Unless things change in a hurry, not many people are likely to look back on 2025 and say, “that was a great year.” But Fredrik Rasten could justifiably make the claim. The Berlin-based Norwegian guitarist will release at least four albums this year, each revealing a different facet of his engagement with just intonation tuning. He’s also on the road this summer with Alasdair Roberts. In 2021 Rasten, as a member of the folk group Völvur, accompanied Roberts on the album The Old Fabled River. They’ve since put together a duo set consisting of long, slow Scotts ballads, which should be the subject of an album of its own out next year.
Strands of Lunar Light was realized by another duo. Rasten is joined by Belgian multi-instrumentalist Ruben Machtelinckx, who is also…
Category: indie
A funny thing happens about two-thirds of the way through “Mistral,” the gospel-tinged fourth track on Fuubutsushi’s new album Columbia Deluxe: Someone yells “Woo!” The eruption of hoots and hollers on a live album shouldn’t be unusual, even if the deeply chill energy of the chamber jazz quartet usually evokes contemplation instead of rowdy celebration. Columbia Deluxe isn’t just a live album, however — it not only captures the first and only Fuubutsushi concert, it also marks the only time on record that the group has played in the same room with each other, let alone in front of other people.
Fuubutsushi started as a pandemic project, with each member — Chris Jusell (violin), Chaz Prymek (guitar), Matthew Sage (piano/synths),…
A year before Kim Gordon co-founded Sonic Youth, she published “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” an essay on New York’s hypermasculine fringe rock circuit. “Throughout one’s life,” she deadpanned in its opening lines, “one becomes ‘out of tune.’” Could Sam Fenton and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi possibly disagree? As Double Virgo, the pair make poorly mixed guitar music that feels borderline voyeuristic: two dudes, probably kind of drunk, fiddling with detuned Squiers and mourning the losses of their respective freaks. It isn’t the ear-splitting anarchy Gordon witnessed at CBGB, but it is earnest, which is particularly disarming for the bonding males in question.
Fenton and Fehmi are better known as the guitarists of Bar Italia, a British band whose own…
Remastered and beefed up with an extra disc of archival tracks and unreleased live recordings
Flags of the Sacred Harp is a comeback album of sorts, released after a hiatus in the band’s activity and a lineup reconfiguration that sees the return of Nudge leader Honey Owens and the arrival of guitarist Adam Forkner. The break was beneficial, because this is the group’s tightest, most pleasant album to date. What strikes first is the song orientation: at least five of the seven pieces can be rightfully called songs. That said, fans of the group’s experimental side need not worry.
The 16-minute instrumental “Spirit” aptly illustrates that persona of Jackie-O, while a song like “Nice One” develops into looser sections that surely couldn’t be interpreted as a sellout decision.
The Brisbane-born, now London-based singer-songwriter MF Tomlinson builds on the experimental base of an acclaimed sophomore album and earlier EP releases to reinforce evermore progressive, art rock-inclined sights.
A sense of freedom underscores the Australian troubadour’s third album, an in-part continuation of the freeform jazz and folk leanings that powered We Are Still Wild Horses, with its breeziness traded for cathartic passages delving into Tomlinson’s internal psyche and fluctuating spatiality. Where guitar solos pierced the latter record’s baroque sonic backdrops, Die to Wake Up from a Dream tacks to a doggedly disorientating vision that sees ambitious soundscapes dialed up to eleven, notably a nine-minute title track that…
Laetitia Sonami’s Dangerous Women: Early Works 1985-2005 traces twenty years of fearless electronic innovation. From her studies with Eliane Radigue in France to mentorship under Robert Ashley and David Behrman at Mills College, this 2CD collection captures her evolution from analog experimentation to pioneering digital performance with her legendary “lady’s glove” interface.
Lovely Music unveils a stunning 2CD retrospective that captures the fearless evolution of one of electronic music’s most compelling pioneers. Following the tradition of visionary reissues that have illuminated forgotten corners of the avant-garde, Lovely Music presents Dangerous Women: Early Works 1985-2005, a revelatory collection that traces Laetitia Sonami’s remarkable journey…
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…
Kenny Becker had an idea. Goon, his LA-based psych-pop quartet, had just released 2022’s Hour of Green Evening, a lush live-band affair tracked together in the studio. That album was a work of placid splendor, achingly pretty but with a vaguely unsettled undercurrent, like a darker, more lysergic update on Real Estate’s pastoral sighs. It was a real achievement, one that elevated Goon’s standing within the independent music world, but Becker was feeling the urge to mess with the band’s approach next time around. He wanted to merge the pristine, straightforward, live-in-the-room qualities of Green Evening with “more of the haphazard, intuitive, 4-track cassette, homemade style” that had previously characterized the band when he began it as a home recording…
There is an authenticity to Longtime Friend, the New West Records debut from siblings Aila and Elisha Wildman, that simply cannot be faked.
