Coming on twenty into their run as one of Austin’s most consistently inventive rock bands, White Denim’s 13 feels less like a reset and more like a snapshot of everything they’ve learned how to do and how comfortably they can shift between those ideas. The band has always pulled from a wide range of influences, but here that approach is pushed even further. It’s a dense, groove-focused record that draws on rock, funk, soul, country, and more. The result is a record that moves quickly, sometimes abruptly, but rarely loses its footing.
“(God Created) Lock and Key” sets that tone early. The song shifts through a few different sections without warning, moving from tight, controlled guitar lines into looser, more unstable passages. It feels deliberate rather than chaotic…
Category: indie
Even the most manufactured pop stars are given the option to reinvent themselves.
Gia Margaret, however, really had no say over the circumstances that led to her breakthrough. The Chicago native started fast as a slowcore singer-songwriter who blew away South By Southwest. Then, somewhere around 2019, after coming down with laryngitis, she lost her voice. While the injury lingered, she went viral by turning herself into, of all things, an ambient artist. Now, at 38 years old, Margaret can finally sing again. Her new album occasionally falls flat, but Singing still hits plenty of high notes.
Margaret was never the type of singer to show off. On her first full-length, she sang softly and discreetly, coaxing meaning from each syllable.
Since their beginnings, indie folk duo the Milk Carton Kids have been associated with a hushed, melancholy brand of song as well as with effortless guitar technique, with both Kenneth Pattengale and rhythm guitarist Joey Ryan playing vintage 1950s-model Martin and Gibson guitars, respectively. With their fourth studio album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do (2017), they recorded with a backing band for the first time, before returning to the duo model. Since then, however, they’ve toyed with instrumentation, and their seventh LP, Lost Cause Lover Fool, finds them incorporating banjo, mandolin, bass, and/or percussion on some tracks for subtle texture shifts on an album guided by the theme of transformation. At the same time,…
David Sylvian-led Japan became legends of ‘80s electronic music, and Sylvian himself had a renowned solo career with a series of more and more experimental releases. Yet quite a few fans of the genre sometimes need to be reminded that all other members of the band had a series of good to excellent releases with their solo, joint or collaborative/band efforts. This is particularly true of Richard Barbieri, the man that many critics cite as the architect of the Japan’s synth programming, who has behind him not only a series of electro albums, but also became an integral part of prog rock favourites, Porcupine Tree.
Barbieri has been a bit quiet for the last five years (his previous effort was Under a Spell from 2021) but is now back with aptly titled…
There are so many ways that musicians can currently cooperate, without necessarily having to be physically together in the same studio, room, basement or whatever, and we got a clear example here with Developments, the album that is, well, developed by Six Missing & Patrik Berg Almkvisth.
Behind the Six Missing moniker is Austin, Texas-based ambient composer and sound designer TJ Dumser, while Almkvisth is a musician/pianist and actor from Stockholm. To create this seven-part set of ambient movements, Almkvisth kept sending improvised solo piano pieces in their raw form to Dumser. Then, as their PR notes, Six Missing then expanded each one into a fully realised scene, cycling them through tape machines, routing them into modular systems, and…
Wielding little more than drums and a keyboard, Osaka-based duo HYPER GAL are waging a perpetual loudness war against themselves.
Formed in the late 2010s, the band was inspired by the anarchic creativity of Japanese noise acts like Melt-Banana, Solmania, and Boredoms. But while their forebears deconstructed rock conventions, HYPER GAL’s primary influence is the glistening textures of pop. Their songwriting formula is bracingly simple: Kurumi Kadoya loops a keyboard phrase, pushing the volume until the melody grinds into a thick harmonic paste. Then she lays into the drums, heavy on the cymbals, while her bandmate Koharu Ishida half-sings and half-raps with a dreamy detachment.
The band’s 2021 debut album, Pure, which…
Alternative pop-rock outfit, CHROMA, have put out their newest record 25 Forever. The Welsh trio decided to take a different approach when it came to the writing of this record. Where their debut album, Ask For Angela, was a commentary of social-political issues, this record takes on a more personal approach as they look back and discuss life lessons most people will experience in their 20s. From relationships to mental health to existentialism, CHROMA have created something honest that gives off the vibes of talking about these same topics with a close friend, all against a soundtrack that you’ll find yourself dancing along to albeit unintentionally.
This is clear from the very start with opening track What! that opens with feedback…
Last Time Here serves as a stunning sonic time capsule, capturing The Album Leaf at a pivotal moment in the project’s evolution. Released in 2026 as a companion to the 25th-anniversary reissue of One Day I’ll Be on Time, this live collection transforms the delicate “bedroom” intimacy of the original 2001 recordings into something far more expansive and cinematic.
