As Michael Cloud Duguay points out, church organs are the only instruments that form part of a building. Organs only play in the place where they were constructed, and people come to them if they want to listen.
Duguay is a composer and producer from Ontario, and he describes Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go as “almost” a documentary about organs. Using recordings made during a nine-day road trip around the remote fringes of Newfoundland, the album is built around the sounds of organs in seven different churches – in places called things like Agathuna, Bonavista and Cupids.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a complex, multi-layered album with a strong documentary flavour – not only bringing these crumbling…
Category: indie
Making guitar pop/rock (of any kind) work more often than not depends on the synergy of musicians involved, rather than the guitar expertise, and sometimes even the songwriting quality. That synergy seems to be the driving force for the guitar pop Manchester-to-London duo atmos bloom (Tilda Gratton and Curtis Paterson) create on their second album Everythingness.
The duo, who also became life partners, create the kind of guitar pop where that of every kind from above parentheses comes into play – it can be dream pop, it can be twee pop, it could be jangle pop or whatnot – the thing is Gratton and Paterson practically cover it all here. And they wrap it in some very good to excellent songwriting and equal quality harmonies, with high quality…
…Made up of teachers, activists and artists, London’s Shovel Dance Collective recontextualise the folk canon, steepings their songs in field recordings, subterranean drone passages and the theatrical grandeur of second wave post-rock to better fit the realities of modern Britain.
One of the shining lights in Shovel Dance is Nick Granata. A supremely gifted vocalist, Granata’s introduction to traditional music only began around the time of the recent folk resurgence, but they have since become an invigorating and uniquely moving presence among practitioners of the style, as if ANOHNI chose the pedal harmonium over the piano. Their debut solo LP, My Heart is Running Backwards! A Martial Artist! With a Closed Fist! Woof! only cements further…
The title of foodman’s new album, HIKARIGA- SASHIKOMU, translates from Japanese as “light shines in” — meaning, a sign of hope and optimism seen from a dark or difficult place. It’s a clear indicator that Foodman — real name Takahide Higuchi — is writing from a deeply personal space, not just through the emotions he conveys, but in the sense he’s inventing his own musical language as he goes.
Higuchi has been producing since the early 2010s. But it was his 2021 Hyperdub debut Yasuragi Land that really put him on the map: a quixotic spin on footwork that invested the sound’s jittery repetitions with a kawaii sense of play. Since Yasuragi Land, Higuchi has continued to release (slightly) more formally straightforward…
Mohamed Bourouissa has long treated sound as an integral part of his artistic practice, but LILA marks the first time it fully steps into the foreground. Conceived as a “musical object,” the album functions as an inventory of relationships: each track is dedicated to someone who has shaped the artist’s life, transforming memory into vibration rather than portraiture. Just as Bourouissa’s photographs and films explore lives at the crossroads of integration and exclusion, LILA constructs an intimate sonic space where people survive not through representation but through the emotional traces they leave behind.
Drawing on a decade of collaborations and experiments with sound, Bourouissa assembles a vocabulary that slips effortlessly between…
Josh da Costa imagined his solo debut album New Wave Graveyard as a “greatest hits from a parallel universe, classic songs from an alternate reality.” He says, “Instead of trying to home in on one specific vibe or sound and capturing it over the course of, say, a month of my life, I chose to sort of chameleon my way through my own taste and record collection and try out different approaches to songwriting – as if I were more than just one artist.”
Anyone who’s witnessed Josh DJ around LA or checked out his Confusing Mix radio show on NTS will be familiar with his curious blends of music – Brussels micro-labels, Flying Nun favorites, and leftfield post-punk – and how they all somehow make sense together.
Remastered at Abbey Road, Ask Me Tomorrow (1995), Out of Tune (1998), Excuses for Travellers (2000), Spoon and Rafter (2003), and Puzzles Like You (2006) are available on standard black LP and CD, as well as in a 4AD exclusive slipcase featuring all five albums on clear vinyl, complete with an 8×10″ print. Ask Me Tomorrow features newly updated artwork with photographs by Colin Gray, while all of the other albums retain their original artwork.
Born from the ashes of Slowdive in 1995 by former members Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell, and newly acquired drummer Ian McCutcheon, Mojave 3 began by recording six sparse, acoustic, vocally-driven tracks that stripped away the swirling guitar distortion that had once cloaked…
It doesn’t seem that long ago that singer-songwriter Maya de Vitry’s former group, The Stray Birds, was charming audiences.
Yet that ended in 2018, and de Vitry has been prolific since, issuing her fifth solo album, All My Faith. The album is self-produced and comes on her own independent label, Mad Maker Studio. She originally hails from Lancaster, PA, but has resided in Nashville for nearly a decade. Her crystalline voice is the essence of beauty, while her songwriting continues to grow in personal expression and imagery.
