Przemysław Jankowiak, aka 2k88 (and fka 1988), is one of Poland’s most singular producers. Long associated with alternative rap and experimental electronics, he gained a cult following as a member of duo Syny and later lent his hand to some of the adventurous figures in the Polish mainstream. His music is, like his concerts, full of smoke: airy, cloudy, inscrutable, dreamy, and unreal.
Everything Always Changes, for We’re Truly Here started as a one-off special project for Kraków’s Unsound Festival. Jankowiak enlisted a trio of acclaimed, like-minded British artists who, like him, work across ambient, rap, R&B, and pop. The four musicians passed ideas back and forth, bringing forth their shared sensibilities and aesthetics: Rainy Miller delivers his signature…
Category: indie
The leaders of Hew have been around for a long time. Your Version might technically be the debut album for this band, but Mercy Harper and Lindsay Minton have been making pristine second- meets fourth-wave emo for 20 years.
Their original college band, Tin Kitchen, crafted unsteady, introspective indie rock. Their longest-running group, football, etc., released a string of excellent yet underrated emo records that blended Rainer Maria with Braid to tremendous effect. They followed that with Overo, which introduced some post-hardcore flair to their sound. Suffice to say, this duo has experience and songwriting chops to spare.
And yet, Harper and Minton refuse to rest on their laurels with this new 11-song album.
When Twisted Teens broke through with their second album, Blame the Clown, only five months ago, the New Orleans duo’s southern-fried mix of garage rock, early punk, rockabilly, and country screamed both “First thought is absolutely best thought” and “Wait until I show you what else I can do.” But if their last album presented the band at their most gleeful and cocky, ready to call the world as they saw it, then Florida Water Blues takes place the morning after: a touch more vulnerable now that the liquid courage has subsided and the hangover is setting in. Blame the Clown may be where the makeup was first put on, but Florida Water Blues is where the tears start to show.
That’s not to say that Twisted Teens have suddenly upended their approach.
Drakulas are a Texas punk band, three of them veterans of the Riverboat Gamblers, all native to the same Denton nexus that birthed the Marked Men, Radioactivity and Bad Sports. (The great, now sporadically active Dirtnap Records released records from all these bands as well as this one.) Yet while Riverboat Gamblers were frenetic but straightforward Ramones-style garage rockers, Drakulas has a bit more new wave in its DNA.
“Going Going Gone Gone” thumps and pillages, true, but with style and a certain amount of decadence. The hammer of drums, the giant guitar chords are block simple, but the vocals vibrate with lurid romanticism, and the keyboards gleam with futurism. Sophistication goes slightly rotten, grand gestures turn theatrical, and all…
If there’s one thing you can be sure of with The Last Dinner Party, it’s that they’re not short of confidence. After releasing a debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, that debuted at Number 1 and was nominated for the Mercury Prize, and playing a succession of gigs that successfully combined camp theatrics with magnetic stage presence, you wouldn’t be surprised to see the London five-piece put their feet up for a while.
Not a bit of it. The band’s second album, From the Pyre, follows just 18 months on from that planet-straddling success story and already sounds like an instant hit. It has all the elements that made Prelude to Ecstasy such a success, and seems to refine them. Abigail Morris’ voice swoops and soars magnificently, Emily Roberts launches…
Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri have independently created some stunning ambient-drone over recent years, including Mogard’s Circular Forms (2015) and Irisarri’s The Shameless Years (2017). Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is the duo’s third collaborative release, following 2024’s Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close and 2025’s Live at Le Guess Who? The raw materials for this new collection originally came together during a three-day live residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin, with Mogard on synths and Irisarri on guitar. The sound masses accumulated during those performances were later hewn in the studio, then cello (Martina Bertoni), and violin and vocal (Andrea Burelli) overdubs were added. The resulting six-track suite is…
Toward the end of “I’ll Let You Finish,” the rollicking opener of his second record Fire from the Hip, Finn Wolfhard does something unexpected. After affecting a nineties indie rocker drawl and doling out charmingly rambling lyrics, the twenty-three-year-old singer/actor finishes the song by singing Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 VMAs. It’s an odd moment, one that would come off as a pretentious cop-out in another’s hands. And in a way, it does have a quality of randomness for its own sake, but Wolfhard somehow makes it work. Part of that is due to how much crackling personality he suffuses into the song itself, but Wolfhard’s recontextualization of that soundbite offers a strangely compelling parallel to his own difficult…
Forty-two years into a career that has quietly defined the underbelly of American neo-psychedelia, Seattle’s The Green Pajamas return with When Fever Let Me Dream. Led by the ever-prolific singer-songwriter Jeff Kelly, the band delivers a record that feels like a lucid, late-night transmission from a bygone era-yet it remains completely timeless.
When Fever Let Me Dream captures the band at their most atmospheric. Heavily indebted to the experimental studio sorcery of the Beatles’ Revolver and the pastoral whimsy of early Pink Floyd, the album floats seamlessly between melodic baroque-pop and hazy, nocturnal rock. The brief opening instrumental “Intro: Pastyme With Good Companye” immediately sets…
Over the course of his career, Will Sheff has released 10 albums that have given the frontman of esteemed indie rock band Okkervil River a reputation as one of the greatest working songwriters in the country.
