The Homesick have never been a band particularly interested in standing still. This adventurous Dutch trio has spent its career twisting post-punk, krautrock, new wave and experimental pop into something restless, strange and frequently exhilarating. Curiosity is their compass, and convention has never been much of a concern.
Across several albums, The Homesick have repeatedly reinvented themselves – from the raw momentum of their debut Youth Hunt to the baroque eccentricity of The Big Exercise, their breakthrough released by Sub Pop. Their third, independently released self-titled album, recorded in the aftermath of the pandemic, stripped things back into a leaner, more pulsating form, while still retaining the band’s wonderfully eclectic DNA.
Category: indie
UK alt-folk group Stornoway release new album Beyonder. The band – from their name alone – have long had a debt to Scottish islands, to the experience of life on the fringes. New album ‘Beyonder’ takes this to an extreme, with the group’s Brian Briggs citing a revelatory experience on St Kilda as the root of their LP. The record contains a photo taken on St Kilda at its artwork. The most Westerly point of the British Isles, St Kilda’s human population abandoned the island in the 1930s, requesting to be evacuated to the mainland. An evocative and moving part of the country, the album helped unlock the album Brian Briggs has been “trying to write my whole life”.
He comments: Lying in bed in a stone blackhouse in St Kilda, being deafened…
German experimental ambient duo TROUM, active since the ’90s, return with EmphasYs. The album’s seven drone-oriented tracks result from an unconventional process in which each is structured around a single focal instrument. Nonetheless, the album maintains a unifying sound and feel.
These instruments are electric guitar, cello, accordion, didgeridoo, acoustic guitar, zither, and saxophone. They are used to generate texture and atmosphere rather than melody and harmony. Thus, their output is heavily processed and joined with that of synthesizers and a supporting cast of secondary sources.
While this processing can render the focal instruments largely obscured, some are readily apparent. These include the gritty cello…
…A major downtown transit hub, Chicago’s Union Station occupies an archaic building that is poorly designed, often crowded, and notoriously associated with delayed commuter trains. Sections of it are literally falling apart.
In May 2025, cellist Lia Kohl set up in Union Station’s Great Hall with nine other musicians from Chicago’s improvised / creative music scene for a free, 43-minute rush-hour set.
The instrumentation included cellos, bass clarinets, sax, trombones, tuba, and violin. The performance functions as a piece of sound art that combines slow-moving chamber music with the ambient noise of the space. Alongside strings, horns and reeds, one can hear voices, travelers walking by, luggage carts, and…
Lisbon, Portugal is famous for tiled streets and azure ocean views. Local trio MAQUINA. contrasts the city’s sun-streaked facade with a visceral fusion of krautrock, industrial, and dance.
Since their 2023 debut, DIRTY TRACKS FOR CLUBBING, the project of Halison Peres, José “Mendy” Rego, and João Cavalheiro, has become an energetic fixture of the European festival circuit. Thumping grooves and fuzzy bass lay a firm backbone for Peres’s shouted vocals. The result exists in surging motion, tailored to leathery dive bars and warehouse debauchery.
If MAQUINA.’s prior releases prominently featured improvisation and jamming, with cuts often exceeding 10 minutes, BODY TRANSMISSION is heavy on stark contrasts, tight…
Australia’s next great rock icons have arrived, yet they’ve been here the whole time. The rowdy punk four-piece known as C.O.F.F.I.N has crafted complex, hard-hitting, guitar-driven rock music for the past few years, finding success through a steady stream of impressive LPs, including 2023’s raw and unadulterated Australia Stops. 2026, though, seems to be the year they come into their own, basking in the blinding light of worldwide attention with the announcement of their documentary, 10,000 Miles from Oslo, a European tour, and, to top it all off, a new album.
Out in Oslo is the 11-song follow-up to the aforementioned Australia Stops and comes at an important time for C.O.F.F.I.N. Along with getting more recognition for their prowess…
One of Britain’s most beloved alt-rock acts returns. Twilight is the eighth studio album from Jesus Jones, and their most anticipated release in years, their first new record in eight years.
