Category: indie


Following the success of 2024’s reissue of 1980’s key works by cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu, Phantom Limb return with compendium release Zentai: The Collected Works of K. Yoshimatsu, collecting nine albums created from 1980-1985, over three volumes spanning exploratory home-recorded 4-track experiments.
Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue…

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Puscifer, featuring Maynard James Keenan, Mat Mitchell, and Carina Round, have released In Case You Were Napping, a 15-song digital-only collection celebrating the band’s nearly two decade career. Pulling from the band’s albums and EPs, In Case You Were Napping serves as both a primer for new listeners and a curated journey for longtime fans. The tracklist highlights favorites such as “The Humbling River, “ “Momma Sed,” and “Conditions Of My Parole,” alongside standout tracks including “The Mission – M Is for Milla Mix” (featuring vocals from Milla Jovovich), the 2020 single, “Apocalyptical,” and Sessanta tour closer, “Grand Canyon.”
…Over their career, Puscifer have released four full-length studio albums: “V” Is for Vagina…

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Sometimes you’ve got to go backward to go forward. When the Tectonic label was founded by Rob Ellis, aka DJ Pinch, in 2005 it marked an important step forward for the then-minuscule dubstep scene. Along with Pinch’s dance night Subloaded, it marked Bristol as dubstep’s Second City — just after the South London suburb of Croydon where the sound first emerged in the early ‘00s as a deeper, more DJ-focused first cousin to grime. Bristol, of course, had a long history of experimental soundsystem music, as its large Caribbean population influenced punks and ravers, and was vital in the evolution of jungle, trip-hop, and so on. It was natural that a sound initially focused on pure subsonic bass should take root there.

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Formed in 2021 as an evolution of Modern Hinterland, 4-piece Burntwood’s eponymous release is an infectious debut steeped in early 90s indie-rock sensibilities. As with the previous band, this new incarnation is a collaborative affair with founder Chris Hornsby wanting to create “something communal, exhilarating and loud”.
The raucous ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ gets the 11-track collection off to a flying start. The band is tight, and the pounding drums really get the blood pumping. Debut single ‘Landline’ alternates between catchy guitar hooks and ringing power chords in a world where people still have and use a landline (younger readers may need a grown-up to explain it). ‘Loophole’ keeps the indie rock feel going until the easy groove of…

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There is something pulmonary in Lori Goldston’s Open Space.
Produced in a single take of solo improvisation, Open Space was born from nothing but Goldston’s cello, an amp and her distortion pedal. Her uninterrupted take was ultimately divided into ten tracks, with Goldston oxygenating her cello’s resonant sound with titles such as “Morning Air,” “Cloudless,” “Wave from Heaven,” “Rocky Lavender Cliffs” and “Open Space.”
Experience the album from beginning to end and Open Space becomes an enveloping and meditative experience as it sonically chronicles the day’s surrender to dusk. Goldston performs and records on the edge of a precipice, grinding her cello for 75 minutes as she bears witness…

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Juggling Dualities feels like an odd title for a musician like rRoxymore. The French producer born Hermione Frank has used each 12″ and LP as a chance to switch up the formula.
In the past five years alone she’s made 2-step, dreamy downtempo, and a collaborative track with DJ Plead that impressively hybridizes UK and Atlanta bass. “Water Stains,” the highlight from her 2022 album Perpetual Now, was a 15-minute epic that treated contemporary club music as a site for sparse sound design. It was a fresh tack for her, in the lineage of her electroacoustic exercises on 2016’s Where Do We Go From Here. If her discography is to be believed, rRoxymore doesn’t work in binaries.
A commitment to evolution animates…

