Although My Precious Bunny, the solo project of Penelope Isles’ Lily Wolter (and her mother’s nickname for her), predates her noise pop band, it remained a collection of in-progress ideas until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaving Brighton and sheltering in place at her family’s home in Penzance, Cornwall, she didn’t have much to do except go surfing, write songs, and make demos. When her brother – Penelope Isles co-leader Jack Wolter – then became busy with recording the full-length debut of his own reanimated solo project, Cubzoa, Lily took the opportunity to record My Precious Bunny’s debut album with childhood friend Allister Kellaway (Last Living Cannibal, Eera). With songs inspired by a recent breakup as well as her childhood, the resulting…
Category: indie
…Featuring two acoustic, warm takes of her songs “Champ” and “I Just Do!”, an emotional cover of Charli xcx’s “I Might Say Something Stupid”, and a new original track “Sweetness”.
Throughout the early 2020s, singer/songwriter Rebecca Harvey made a name for herself under the music alias girlpuppy with her moody blend of midtempo indie rock, floatier dream pop, and sparer intimacy, including on her debut LP, When I’m Alone. That album was produced by Sam Acchione (Alex G, Tomberlin), mixed by Slow Pulp’s Henry Stoehr, and released on Royal Mountain Records. For the darker, heavier-textured follow-up, she adds washes of shoegaze, grungier alt-rock, and catchy 2000 indie pop/rock for her Captured Tracks label debut.
Philadelphia singer/songwriter Greg Mendez had been plugging away on the regional D.I.Y. scene for over 15 years when he unexpectedly generated some buzz with his 2023 eponymous LP. That album had stripped back the arrangements of many of his prior self-recorded indie rock tracks, arriving at something more intimate, acoustic-minded, and disarming while hanging on to his affinity for short, sensitive, self-conscious songs.
The Dead Oceans label signed him soon after its release. Arriving a full 20 years after his first MySpace uploads, he makes his proper full-length label debut with the like-minded Beauty Land, an album of regretful, confessional songs so short that they verge on a different art form. (Its 14 tracks clock in at 26 minutes.)
Gigi Masin‘s form of ambient music has often incorporated rippling textures and forward motion, so it’s not hard to see how his records have become favorites of DJs and sample-flipping producers. Soon after the Talk to the Sea compilation on Music from Memory introduced Masin’s music to new listeners, he made two albums with Tempelhof which delved into downtempo and Balearic house, and later recorded some mellow jazz sessions with Greg Foat.
For his 2026 solo album Movement, he intentionally created ambient music that connects with the body as well as the mind. While some of the album’s tracks, like opener “Bed on Mars,” sound like drifting clouds or a fog rolling in, others are far more rhythmic, utilizing deep house…
…includes 3 bonus early demo versions.
Toronto duo Ducks Ltd. wasted no time issuing their mission statement on debut album Modern Fiction. The first sound on opening track “How Lonely Are You?” is a wall of bright multi-tracked guitars firing off a barrage of nervous, ever so slightly melancholic chords. It’s jangle pop excellence from the first few seconds, opening up into a powerful but compact rush of simple drum machine rhythms, melodic basslines, and layers of smart vocal hooks. The song is here and gone in less than three minutes, beginning an album of thoughtfully constructed tracks that take notes from some of indie pop’s best artists.
Over the course of Modern Fiction‘s streamlined runtime, Ducks Ltd. channel…
Jana Bahrich, the mastermind behind the emotional and epic music by Francis of Delrium, is growing up before our very eyes. With the artist’s debut EP arriving just as the multi-hyphenate was graduating high school in 2020, and thanks to her prolific nature, fans have seen her grow into an unabashed poet, more akin to a troubadour than to any other artist on the alt-pop/indie rock spectrum. That busy release schedule, though, is not for appearances, nor is it an attempt to keep up with the dwindling attention span of a generation chronically online. Bahrich makes ethereal music meant to be felt as a whole, with each complex emotion broken down and every sonic trick felt from the minute it touches your ears to the moment it reaches your soul, and she has…
Iceage have always seemed like a band in a state of constant development. You might say that’s understandable, given the Danish musicians were in their teens when their debut album New Brigade was released in 2011: if you don’t change between the age of 18 and your early 30s, you’re probably in trouble. But rock music isn’t real life, and a less adventurous band might have been minded to stick with a good thing, given the reception New Brigade was afforded. Twenty-four minutes of hardcore blended with noisy Birthday Party-esque post-punk and a sizeable pinch of gothic gloom, it was praised so vociferously that the praise itself provoked heated debate, as claims any one band are the “saviours” of an entire genre are wont to do, particularly when said genre is punk.
The Bug Club are back with a new album. It’s been a whole eleven months since their last. Where have they been?
Every Single Muscle, the band’s fifth LP, arrives May 29th, 2026 via Sub Pop, making it a hat-trick for the Welsh duo and their esteemed Seattle-based patrons. Since Very Human Features, which emerged in June of 2025, the non-stop tour has seen the BBC 6 Music and KEXP favourites ping-pong across the Atlantic like they used to the Severn Bridge. Various festival slots in the summer kept them from having any sort of holiday – who needs one when you live in Wales anyway? – until it was time to head back to the writing room.
So that answers that first question. Not that you’d have otherwise known.
Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, the near-title homage on Kurt Vile’s album-length valentine to his hometown, is a high time no matter where you’re from: a deliciously hazy twist on Todd Rundgren’s white-soul futurism with pillowy synthesizer, church-bell treble guitar and heartbeat drumming in a sultry-ballad stride that suggests Billy Paul’s 1972 cheatin’ hit ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’ with the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker on that session. At times, Vile sounds like he’s singing in dialect, crooning about a city waterway, the Schuylkill River (“Always hard to spell” and “polluted as hell”), with the marbled articulation of Murmur-era Michael Stipe.