Raised in the tiny Virginia town of Floyd (population of less than 500 based on the last census), Elisha learned guitar and mandolin as a kid, while Aila opted for the fiddle before they were teenagers. As soon as they scraped together a set list, they started playing gigs locally as the Blackberries with their mom on bass at the time. The two eventually left for Boston’s famed Berklee School of Music and self-released their debut along the way. And while the screenwriter for A Complete Unknown could not have scripted a better backstory for a modern indie folk and Americana band, Longtime Friend is all the proof you need that…
The lads and lasses of Autocamper have clearly done their homework, studying the greats of indie pop — the noisy bands of C86, the jangling bands of Sarah Records, the laconic indie rockers of early 90s America, and seemingly every important group (the Pastels, Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura, the Vaselines, etc.) to hail from Scotland — with their noses buried deep in the books and never allowing anything to distract them from absorbing knowledge. The result of all this hard work and dedication is a passing grade for their debut album What Do You Do All Day? There are enough pleasant melodies and sharply poppy hooks to fill a giant size lunch box, the band crank them out like they were second nature. The lineup is the classic guitar-bass-drums with vintage…
Before assembling My First Album, Jessica Winter, who moved from Hayling Island to London at 16 to pursue a career in music, cut her teeth in multiple bands, most notably as a member of glammy, theatrical pop/rock duo PREGOBLIN, and she wrote and produced music for others, including on-the-radar acts such as Jazmin Bean and Walt Disco. When she released her solo debut EP, Sad Music, in 2020, it was with a fully conceived, dance-oriented alt-pop. It should come as no surprise, then, that the self-produced My First Album doesn’t sound like the work of a newbee, although it does find Winter making a statement about coming into her own. With songs about standing up to pressure and breaking co-dependency (“L.O.V.E.”), loving herself (“To Know Her”), and being…
When Allo Darlin’ called it quits in 2016, (onetime Tender Trap member) Elizabeth Morris and band had released three remarkably consistent, critically acclaimed albums within five years — their alternately bouncy and melancholy songs, tuneful melodies, and earnest, untrained vocals were quintessential of the indie pop style. After getting back in touch via Zoom calls while sheltering from COVID-19 in the early 2020s, the London quartet officially reunited in 2023 for a pair of U.K. shows that sold out in minutes. They went on to write and record Bright Nights, their fourth album and first in 11 years. Drawing on emotional experiences from the preceding ten years, the LP may be a bit more reflective in nature than their previous releases, but fans can take heart that it’s…
A great album needs a centrepiece, and Mike Polizze‘s Around Sound has just that, a five-minute work that seems to sponge up all that we have heard so far, submerge the listener in its splendour before packing us off to experience the second half of the album. ‘Wake Up’ could not be more on point with its title if it abruptly pulled the curtains apart in the morning and plied you with coffee. It is a hazy first hit of the daybreak sun, an acoustic rising that hovers into view, gently caressing the senses before taking flight. Music can be so powerful when lyrical imagery and sonic visions work in tandem. However, the words sung here have a distant, grainy filter, as though they are a voice in your head or some invisible dream state narrator that you cannot quite pinpoint.
Legendary artist, Raincoats co-founder, songwriter, filmmaker, and feminist icon Gina Birch has released her eagerly awaited second solo album, Trouble, arriving via Third Man Records. Trouble is heralded by today’s premiere of the album’s blistering centerpiece, “Causing Trouble Again.” An official music video – directed by Birch and famed photographer/filmmaker Dean Chalkley and featuring an all-star collective of fellow female artists including Birch’s longtime friend and co-founder of The Raincoats, Ana da Silva, Neo Naturists co-founder Christine Binnie, singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, X-Ray Spex and Essential Logic co-founder Lora Logic, painter Daisy Parris, artist Georgina Starr, writer Jill Westwood, multi-disciplinary artist and activist Bobby Baker…
Nevertheless is a word that Marc Byrd, half of Hammock along with Andrew Thompson, grew accustomed to hearing at funerals in the Deep South. “A loved one is gone. Nevertheless…” The word was meant to convey reflection, recalibration, a pause between considerations, as in Selah.
The duo is no stranger to sorrow and loss, which has informed their music for decades. This makes them well-suited to convey empathy, as they do throughout this recording, dedicated to a friend who lost both a son and a daughter to addiction. “Requiem for Johan” (the son) begins this journey, which is less one toward recovery than to incorporation; the track title “Like a Sadness We Get Used To” reflects this incorporation, as do Byrd’s words, “We limp on,” which might…
Anybody who’s followed Gwenno Saunders’ career since leaving The Pipettes will know to expect the unconventional. In the last decade, she’s released three albums, all sung in either the Welsh or Cornish language. Her solo material is as far removed from the day-glo pop of The Pipettes, instead being dreamlike electronica tackling subjects like loss of culture and regional identity.
Utopia, though, is quite the departure. Saunders’ fourth record sees her singing in English on most (but not all) tracks, and the songs are far more personal than before. There’s a loose theme of looking at Saunders’ formative years, which involved a spell living in Las Vegas, a move to London and the rise and fall of The Pipettes.
As a result, Utopia feels like her most varied…
Nearly a half century after the frantic, drum pummeling, free-associating “Calling All Girls,” Half Japanese’s Jad Fair is still at it, both on his own account and under the now storied Half Japanese name. A pair of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, faux-naive 2025 releases attest to the fact that cynicism has no hold on Fair, even now, and that lots of things still rhyme quite excellently with “heart.”
Adventure is latest of somewhere north of 20 Half Japanese albums. It features a long-standing line-up, whose members have been in place since the late 1980s: Jason Willett on bass, Gilles-Vincent Rieder on drums and percussion, John Sluggett on guitar, piano and bass, and Mick Hobbs, sadly, on guitar for the very last time. He passed away in 2024. Euan Hinshelwood, who also…
For Sowmya Somanath, music is a borderless realm. Trained in Western and Indian classical singing, the Hindustani-American artist frames ragas with a facade of electronic beats, samples and random sounds. In her world, different traditions coexist innocently and peacefully. This enriching coexistence is manifested in both music and artwork. Possibly alluding to the chivalric romance about Tristan and Isolde, a sword, depicted on the cover is emblematic of connection under pretence of division.
Both visually and sonically, her second full-length as Plume Girl continues the trajectory of Somanath’s previous work, In the End We Begin, originally released in 2023 and scheduled for reissue on the same day as the new record.