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There comes a point after committing to a decision where doubt settles back in and gnaws at your thoughts. After five years with his downtrodden indie-rock band Far Caspian, Leeds-based, Ireland-born musician Joel Johnston started to question his career: the burning spotlight of expectations, the perfectionism of writing and recording everything himself, the purpose of making music at all. In penning a follow-up to 2023’s The Last Remaining Light, Johnston almost gave up entirely.
Faced with the decision to abandon his music career or decode how to achieve peace of mind within it, Johnston stepped away from Far Caspian to focus on producing albums for other bands instead. There, behind the soundboard…

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‘Can You Fly’ is the second critically hailed album by singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston. It was released in 1992 on Bar/None Records. Remastered with bonus tracks.
A giant step forward from his likeable but ragged debut, Freedy Johnston’s Can You Fly is a stunningly accomplished and coherent album that recalls the raw lyricism of such quintessentially American writers as Raymond Carver and Richard Hugo. Johnston sold his family’s Kansas farm to finance the recording of Can You Fly, a fact that’s cited in the record’s opening line and reflected in several autobiographical songs about the guilty downside of pursuing a dream. Elsewhere, Johnston creates rich character studies of people who are vaguely aware that their lives…

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Alex Koenig might get lumped in with vaporwave, but the producer’s work as Nmesh goes deeper than dolphin GIFs and abandoned malls. He cut his teeth drumming for metal and hardcore bands in Louisville, Kentucky, then turned to electronic production after getting hooked on psychedelics and the Warp Records catalog. The Nmesh project kicked off in the early ‘00s, with a smattering of records that spanned blissful breakbeats, plunderphonic glitches, and marshy noise. The project strengthened during the ‘10s — a woozy heyday for terminally online stoners. Defined by a series of increasingly freaky left turns, Koenig’s discography now lands somewhere between Black Dice, Omni Trio, and a thrifted New Age cassette with occult backmasking.

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Nihilistic Easyrider. The moniker Jacob Duarte chose for his solo project is almost a disclaimer in itself: Don’t read too far into this. “Easyrider” invokes a multitude of definitions, most of a titillating, opportunistic, or otherwise anti-status quo nature — interpretations that pique questions about morality. “Nihilistic,” however, suggests that Duarte, our unreliable narrator, isn’t too concerned with the distinction between right and wrong. Maybe you could uncover some sort of meaningful philosophy about that combination of words if you smoked enough weed — and our narrator will confess shortly to having smoked a lot — the Narrow Head frontman probably just thought the combination of two antithetical, multisyllabic words together would be funny to tell your…

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“The Scream”, Siouxsie & the Banshees’ first album, was released late enough in the punk era to bear some claim as the first post-punk album, with only minor traces of ‘punk’ lingering) and enough hints of what had come even earlier to be, paradoxically, new.
Siouxsie was the focus of the band, with her unique vocal style and lyrics, but the musical innovator in this early line-up was John McKay, who wrote most of the album’s tunes (and singles like “Hong Kong Garden”), creating a wholly new guitar sound – harsh and brittle, yet melodically intoxicating . . . a sound so unique it was described by a somewhat confounded Steve Albini years later “. . . only now people are trying to copy it, and even now nobody understands how that guitar player…

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Night Moves dust a little disco sparkle into their rootsy twang for 2025’s Double Life. It’s an evocative sound and one which nicely fits into the group’s conscious throwback ’70s vibe. Co-produced with Jarvis Taveniere (Woods, Purple Mountains, and Waxahatchee), Double Life is the kind of album the Minneapolis band has been threatening to make for years. Certainly, both 2016’s Pennied Days and 2019’s Can You Really Find Me already found them jazzing up their earnest, denim-toned sound with keyboards and falsetto harmonies. Here, they take it one step further, slipping into a stylish pair of musical bootcut designer jeans and framing singer John Pelant’s throaty coo with fluorescent dancefloor synths and boogie-ready grooves.

