Black Country outfit Chartreuse showed plenty of signs of promise with a fresh spin on indie rock across their 2023 debut record Morning Ritual. The quartet returns with their much-anticipated sophomore album Bless You & Be Well which expands their sound and shows they’re a group to take note of. It’s another album that’s hard to pin to an exact sound, broad yet accessible.
The title track goes in some unexpected directions from the off with a folk-influenced first half built around vocals and guitar. The harmonies slightly discordant. Once the drums kick in it adds some oomph. It’s unusual and fresh, and a statement way to start the album. ‘Fixin’ calms things down, short and stripped back at just 96 seconds, it packs in a lot of detail.
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When singer/songwriter Nicholas Krgovich and multi-instrumentalist Joseph Shabason booked a two-week tour of Japan in 2024, they enlisted Saya and Takashi of Tenniscoats to be their backing band. The pairing might have seemed a bit of a disconnect at first as the Tenniscoats sparse, loose, and lo-fi approach differs greatly from the precise, well-sculptured feel of Krgovich’s work. The concerts went well enough that the four musicians decided to make a record together. They booked a couple of days at an artist retreat housed in a century old house in Kobe and the result was a charming record titled 
A band made up of longtime players on the U.S. Northeast D.I.Y. punk and hardcore scene, Brooklyn’s 
Dev Hynes’s fifth studio album as Blood Orange opens with a series of unexpected musical juxtapositions. The first track, ‘Look at You’, starts out with softly sung vocals over a cushion of equally soft synthesiser chords, before stopping dead, then re-emerging as almost an entirely different song: harmonies over guitar chords strummed so slowly you can hear the plectrum hitting each individual string. The second, ‘Thinking Clean’, offers a piano over pattering hi-hats: there’s something anticipatory about it, like an intro that’s about to burst into life, but when it does – complete with dancefloor rhythm – the song swiftly falls apart. The piano becomes increasingly abstract, before everything gives way to scrabbling, apparently improvised cello.
Since forming at 
Rising from the New York punk rock/new wave scene of the 1970s, 
Frequent collaborators Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke performed their first concerts outside of Japan during a 2023 European tour. 
Modern Nature’s songs exist within a sunny fog, all soft contours and elliptical inference. Wistful choruses drift by, occasionally bolstered by shadowy CSNY-style harmonies, as phrases emerge and recede, widely separated by pauses. It’s all very languid and impressionistic on the surface, but carefully structured underneath. The crisp minimalism of drum and bass pushes forward but quietly, like a krautrock rhythm section swathed in batting. Two guitars play at each other with lucid precision, not in sync, not even really in conversation, but approaching the same problem from different directions.
With ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’, a sparkling, razor-sharp soul anthem about body shaming, CMAT delivered one of the best tracks of the year.
Past the pain and grandeur that accompany growth can sometimes come the realization that you might end up exactly where you started. The Auckland, New Zealand-based four piece 
“Somebody just died / Nobody you’d know,” 
Originally developed during an 
An unadulterated opening statement intoned by 
Rescued after 40 years, Húsker Dú’s near-mythical homecoming set at Minneapolis’s First Avenue club (where much of Purple Rain was filmed) has been properly mixed and mastered at last.
Producer, vocalist and creative powerhouse KUČKA marks a year of her sophomore album 
Well into their third decade as a band, The Hives are still the most fun rock’n’roll party you can find. Still dressed entirely in black and white, still trading under absurd stage names such as Chris Dangerous and Vigilante Carlstroem, and still making high-kicking punk rock that avoids any hint of musical maturity despite the fact that they’re all now pushing 50, the Swedish quintet are nothing if not committed.