and really quite charming.
More or Less arrives just 18 months after their debut and it’s full of the same bursts of sparkling, jangly pop. Dancer don’t try to reinvent the wheel, instead they draw from a long lineage of Northern indie bands. Songs like ‘Baby Blue’ and…
Amidst today’s deluge of genreless streaming bait, Liquid Mike are a refreshing splash of tonic.
Since unknowingly bursting onto the scene in 2021, Mike Maple and company have continued to self-produce power-pop gold at a freakish rate that’s typically reserved for Guided By Voices. Hell Is an Airport is Liquid Mike’s fifth full-length since 2021 and first following last year’s well-documented breakthrough. They’re still breaking out of their own self-destructive cycles. But even though the adjustments on their new album are minor, this band of Midwest workhorses keep firing on all cylinders.
Maple recently quit his job delivering the daily mail, but that hasn’t changed how Liquid Mike operates. Hell Is an Airport was recorded,…
After working on their previous album remotely due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, Bombadil‘s Daniel Michalak and James Phillips met up in person at Phillips’ recording studio in Durham, North Carolina, in April 2025 to track a concept album about the moon. Joining them was new member Madison Rivis, a dancer/choreographer/multi-instrumentalist who’d been adding some choreography to their live sets, and who wrote the fable that served as the basis for an album about a group of friends who try to help the fallen moon get back in the sky.
While knowledge of this overarching plot isn’t necessary to enjoy tuneful acoustic songs about friendship, adventure, existential reflection, and needing help, it will aid in making sense…
In a way, Rafiq Bhatia‘s improvisational second album for Anti- is an extension of his interpretive work. The musician paid tribute to Flying Lotus and Sam Cooke in 2012 with versions that bore strong rhythmic and melodic likenesses to the originals. Crepuscular and turbulent 2020 renderings of classics by Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, and Ewan MacColl, as heard on Standards, Vol. 1, were more unorthodox, far less likely to be heard on a “coffee house vibes” playlist than in a dim bohemian cafe or den where scuffed copies of David Lynch soundtracks, Ambient 4: Isolationism, and Ben Frost’s By the Throat are in rotation. With his guitar and laptop and other gear at his feet, Bhatia takes inspiration this time from the elements, but we’re not talking…
After landing in the Top 30 in their native Australia as well as charting across Europe with their second album, Day/Night (2021), Parcels remain deeply indebted to the sounds of the ’70s on LOVED, an album guided by the theme of unity. What makes Parcels so irresistible here — at least if one is open to some wholehearted brotherly love — is that their particular touchstones seem to include funky disco in the celebratory tradition of Chic, certain civil rights-era classic soul, and the vestiges of harmony-driven West Coast hippie folk-rock, all tinged with modern indie and electro-pop. Not entirely party-hearty, a good half of the album succumbs to a yearning bittersweetness, although it’s relentlessly affectionate throughout, and LOVED kicks off with a dance-funk…
With her second album, Dark Sky Reserve, Dutch musician Robin Kester continues to explore the gloomy, mysterious atmospheres she fortified on 2023’s Honeycomb Shades. That album saw her adding vintage organs and keys, woodwinds, and various other instruments (vibraphone, autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, and more) to a core palette of guitars, modular synths, bass, and drums that she had established on earlier short-form releases. The album was recorded with producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding) in Bristol, England — her first time tracking outside of the Netherlands — and a handful of similarly celestial-minded musicians, such as Portishead’s Adrian Utley and This Is the Kit affiliate Rozi Plain. The idea of exploring is an apt one for a track list with titles…
…includes the original album, demos, the B-side “Shame,” a previously unreleased song called “The Seventies,” and live recordings of “Long Haired Child” and “Hey Mama Wolf.”
Cripple Crow marks a departure for Devendra Banhart. It’s obvious from the faux Sgt. Pepper-meets-Incredible String Band freak scene cover photo that something is afoot. The disc is Banhart’s first foray from Michael Gira’s Young God label, and it’s more adventurous than anything he’s done before. This is not to imply that the set is a slick, over-produced affair, but it is a significant change. The instrumental, stylistic, and textural range on this 23-song set is considerably wider than it’s been in the past. Working with Noah Georgeson and Thom Monahan, a backing band of…
…includes a bonus 12” of the 1994 ‘Machine Cuisine’ EP, and a download of 17 additional songs, including rare singles, compilation tracks, and unreleased material. All the material has been freshly mastered by JJ Golden.