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A twenty-minute video filmed at Other Music, a record store in New York, captures Stars of the Lid live in 1996. Shot on a camcorder, the duo, the late Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie, are playing in a seemingly ad hoc space. While the latter stands next to a bookcase and a ladder, the former is perched left of frame by a door opening onto a packed closet. They tune up and chat, a guitar chord hits a longtailed delay and starts looping. The point where the banter stops and performance starts isn’t clear cut.
In terms of video, it captures a sparsely documented stage of Stars Of The Lid’s history, nearly two decades before they would return to NYC to play in a church for Boiler Room, but this time bolstered by a chamber orchestra.

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From Sunik Kim’s dense noise monoliths to aya’s 4am horror stories, much of the best contemporary electronic music embodies the inherent chaos of life in 2025. This music is often intimidating, jarring, or straightforwardly unpleasant, born from circumstances that Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux snappily termed “a gaudy, unlivable present” – or, in other words, a Decadent Stress Chamber.
But despite this ominous title, Keith Rankin’s fifth album as Giant Claw represents a heel turn from the nihilistic excess of the zeitgeist. Decadent Stress Chamber is maximalism of possibility: a commingling of worldly frenzy and human warmth that feels positively utopian. Across eight tracks, Rankin re-shapes elements of seemingly hundreds of genres – K-pop, yacht rock,..

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Whether with the Knife or Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer’s live albums are as essential to their body of work as their studio recordings. The Year of Radical Romantics is no exception, unifying Radical Romantics‘ nervy energy, Fever Ray’s eerie intimacy, and the kinetic pulse of Plunge into a hypnotic whole. Recorded live to tape in the studio, the charged performances from Dreijer and their touring band unite songs as varied as the haunted isolation of Fever Ray’s “When I Grow Up” and the tropical whoops of Radical Romantics‘ “New Utensils.” Even without a cheering audience, the album’s intensity rivals any concert on “Even It Out,” where Romarna Campbell’s visceral drumming magnifies the song’s feral parental rage, and on “I’m Not Done (Radical Romantics…

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What would an alien satellite tell us if it could overcome the gulf of time, space and language? “Thirteen thousand years orbit Earth get mistaken for trash,” suggests Wendy Eisenberg, their cool, clear voice transforming compressed lyrics into a post-human plea for connection. It’s a sharp opening to a fresh, ferocious third album from Editrix – an experimental trio founded in Massachusetts’ DIY scene – which explores forms of frustrated, imbalanced communication via a musical language all their own.
From rock’s foundations and various genres – blues, jazz, punk, prog, hardcore, indie, metal – Editrix carve a style that is articulate and crushingly exhilarating. With galloping interplay between Steve Cameron’s bass and Josh Daniel’s…

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…features a remastered LP of Mic City Sons’ 12 original songs, plus a set of rare demos and unreleased tracks. 
Heatmiser was an indie rock supergroup of sorts, featuring songwriters Elliott Smith and Neil Gust (No. 2), as well as Sam Coomes (Quasi) and the multitalented Tony Lash. The quartet’s finest and final album, Mic City Sons features a decidedly more pop feel than its predecessors and marks Smith’s maturation into the role of the band’s visionary. From the opening notes of the swaggering, bass-heavy “Get Lucky” to conclusion of the album with a soothingly soft hidden track, Mic City Sons is an outstanding collection of diverse and invigorating tracks. Songs like “Plain Clothes Man” and “You Gotta Move” exhibit…

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…77 minutes of track-by-track commentary, plus instrumental and acoustic versions of the whole record, and cover of “Broken Wings”.
Originating in Berkeley, California, and now based in New York City, We Are Scientists have been a staple of the indie rock scene for over 20 years. Vocalist/guitarist Keith Murray started his conversation with PopMatters by answering a question about how he and bandmate Chris Cain have managed to maintain a creative, commercial, and platonic relationship for more than 20 years. While the pressures of touring, the public eye, and demanding music labels can be enough to squash many a band (think the White Stripes, Oasis, and Fleetwood Mac — the list is truly inexhaustible), We Are Scientists have found a rare sort…

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