Animal Collective has always approached its records from a modular mindset, working as a literal collective of artists who operate under a shared banner. Throughout their myriad releases, some members have been absent on certain albums, and different configurations of the four players have resulted in wildly different sounds, ranging from wide-eyed folk to rave-worthy experimental electronica. Though they’ve produced music as Animal Collective previously, Croz Boyce zeroes in on the specific creative connection shared by AC members Dave Portner and Brian Weitz. It’s a sound that’s very much in keeping with the woozy psychedelia of their greater collective, but just different enough to merit its own distinction. One of the primary differences is that…
Category: indie
Two years ago, Carla J. Easton co-directed and narrated Since Yesterday, a documentary examining 60 years of all-girl bands in Scotland. You can tell, too; her latest album plays like a paean to the effervescent pop of the likes of Strawberry Switchblade, His Latest Flame and The Twinsets. There are more contemporary influences, too, with Alvvays – Easton’s one-time shipmates on Belle & Sebastian’s Boaty Weekender – hanging particularly heavy over this sparkling set of guitar-pop songs, which are made all the more impressive when you consider that Easton learned to play the guitar specifically for this record.
There is real depth and variety on I Think That I Might Love You, which runs the gamut from the glam-pop stomp of…
By this point, Loraine James needs little introduction. For much of the last decade, she has been one of London’s most consistently innovative and emotionally expressive club producers, building a reputation over a series of albums of questioning electronica, expert sound design, and shapeshifting beats, whether it’s the watercolour techno of records like For You and I (2019) and Reflection (2021), the Julius Eastman-homage Building Something Beautiful for Me (2022), or her extraordinary ambient work under the name Whatever the Weather.
…Exactly why this might be, it’s hard to say. How much it matters, even more so, as James does have a significant and committed audience; it’s just that her body of work so far commands…
Lavender Networks marks the Warp debut of Fire-Toolz, Angel Marcloid’s hard-to-pin-down new age cybermetal project, which has issued albums on tape-friendly experimental labels like Hausu Mountain and Orange Milk.
Coming several months after a Danny Brown album loaded with guest features from the hyperpop and digicore scenes, Marcloid’s presence on Warp shows that the label has been paying particular attention to newer generations of niche Internet-based musicians with an anarchic disregard for genre restrictions. Marcloid’s record-store-in-a-blender genre fusion is well established by this point, but as with her last few albums, she’s continually refining her style while adding new elements and approaches.
Cola always felt like a comedown. By the time Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy’s previous band, Ought, came to an end in 2021, the Montreal group had morphed from nervy, scrappy post-punk to grandiose art rock. Cola, formed with drummer Evan Cartwright, shifted to something stark and simple with the terse indie rock of their debut, 2022’s Deep in View and its slightly lusher follow-up, 2024’s The Gloss. On their third album, Cost of Living Adjustment, Cola have embraced, if not maximalism, then at least letting go of restraint.
The trio is still enthralled by the pointed edges of post-punk that serve as the skeleton of most of their tracks. Yet, from the moment that opener “Forced Position” kicks in, you can tell something has changed. Cartwright’s anxious…
Look for Your Mind! is the 6th album from brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario, aka The Lemon Twigs, following on from their career highs of 2023’s Everything Harmony and 2024’s A Dream Is All We Know, both of which had elevated their music to a new finessed, sophisticated level. On this latest outing the formula hasn’t really changed in that the songs still have their roots in the 1960s and ’70s and arrive with a refreshed vibrancy, although there are moments where the brothers tread a fine line between authenticity and pastiche.
