On their self-titled album (and their first recordings for the Thrill Jockey label) North Carolina group Setting takes rustic acoustic sounds into deep space, sitting around a cosmic campfire and creating a group sound that’s naturalistically beautiful and mysterious. The trio of Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund work in both improvisation and composition with stringed instruments, synthesizers, and percussion, landing in a place that’s partially informed by traditional Appalachia, part droning fields of synthesis, and part meditative Krautrock repetition. All of these aspects of Setting’s sound are in play on the album’s opening track “Heard a Bubble.” The nearly nine-minute piece opens with a lonely banjo line, and is quickly joined…
Category: indie
With members from various groups in the Melbourne indie rock underground on board, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Season 2’s first album, Power of Now, would be a low-key, off-kilter delight. The band – which features drummer Carolyn Hawkins (Parsnip, School Damage, and Chook Race), bassist Charlotte Zarb (the Snakes, Phil & the Tiles), guitarist Matt Powell (also Phil & the Tiles), keyboardist Claudia Serfaty (Stroppies), and guitarist Freya McLeod (herself) – whip through a half-hour of jangling indie pop gems, angular post-punk mood pieces, and jittery bedroom punk rockers along the way to making a record that stands with the best work of the groups they are associated with. The songs are all quite catchy, sometimes in a sideways…
The third solo album by New Orleans D.I.Y. musician Urq (Spllit, W-9), This Dismal Village marks his Exploding in Sound label debut.
It’s his first to be recorded entirely on a four-track cassette Portastudio, almost ditching any digital elements in the process (although some chords from a phone app were looped into “Kings in Bed,” for instance). A dingy, lo-fi blend of playful prog-pop, druggy psychedelia, angular punk, and alternate tunings, it’s a dystopia-themed concept album that travels through time with stops in the Dark Ages, the 1950s, and the present, and each track represents a location in the village. While not recommended for those in a dour or earnest mood, cynicism is welcome.
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have…
The seven-piece psych-rock outfit Evolfo returns with the most relaxed, mind-expanding album of their career, Of Love. The Ridgewood, Queens-based players sifted through hundreds of hours of jams developed in their new studio to piece together the thirteen swirling tracks presented here.
The group, Ben Adams – Guitar, Synthesizer, Vocals, Matthew Gibbs – Guitar, Vocals, Ronnie Lanzilotta – Bass, Dave Palazola – Drums, Kai Sorensen – 12-String Guitar, Rafferty Swink – Keyboards, Sound Manipulation, Vocals, and Jared Yee – Saxophone, took the last few years to build a studio and work out their relaxed, hive mind jamming style. Produced, engineered, and mixed by Swink, Evolfo took full…
Newly remastered version of Oren Ambarchi’s long out-of-print classic Hubris originally released on Editions Mego in 2016. Expertly remastered by audio wizard Joe Talia who worked with the original mixes, highlighting the myriad details of the audio with forensic precision, previously unheard up until now.
Hubris continues the exploration of relentless, driving rhythms heard on Ambarchi’s Sagittarian Domain (2012) and Quixotism (2014). Where those records looked to Krautrock and techno for their starting points, the sidelong opening track here begins from the perhaps unlikely inspirations of disco and new wave, drawing particularly from Ambarchi’s love of Wang Chung’s soundtrack to William Friedkin’s…
Browse the live listings in Tokyo long enough and you’ll inevitably stumble across a party themed around modular synthesizers. Whether it’s an annual event at a multi-level nightclub (Festival Of Modular) or an intimate set at a cozy neighborhood venue (Modular Wednesday at Shibuya Otto), the itinerary remains the same-artists plugging away in the moment, tinkering ad hoc for a live audience.