But the greater effect, across the whole record, is universal in trance and gratitude.
The day Robert Pollard stops making music is the day Hell freezes over. The Guided By Voices singer and songwriter has been at it for over four decades now, and his pace hasn’t slowed — if anything, it’s picked up. More impressive than even that, though, is just how consistent the beloved rock band has been throughout the years. They have a formula and, goddamn, have they perfected it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not willing to explore. Take Crawlspace of the Pantheon, the Dayton group’s 44th album (give or take; the exact count seems to depend on who you ask): compared to other recent entries into Pollard’s vast discography, Crawlspace is considerably more lyrical, more intent on content — there’s a strange thread of semi-autobiography running through it, pulled both…
Trying to make instrumental albums that, as an entity, do not stick to a specific genre, but at the same time have their own identity and character, is not something a faint-hearted artist should attempt to do. More simply put, such albums are an excellent recipe for a disaster because you have to have a full grasp of what you are attempting to do, as well as being truly knowledgeable about the genres you are trying to mix and match in such an attempt.
That is exactly what NYC artist Jason Vitelli is trying to do on amply titled 2. No Wave Gaze, a second in his series of thematic albums (his fifth overall) that started with 1. Ambient Corridors is supposed to continue with an album focused on classical pieces and will be recorded live.
The Suncharms are a band with an interesting history. They date back to 1989, and called it a day in 1993, but not before releasing a couple of EPs. In 2015 they reformed, and since then have released two albums.
…their third album Darkening Sky unfolds as a luminous exploration of reflection and sonic patience, a record that balances emotional immediacy with the quiet assurance of seasoned musicianship. From the opening track, “Midnight Train,” the band establishes a world of expansive indie-pop textures, Matt Neale’s guitar shimmering over a subtle rhythm section, while the trumpet’s late entrance adds a warm, unexpected depth that hints at the album’s willingness to bend conventional forms. The song evokes…
The songs simply had to come out. Annie Taylor recorded their third album between the band’s U.S. tour and a run of European shows. In keeping with its title, Out of Scale’s songs are characterized by intense emotions, chaotic relationships and big dreams.
At times we can hear singer Gini Jungi’s suffering. All the hurt and struggles. Sometimes her voice floats longingly over Tobias Arn‘s guitar riffs. But when Michael Mutter‘s bass and Daniel Bachmann’s drums kick in, it’s clear that these new songs will get the crowd moving.
The band met in a bar in the Swiss mountains after a snowboarding session. Fast forward a few years and they are now well known for their live shows, having already played SXSW…
Released at a pivotal moment in their career, Tensongs remains one of the most fascinating chapters in the catalog of Hubert Kah. Arriving in 1986, the album marked the band’s full transition into English-language material, an ambitious attempt to carry the success of the Neue Deutsche Welle movement into the broader international synthpop market. Forty years later, Tensongs stands not only as a time capsule of mid-80s electronic pop, but also as an underrated artistic reinvention.
Produced by Michael Cretu and Armand Volker, the album wrapped Hubert Kah’s melancholic songwriting in sleek, atmospheric production that clearly aimed beyond Germany’s borders. The influence of sophisticated…
The tapes started arriving on April 7, VHS cassettes stickered with the Boards of Canada hexagon sun logo, sent from Warp Records to the homes of various people who’d previously purchased something from their Bleep.com retail site. The purposefully degraded footage contained therein featured various mysterious images including a Greek Christogram and a distorted image of US TV evangelists Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker, while the audio featured a reversed snippet of The Elegants’ 1958 doo-wop single ‘Little Star’ (taken from 2019 Boards Of Canada mixtape, Societas x) plus audio from an advert for the Moody Bible Institute’s long-defunct monthly magazine (“all for only $2.95!”) And the promise of a “free hexagonal flexi-disc…six voices and music to guide your…
U.e.’s Other Girl is a singer-songwriter album that strips away a lot of the singing and even more of the songwriting. With the words buried behind layers of interference, the music itself is left to do most of the emotional legwork, and while the palette is the sort traditionally associated with “intimacy” in Western pop music — acoustic guitars, piano chords you can feel in your chest — there’s no readymade narrative to map onto these 10 songs. You can either let this obscure approach bewilder you or treat it as a blank slate on which you can map your own feelings. From this angle, the spaces between the chords can fill with your own thoughts, and the distance between these recordings and your ears can stand in for the distance from whatever you…
Think about music, all the music that is available to hear, all the music that’s been made, especially in the past 80 years of popular styles. Where does it all go in your mind? How do you get from one thing to another?
These questions matter for this album, because Haruhi Kobayashi started off in the public eye as a J-Pop singer, putting out the 2017 album Inside Out on Sony. To be frank, it’s an undistinguished derivation of American soul and soft rock, the kind of imitation of styles that young musicians work through to find their own voice.
Well, Kobayashi has found that voice, and it’s not just orders of magnitude distant from the earlier album, but a remarkable journey from the universe of pop music into the kind of…
Known in the fine art sphere as wildly praised disruptive painter and Degenerative Artist ‘Shardcore’, Eric Drass is also an in-demand (if acerbic) global speaker on AI, deep fake, and machine learning tools in art (he’s showed up as a guest expert at the BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and even on telly explaining deep fakes to Ian Hislop). DRASS is his first solo music project. On the Hill was gestated through 2025 in Eric’s secret lair in Sussex (genuinely accessed via a hidden doorway in a bookshelf).
…With his rhino-horn quiff and black varnished nails, a classy dresser, he cuts a ubiquitous silhouette around town, at our juicier tech gatherings, or propping up the bar at a certain kind of indie gig. Furious and funny, debut…