If there were an award for artists with the most consistent bodies of work, Widowspeak would surely be among the winners. Since their 2011 self-titled debut album, their Americana-meets-grunge-meets-shoegaze fundamentals have barely changed; when they do wander, as on 2022’s quasi-concept album Jacket, they always return to their comfort zone – which is exactly where Roses resides. If anything, Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’ seventh album doubles down on classic sounds and imagery. The thumping kick drum and twang that begin “The Hook” have more in common with Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones than Mazzy Star, while its longing for the one who got away could hardly be more ageless. Widowspeak’s reverence for the time-tested…
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A lot of people are making music influenced by trip-hop right now, and a lot of it is very good. But it typically skews towards the sultry meeting point of sexual danger and stoned paranoia with the razor-sharp aesthetic edges of the ’90s and ’00s internet. Bristol’s 
Zoh Amba has been making waves recently as a free jazz saxophonist in the same vein as Peter Brötzmann or Albert Ayler. With a reputation built on incendiary live performance, a list of high-profile collaborators, and a handful of critically acclaimed albums (the first of which, O, Sun, was produced by fellow avant-garde traveller John Zorn), you would be forgiven for expecting a certain kind of career trajectory, one that features heavily in the pages of The Wire and on the stages of the most outré jazz festivals. But Amba has other ideas. They are, in baseball parlance, a genuine two-way player, someone who excels equally in two disciplines that are so different that at first there appears to be no link between them.
Originally from Northern California, singer and songwriter 
This debut record by one-half of prodigious London duo 
Modest Mouse has long been a band of wild contrasts and combinations that shouldn’t work, but do. Centered around the emotionally and cerebrally unfiltered character of Isaac Brock’s songwriting, the sound of this longrunning Pacific Northwestern indie group often finds tormented yelps delivering accidentally profound philosophical truths, while the musical backing waffles between chaotic noise and blissfully melodic sweetness. The eighth studio album from Modest Mouse, An Eraser and a Maze, comes thirty three years into their practice of organizing these unruly feelings and sounds, five years after their last album, 2021’s pop-forward 
One of the more enigmatic bands of the classic 4AD era, 
The extremely personal nature of this album is evident in the introduction to the song “Canopies.” What begins as a gentle prelude is actually a moment captured on a family trip to Houston, where Azniv Korkejian (AKA 
To say that history looms over 
The ninth studio album from the alt-rock/folk outfit 
A unique and brilliant collaboration between the legendary dub/reggae pioneer and German electronic production duo Mouse on Mars (aka Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma). Lee “Scratch” Perry’s last ever official album project before his passing in 2019. Recorded in 3 days at Mouse on Mars’ Paraverse Studio in Berlin in 2019.
Going two-for-two with John Congleton, indie stalwarts 
These days – on the new, ninth Fink album – Greenall is operating within a lineage of authentic, quietly revolutionary artists from England’s verdant southwestern toe. Artists like Michael Chapman. In 1970, the elusive acoustic guitar wizard released an album called Fully Qualified Survivor. The cult-classic served as a lodestar for Greenall – along with bandmates Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker – as he began jigsawing together 
As any of Montreal devotée knows, Kevin Barnes has long been known to make diaristic and compelling hay out of chronicling the unfiltered nuances of his personal life. As the long-running musical project enters its 30th year of existence, Barnes has remained true to form, continuing to evolve while navigating the murkiest waters life has to offer.
The tracks on Along the Low Road, by multi-instrumentalist 
Did 
With more than 43 million songs uploaded to streaming services every year, how does one avert overload fatigue from the sheer mass of new music? It’s a modern reality that the Dutch music producer Jochem Paap has been wrestling with, with Walkman his first solo release in twenty years. The name of this record harks back to the Sony Walkman, of course, the mobile cassette player that revolutionised personal listening in the ’80s and set us on our way towards the iPod and streaming platforms listened to via smartphones.