‘Normalization’ in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s was paradoxical: rather than a return to normality, it in fact meant renewed state control over society, culture, and public life. It followed the Prague Spring of 1968, which had grown out of the political and cultural relaxation of the 1960s, where under Alexander Dubček, reforms aimed to create ‘socialism with a human face’ allowed greater freedom of expression and artistic experimentation. The Soviet Union considered these reforms too radical, however, and in August 1968 Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, bringing the reform process to an end.
From 1969 onwards, the authorities restricted freedom of expression and cultural activity, and excluded politically undesirable figures…
Category: indie
Across three Ghosted records Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin have expanded the possibilities of the guitar-bass-drums trio with slippery yet rigid, kosmische yet earthy music that challenges the idea time exists in neatly parcelled, indivisible increments.
For Serpentine they’re joined by multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén, who contributed Donso n’goni to Ghosted I’s opening track. Bothén’s first instrument is the bass clarinet. In the 70s he studied the donso n’goni, a six-stringed ‘hunter’s harp’ from the Wassoulou region in Mali, eventually bringing him into Don Cherry’s orbit. He’s also versed in Gnawa, learning guinbri in Marrakesh. This worldliness ripples through Bothén’s 1984 record Trancedance,…
Stephen O’Malley’s name is synonymous with duration fascination. His performances with Sunn O))) seeming to stretch out indefinitely. The sprawling recordings he also makes with Äänipää, KTL, Khanate, and Æthenor, alongside recent collaborations with his partner Kali Malone, ask that listeners sit quietly as the music slowly unfolds over lengthy intervals.
Named after a thousand-year-old tree on the Swedish island of Fårö, Avaeken is no different. Clocking in at forty-two minutes and formed of long, sustained tones that ebb and fluctuate, this work was initially composed by O’Malley for the Belgian electric guitar quartet Zwerm. It then accompanied Wish You Were Here, a site-specific exhibition by multi-disciplinary…
Communication often has multiple angles: at the beginning of Is affect real?, the third song on Frances Chang’s new album, she sings “Sometimes I want to wear / A head of light blonde hair / I don’t care if that’s unfair / Or makes me ordinary”, and she’s being vulnerable while also putting up a defence against being judged. It’s an interesting mix of defiance and insecurity, and Been Thinking Bout Confession sees Chang delivering this kind of lyrical material over idiosyncratic, contemplative instrumentals.
The piano melodies that run through I can feel the waves are sweet and playful, contrasting nicely with the song’s rickety, distorted drum machine loop. Strings add some harmonic layers, sometimes lush, sometimes uneasy, and Chang’s…
…includes the original album tracks supplemented by rare B-sides, remixes, and a pair of previously unreleased instrumental tracks.
Maps & Atlases’ second EP, You and Me and the Mountain, found the band moving in a lighter direction than the mathematical frenzy of their first EP Trees, Swallows, Houses. Their first full-length sees them fully morphed into a sophisticated indie pop group. Perch Patchwork is a bold debut, filled with bombastic arrangements, twisting modal progressions, and percussive layers. The skill set is high, but it’s far less showy. Guitarists will still be enthralled by Dave Davidson’s and Erin Elders’ fingertapping, but acoustics take precedent, and moderately slow tempos maintain the album’s balladic feel.
Dreamin’ Of is Pieta Brown’s ninth album and her second recorded with Bon Iver alumni S.Carey and Mike Lewis producing with her and forming the rhythm section, and with Jeremy Ylvisaker returning on guitar too. Her previous album, Freeway, released in 2019, met with critical acclaim and recognition from eminent peers Ani DiFranco, whose Righteous Babe imprint released the record, and Don Was, who wrote the sleeve notes. Although there has been a lengthy gap between records, this continuity of label and band gives a palpable assurance to the album.