The first half of the album features several standout moments, some of the best of their career to date. The title track comes out of the blocks fast, the sound of 1965 guitar-pop distilled into the finest of essences. The motifs may be familiar…
The energy is the first thing you notice. A lot of reunions and records coming off a long hiatus can sound tentative, careful, or, worst of all, listless. Remember the Humans, the first Broken Social Scene album in nine years, brims with vitality from the outset. In fact, the opening track, “Not Around Anymore,” pulses with pent-up energy, and in it frontman Kevin Drew reassures the listener that passing time is okay, that “you don’t need to cry anymore,” even though, “it’s all gone away.” Loss doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
The song also reassures in its symphonic pleasures, showcasing Broken Social Scenes’s shifting palettes, from soft horns to sped-up fast-picked guitars. Throughout, the band overflows with ideas, excited but patient, letting the tunes…
Heavy Stereo, Hurricane #1, Arnold, Kevin Rowland in suspenders… it’s generally accepted that Creation Records did not invest their Oasis windfall wisely. Yet amid the frenzy of the mid-’90s guitar-band goldrush, they did make one very shrewd acquisition, swooping in to sign Super Furry Animals after only the band’s second show proper outside Wales – even if Alan McGee subsequently let slip that this may have been more a case of luck than judgement.
“Initially I just heard Super Furry Animals as being similar to Blur,” McGee told SFA biographer Ric Rawlins. “So I thought, ‘Well, fuck! Blur sell lots of records, I could have my version!’ Little did I know that I was signing The Beach Boys meets fucking Gong meets Isaac Hayes on a fucking…
Aldous Harding cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock. To her devotees – and there are enough of them to warrant her playing three nights at London’s Barbican later this month – she is a strange and endlessly fascinating figure. Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis. On Train on the Island, her fifth album, you’re invited to make some kind of sense of stuff about naked owls, having your face covered with bechamel sauce, seeing “the real John Cale” silently eating rice, “Sicilians reaching over the clams”, and the imponderable lines: “I’m saving myself by eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel.”
The curious album covers; the uneasy stage presence and between-song non-sequiturs;…
Brown Box includes all of the duo’s studio output released between 1990 and 2007, including Twin/Tone debut album God Ween Satan: The Oneness, a run of releases on Elektra spanning 1992’s Pure Guava to 2000’s White Pepper; the outtakes collection Shinola, Vol. 1; and the band’s most recent release, 2007’s La Cucaracha. (Chocolate and Cheese uses the same 2024 remaster from the box, but it has not been confirmed if the others have received similar treatment.) All the discs are packaged in CD-size wallets; there does not appear to be a booklet or additional notes in the packshot. The albums White Pepper and 2003’s dark Quebec, long out-of-print on vinyl, will also be made available on colored vinyl: a “green pepper” LP for the former…
Fuzz Club are becoming one of the key hubs for all sounds psychedelic – whether it is the music that is fully in vein with the original psych of the late sixties or any of the updated versions from there on to current times. In that respect, to all who follow all things psych, it will probably be no surprise that one of the modern purveyors of psych that are Minneapolis’ Jason Edmonds and his Magic Castles, have found their way to this label with their new offering Realized.
Edmonds, as the bad’s principal songwriter, has always favoured that trippy, dream-like thread that original psychedelia introduced (not much fuzz or energy rush there), giving it that shoegaze/dream pop veneer, but then updated for the new century. Of course, many critics have…
1. Marisa Anderson – Rop Koh
2. Ed O’Brien – Blue Morpho
3. The Sleeves – Empty Thoughts
4. Tamikrest – Imanin
5. Thomas Dollbaum – Pulverize
6. Blood Sucking Maniacs – Family Tree/Heartbeat (Lucky Marlo Allen)
7. Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – Like Swimwear (part two)
8. The Lemon Twigs – 2 Or 3
9. Kevin Morby – Badlands
10. Brown Spirits – Bakelite Dashboard
11. Aldous Harding – Venus in the Zinnia
12. Angélique Kidjo – Big Heart
13. Hiss Golden Messenger – I’m People
14. Suss – Sunset IV
15. Hurray for the Riff Raff – Pa’Lante (Live)
Following the release of their debut, The Haunted Youth return with their second studio album, Boys Cry Too via Play It Again Sam. Beginning as the solo project of artist Joachim Liebens, the band today reveal the first single to be lifted from the record, deathwish, featuring fellow collaborator and Orlando-based singer-songwriter, Max Fry.
