…Home Is Where have unexpectedly found themselves amidst a rising tide of artists pivoting out of punk into alt-country — or, at the very least, the raw elements of alt-country. The band who invented the deeply, deeply online fifth-wave emo taxonomy has spent the past three years immersed in the canon of Neil Young, Flying Burrito Brothers, and Gram Parsons, while recognizing that Alan Jackson might belong there, too. It’s very possible that “Chattahoochee” inspired MacDonald to make a chorus out of “Loxahatchee” on “The Wolf Man,” though the feral nature and suburban dullness of an uncaged safari park in West Palm Beach makes for a perfect Home Is Where image in its own right.
Their pivot is surprising in its extent, rather than its direction. Whether it was the honking…
Category: indie
It’s eight years since Nadah El Shazly’s debut, but her works since – particularly the astounding Pollution Opera with Elvin Brandhi – point to an artist still open to bringing in new sounds, one with a freeform approach to influence, intent on channelling as much as possible through her blend of experimental electronics and traditional Arabic influences.
This instinct remains on Laini Tani, songs clearly bearing the influence of myriad sonic worlds, but it’s strange that they manage – at least early doors – to coalesce into music quite so characterless. Her voice remains gorgeous, but tracks like ‘Banit’ and ‘Elnadaha’ never lift beyond a plod; never seizing in the way you know her work can.
Then, from the throbbing opening of…
…Qasim Naqvi built Endling as a kind of solo prequel to God Docks at Death Harbor, which the BBC Concert Orchestra premiered in 2023. With its title and concept inspired by a phrase his wife remembered from a dream, God Docks at Death Harbor imagines the Earth’s landscape long after humans have slipped off the planet.
Endling documents the tragic hero’s journey as the last of a species tries to hang on to humanity a bit longer. It is at once draining and uplifting, a terribly beautiful and beautifully terrible vision of self-made extinction.
For more than a decade, Naqvi has made grand tones feel subtle and suggestive. Inspired by his explorations of the ARP Odyssey, the voices on his 2014 choral album, Fjoloy, quiver…
It takes a brave artist to channel all their experiences, negative as well as positive, into their music. Yet Nick Mulvey has done just that on album number four, gathering all the difficulties experienced in the three years and channelling them into not one but two searching albums.
A friend reassured him during these times of loss, challenge and grief, that there would indeed be a ‘dark harvest’, and ‘treasure from these struggles’. They were proved right, Mulvey’s experiences yielding not one but two albums – the second of which is due later this year. Part one shows how rich the inspiration has been, though in the course of 11 tracks we visit some dark corners of the author’s mind, with lingering glimpses of the strength that has got him through.
Ohio band, Caamp, has released their fifth studio album Copper Changes Color. “Nothing stays the same forever,” says Caamp’s Taylor Meier, “and there’s something beautiful about that. Time passes, seasons turn, people grow. Change is what makes life special.” The suggestion is that this is the band’s most adventurous album to date, and is indeed, a reflection on growth and evolution, but also perhaps a celebration of the dreams and bonds that endure. The album was recorded in Texas, Oregon, and New York with co-production from Beatriz Artola (Fleet Foxes, Sharon Van Etten) and Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, R.E.M.).
On the title of the album Meier elaborates: “When we were putting the finishing touches on this record, I started noticing copper everywhere I went.
Aiko Takahashi is a Nova Gorica-based musician, a spirit that has released albums on various labels. Just like the line that separates the two cities where Aiko lives, Gorizia and Nova Gorica, divided between two countries yet united as one, Aiko’s music exists on a boundary. A line that separates silence from peculiar, almost imperceptible sounds. Too quiet to be Ambient, too Ambient to be Sound Art.
Two years ago, after a first complete release on IIKKI with “It Could Have Been A Beautiful”, Aiko Takahashi comes back with a second complete album, this time, on LAAPS.
