Category: indie


As we hurtle toward Skynet, there is more information than we know what to do with. Great swaths of the population bend the knee to those who orchestrate our demise. We live in an Information Age in which very few people seem to be doing any thinking. This creates an opening for false prophets and self-appointed kings.
Such is the overarching theme of Signal Fire, the fourth album from electro-metal smashers Genghis Tron. As on their 2021 comeback record, Dream Weapon, core duo Hamilton Jordan and Michael Sochynsky are joined by Sumac drummer Nick Yacyshyn and the Armed vocalist Tony Wolski. Unlike last time, Kenny Szymanski from the Armed plays bass.
…“I Am All” is Genghis Tron in excelsis,…

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Delia Beatriz’s latest as Debit continues her explorations of Latin American rhythm and identity through the lens of club music. The first and most obvious thing to note about Potpourri is that it is bangin’. Following last year’s woozy 90s elegy, Desaceleradas and the dreamy experimental ambient of The Long Count, the carnival of beats on the new album bring a jolt of restless energy. If those previous records drifted through interior spaces of memory and imagination; this one feels crowded and busy, a vortex of motion and ideas.
Marking Debit’s return to NAAFI, the move to the dance floor finds her picking up where her previous SYSTEM EP left off, mixing up guaracha with industrial techno and noise. ‘Referencepoint’ offers a scene-setting introduction:…

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The ferny Brutalist cityscape on the cover of Soli City’s Poetics of a New Estate is a fine advertisement for what’s inside: curated Copenhagen vibelessness, shorn of grit but not without a certain numinous quality. Anyone who’s heard the computer-screen fantasias of ML Buch’s Suntub or the mallsoft jazz of MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s Opening Night knows on some level what to expect: spiffy ’80s guitar that twangs and ripples just this side of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” a conservatory-schooled ear for arrangement, a lack of friction that belies the spookiness rumbling underneath. Less expected are the jarring tonal shifts liable to induce whiplash across its 45 minutes — and which would seem haphazard if every single one of them wasn’t…

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In November 2025, trombonist and composer Kalia Vandever released the celebrated quartet offering Another View on Northern Spy. The five-track set was performed by the artist’s quartet that included Mary Halvorson, Kanoa Mendenhall, and Kayvon Gordon. Vandever’s music won attention not only for its quality, but for its difficulty to categorize. While their compositions often utilize modern jazz and vanguard classical music as frameworks for new exploration, Vandever has also worked in pop, classical, and theatrical settings. Mana, her International Anthem debut, relationally returns to the solo framework the artist adopted for 2023’s We Fell in Turn for trombone, voice, and electronics. The seven works here loosely follow that direction, but they expand…

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On Music for Tombak & Synth, Paris-based Iranian musician Cinna Peyghamy transforms a technical experiment into something deeply personal. What began as research into contact microphones and live improvisation gradually evolved into a meditation on exile, double identity, and inherited memory. The dialogue between the Persian tombak and modular synthesis — “a piece of wood and skin” confronting a hyper-technological electronic system — becomes both sonic method and autobiographical metaphor.
The album’s greatest strength lies in the extra- ordinary physicality of its sound design. Peyghamy gives space to every resonance, allowing intricate rhythmic patterns, modular modulation, and acoustic textures to breathe and…

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Andrew Jim Gannon feels like he’s lived multiple lives. Starting off in an indie/guitar band, then sliding into studio work, then being asked to set up a studio for an unknown client.
This led to him producing, and engineering, the 2010 Giggs album Let Em Ave It. In the early 2020s he stepped away from anonymous studio work to release music as On Man. This led to a glorious self-titled album, which led him to finally release music under his own name.
Listening to his new album Hydrate Those Folds! it’s all there – a lot of it in plain sight, but some of it hidden just below the surface.
‘Golden Kayak’ is the first great song on the album. The backing track as a pulsating drone, stuttering beats and languorous synths,…

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…Brown Wimpenny formed in Manchester in 2023. Within weeks, their ranks had swelled to twenty-five, with members based in Liverpool and London. For a spell, they existed as an amorphous entity, a folk collective with the spirit of punk experimentation, traditional music’s answer to dada or situationism. By 2024, they had settled on a line-up of a mere eleven members and released a selection of brilliantly raw demos in January of that year. Their first single, ‘The Sheffield Grinder/Black Joak’, came out last year and was swiftly followed by ‘Raglan Road’. Both of those songs appear on the band’s full-length debut, Long Live Brown Wimpenny.
‘The Sheffield Grinder/Black Joak’ was quite an introduction. Accordionist James Brown…

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Darren Hayman is reissuing ‘The Violence’, the sprawling double album he regards as the most ambitious work of his 30-year career. Originally released through Fortuna POP! in 2012 and recorded with his 16-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it returns with previously unreleased songs and demos folded into the running order.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, if she floats or drowns” wrote Darren Hayman on Hefner’s ‘The Sad Witch’, a decade later he’s returning to the subject for The Violence, a concept album based around seventeenth century Essex witch trials and the English Civil war.
As concepts go it’s not as odd a choice as you might think. Leaving aside allegorical links to the present day, intended or otherwise…

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Fischer-Z found success across Europe and sold more than two million albums and collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Steve Cropper and Dexys Midnight Runners’ horn section. Band main man John Watts has released 26 albums and played around 4,000 concerts so far.
Fischer-Z continue to release brand new music and tour all over the world and celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2026. The celebrations begin with this expanded 3CD deluxe digipak which collects their first three albums; World Salad (1979), Going Deaf for a Living (1980) and Red Skies Over Paradise (1981), originally released on United Artists and Liberty. This expanded collection is completed by a selection of bonus tracks from each album’s original release.