Ephemeral & Fleeting: Modular Music of Japan celebrates the transient nature of the country’s contemporary modular scene. Curated by accomplished modular artist Yumi Iwaki, these 10 songs are a chronicle of the diverse sonic approaches taken by synthesizer aficionados, and the creative rewards that await those steadfast enough to master…
Released a month before the composer’s 89th birthday, Irmin Schmidt‘s Requiem is a meditative work reflecting on loss and commemoration, as well as nature and the environment. The slowly unfolding composition, divided into two parts, is intended for deep listening. Schmidt gathered natural sounds such as rushing water and the calls of birds, frogs, and insects, hearing music within them, and decided to incorporate them into his own music. The beginning of Requiem features abstract piano notes laid over a bed of chirps and croaks, largely undisturbed, until some strange thrusting movements emerge after five minutes, resembling some sort of vehicle like a tractor manipulated into a rhythm. Dripping water periodically works its way into the rhythm as well,…
Indie singer/songwriter Rae Chen began releasing his intimate, dreamy music under the pseudonym tofusmell in the early 2020s. He was still based in his home state of Florida when Hardly Art signed on to release his project’s debut EP, the home-recorded Humor, in 2023, although he soon relocated to Winnipeg, Canada.
Featuring 12 songs in all, his full-length debut, All My Time, fleshes out his sound with help from outside producers while staying true to key influences Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith. Six of the songs were recorded with Keiran Placatka (Field Guide, William Prince) in Winnipeg, and four others were tracked with Paul Larson in Los Angeles — the latter group feature a more invigorated, live-band sound. Suggesting Stevens with…
The Horizon Spirals/The Horizon Viral brings together OOIOO and Lightning Bolt, both Thrill Jockey labelmates and longtime pillars of the experimental rock underground. The split LP arrived in April of 2026, soon after the two groups had played several West Coast dates together. The OOIOO side consists of two long tracks, both of which revisit the gamelan-inspired percussion arrangements of their 2014 album Gamel. “The Horizon” focuses on hypnotic percussive patterns and YoshimiO’s supernatural vocal abilities. The song changes to a faster rhythm halfway, elevating the mood with soaring trumpet and busy, locked-in percussion. “Gamel Be Sure to Spiral” revisits “Be Sure to Loop” from 1999’s Feather Float, adding gamelan percussion to…
Doug Gillard’s formidable body of recordings is as impressive as it is voluminous, encompassing his work as a key member of such notable combos as Guided by Voices, Nada Surf, Death of Samantha, Cobra Verde, and Gem, as well as an array of noted collaborations with the likes of Richard Buckner, Neko Case, Bill Fox, and The Hold Steady. Parallel Stride is the Ohio-bred, New York-based singer/songwriter/multi- instrumentalist’s fourth official solo album.
Although he’s well established as a luminary of the American indie-rock community, Gillard’s musical sensibility is firmly rooted in the time-honored old-school virtues of catchy melodic craft, emotionally resonant lyrics and emotion-charged performances. Parallel Stride standouts…
Sunflower Bean singer and bassist Julia Cumming blooms into her pop self with 2026’s gorgeously realized Julia. Her solo debut, the album captures both a personal and creative transition for Cumming who wrote many of the songs over a two-year period, traveling between her childhood home in N.Y.C. and living rooms in Los Angeles where she worked closely with bassist, guitarist, and producer Brian Robert Jones and producer/engineer Chris Coady.
During the same time, she was busy with Sunflower Bean, releasing both 2023’s Headful of Sugar and 2025’s Mortal Primetime; albums that found the indie trio expanding their sound, balancing edgier alt-rock leanings with Cumming’s love for the lyrical, ’60s and ’70s AM pop she…
There’s no two ways about it – in terms of inventive, kaleidoscopic music, there’s few groups that get close to The Junipers. From 2008’s ‘Cut Your Key’, they burst onto the scene marrying the sounds of the deep-cut psychedelic 45s from your collection, to the joyful pop of Wings-era McCartney, Gilbert O’Sullivan and Emitt Rhodes, with the toytown symphonies of Curt Boettcher, Brian Wilson and Mark Wirtz.
