Everything I Ever Saw continues The Menzingers’ tradition of heartfelt storytelling through their signature Americana punk rock style. It’s an album built on consistency rather than reinvention, leaning heavily into the formula of impassioned vocals and steady rock riffs that has made the band so beloved.
The use of Shin Noguchi’s street photography for the artwork immediately stamps the album with a recognisable personality, the same intriguing, sombre vulnerability that is present across most of their album covers is undeniable here. In fact, it is one of their strongest artwork choices, second only to 2017’s After the Party, and it feels like an intentional reference to their most popular album. Many of the tracks follow suit,…
Category: indie
There was a fusty, claustrophobic aura surrounding Cardiacs’ 1988 debut album, A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window. Released 14 months later, On Land And In The Sea captured them basking in psychedelic sunshine. Less a transformation than a giddy blossoming, it showcased their self-created world of imagination, wonder and squint-eyed eccentricity.
Leader and chief songwriter Tim Smith may or may not have been thrilled by an increasing amount of attention from the music mainstream, momentary approval from Steve Wright on Radio 1 included, but his music spoke only of feverish, mischievous delight. The primitive, angular clatter of Cardiacs’ earliest efforts had grown into something bigger and more ambitious.
The deluxe edition features 15 additional tracks: rare remixes, live versions and instrumentals.
On their sixth album, the increasingly prolific neo-psych outfit Portugal. The Man look to the past for inspiration on In the Mountain in the Cloud. The album represents a breakthrough for the band on a couple of levels, the most obvious of which is their signing to major-label Atlantic, which comes as a big step up after years of quietly working their way through the indie circuit. The other is the less tangible artistic breakthrough. With such a rigorous release schedule, Portugal. The Man has been a band that listeners have been able to watch hone their craft step by step, slowly tinkering and adjusting things and growing into a band that’s not only hit their stride, but is in full…
…includes three bonus tracks: a previously unreleased alternate mix of “Dogtown”, “I Don’t Know Why” (Demo) and “Walking on Thin Ice”.
Born in the shadow of incredible grief, Yoko Ono’s fifth solo album, Season of Glass, holds a specific place in her greater body of work, its vivid expressions of a spectrum of painfully raw feelings frozen in place by tragedy. Released in 1981, Season of Glass arrived just months after Ono watched her husband John Lennon be murdered as they were returning home from a recording session. Infamously, a photograph of Lennon’s blood-spattered glasses served as the cover art for the album, a creative choice Ono fought for against pushback from label executives who felt it would horrify the record-buying public.
True to its name, (the best & the rest of) New Order will include both the 1994 hits set (the best of) New Order and its 1995 follow-up (the rest of) New Order. The former featured their biggest hits up to 1993’s Republic and new mixes of songs like “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “True Faith” and ‘Round & Round,” while the latter collected 10 mostly recent remixes, including a handful of exclusive tracks. For this new package, those discs will be augmented by a further two CDs of remixes and bonus tracks, including the versions exclusive to U.S. and cassette pressings of (the best of) New Order and plenty more period remixes, including many which were only ever on vinyl and even a few unreleased cuts, including the first focus track: a vintage mix of Republic track…
Along with the lucky hundreds in attendance at north London’s Unit 58 and the car park of Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, NME first heard Yard Act’s new album in May. At these free last-minute gigs, the Leeds quartet surprised fans by playing ‘You’re Gonna Need a Little Music’ from top to bottom – instantly after it was announced. A power move that perhaps indicates the confidence they harness, now three albums in, but one that also mirrors the approach that birthed it: four live musicians under one roof at their most instinctive.
Following the bitty writing process that characterised their Mercury Prize-nominated debut album ‘The Overload’ (2022) and its playful successor ‘Where’s My Utopia?’ (2024), Yard Act assembled their own studio space in…
Different When It’s Silent appears six years after the release of Fall to Pieces, the album Tricky made soon after the death of his daughter Mazy. Though he’s issued material through several collaborative side projects in the interim, it makes sense that this is the proper follow-up to Fall to Pieces, as it feels like an extension of that album’s outpouring of grief and occasional anger.
For most of the songs on the album, Tricky is joined by new collaborator Mitch Sanders, whose haunting falsetto floats above Tricky’s wounded, raspy whispers. Brooding opener “I Still See Me There” finds the two mourning together over a slow, obtuse rhythm, making for one of the album’s most striking, affecting moments. The two continue to ruminate on pain and loss…
When Conal was released in 1981 on the Norwegian independent label Uniton Records with an initial run of 4,000 LPs, Conrad Schnitzler had already long been known beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany and was now appreciated worldwide as a media artist and musician. In addition to the many cassette and LP editions he released himself, international labels were now increasingly releasing his music. In the same year as Conal, for example, the album Control was released on the American label DYS, followed in 1986 by Concert in the USA and Consequenz 2 in Spain. Schnitzler worked tirelessly and his total work of art, including his music, was becoming increasingly multifaceted. Conal is a good example of this development.