Since forming in 1988, Jesus Jones have sold over two million albums worldwide, scored eight UK Top 40 singles, and delivered one of the defining anthems of a generation. “Right Here, Right Now” topped the US charts in 1991 and remains a global radio staple to this day. Twilight finds the five-piece, led by singer-songwriter Mike Edwards, venturing boldly beyond their comfort zone, while honouring the restless spirit that has always defined them: the collision of rock dynamics with the experimental freedom of dance music. It’s the sound of a band who know…
Low-key supergroup Railcard are an indie pop lover’s dream ensemble. Not only does Rachel Love of the incredibly influential 80’s guitar pop band Dolly Mixture play guitar and singer, Ian Button of the criminally overlooked Papernut Cambridge plays drums and sings, and Peter Momtchiloff — legendary guitarist of Tallulah Gosh and Heavenly — holds down the bass job. Add in trumpeter/keyboardist Rachel Bennett, who has played with the brilliant Trash Can Sinatras, and it’s almost too much. How could a group with such an impressive CV live up to the expectations? Without a problem judging by the string of lovely EPs that incorporated Northern Soul, girl groups, and space age bachelorette pad music into the charmingly sweet melodies and chiming guitars.
Not all of us can afford beachfront property with a convertible Bugatti to match, but thanks to the new album by Argento, we no longer need to. Inspired by the riches of the Tuscan coast, Miraggi is as sultry as music tagged ‘Balearic’ gets. Breathy flutes wisp up and down, casting their ocean spray as they pass. Lithe basslines sway against windswept chimes, beckoning you to leave it all behind. New age, downtempo, and jazz fusion shimmer and swirl together like crisp white wine.
…If this all seems like fantasy, it’s just as much of one for Argento. The side project was conceived by German-Italian producer David August, who spends most of his time hovering…
Over her 40 years as a musician and three decades as a solo artist, Kristin Hersh has built a body of work that’s as consistent as it is unmistakable. Her serpentine chords and rhythms, surreal yet earthy songwriting, and singular rasp have always set her apart – but so do the subtleties that make each of her albums special. On Sugar on Blackstone, Hersh takes a darker, dreamier turn than she did on 2023’s Clear Pond Road. Like its watercolor artwork, its songs are heightened but also impressionistic, with the mesmerizing drone from her guitar and Pete Harvey’s cello making everything lulling and unreal; on songs such as “Dom in Orange,” Hersh’s wordplay (“The water’s fine/The water’s fire”) shifts as much as the music surrounding it.
This short but very sweet eight-track vinyl release represents one of the milestones in the career of the least typical of British punk bands. Though they’re generally classed as post-punk, the Fall were technically more “parallel punk,” having formed in 1976, and not under the influence of the Sex Pistols or Ramones, but the Stooges and Can. For many bands of the era, the spartan recording conditions and strict timetable of the BBC studios where sessions were recorded for John Peel’s radio show were a challenge, but for the Fall this was actually a step up or, more typically, a step sideways. 1978 turned out to be the band’s year or at least a fairly strong start – they had made their only studio recordings to date, the Bingo-Masters Break-Out!
Punch Card delivers android funk of the highest order. The Stoke-on-Trent trio raises the ghosts of Hearpen Singles Pere Ubu and robot-funky Devo. The main flavor though is the earliest version of the Talking Heads (think “Psycho Killer”). Formal Sppeedwear moves with the herky-jerky, stutter-stepping assurance of the very earliest Talking Heads, before the incorporation of Afro-beat, all thumps and yelps and manic rants. They raise rickety architectures of post-punk syncopation, the bass plunking forward and doubling back, as fizz bombs of trebly guitar go off, synth stabs rattle and wobbly rants unfold. The music shakes like jello and bangs like junkyard metal.