Without all the fuss of fanfare, their albums wouldn’t so much get released, but rather, emerge from whatever multicoloured world The Junipers reside when they’re hatching up new music. People will tell you they’re just some good blokes from Leicester – but when these records appear, it feels more like they’re hanging…
With every successive album she makes, Carla dal Forno‘s songwriting becomes clearer, more upfront, and more emotionally direct. She actually intended her fourth solo effort to be more abstract, perhaps closer to the mystery-shrouded experimental work of her earlier group F ingers, but as she was writing the songs, she found that they only made sense when she wrote about her emotional experiences in plain language. Her recording environment also helped shape the directness of the songs. Instead of living in a busy city, she had relocated to a small country town which offered stillness and solitude, making it easier to reflect on her life situations and focus on the truth. That said, even though Confession lays deeply guarded feelings bare,…
On her sophomore album, Pearla explores themes of love and its ability to contain and dissolve, to stretch and collapse time, and to bridge the spaces between the real and the surreal. While Pearla was concerned with the mysteries of the external world in her debut (aptly described by Pitchfork as “a detective of uncertainty”), this collection is an intimate look at the interior, the relational, and the capacity and bounds of the heart and mind.
Song Room finds Pearla in a tug-of-war between the inner and outer worlds, creating moments of tension that are at times raw and exposing, and at others cosmic and harmonious.
In “Good Dog,” she pivots her fear of losing herself in another person toward the stable accuracy of the moon: “If I become whoever…
Graceland Way, the newest release from harpist-singer-songwriter Mikaela Davis, finds the artist luxuriating in the Los Angeles sunshine, delivering a modern Laurel Canyon pop-rock style, influenced by the famous location’s late 70’s heyday.
Working with longtime collaborators bassist Dan Horne and guitarist John Lee Shannon, the trio co-wrote and co-produced the album. Davis lets her vocals shine, putting her harp playing in the background as the trio brings in various guests to flesh out the record’s sound and scope.
The opening “(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses” is a straight-ahead pop-rocker with pedal steel from Kurt G. Johnson, as the song bops along in a Tom Petty-inspired fashion. The tune delivers a backward looped break…
White Fence has been many things since the project first oozed out of songwriter Tim Presley’s mind in the early 2010s. It existed as crumpled lo-fi renderings of Presley’s psychedelic pop songs on the earliest albums, sometimes dissolving into sound collages or bizarre excursions into experimental home-recording techniques. It was cleaned up for later albums, tucking the sonic strangeness into more formalized production but remaining stylistically and subjectively out-there on outings like the synth-drenched 2019 album I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk.
Orange is the first White Fence album since 2019, and it represents some of the most straightforward tunes in the band’s winding catalog, with analog production and backing…
Angelo De Augustine returns with his fifth album, Angel in Plainclothes — a deeply felt rendering of his multi-year journey of healing and renewal. The first single is a standout psychedelic country piece, “Mirror Mirror,” and offers the first look at Angelo’s multi-year healing journey and the renewal that followed.
“Usually when I make music, I’ll sit down with one instrument and write the song,” states Angelo. “In ‘Mirror Mirror,’ I didn’t stick to this principle and was messing around with the tape machine’s varispeed function—seeing what would happen if I slowed down what I’d recorded on the bowed psaltery, creating an unusual droning noise. The song came from experimenting with layering sound in a very free way and watching…
There’s an air of celebratory nostalgia around Metric at the moment. Last year, the Canadian quartet played their 2009 album Fantasies in full on tour and that seems to have lit a bit of a creative spark. The band’s 10th studio album, Romanticize the Dive, sees them reunited with Fantasies producer Gavin Brown, and even saw them return to the legendary Electric Lady studios in New York. From the outset, Romanticize the Dive seems like a return to Metric’s roots. While there was much to enjoy on Formentera and its 2023 sequel, you did sometimes long for that intoxicating spark to be lit again.
Opening track ‘Victim of Luck’ immediately seems to recreate that energy with a chiming guitar riff from Jimmy Shaw, while lead singer…