Herky-jerky pandemonium rife with buzzing guitars and spooky, deliberately melodramatic synth and Moog lines, Severe Exposure is filled with tight, paranoid riffs that fulfills the deepest wish of anyone who ever wanted to find out what the unholy progeny of Big Black and Devo would sound like. Although there isn’t much sonic variety — and some of their attempts at humor are downright silly — the Satellites command attention with their unrelenting musical intensity and singer J. Ryan’s frantic, hell’s-bursting-loose…
…The ‘gay church folk’ project began back in 2001 when Canadian singer-songwriter Joel Gibb wrote Ecce Homo, The Hidden Cameras’ first album. He gathered up a group of musicians, singers and go go dancers to perform his lush queer pop live. Sometimes two dozen bodies – wearing only tight white pants and balaclavas or gold sequin bikinis, playing harps, plinking xylophones, strumming guitars – would sway and writhe around Gibb. Backed by a choir, soaked in soft string music, the Hidden Cameras became legendary for their eccentric, transcendent shows in churches, parks, art galleries, porn cinemas. Members of the audience – their congregation – would be wrapped in ribbons, invited into the loosey-goosey, loved-up throng. The fluid troupe of…
The original album plus rarities and b-sides, all remastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound.
A strange thing happens before the two-minute mark in “Saeglopur.” All the twinkling and cooing erupts, at what might seem like eight minutes earlier than normal, into a cathartic blast of tautly constructed group noise — or, as those who prefer songs and motion over moods and atmospheres might say, “The good part comes.” “Saeglopur” is emblematic of Sigur Rós‘ fourth album, released nearly three years (!) after ( ). Nothing resembles a drone, and no part of it could be described as funereal. Even so, Takk… is still very much a Sigur Rós album, due in large part to the ever-present otherworldly vocals, but also because the only real changes are the activeness of…
There is a reason Emma Swift calls The Resurrection Game, her first full-length collection of all original material, a “bummer of an album,” as it took coming back from a mental health crisis for the singer-songwriter to develop these ten tracks.
The Sydney, Australia-born, Nashville-based Swift had a major nervous breakdown, leading her to be hospitalized for weeks and work for over a year to recover from her fragile state. Dealing with this mental pain, she somehow managed to turn these feelings of fear and helplessness into works of art. Teaming up with producer Jordan Lehning (Kacey Musgraves, Rodney Crowell) Swift gathered some of Nashville’s brightest and decamped to Chale Abbey studio on the Isle of Wight.
The island’s sense of isolation fed into…
A lot can be conveyed through minimal movement. A simple raised eyebrow shot towards a comment can showcase a lack of trust, an involuntary smile can highlight the love between people, and an acoustic, lyric-driven ballad can encapsulate an entire life’s journey. The closest most of us will get to a conversation with an artist we admire is through the vulnerability expressed in their music. A soft, slow, simplistic cut off an album begins to showcase an artist’s approach to songwriting and storytelling, and says a lot about the level of honesty an artist is willing to reach in order to connect with the listener.
Fruit Bats, the ever-evolving project of Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Eric D. Johnson, is no stranger to gentle, swaying balladry.
Across a dozen albums, Josh Ritter has established himself as a masterful songwriter, capable of transforming the raw stuff of human emotion into poetry that still feels deeply accessible. His talent has resonated not only with fans – music greats like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Bob Weir have also performed and recorded his songs. That wide-reaching admiration is proven out yet again on his latest release, I Believe in You, My Honeydew.
This latest record follows up last year’s mini-album Ritter recorded with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, but is more akin to his 2023 full-length, Spectral Lines. The title refers to Ritter’s muse, which he has named Honeydew, and like many of his earlier efforts, the album’s themes cover a range of emotions from loneliness to contentment,…