“This album is a delicate, meditative collection recorded between March and November 2024 in Aiko’s former studio, a secluded spot…
Are Brooklyn’s Purelink a boy band or a jam band? Well, they’re neither; they’re three former Chicagoans making ambient music in the Y2K-era clicks + cuts tradition, yet those faintly disingenuous tags actually say a lot about what sets them apart from their forebears. Guys like Oval, Pole, Jan Jelinek and Vladislav Delay carried themselves with modesty, reserve, and dry Northern European humor; they didn’t seem like people you’d necessarily want to have a beer with. Purelink, meanwhile, are the kind of band you’d want to be in: three 30-year-olds with impeccable music taste and even better networking skills, driving south every year to link up with artists like Ulla and Huerco S. at Kansas City’s C- parties.
This sense of eagerness and irrepressible youth,…
In a 2017 interview with Bandcamp Daily, Thom Wasluck of Planning for Burial referred to his modus operandi as “whiskey and sadness.”
That was certainly the case with the one-man doomgaze band’s album from that year, Below the House, which also happens to be the last full-length he put out.
We can’t speak to the whiskey — Wasluck apparently quit drinking, at least for a while — but the sadness is alive and well on It’s Closeness, It’s Easy. Wasluck’s fourth album under the Planning for Burial banner is soaked in isolation, longing, and sorrow, not to mention tons of droning guitars, fuzz boxes, delay pedals and synthesizers. It’s all there in opener “You Think,” where an insistent snare gives way to a gauzy,…
“Evil is very real and having its way, and love is also real and hasn’t lost yet.”
That’s how Activity’s Travis Johnson described their third album, A Thousand Years In Another Way. A friend had asked why these songs seemed to capture the strange, heavy feeling of being alive right now better than anything else-and that was his answer. The album doesn’t try to explain this time we’re living in; it simply feels like it. It’s a mix of violence, alienation, and tenderness-reflecting the surreal, dreamlike (or nightmarish) rhythm of daily life.
Across ten songs, Activity blends experimental rock, electronics, and found sounds with a sense of paranoia, flickers of hope, and a warped reality. Working with producer Jeff Berner…
…features five reimagined tracks from last year’s album and a previous fan favourite, “Rubberneckers”.
No matter how deceptively delicate and contemplative the music of Christian Lee Hutson may be, there seems to be a competitive spirit hovering overhead. Relationships, regardless of how entangled within them he is, provide an insight into the dynamic held within each song. Someone has to win, someone has to lose. You can see this even in a propulsive song like the stunning “State Bird,” where the argumentative relationship he’s unpacking makes it clear the side we’re hearing is from the loser.
It’s a viewpoint that only makes sense considering his last two albums were entitled Beginners…
When Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard released the first track from their collaborative album Tall Tales in February, they thoughtfully included a free nightmare with every stream. Directed by the Australian artist, filmmaker and “third member” of the project, Jonathan Zawada, the video for ‘Back in the Game’ featured a parade of hideous creatures – a weird fish with another fish in its mouth, a Lord of the Flies-style pig, a tentacled mini-Cthulhu – marching to a museum to participate in a bonfire of art. Rendered in the squashy dayglo of kids’ TV, it became a queasy – if somewhat blunt – illustration of a world fallen to grotesque forces.
From the moment he cast himself as the eternal weirdo of ‘Creep’ – the Frankensteined outsider who just wants to be loved – Yorke has been…
Released by Edsel, Toyah’s 1987 studio album Desire receives its first ever standalone CD reissue in a new expanded edition, in deluxe 7” sized gatefold packaging. Originally issued on the EG label, the album was produced by Mike Hedges (Siouxise & The Banshees) and recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in the autumn of 1986.
This deluxe 2cd edition includes a second disc of 18 rare and ‘desirable’ bonus tracks including the 12” mix of lead single Echo Beach plus outtakes and B-Sides from the album sessions. Excitingly six previously unreleased tracks feature including the long-awaited release of the post-Desire rarity We Play Machines.