The record is predominantly indie-folk styled, with a production feel not unlike Daniel Lanois, with a sparse and open feel, additional instruments layered in sparingly and to add texture,…
…Almost a decade ago, when the Minnesota-born Brennan Wedl was a college student living in Boston, she shared vocal duties with bandmates Lea Jaffe and Otto Klammer as a member of the short-lived queercore outfit Dazey and the Scouts, whose 2017 EP Maggot found a new cult fanbase on TikTok in the early 2021. A lot has happened since Dazey and the Scouts amicably disbanded — according to Wedl, they still maintain a “pretty active” group chat. Wedl grew up, moved to Nashville, signed to ANTI-. She amassed a star-studded crew of collaborators, including labelmates MJ Lenderman and Katie Crutchfield, sought-after alt-country and indie rock producer Brad Cook, and grunge revivalist Lindsey Jordan, all of whom have contributed to Wedl’s debut.
Ever wished you could be someone else? Ok Cowgirl’s Leah Lavigne surely has. The Brooklyn indie rock outfit’s second LP, Rhinestone Cowgirl, is preoccupied with “what if”’s and “why”’s, ruminating on the burnout and precarity in an artist’s path. Lavigne opens the record with what initially seems like an explicit expression of disillusionment: “Rock n Roll Ruined My Life” runs through the safer, more domestic scenarios that touring musicians forego for their art. But it’s the heartbreak and adventure that make it worth it, she explains as moody arpeggios simmer in the backdrop. It’s both a mourning of what could have been, and an acceptance that there’s something beautiful about putting everything on the line for self-expression. Ruining your life…
On his previous album 2022’s Avatars of Love, Sondre Lerche hit on a sound that really worked for him. Super sophisticated with loads of strings, smooth textures, and intricate instrumentation, the backing was perfect for his wistful tales of love and heartache. It was such a perfect amalgam of sound, emotion, and performance that it makes sense that for his next album Lerche would want to keep things roughly the same.
2026’s Acrobats brings back the strings and smoothness, as well the pristine arrangements that frame the songs, sometime with sensitive grace, other times with almost bombastic power. It’s a bit of a shift from Avatars of Love in that the songs and sound are a little more insistent. “Drive Me Away From You” is strident and pulsing…
…a digital deluxe edition of the album with three bonus tracks.
The U.K. band Wolf Alice have been making eclectic pop-rock for a decade, specializing in textural music that swings big emotionally while moving within different sonic settings, proving what a guitar band can do to stay on its game in a post-guitar world. They’ve never put it together with the sweep and depth of their fourth album, The Clearing, steeped in classic Seventies and Eighties influences yet never feeling like they’re just firing up a playlist of old bangers.
Singer-guitarist Ellie Rowsell goes all-in on huge rockers while delivering serious personal impact on this album’s softer stock-taking moments. Musically, they’re sharp as ever.
Art is rarely as orderly as a gallery — or a rock album, for that matter. Even when restraint is involved, even when it’s finished, shit’s all over the place in the studio. That’s kind of the point, really: There’s always a bit of chaos in getting the ideas down. Tyondai Braxton understands this. Those who existed, perhaps lived through the late 2000s, recall his stint as frontman of experimental wunderkinds Battles. But his path was never truly meant to be with a rock band, as the aftermath of his exit indicated. Rather, it was to revel in the discord of music in different forms through composition. He’s the type of guy who fits in more with collaborators Kronos Quartet and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma than, say, Grizzly Bear. Braxton was more at home with orchestras and museum…
On Melting Days, the tenth album by Lusine, Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain brings two decades of production experience to bear.
His particular brand of ambient electronica has a wonderfully tactile quality, juxtaposing warm surges of thickly textured synth against crisp rhythmic and melodic details. Counterbalancing the macro with the micro, there’s a sense of both suspension and subtle movement, simplicity on one level and complexity on another, which keeps these ten tracks immersive.
