01. Martyn Lenoble & Christian Eigner feat. Mark Lanegan & Dave Gahan – Cat People (Putting…
02. Supersuckers – Never Let Me Down Again
03. The Stooges – Dirt
04. Johnny Marr – I Feel You
05. Vince Clarke & Ane Brun – Fly On…
06. Gordon Lightfoot – Sundown
07. The Soulsavers – San Quentin Blues
08. Nouvelle Vague – Enjoy the Silence
09. Fad Gadget – Back to Nature
10. The Normal – T.V.O.D.
11. Cabaret Voltaire – Spread the Virus
12. Front 242 – Headhunter
13. Sunroof – Conspiracies
14. LFO – Freak
15. Blind Willie Johnson – John the Revelator
Category: indie
Ambient Americana Volume 2 brings together major icons of the ambient and experimental folk scenes, including legendary producer Daniel Lanois, ambient guitar pioneer William Tyler, and standard-bearers of the current cosmic Americana revival like Hayden Pedigo and North Americans.
“Our May 2021 issue came with a special free CD – the then-latest instalment in our Sounds of the New West series. Titled Ambient Americana: A Road Trip Across Psychic State Lines, it brought together a group of artists who were mixing the traditions of country and folk with the mind-expanding sounds of ambient and kosmische music.
…a mere five years on, we’re delighted to bring you Volume 2, which comes free with Uncut’s August 2026 issue.”
Nashville-based guitarist and composer Kevin Coleman is a far-reaching musician who likes to take the instrumental acoustic guitar genre and fully maximise its potential. His debut album, 2018’s First Songs, used the purely solo set-up to demonstrate his ambition and prowess, while 2024’s Imaginary Conversations saw him expanding the soundscape to incorporate a broad range of ideas.
K.C. Blues is a natural follow-up to Imaginary Conversations that Kevin began recording pretty much as soon as that album landed. This extended writing and recording process has resulted in a set that feels diverse, bringing in experimental folk, Americana and blues over six tracks and forty minutes. Like on Conversations,…
DoYeon Kim works in a space informed by jazz and free improvisation, imbued with vestiges of folk music. She plays a gayageum, a plucked zither, which is not an instrument normally found in these contexts. Joining Kim are violist Mat Maneri, bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. The musicians are well attuned, bringing out detailed interactions between subsets of the group and the quartet as a whole.
The opening track, “The Beats of Distant Thunder,” is a case in point, with Kim and Maneri beginning the proceedings in the lead, only to have Fraser and Sorey lock in a double time groove that spurs the action further forward. Maneri and Fraser trade solos, and Kim plucks a line imitating Sorey’s use of cymbals. The whole group brings…
Before they shaped the future of music, and before they led the indispensable label that housed this sea-changing output, PC Music’s A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle were just two British kids — “Dux Kidz,” as they called themselves — who wanted to have fun. Their 2012 output under the “Dux” name ranged from happy-go-lucky pop to artfully disfigured hip-hop and even impressionistic classical music.
All of these tracks featured commercial instrumentation pulled from romplers, MIDI banks, and sample CDs — an unabashed embrace of sounds once considered tacky and undesirable. Why make an honest attempt at distinguished music with such cheeky components? Because that sort of thing sounded like a damn fun time.
Alex Cameron probably didn’t mean to release his album right after the trailer for Digger dropped, but it’s mighty good timing. Digger is a Tom Cruise venture and appears to be halfway between Tropic Thunder’s gonzo work and Christian Bale’s Oscar angling in Vice. Both Vice and Digger ogle like a carnival barker at the transformation of a usually chiseled Hollywood star getting fat, as if the gravitas and comedy simply spring from calories and discrepancy.
“I put on a ton of weight / For a role I didn’t get / Now I’m always late for set / Getting panned in the LA Times / Getting tanned on the internet,” Cameron snarls at the beginning of his new album, Late to Set. Pumped up and steely “Eye of the Tiger” guitars thud behind him, a warbly…
Welcomer’s Miles Sutton observes the world from a remove, delivering even intimate scenes from an ironic remove. Most of the time, he’s only half singing, through the verse injecting conversational lyrics with the barest tinge of melody.
Yet in the chorus, Sutton reveals a fascination with pop: the arrangements bristle with hooks and billow with strings, multi-voiced singing and rock instruments.
This is Sutton’s first full-length album as Welcomer, following a self-titled EP in 2022. The Wellington, New Zealand artist enlisted producer and engineer Jesse Austin-Stewart for this one, working with him to develop layered but buoyant orchestrations for these songs, which glisten and shimmer with trebly picking, swoops of…
The lo-fi, melancholic slowcore of Duster proves a magical fit with the atmospheric, pleasingly pastoral sampledelica of Dirty Art Club; they teamed together under the name Sooj to make the excellent Crusher. A drifting, meandering, and hazily trippy album, it’s made up of songs that are a soundtrack for staring out the window on a cloudy day wondering where it all went wrong. Or perhaps accompaniment for a long bike ride in the autumn haze of a late afternoon, twisting and turning down unknown streets losing oneself in the music. So, a lot like a Duster album, but somehow even more so. The lovely samples and washes of sound Matt Cagle (aka Dirty Art Club) fits between the strums, thrums, and croons of Clay Parton and Canaan Amber (aka Duster)…
Many bands have written songs about surviving, whether that’s dissecting the circumstances of life events or analysing pain, but very few make survival sound so exhilarating. On their debut album, Hoping As a Coping Mechanism, Bristol trio MOULD manage to tap into and bottle the nervous energy of being human in the world today, then they shake it until it fizzes over the edges. “Misanthrope” immediately launches the listener into a paradox of simultaneously combustible and life-affirming noise.
Building on the ferocious promise of their previous EPs the band allows themselves more time and space to broaden their sonic vocabulary here. Lead singles “Float” and “Falling Posture” hinted at this evolution and within the context…
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…
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.