Rare live concert recordings of Desire songs…
After Buzzcocks disbanded in 1981, frontman Pete Shelley teamed up with Martin Rushent, embracing the producer’s newly acquired synths and drum machines to rework his tracks, crafting a new blueprint for electronic pop music in the process. A production blueprint that would soon achieve massive mainstream success with another Rushent production; Dare by the Human League.
Across both LPs, Shelley combines his urgent songwriting with chugging synthesisers and electronic percussion creating records that straddle rock radio and London’s nascent club scene. These albums sound as fresh today as they did upon release, but the innovative nature of Homosapien and XL-1 has been overlooked. Overshadowed by the influence of Pete’s former band…
Finn Wolfhard’s love of the indie rock of the ’90s is well documented to anyone who has heard his bands Calpurnia or the Aubreys, both of whom are very much indebted to that much-referenced decade. On his solo debut, Happy Birthday, Wolfhard leans hard into lo-fi recording techniques while running through a set of songs influenced by crunchy power pop, staticky late-night bouts of introspection, the Beatles filtered through Guided by Voices, the hushed strumming of Elliott Smith, and the singer’s own unique set of anxieties. Co-produced by Kai Slater of the band Sharp Pins, the record is loose without being ramshackle as it rambles along thorough a dynamic set of tracks that can be incredible hooky (the power pop gem “Choose the Latter”), painfully…
Following their eponymous debut EP for Carpark Records by less than a year, the full-length Aseurai finds Auckland outfit Phoebe Rings writing together as a band for the first time. Phoebe Rings was started as a solo project by Seoul, South Korea native Crystal Choi, who came to New Zealand to study jazz piano. Upon graduating from music school, she quickly made fans of members of the bustling local indie community, and she recruited drummer Alex Freer (Tiny Ruins), bassist Benjamin Locke (Wax Chattels, the Beths), and guitarist/synth player Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent (Princess Chelsea), all experienced bandmembers, sidemen, and, in some cases, solo artists in their own right. The resulting collaborative LP expands on Choi’s sweet, jazz-tinged dream pop with…
Following 2024’s ‘Wobble’, Mellowmaker is the second chapter in Black Market Karma’s two-part album series on Fuzz Club. Crafted entirely by Stanley Belton—who writes, records, and produces everything himself-the record embraces analogue imperfections and tape wobble, splicing them with modern techniques to create a “cassette-ified” lo-fi psychedelia blending ‘60s pop, ‘90s neo-psych, and crunchy hip-hop breakbeats.
“Mellowmaker was made immediately after Wobble, I kinda see them as two sides of each other”, Belton says. The washed-out saturated vocals and jangling Vox guitars are there, but the in-built fuzz and repeater sounds on his cherished vintage Ultrasonic get some heavier usage here. Synths take more of a back-burner in favour of dreamy…
Black Moth Super Rainbow continue to make records that tweak their core approach of sticky sweet melodies, queasy synths, and vocodered vocals. Their previous release, 2018’s Panic Blooms, degraded and murked up the sound to a degree they hadn’t attempted before. Eight years later, they’ve gone in almost the opposite direction on Soft New Magic Dream. Instead of murk and grime, the songs are almost pretty. The synths have a glistening sheen to them, the vocals are almost lilting, and the melodies throughout are soft and dreamy for the most part. Of course, it being BMSR, these bits of abstract loveliness are still a little sickly, a little off-kilter, and not recommended for a playlist one might be making for a prospective romantic partner.
The hilarious thing to do in schoolyards in Britain when ‘Homosapien’ came out in 1982 was to sing its title line as “you’re homosexual too”. Yet former Buzzcock Pete Shelley was way ahead of the mockers and rockers on this synth pop venture, ‘Homosapien’ being far queerer than playground masculinity patrollers – or the banning BBC – could imagine. It’s not just the lyric’s double entendre, “homo superior, in my interior” but the song’s expansion from the personal to the political: “I just hope and pray that the day of our love is at hand”. A love song hence becomes a demand for liberation, insisting that “homosapien” is the only label that matters: “I don’t want to classify you like an animal in the zoo”. But there was something equally queer about the sound…