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Frankie Archer combines traditional balladry with very contemporary-sounding electronica. This idea in itself isn’t new, but Archer’s fresh approach and sure hand – and, most importantly, her willingness to experiment – result in a sound that is unlike anyone else. Her first two releases, the EPs Never So Red (2023) and Pressure and Persuasion (2024), seemed like fully-formed, finely-cut gems, but debut album The Dance of Death, which was co-produced by Kylie Minogue collaborator Guy Massey, sees her take her artistry to new levels. As the title suggests, this is a record built around the ideas of death and mortality, but it is anything but one-dimensionally depressing.
The way the album quietly foregrounds theme and structure without compromising on…

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London’s Shannen SP has had an ear for cutting edge club sounds since her secondary school days, when she developed a penchant for bass at DMZ nights and Club Exodus in Leeds. In the late 2010s, her NTS residency and multidisciplinary Ø party at Corsica Studios with Kode9 highlighted African diasporic genres from kuduro to gqom, bringing on guests like Nazar and DJ Lag. On Mzansi Bass, her latest curatorial effort for Colombian label TraTraTrax, Shannen SP assembles a team of South African producers innovating on local genres like 3-step, gqom, and amapiano. From veterans like DJ Lag to newcomers like Jay Music, the artists featured here share a murky minimalism that still imparts an irresistible groove, filling out the spaces between the four-on-the-floor.

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Cloud Machines is the extraordinary debut collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, the Baltimore avant-garde institution and band leader behind High Zero Festival, the Red Room collective, Geodesic Gnome, and radical sonic concepts like Spectral Relay (a bespoke signal processing architecture) and Relabi (a conceptual genre defined by a Rorschach-blot pulse). After more than one hundred combined years of this pair pushing the boundaries of what music can be and where it can come from, these two iconoclasts have delivered something genuinely unexpected: an oddly sweet electronic opus that’s as immediately engaging as it is a series of delicious puzzles. When two of experimental music’s most…

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…featuring 8 bonus tracks including rare studio recordings + iconic live performances.
Kaleo (a Hawaiian word for “the sound”), are a group of talented young rock/blues musicians from (where else would you expect?) Mosfellsbaer, outside Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik, and only recently relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2015.
Having riled up a significant following in their home country as well amassing a horde of streams on Spotify, the band signed with Atlantic Records, and now we have their first complete gift to American listeners.
A/B sounds like a greatest hits album. In a way it kind of is, as it draws from Kaleo’s Icelandic self-titled debut and the handful of singles that have been released in America.

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Sometimes, you just have to let things go and while it can be uncomfortable, it can also be incredibly liberating – and the Embrace boys are championing this philosophy superbly in Avalanche, their ninth studio album and their first release in four years. When you stop anticipating the big moments and let it flow, the need to have your life figured out swiftly fades away. It becomes about the small things – the ones you’d otherwise miss. The name of the album is a metaphor for the force of feeling when the little moments all snowball together and how it’s important to celebrate those smaller imperfect moments of life as opposed to being laser focused on the ‘big picture’. It was conceived on the idea that life doesn’t pause for permission; it keeps on…

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Remember when dubstep was good? Paris-born producer and DJ Beatrice M. certainly does: Their music calls back to the genre’s mid-2000s South London days, when dub implied reggae, Skream was a youthful prodigy, and Sonny Moore was the singer in a hardcore band.
It was probably inevitable that this sound would come round again, with music’s proverbial 20-year fashion cycle once again raising its head. But Sinking, Beatrice M.’s debut album, released on the none-more-cerebral dubstep label Tectonic, has more to it than simple revival. On the one hand, the record is full of the recognizable traits of classic dubstep — the reggae-inspired half-step beat; basslines that are warm and corporeal rather than dumb and abrasive; and…

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Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE recorded in grief or in hope at producer Seth Manchester’s Machines with Magnets studio, with touring bassist Liam Andrews contributing to the group’s recording sessions for the first time. The result is the most texturally detailed, sonically overwhelming BIG|BRAVE record to date. Nearly every moment is bristling with blown-out distortion, yet it’s shaped so that there’s enough space for all the elements to breathe instead of cancel each other out.
On opener “what may be the kindest way to leave,” waves of doom-laden noise set in, with Robin Wattie’s manipulated vocals floating in the center, and when the bass pierces through towards the end, the impact is felt deeply. Then, “a shape of shame” gently rocks back and…

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Working with guitars, drum machine, sampler, self-built electronics, and all manner of percussion, BASIC, the trio of Chris Forsyth, Mikel Patrick Avery, and Douglas McCombs, synthesize the vast influences and distinct histories of each member, producing a boundary-less, rhythm-forward amalgam of art rock, trance jazz, collective improvisation, and humming electronics on their new eponymous full-length for No Quarter.
Philadelphia’s Chris Forsyth, known for his lyrical guitar compositions and mercurial improvisations as leader of the Solar Motel Band, founded BASIC in 2022 naming the project in homage to the 1984 Robert Quine/Fred Maher album “Basic,” yes, but also to indicate a desire to get down to fundamentals rhythmically and musically.

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When MONO recorded their previous album, OATH, with longtime production partner and friend, Steve Albini in 2023, they never fathomed that it would be the final studio album they made together. Albini tragically died the following year, and that loss left an incalculable void in the lives of not just everyone who ever knew Steve, but everyone with an attachment to any of the thousands of records he helped bring into world over the past four decades. He brought a clarity to the chaos, and a selfless sense of service to art and artists that was unrivaled. On both a personal and practical level, the loss left MONO faced with profound grief and uncertainty. Albini had become a fundamental part of MONO’s unmistakable sound, and the thought of replacing him was daunting…

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