When it comes to venting about heartache, doubt, and mid-twenties angst, it’s hard to beat midwest emo and the heavier side of alt-rock. For her fourth album, Beabadoobee’s Bea Kristi needed that heft and firepower to navigate her quarter-life crisis, so she recruited some of the best possible collaborators: Hayley Williams of Paramore, Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, and Title Fight’s Shane Moran – in other words, her heroes when she was a teenager writing songs in her bedroom. From its scrapbook-collage artwork to its crushing riffs and choppy rhythms, Pylon is as authentic and cathartic in its own way as any of their music.
With its jerky riffs, huge drums, and shout-along choruses, “Sun Has Set” delivers…
Category: indie
Music fans worldwide know Roger Joseph Manning Jr. as co-founder or member of the bands Jellyfish, Imperial Drag, The Moog Cookbook, TV Eyes, Beatnik Beatch, and The Lickerish Quartet, in addition to being a member of Beck’s band and an in-demand session player. Over the years, he’s contributed to albums by Beck, Morrissey, Lana Del Rey, Blink 182, Johnny Cash, and Adele, among many others.
Omnivore Recordings is thrilled to continue their long association with Manning in releasing his new split EP/live EP which together form the album Hopium. Side one features five new songs, some of which have been in the works for over 15 years. Across the ensuing years, Manning worked with musician friends…
Radical Frame marks Actress‘ return to Ninja Tune after several releases on other labels, including a reactivation of the producer’s own Werkdiscs imprint for a live collaboration with electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani.
Beginning the album with two fragmentary pieces consisting of muffled, cut-up voices, it’s clear that the artist remains enigmatic as ever. “Live by You” features a guest verse by U.K. rapper CASISDEAD, whose bitter, unapologetic rhymes are initially presented starkly over sparse, eerie synth notes. After a few bars, the track erupts with overloaded grime bass and scattered handclaps, while the emcee’s voice is distorted and glitched-out beyond recognition. The song ends short of the two-minute mark, malfunctioning and burning…
…the expanded version features covers of tracks from the album by PUP, Wild Pink, Ducks Ltd., Bad Bad Hats, and Free Range. Ratboys also threw in a cover of their own, a version of Texas punk band the Marked Men’s “Fix My Brain” recorded for SiriusXM earlier this year.
Ratboys didn’t explode onto the scene, nor did they propel to stardom on the back of their debut. That’s a good thing, mind you: having never been through the ringer of hype machines and overnight success, the Chicago band have instead allowed their twinkling, countrified take on jangly indie rock to steadily brew for a decade-plus without any major spectacle.
Ratboys’ fifth LP Singin’ to an Empty Chair arrives with little fanfare — just the way they…
Fans will be happy to know that Lizzy McAlpine’s fourth album, Angel, is filled with sounds reminiscent of her decade-long career; however, this time, there’s a coating of something evolved. Instead of brutal, gut-wrenching heartbreak, this fifteen-track record explores acceptance and closure, and instead of self-reflection that tears you apart, there’s self-discovery that evokes freedom — the musicality may sound similar at times, but this addition to her discography is McAlpine’s most devoted yet.
The folk-heavy album swoons listeners with the opener and first released single, ‘The light in the painting’, a declaration of love in the form of peaceful poetry and soothing melody. The song reminds listeners of a previous opening…
The CD features the full concert remixed and remastered from the original multi-track master tapes and restored to its original running order and released for the very first time.
Includes live versions of the hit singles ‘New Song’, ‘What Is Love?’, ‘Hide And Seek’, ‘Pearl In The Shell’ and ‘Like To Get To Know You Well’ plus Howard’s previously unreleased version of the Xmas favourite ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High’, sung to the backbeat of his hit single ‘New Song’.
This ‘restored’ live in concert performance by Howard Jones is being released on DVD for the first time.
Also includes a version of the track ‘Human’s Lib’ featuring Howard’s full spoken introduction entitled ‘The Story Of Ruth, David and Dennis’.
