In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, American mythologist Joseph Campbell uses tales from antiquity to chart the “Hero’s Journey,” the cyclical sequence of departure, initiation, and return which serves as the basis for mythic narrative. While this may ring true in the world of fables, practically speaking, I’ve always found personal journeys to resemble curves rather than circles; soft arcs of change that bend imperceptibly, but eventually, toward resolution. Oakland recording artist sachi’s mirror appears to agree. On her debut album, Talking in a Different Way, she opens a portal to a celestial plane of orchestral, fourth-world trip-hop that embraces patience as a means of evocation and wandering as a way to move on.
Sachi’s mirror is the alias of Shaina Pan,…
Category: indie
The feedback loop between video games and music runs deep. Obviously, there’s music’s enriching influence on games — see the banging, drum & bass sensibility of the Wipeout racing series. Going the other way, the interactive medium’s aesthetics and sensibility have wormed their way into the output of a new generation of artists like Bladee; the Swedish rapper’s records are so jam-packed with deep-lore nuggets and sonic worldbuilding flourishes that they almost feel like video games in and of themselves. As listeners, we don’t just listen: we enter.
That’s the best way to approach cellist and composer Patrick Belaga’s gorgeous new album, Solar Calf, which was conceived as a “soundtrack to his own playable environment.” The record…
The new full-length from Laurie Sara-Smith and Lifeguard’s Asher Case is an experimental, feverish portrayal of physical repetition built from guitars, drum machines, and woodwinds.
…Despite the fact that the first Laurie Duo EP, Early, was bounced between “a Dora the Explorer-sticker-plastered TASCAM 414” and a “very plain desktop computer,” “lo-fi” doesn’t feel like a totally apt description: those songs, especially “Laurie’s Loop 01,” sound like they’re genuinely disintegrating. Day, their full-length debut, is a more fleshed-out forty minutes. On Bandcamp, Case and Sara-Smith refer to the music’s setting as “the little pocket of bygone jazz-age bachelor pad once called Phantom Manor and now called Common Starling” — from The Haunted Mansion…
In July 2024 Kiasmos returned with their second album, II, to critical and fan acclaim. The album took Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen across four continents over the next 18 months, playing to sold-out audiences. Now the duo have entrusted five artists to completely reimagine it, II Reworked is out now.
Arnalds and Rasmussen, together with executive producer Robert Raths, invited long-time friend and composer Alex Somers, producers/multi-instrumentalists duo Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith (aka Disiniblud), and fellow Icelandic composer duo Kjartan Holm and Sin Fang to rework the entire album. The result is a sprawling and shimmering trip back through the record’s melodies, with a dream-like daze more suited…
The Mind Maps series occupies a singular position within the broader ecosystem surrounding The Future Sound of London. Issued in collaboration with Touched Music and available exclusively as physical Compact Disc releases, the series has never behaved like a conventional compilation program. Rather than functioning as a simple showcase of artists, each volume serves as a carefully constructed act of curation, interpretation, and contextual reimagining. Across seven installments, Brian Dougans and Touched Music have gradually established a parallel archive—one in which contemporary electronic music is not merely collected but refracted through the distinctive aesthetic lens of FSOL. Mind Maps 7 may be the clearest realization of that concept thus far.
As We Once Were is the third studio album from twice Welsh Music Prize nominated artist and producer The Anchoress aka Catherine Anne Davies. This new record is the long-awaited follow-up to the UK Top 40 album The Art Of Losing, which received wall-to-wall critical plaudits upon its release in 2021 and scooped up a raft of Album of The Year nods from The Sunday Times, to Prog, to the Mail on Sunday. With Sir Elton John naming it “one of my favourite records of the year” and Caitlin Moran calling it “the inadvertent, beautiful and truthful soundtrack to this moment”, it went on to sell over 10,000 physical copies via the power of word of mouth.
Featuring an all-star cast of guest vocalists, including vocals…
Alli Logout and Margo XS might seem to occupy opposite sides of the cultural spectrum. The former is the frontperson for New Orleans-based electronic post-queercore band Special Interest, a firecracker performer who can channel fury and sexuality onstage like few of their punk peers. The latter is one of pop music’s rising producers, with a 2026 Grammy nomination for her work on Zara Larsson’s girlie-pop juggernaut “Midnight Sun,” and the executive producer of Kim Petras’ most recent album and subsequent club rebrand. Logout and Margo XS have been making grimy, sexy, explosive dance music under the name deBasement since 2024, and on their second EP, HARDBODY, instead of trying to simply fuse the sounds of their respective projects, they’ve…
Milwaukee skramz trio snag. have always had their fingers firmly on the throbbing pulse of the horrors of modern existence. In the past, they wrote songs with titles like “Hydraulic Fracturing Makes the Earth Shudder” and “Capitalism Is a Pyramid Scheme.” They spoke of climate change and the apocalypse in equal measures, letting their anxiety out to scrawl itself in primal screams across their aggressive guitar attack.
On their third full-length album, All the Cages Holding Us Will One Day Turn to Dust, they change this up in a couple of key ways: first, by turning to introspection; second, by playing with their style to keep themselves from being another interchangeable hard emo band. Both work well, and the album shows snag. as a band…
CD 83-track box set tracing the development of indie music from the height of the Britpop explosion in 1995 through its aftershocks to the post-Britpop period in 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium. This box continues the story of indie/Britpop from Cherry Red’s Popscene: From Baggy to Britpop 1989-1994.