“Bird’s Eye” has a rapidly whirring clockwork intricacy to its bright arpeggiation, while its slow chord changes muster a feeling of humbling grandeur. “Apparition” conjures the radiant luster of Michigan trio Kiln, while the glitchy…
Who is GB? When Danish record label Posh Isolation called it quits in early 2025, one of the final records in its 16-year run was a mysterious album of savvy post-punk by an unidentified artist whose initials were scrawled in blue across its cover, with very little other identifying information. GB later turned up in The Guardian’s profile of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory — the educational institution that has attracted recent media attention for producing renowned graduates including ML Buch, Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne, Smerz, Molina, and Clarissa Connelly — and was later revealed to be one Gustav Berntsen, a recent graduate of the program who has been active in Copenhagen for many years.
As frontman for the band Pardans, he’s…
Finding glimpses of joy is very much the theme of Mystery Jets’ seventh album, A Hole to See the Sky Through. Across – for example – the title track, and ‘Godrays’, the indie stalwarts sing of “seeing a rainbow through the thunder” and someone who’ll “clear a hole to see the sky through”. The irony is that listening to A Hole to See the Sky Through often feels like a similar exercise: searching patiently for fleeting flashes of excitement.
Predecessor A Billion Heartbeats felt urgent, spiky, and politically-charged. It was a record that crackled with purpose, sounding worlds away from the sugary exuberance of 2008’s Two Doors Down. A Hole to See the Sky Through never quite matches the urgency of the former or the charm of the latter, often content to drift into…
“If I just get on my bike, I’ll outride any heartache,” sings Ella Williams on “Surfing USA,” a yawning, lovelorn paean to heartbreak in the Great Lakes. Since making her label debut as Squirrel Flower in 2020, Williams has translated her rich emotional life into a catalog of smoky indie rock and folk that careens between whispered intimacy and cathartic sprawl. She’s a Boston native who found her voice in the Midwest, beginning her career in Iowa, then adopting Chicago as her hometown and frequent muse. Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going is her fourth album for Illinois indie Polyvinyl, and finds her in a similar sonic space to Tomorrow’s Fire, the 2023 album she made with co-producer Alex Farrar. This time around, she and a group of Chicago collaborators cut a live,…
Get ready to dive into Wild Pink’s sixth long player, Still Coming Down, which clocks in at just under 33 minutes. The notably concise record finds frontman John Ross trimming the fat in favor of swaggering rock and roll. After the songwriter’s battle with cancer and being a father for the first time, he learned there was plenty of meaning to be found in going back to the basics. The band’s approach exemplifies this newfound vantage point, even if the album would have benefited by creating some space every now and then.
Wild Pink lean into the fact that this is a genuine rock record with big arrangements and even bigger riffs. The recording process at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, with producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza,…
Taking a cue from Happy Mondays‘ smash’n’grab approach to making music, this super-deluxe reissue of the group’s totemic third album raids an array of previous Mondays releases. Alongside a new remaster of Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches is an amalgamation of the Madchester Rave On and Hallelujah EPs; Baby Big Head Bootleg Album, the “unofficial” 1991 live recording originally let loose by the band themselves; and a slew of remixes, some lifted from original singles, others from projects issued earlier this year.
It all makes for a gloriously heady package which befits the Mondays’ time-warping maximalism. With grunge, Britpop and hip hop all outlasting the Madchester scene the Mondays birthed (and transcended), it’s easy to forget that…
2026 may have been a pretty depressing year in many aspects but one thing is for sure – the British music industry is in rude health. This year, bands like Mary in the Junkyard and Man/Woman/Chainsaw have built upon their burgeoning live reputation to deliver stellar debut albums, and now they’ve been joined by Westside Cowboy.
The Manchester quartet have spent the past few years releasing a string of EPs and touring their guts out – if you’ve been anywhere near a festival during 2025, it’s more than likely you’ll have seen them on the bill. The good thing about It Goes On is that the band have successfully transferred their jittery, intoxicating live sound into the recording studio, resulting in an immensely satisfying debut album.