Recorded last year in Los Angeles, Ghosts of American Psychonauts finds Will Oldham reworking five of his best-loved tracks (including ‘I See A Darkness’) and a handful from 2025’s ‘The Purple Bird’.
Oldham had an impressive ensemble with him for this one. Of course, his regular tourmates Thomas Deakin and Jacob Duncan were present, but it’s the guests that make this one special: London May on drums, Patrick Shiroishi on sax, Emmett Kelly on bass, Ryder McNair on piano and Dv DeVincentis on sax. Even ‘The Purple Bird’ producer Dave Ferguson shows up to sing John Anderson’s part on ‘Downstream’. And although the new tracks are good to hear in a more casual format, a hop, a skip and a jump from Nashville…
Continuing in its series of Yoko Ono reissues, Secretly Canadian has released Ono’s seminal 1982 album It’s Alright (I See Rainbows), in expanded CD and digital versions, and on vinyl for the first time in more than forty years, with expanded and enhanced artwork.
Influenced equally by 1960s girl group vocals and 1980s synthesizer experimentation, It’s Alright (I See Rainbows) is an album of “adventurous… lush… committed and convincing avant-gardism” (Rolling Stone). As Ono said in her 1992 Onobox liner notes, “It was ’82 and it seemed as though I was finally in sync with the world.”
Vacillating from a widow’s never-truly-over grief, to the necessary uplift for an artist and mother to continue her life’s missions…
Echo & The Bunnymen return to the fore with Apples for Isaac, their thirteenth album and their first in 12 years following 2014’s ‘Meteorites’. It would be fair to say that the group have had a shift in tone since their last effort, though, which maintained a darker, more forlorn sound than the recent record. In contrast, this new album maintains a cheerful-sounding, yet well-considered and balanced range of tracks which provide a thoughtful yet optimistic atmosphere – one that, gloomy news cycle aside, which leaves you feeling pretty good about things. The production is the work of frontman Ian McCulloch, who has put together a bright-sounding mix, featuring masterful arrangement of the band’s instruments along with smartly used orchestral arrangements.
All those reinventions, genre-clashes, breakdancing and Gen X irony can take it out of a person. So it’s little surprise that every twelve years Beck returns to a safe place, a familiar terrain, where he can work through difficult emotions with trusted musicians. There’s no pressure to show off, innovate or get crazy with a processed cheese spread.
Sea Change, Beck’s eighth album, established this more sombre space in 2002. It was folky like 1994’s One Foot in the Grave and ’98’s Mutations, but different too: a dead serious, dead slow, dead melancholy mix of acoustic guitars, strings and a Gallic-funk rhythm section, it found a bruised Beck channelling his heartache over the end of a nine-year relationship. Sea Change confused…
People like to say that artists who have little left to lose, either by virtue or lack of past success, have “zero fucks to give.” Usually, this means that an artist has either reached a point at which they no longer care what kind of impression their work makes on the general public, or, taking a more wide-angle perspective, they see no appeal in anything the world and future have to offer, and wash their hands of the whole thing. Colin Newman and Malka Spigel, formerly of post-punk legends Wire and Minimal Compact, respectively, have certainly earned the right to rest on their laurels, cruise on autopilot, follow their fancies, or indulge in score-settling. They owe the world nothing, but the world owes them plenty. Yet their latest album as Immersion is a work of craft…
Laurie Osborne (Appleblim) describes Liminal Tides with a series of antinomies: awake / asleep, self / no self, and conscious / unconscious mind / no-mind. To these, one could add Bristol / Berlin.