A sign of the ever-encroaching AI times in which we’re living, the words “Produced Entirely by Humans” appear on the back cover of this superb joint effort from electronic artists David Helpling and Scott Reich — not that such clarification is needed when the music couldn’t more possibly reflect a human touch and the sensibilities of its creators. Both figures are long-standing practitioners of the ambient art, and the two appear to bring out the best in each other when pooling their talents as they do here.
While details about “who plays what” are clarified, the nine compositions are credited to both, making it impossible to determine who might have been more involved in the production of a given piece or whether each was equally…
Brighton on the English South Coast has always been weird. It was built almost from scratch as a hedonistic playground by the foppish Prince Regent, later King George IV, just over 200 years ago — and ever since has attracted waves of freaks, cultists, ravers, lowlifes, and oddballs. Nowadays, it’s beset by gentrification, chain restaurants, media folk and wellness gurus, but just under the surface it still has the air of “a town that is constantly helping the police with their enquiries” as the writer Keith Waterhouse put it in the 1970s. And now, as ever, hidden away from the seafront clubs and big indie gigs, it has a wellspring of genuine eccentricity clinging on to its surreality in basement flats, weird jam sessions above pubs, smelly poetry readings, and weird…
Those who have been following Shane Embury’s career closely since the days of Unseen Terror’s Human Error back in 1987 may be less surprised by the largely accessible, melodic music of Bridge to Resolution than those who are aware of him only as Napalm Death’s bass player and a figurehead of the U.K. extreme music underground scene. There’s never been any shortage of diversity in Embury’s musical career, and it’s his work outside of metal, such as the shoegaze-ish indie noise rock of Little Giant Drug, his electronic dark ambient/drone project Dark Sky Burial and his association with art-rock veterans Cardiacs, that point most clearly in the direction he takes on the first album to be issued under his own name.
As the awkward phrasing above suggests,…
Show Me the Body have always approached hardcore less like a defensive crouch and more like a charge — they treat it as an offensive form. Their songs don’t wait to be cornered; they move first into the fray, with jaw set and teeth bared as the hand that feeds draws near. They force confrontation, and on Alone Together, this is the most direct and recognizably punk they’ve sounded — not because they’ve abandoned what has made them one of the strangest, most experimental hardcore acts around, but because they’ve sharpened it all into a weapon of absolute precision, brandished with love.
Yes, their classic banjo-punk sound still scrapes like grazing the surface of some exposed rusting metal, while Julian Cashwan Pratt…
Melodi Ghazal’s debut full-length finds the Copenhagen-based artist tracing a path through cultural inheritance and sonic exploration. Raised by Iranian parents and shaped by everything from pre-revolutionary Persian pop to VH1 balladry, her sound was honed at the illustrious Rhythmic Music Conservatory – the same stable as left-field contemporaries like ML Buch and Astrid Sonne.
The opener ‘Heart on the Loose’ drifts in on cyclical grooves and devotional lyricism, Ghazal’s voice hovering over soft-focus electronics and darkening daf rhythms, while ‘Miracle’ is a swirl of delayed synths and sultry bass.
‘Fariba Forever’ sets spoken word against manipulated melodies, ‘Numb’ pairs shimmering guitar with a muted sense of release,…
Slow Magic is the second album by Sailing Stones, alter ego of the Irish-born and Bristol-based singer-songwriter Jenny Lindfors, arriving six years after the debut Polymnia — released in 2020, the very year her daughter was born.
The record explores the rising tide of physical, psychological, and emotional changes that come with motherhood, blending together moments of beauty, rage, heartache, and exhaustion into a woozy psych folk swirl.
…It is both musically and lyrically built around the subject of matrescence, the transitions and major life changes a woman goes through at the time of bringing new life into the world. Which is not to say that only half the population will relate to this collection; it is a universal moment…
She’s green have been justifiably building buzz as purveyors of a mighty fine brand of shoegaze and ethereal indie rock since their 2023 EP Wisteria took the scene by storm. Now swallowtail arrives ready to cement their status as one of the best and most exciting bands of their time. Coming in at seven tracks and 29 minutes this record still counts as a long EP rather than a short album. The power and beauty of the band is only growing, which is shown in multiple spots on the record, whether on the more understated “dear ivy” (“and I need you know” ringing out in its latter stages atop some beautiful lead guitar lines) or in the more restrained “empty house” where vocalist Zofia Smith truly comes to the fore.
Elsewhere, tracks build to perhaps more…
Inspired by a bird landing on a city windowsill, Air Signs by anthéne looks to the skies for meaning or assurance. We don’t find a feathery, avian energy here. Instead, this is an airborne album of open expanse and surging textures, matching the bird’s natural element. Ephemeral guitar sounds overlap in loops, rising and falling like breath. Diffuse gusts of melody blow past. Bright glimmers of sound give a sense of sunlight and shadow.
Air is immediate evoked on Air Signs. So what about signs? With guitar, pedal, and filter, artist Brad Deschamps weaves signification out of thin air, or transcribes the air’s own signifying. The finished work may be organic and effortless, but the activity of meaning-making is hinted at. Rustles, clicks, pops, and crackling…