…1995 was the year that Britpop exploded into mainstream consciousness due to the infamous Blur vs Oasis chart battle that was even covered on the national News at Ten. Both bands had already scored UK number one albums in 1994 but going head-to-head in the singles chart ensured maximum media coverage. Their success focussed attention on a revolution in music that included acts such as Elastica, Paul Weller,…
Highsigh like to stretch definitions. In the studio, they’re about pushing the boundaries of what we might call pop; on paper, they test the meaning of ‘supergroup’. There’s a whole heap of musicians mucking in here on debut album Once Bend, but primarily they comprise Ro Lundberg of freeform New Yorkers JOBS, John Dieterich of Pitchfork art-rockers Deerhoof and Matt Mehlan of whatever-works collective Skeletons (and any number of jazz-adjacent experimental outfits he happens upon). It’s a dense mix of exploratory musical backgrounds and usually sounds like it too.
Part-time percussionists all, the three of them are fixated on rhythm, piling on drum patterns and chewy electronic thumps. They whip up a panic attack on ‘Words We Choose’…
Earlier this year, Cheekface “broke containment,” as the youths say. The Los Angeles trio had spent seven years self-releasing albums of quirked-up indie rock and amassing a following of “Cheek freaks,” loyal fans who revere their playful hooks and meme-poisoned humor. But in March, after revealing that they had rejected an opportunity to appear in an AT&T commercial due to the company’s contracts with ICE, Cheekface drew a surge of attention for their politics — which, like their lyrics, lean lefty and anti-corporate. Then a clip of their jittery deep cut “I Feel So Weird!” blew up and became a TikTok trend in the furries community, and suddenly this humble DIY band was the subject of “discourse” and “quote dunks” and Needle Drop videos and other…
Following the 2LP vinyl edition for Record Store Day, XTC’s 17 April 1981 gig at Emerald City in New Jersey is released once again as Live Boots – Official Bootleg but this time as a 2CD set.
Dave Gregory recalls this as “Gig 11 on a 19-date U.S. tour, planned to promote the living daylights out of our Black Sea album, this night was a return to a hot venue we’d previously visited in January 1980 as part of the gruelling Drums & Wires campaign…. XTC at that time was a performing machine capable of creating megawatts of excitement.” Andy Partridge says: “We were tighter than a firefly’s fundament that night, even more astounding was the adrenaline-soaked speed we took every song at”.
This is apparently the first of a planned…
DICE have always made music for moments. The kind that become memories before they are even over. On their second studio album ‘I Thought the Altitude Would Make It Worth the View’, the Perth quartet effortlessly capture that strange feeling of being nostalgic for experiences that may have not actually happened yet, turning their instinct for connection, movement and living in the moment into their most ambitious record to date.
Following the momentum of ‘Midnight Zoo’ and the ‘Wings’ EP, DICE have moved far beyond their roots as Perth indie favourites, becoming an international touring force. The leap from their garage rock beginnings into ‘I Thought the Altitude Would Make It Worth the View’ feels utterly organic rather than forced.
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, The Darling Buds made a trio of very fine albums that flirted with noise pop, dance rock, and trip hop while ultimately coming across like first-class guitar pop. Since their return in the late 2020s they’ve continued making fine music, first with the Evergreen EP in 2017, now on 2026’s Same Sun/Same Sky. The band are in fine form, sounding tight and energetic with guitars that alternately jangle and bite. Andrea Lewis Jarvis’ voice doesn’t sound like it has aged a day; she presides over a batch of peppy rockers and swooning ballads like she’s been doing it non-stop for decades. As nice as it is that everything sounds really good, what’s even better is that their songwriting is on par with what it was in their prime, and maybe even…
There’s a slang term in Brazilian Portuguese that defines the dark, unkempt spaces where underground parties tend to happen: “inferninho,” or “little hell.” Whether they’re abandoned warehouses, as was so common for the UK’s acid house parties in the 1980s, or repurposed samba school rehearsal venues, these makeshift places are almost inescapable if you want to get to know São Paulo’s independent electronic scene. Producer Agazero’s new EP, Dissidente, is a sonic representation of the “inferninho”: a grimy and sometimes harsh experience that’s highly entertaining but could leave your head reeling.
For the last decade, the São Gonçalo-born, São Paulo-based artist has been making jittery club music after first finding his audience…
Paradessence spotlights the innate surrealism of Visible Cloaks shimmering, digital-powered exotica. Since 2014 the duo, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have forged a borderless space where echoes of globally dispersed music converge in a glimmering zone and the periphery between synthetic and otherwise is porous. Their albums bring to mind Yves Tanguy paintings, filled with impressions of familiar forms contained in unusual contours and doused in hyperreal sheen.
Visible Cloaks’ first full length since 2017’s Lex, Paradessence amplifies the portals and colourful intrusions generated by their crossing of streams. Opener ‘Apsis’ begins with slithers of synth that mutate between elegant brush strokes and serrated sequences. ‘Skylight’ begins in…