It’s no secret that Osborne has spent much of his career as Appleblim between these two cities. While he picked up the mantle Appleblim in London, DJing early dubstep at the foundational FWD>> clubnights, he began producing the stuff upon moving to Bristol in 2006. Bristol is also where his two record labels got their start: Skull Disco (2005-2008) which he ran with Sam Shackelton, and the solo imprint Apple Pips (2008-present, though largely inactive since 2013). At the same time Appleblim got big in Berlin, Ricardo Villalobos and the rest of the minimal techno…
It would be easy to describe Santur & Kamancheh for Electronics as an encounter between Iranian classical instruments and electroacoustic music. Fortunately, that is not what this album is about. Rather than treating tradition and experimentation as opposing worlds, Maryam Rahmani & David Esser allow them to coexist within the same acoustic space. The santur and kamancheh are never presented as historical artefacts awaiting electronic transformation. Instead, electronics become another way of listening to them.
From the opening “Glass Tower,” one has the impression that the listener has been placed inside the instruments themselves. Contact microphones, geophones and live processing reveal vibrations that normally remain hidden:…
…features previously unreleased tracks, B-sides and remixes from The Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack, Jagz Kooner, and Two Lone Swordsmen.
Whenever indie music seems lost in its own self-righteous, unchallenging, inoffensive fundament, Primal Scream rides in to try and save it all. So just as Screamadelica tried to encapsulate the importance of ecstasy culture, or Vanishing Point tried to exorcise their own insanity, here XTRMNTR is a nasty, fierce realization of an entire world that has also lost the plot. The album starts with a gloriously vindictive sample of a kid commanding “Kill All Hippies,” and this roughly states the album’s modus operandi. There are songs shouting with furious, feedback-splayed anger (“Blood Money,” “Exterminator”), songs…
The journey to Sylvan Esso’s fifth studio album was a cross-country trip, with a storm on either side. Quite literally — Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn left their longtime home in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene in late 2024; shortly after they settled in Los Angeles, they found themselves surrounded by the January 2025 wildfires. The duo was already mourning the loss of their close friend Jessica, who died of sudden liver failure in 2023.
If there is a single throughline on Ow ∞ (pronounced “Ow Infinity”), it’s grief. It’s not an album about death, per se, but about living in the wake of unimaginable loss, overcoming the pain that keeps piling up — “the suffering of suffering,” as Meath calls it on “Flood Season.”
“I have something to say,” the opening line of Paris Paloma’s raw, visceral, and powerful sophomore album The Fatal Flaw, is a colossal understatement. It’s unfortunate that portraying a world through the female gaze, glaring down on misogyny, superficiality, and capitalism, is considered radical. Paloma knows that the only way to crumble power structures is to face them head-on, and if that’s radical, then she welcomes the label with open arms.
The Fatal Flaw celebrates art, stuffed to the brim with allusions that cement Paloma’s role at the intersection of pop, intellect, and humanity. The songwriting is adeptly concise and eloquent, often reading more like a short story collection than an LP. It’s resoundingly successful in…
Twilark’s Canon Pence sees the beauty in everything falling apart. In a wavery tenor balanced precariously between country confessionals and indie rock self-examination, he mourns the changes in life, in relationships, in bucolic plots of land swallowed by development. And yet, he also finds solace, even revelation in the cycle. The best song on the disc, “Prettiest Way to Die” tracks the slow, visually striking death of a tree strangled by wisteria. It’s a disaster for the tree, clearly, but also an indelible image of weathered bark wreathed in murderous purple flowers.
This is Pence’s second album as Twilark, following 2025’s The Taming Ties Create, a sparer, more inward-looking collection of songs, which nonetheless foreshadowed…
The configuration of bass, drums, and piano is an all-too common one in the world of jazz music, but when those instruments are somewhat turned on their heads, the results can be unique and often stunning. That’s certainly the case with Enneads. Their self-titled debut features Zach Layton on an unusual 17-string electric bass and pianist Phyllis Chen using nodal points inside the lid of an amplified piano, run through a distortion pedal. Hamir Atwal’s drumming setup is fairly standard, but the way he works subtly around his bandmates creates an ambience that adds to the otherworldliness of this startling, moody record.
Released on the forward-thinking Birdwatcher label (responsible for experimental releases by artists like GADADU, Jessica Pavone, and…