The album embraces folk music, folk-rock, and alt-country influences. Simply put, she’s leaning more toward country here than on her previous releases. The project, recorded in three…
All India Radio’s sixth studio album and the first to be released on vinyl back in 2010. The new vinyl and digital version features gorgeous new artwork from Ryan T Hancock. This repress uses the original 2010 vinyl master by Tony Mantz which was flawless.
The Silent Surf features the voice of Professor Don Gurnett, famous for his NASA ‘space sounds’ (also used by the Kronos Quartet on their famous Sun Ring recordings) and a cameo (on ‘The Bomb’) by The Church’s Steve Kilbey (Under The Milky Way). “Since the turn of the 21st century, All India Radio has mashed the ambient-hop signatures of DJ Shadow, Tortoise and Thievery Corporation with the instantly recognizable guitar soundtracking of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti.
…features twelve new songs widely available for the first time: stripped-back versions of songs written before the recording of ‘I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!’ had finished, live favourites heard on McRae’s recent headline tours and festivals appearances, a new version of “Mother Wound” featuring Maisie Peters as well as new tracks elsewhere featuring contributions from Brandi Carlile and Brittney Spencer.
Ever since the release of her stand-out ‘Who Hurt You?’ EP back in 2021, Jensen McRae has been marked out as a special songwriter. Even in that early foray, the Californian managed to effortlessly distil an array of powerful emotions into its six tracks in a way that felt, in moments, truly heartbreaking. So it feels more than…
Discover is the breakthrough third album by Gene Loves Jezebel. Originally released in 1986, Discover captures Gene Loves Jezebel at a watershed moment, propelling the band to an international audience. This 40th Anniversary expanded edition has been remastered at Abbey Road and expanded across a double LP with updated artwork. The second LP contains Glad To Be Alive, a live recording from a 1986 Nottingham show, pressed to vinyl here for the first time since it’s original release.
Recorded live at Nottingham’s Rock City on March 17, 1986, Glad To Be Alive was originally issued as a limited edition 8-song bonus album with initial UK vinyl and cassette copies of Gene Loves Jezebel’s 1986 album, Discover.
Corey King brings a spellbinding, cross-genre fluidity to his third album, 2026’s Change the Wind. A trained jazz trombonist, King is also a singer/songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with a diverse array of artists including José James, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and Iggy Pop. He also took home a Grammy for his co-writing and production work on singer/bassist Esperanza Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab. He brings all of this experience to bear on his solo work, crafting a holistic blend of alt-R&B, indie rock, and electronica. The follow-up to 2019’s A Loveless Sunken Sun, Change the Wind is a deeply personal production that finds King once again revealing his many-textured sound. The album was also written and…
Isn’t the world gorgeous through Sofie Birch-tinted glasses? Listening to “Sefirot Surfa,” a gentle, whimsical romp from Bivabippabualukka, has made the harsh and poorly maintained streets around my East London flat feel magical and new: What portals, it begs a listener to ask, could lie between those cracks in the pavement, or beneath that pile of refuse?
Lush and animated, Bivabippabualukka is an extraordinary break from convention in comparison to Birch’s previous releases, a series of ambient folk records that encouraged scholarly engagement with the minutiae of Birch’s compositional choices. 2025’s soundbath-like Hiraeth, for example, was hardly casual listening, a listening experience that would likely be impeded…
The solo project of Kelly Truong, a producer/songwriter from Southern California, kelz joined the roster of Bayonet Records early on in her music career, with the label issuing her self-recorded debut album, 5 AM and I Can’t Sleep, in 2022. It established a gentle and airy yet dance-oriented sound that she created by combining shimmery synths with fingerpicked guitar, high, gossamer vocals, and simple looped beats.
While the follow-up was four years in the making, it can be described the same way with the caveat that it offers a softer and slightly more intricate version of kelz’s distinctive sound, a sound that never quite moves out of the bedroom headphones and into the club. Its cover design features a blurred photo of Truong.
Sometimes a solo project and sometimes a band, Jilian Medford’s IAN SWEET has switched up its sound from album to album, sometimes favoring bright guitar pop, sometimes shimmery, synth-aided noise pop, and other times applying heavier guitar tones and dissonance to the songwriter’s personal, melodic songs. With IAN SWEET’s fifth album, Shiverstruck, she delivers her most direct-sounding material yet, which is to say that she sticks with mostly full-band arrangements of amplified indie and synthy pop, but makes room for balladry, the occasional appearance of instruments like strings and piano, and a more vulnerable sensibility. The occasion is a breakup album that also carries the weight of a relocation from N.Y.C. to her hometown of L.A. and…