On Boys Cry Too, Joachim Liebens abandons the fragile, bedroom-pop innocence of Dawn Of The Freak – a debut that has since earned cult status back home – in favour of something far more confrontational and emotionally charged. From the towering eight-minute opener in my head to the closing track ghost girl, the album lets go of restraint in favour of something more raw, blending fragile melodies…
Behold, the first new Young Sinclairs LP since 2019’s ‘Out Of The Box’. After a lengthy period of inactivity and time spent focusing on other projects, the band reunited and resumed performing live in October, 2023 featuring a freshly revamped lineup. Momentum gathered, creative wellsprings began flowing again, and new songs slowly emerged. Core members Samuel Jones Lunsford, Daniel Cundiff, and Seanmichael Poff found themselves invigorated by the addition of newcomers Ben Hudson and John Pence – longtime friends and bandmates within kindred musical endeavors. The genesis of Cycles Turning began in 2025 when Samuel recorded a handful of songs in his attic on a newly purchased Tascam 488 8-track cassette Portastudio.
What is so captivating about a pitch-shifted vocal sample? Is it just good old existing IP, scratching the same itch for the trillionth time? Is it the thrill of hearing a sound you thought was fixed respawn somewhere totally new? Loukeman’s eggs are in the latter basket. The Toronto-based producer’s wistful, anemoic dance tracks trawl for vocals across pop, folk, R&B, and hip-hop of the past decade, a net that dredges up Bryson Tiller and Lomelda with equal gusto. But it’s his rendering, like sonic sfumato, that’s the crux of his music. Using an Analog Rytm saturator and a few choice plug-ins, Luke Fenton approaches sung snippets like wet clay, endlessly moldable with a little osmosis. As he put it in an interview last year, he aims to “glue everything together…
Consistency may be disparaged as staid, or celebrated as style. “Art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill,” writes George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, asking, “How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?”
For a house-music producer, it seems around a decade of emphatic consistency really gets the goods. It’s been 13 years since Maya Bouldry-Morrison’s first album as Octo Octa and 10 since she came out as trans — or, as she puts it in the closing poem of her fourth and latest LP, Sigils for Survival, started “finally living life.”
Chicago’s The Arrivals — well, singer/guitarist Isaac Thotz now lives in L.A., while fellow singer/guitarist Little Dave Merriman, bassist Paddy Costello and drummer Ronnie DiCola have stayed local — uh, have arrived with Payload, their first record in 16 damn years. That gap apparently wasn’t caused by anything other than life getting in the way, but we welcome this return regardless.
Recorded by Meat Wave’s Joe Gac, Payload is essentially hit after hit; it’s punk rock with undeniably ultra-catchy melodies that expertly balances the personal with the political. Thotz’s “Just Like My Brother” begins with quiet guitar strum before kicking in with resounding “whoa-ho-ho-ho” chants; it’s a platonic love song that’s soaring, anthemic and insistent.
Stopped A Freight Train With A Grain Of Sand is the latest instalment from the Let’s Go Dancing series – an epic (and still unfolding) 100-song living tribute to Drivin N Cryin singer/guitarist and celebrated songwriter / solo artist Kevn Kinney.
This new set sharpens its focus on the harder, faster and louder edges of Kinney’s songbook. If earlier chapters leaned into folk-born introspection, Stopped A Freight Train With A Grain Of Sand roars, spotlighting the grit and voltage coursing beneath Kinney’s writing, whether delivered solo or at the helm of Drivin N Cryin.
Deer Tick set the tone straight away with a rugged, heartfelt Let’s Go Dancing, leaning into the song’s weather-beaten melody with the kind of loose charm that keeps Kinney’s music evergreen.