…This is the band’s first album, following a hotly tipped EP from 2024. It’s a disciplined…
Best-known for the giddy throwaway pop of ‘Wake Up Boo’, Merseyside outfit The Boo Radleys influences spread much further, as even a cursory listen to their sprawling 1993 masterpiece, Giant Steps, will attest.
Older, wiser, and without original songwriter-in-chief Martin Carr, the Boos have been back tearing up stages for the last few years, with original members Simon ‘Sice’ Rowbottom (vocals, guitar), Tim Brown (bass) and Rob Cieka (drums) rolling back the years, alongside a couple of touring members to bring the average age down.
In Spite of Everything finds the band doing what they do best, crossing genres without a by-your-leave as they embrace searing guitars (‘Affected/Rejected’)…
As Madelyn Byrd’s Through Damp Canyons opens, the camera is still. It’s a hot, dark night on the Sonoran Desert where they came of age – so dark that the arid landscape immediately disappears into the backdrop as thousands of insect wings buzz like uninterrupted static. Then, a motorcycle revs into the foreground, and the camera begins to move with it. Over the course of Night Rider’s next 50 minutes, Byrd’s amorphous soundscapes transmogrify in unpredictable and cinematic ways.
Byrd’s production has evolved since Transcorporeal Portal, and the title of second track Of Nature, Of Bodies, Of Dreams acts as a kind of thesis statement for their psychedelic minimalism. In the edges and cracks between key and vivid details – spoken word, more traditional…
One of the central queercore pioneers of the 1990s, Portland, Oregon’s Team Dresch released just two albums, 1995’s fiery Personal Best and 1996’s more crisply produced but no less visceral Captain My Captain, before dispersing into solo and side projects. The group never fully deactivated, however, releasing the odd single and appearing in various iterations at festivals and anniversary celebrations over the years, including participating in the reissue of their entire catalog (including a non-album singles compilation) by Jealous Butcher Records in 2019. Something that set the band apart somewhat from their contemporaries on the scene, and perhaps helped foster continued interest, is an embrace of rock, grunge, and metal influences in addition to the more typical…
After landing a record deal on the strength of early EPs, ’90s alt-rock and 2000s indie beneficiaries Slow Pulp delivered a well-received full-length debut, Moveys (2020), before expanding their sound on the follow-up, Yard (2023). Both albums were produced by the band’s guitarist, Henry Stoehr, and featured lyrics primarily by singer/guitarist Emily Massey. Their third album, Melodie, finds the Chicago/Madison group continuing to grow in other ways, including having Stoehr taking a larger role in songwriting and sharing production duties for the first time with Massey and an outside producer, Elliot Kozel (Rosalia, MØ, Indigo De Souza). The album opens with a pair of drum-less, brooding reflections steeped in ennui, “Yellow and Green”…
Dragonflies spread their dark sonic wings on their 2026 debut album. A collaboration between singer/guitarist Dhani Harrison and producer Nigel Godrich, Dragonflies showcases the duo’s love of spacy, electronic-tinged psychedelic rock. It’s a sound they’ve both explored in various ways on their own, including on Harrison’s own solo albums and Godrich’s acclaimed work with Radiohead, Beck, and others. It was while working on his 2023 album Innerstanding that Harrison reached out to Godrich for some advice and the two struck up a friendship. Working at the producer’s Brixton studio they developed a process where Harrison would supply vocals and guitars and Godrich would rework the tracks, utilizing electronics, tape loops, and his deep soundboard acumen.
With her 2023 album Love as Projection, Frankie Rose pushed the electronic elements that had been hanging out quietly in the background of her songs all the way into the spotlight. Rose’s music already had a dense and evolving history by then, with time spent laying the foundation for a certain era of indie rock with her work in Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and her own reverb-heavy guitar pop in the late aughts and 2010s, and solo work that grew increasingly more synthetic with each new album. Hila continues the complete dive into electronic pop that manifested on Love as Projection, but takes Rose’s digital sound to places that are darker and more abstract. The gorgeous “Can’t Be Wrong” layers synth melodies over a steady pulse, with thick, strutting bass and Rose’s…