As Sheff and his shifting lineup of players have traveled the world many times over, they’ve made fans ranging from Lou Reed to Barack Obama. Praised as one of indie-rock’s most ambitious thinkers, Sheff released his debut solo album Nothing Special in 2022 to critical acclaim. Extra Mile follows in the path of Nothing Special – patient and alive and breathing and musical. With collaborations and contributions from friends and musicians like Griff Goldsmith of Dawes, Zac Rae of Death Cab, Peter Silberman…
Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto recorded Lichtung after the married couple decided to settle down near Berlin, close to where Hacke grew up, after living a nomadic lifestyle for 14 years. The album also marks the duo’s first since Hacke left industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, the group he joined as a teenager in 1981. In some ways, particularly due to the vocals, which are entirely sung in German this time around, Lichtung actually sounds closer to Neubauten than hackedepicciotto‘s previous work. Hacke re-incorporates electronic experiments similar to the ones he made as a youth, before he joined the group. Several of the songs take the form of slow-moving, sorrowful dirges with weeping strings and drone metal guitars.
Fabienne Delsol does modern garage psych as well as anyone; her handful of solo albums have been mysterious, magical delights full of drama and intrigue; it’s no wonder that one of her songs ended up on the soundtrack of Killing Eve. Any music coordinator looking for a song that combines the hooky pop of French ye-ye, the guitar and keys swirl of psychedelia, the stomp of Freakbeat, and the sweetness of the beat group era would do well to pick any one of her songs.
There are plenty of fine examples of Delsol at her best on her 2026 record Indigo Red. Co-produced by Ed Deegan and Delsol herself with a crack band of contributors (Thomas Gardner, Carwyn Eliis) on board, the record sounds typically good, coated in reverb and echo but still cracking…
The duo of multi-instrumentalists Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre, sundayclub started out in rural Canada as a way to process the emotions of growing into adulthood, having relationships that fade, and self-discovery. Framing their yearning, bittersweet songs in a shimmery, classic dream pop sound perfected by Carmichael’s gentle, airy vocals, they soon landed on Paper Bag Records (with help from the Weakerthans’ Stephen Carroll, who heard them and passed their music along to the label’s A&R) and based themselves in Winnipeg. Produced by Carmichael, St. Pierre, and Kris Ulrich (Boy Golden, Field Guide), the SUNDAYCLUB LP begins with the brief introductory track “Tune In,” which, while not fully orchestrated, establishes their dreamy, longing…
Parts & Labor were mainstays of the American noise-rock underground which flourished during the 2000s, and even if they never received the major critical acclaim or cult following of someone like Lightning Bolt or Black Dice, they toured constantly and released a sizeable discography of powerful, risk-taking records. Most significantly, they stood apart due to the way they combined freewheeling noise, triumphant melodies, and muscular drumming in equal measures. After making a few diversions such as a fully electronic EP and an attempt to make grindcore pop songs, they released their most accessible effort, Constant Future, before calling it a day around the band’s tenth anniversary in 2012. Dan Friel released solo electronic efforts which continued…
…features 3 bonus alternate tracks.
If you’re looking for those raucous, foot-stomping, banjo-slapping bangers in the vein of ‘The Cave’ or ‘I Will Wait’ from Mumford & Sons, you won’t really find them on their new album Prizefighter (unless you count fourth track ‘Run Together,’ which sounds suspiciously like a Mumford & Sons classic).
However, this is in no way a bad thing. While 2025’s comeback album Rushmere contained tracks with more of Mumford & Sons’ traditional musical stylings, we love that Prizefighter feels like a challenge they have not backed away from. It’s great to see them evolve their sound and even greater to hear how enthusiastic they have been about this latest album in interviews they have done, recently.
Since their 2008 debut, Luluc have been immersed in the beauties of the everyday, spellbound by the delicate majesty of nature: the view from a “small window” as 2014’s Passerby framed it.
On the duo’s latest record Sweet Thief, a river addresses a mountain, two ravens ponder where to go and an oak’s roots become a symbol of hope. Recorded after moving back to their native Australia after years in the US, Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett’s follow-up to 2023’s Diamonds is hushed and intimate, as if welcoming you into the pair’s living room, lit with the inviting glow of ’60s-inspired melodies and carpeted in soft, resonant harmonies.
The humble record tiptoes in with fingerpicked guitar and brushed percussion…
Ellen Allien‘s first album in six years, New Life is meant as a statement of protest. With song titles like “Be Your Own Leader” and “Riot,” the release encourages taking control, overthrowing oppressive forces, and building a positive future. It’s also about dancing, and staying true to club culture, preserving clubs as spaces for liberation and community. Most of the album’s ten tracks are hardly anthemic, however. “Cruising” sets the tone for the record’s first half, creating the atmosphere for a midnight city drive, with stark, pumping kick drums flecked with shreds of melody. “Lights Off” and “Wonderful Moment” are designed for deep club immersion, with eerie voices occasionally surfacing while the bass pounds relentlessly. The album escapes the feeling of…