The album thrives on what critics call “aural photosynthesis.” While the original studio tracks were celebrated for their minimalist restraint, these live versions breathe with a new intensity. LaValle’s signature blend of Rhodes piano, glitchy rhythms, and soaring guitar loops feels more organic here. Tracks like “Vermillion” and “The MP” benefit from the live energy, where the transition…
There’s an affectation that courses through certain parts of the musical fringe, where an artist or group’s oft-used descriptors perfectly capture what the listener might be in for. In that, they mirror the best of kitschy B-movies. There’s little doubt what films with titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Blob might give you. So it goes for Houston, Texas duo Ak’chamel, Giver of Illness. The group, who have never revealed their identity, have spent years building out one of the most singular catalogues in experimental music, a strange and enthralling fusion of found sound, psychedelia, neo-folk and the deepest, eeriest recesses of the avant-garde. And their tagline of “Fourth World post-colonial cultural cannibalism” is about as faithful as an indicator can get…
Emerging from Cairo’s experimental underground, Mi3raj is a duo comprising poet/vocalist Mohamed Tarek Moussa and producer/muti-instrumentalist Abdelrahman Shaat. Their hypnotically immersive album, Callings of the Owed, centres on six poems written in contemporary Arabic by Moussa, which ventriloquise the thoughts of characters drawn from Cairo’s fringes.
‘I write to the locusts / whistle into bare air,’ claims one. ‘Pluck the fog from my joints’, pleads another. ‘At my naming feast / widows intoxicated me,’ another confides. The texts are rich and full of mystery, brought to life by Moussa’s dramatic delivery, using multiple overdubs to suggest a Babel of voices: at once pleading, declamatory and ritualistic. Shaat’s accompanying…
While it sounds like it might be the work of some mysterious intergalactic orchestra, Unbalance is the work of two musicians performing with little to no advance direction. Brazilian experimental guitarist and composer Carlos Ferreira and Korean performer and composer Dasom Baek combined their adept skills in ambient/drone, avant-garde, musique concrète, and free improvisation to create an album of four pieces entirely through uninterrupted improvisational flow.
…In addition to the electric guitar, Ferreira uses live electronics, working with an open-source software program called ppooll, which enables audio signal processing, performance, and routing. Baek, meanwhile, performs on traditional Korean wind instruments – jungju, daegum,…
The writer and poet Jonathan Swift began writing poems for his dear friend, and possibly secret wife, Esther Johnson (known as to him as Stella) every year on her birthday, starting in 1719. The works are small treasures, full of love and life even hundreds of years later. Trash Can Sinatras’ singer Francis Reader and producer/Noonday Underground leader Simon Dine are both big fans of the poems and decided to set excerpts from them to music. The two had worked together before so they already knew that Reader’s warm and woody vocals would fit well with Dine’s mixture of loops, orchestral samples, and trip hop-inspired production. They called the band Fellow Mortals and their 14-song 2026 album Stella’s Birth-Day melds tricky wordplay…
For their second full-length album, Under My Umbrella, Miss Grit has lifted the lid on their internal world, lasering in on the anxieties and heartbreak of the past two years, following their acclaimed debut Follow the Cyborg.
On this album, Margaret Sohn – aka Miss Grit (they/she) – channels the noirish atmosphere of classic trip-hop bands, while adding a hefty dose of maximalism and a dream-pop sensibility. The title is a nod to the iconic Rihanna song and embraces Sohn “…letting people in more on this record and trying not to shy away from that. I’m leaving the cyborg behind, I’m letting it all out.”
This record started to take shape when Sohn returned from an intense touring schedule where they’d driven themself around…
Since 2019, The Reds, Pinks & Purples has served as Glenn Donaldson’s primary outlet for mulling over fears and insecurities to the tune of ’80s college rock. It’s the most personal and renowned of the thirty-odd aliases and bands he’s worked on in his prolific career, initially envisioned as a means of turning his long, ambling walks around San Francisco into songs, with trains of thought sharpening into angsty, deadpan verses.
His tenth album under the moniker is Acknowledge Kindness (2026), and he puts extra emphasis on the instrumentals: It’s the most atmospheric and detailed Reds, Pinks & Purples record to date, weaving influences from alt-country and 4AD goth rock.
…It’s hard to believe just how much music…
Electronic dance music and the church might seem like unlikely bedfellows, when in fact they are not. Both share a sense of reaching the divine, of collective worship, of mantra and sacred rites. DJs, like the clergy, aren’t the focal point but the messengers, bringing the congregations The Word from on high. You’ll hear “take me higher” on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Diamond Cutter, the new album from Eve Maret, doesn’t interrogate faith in an overt way, but the trappings of faith offer a framework for understanding why it is electronic music of the highest order.
Maret, an electronic musician based out of Nashville, was raised as Christian, went to Mass three times a week, and has spoken of the “feeling of transcendence” she got from…
Fans of the darker side of modern musical forms, particularly Swans, have Jarboe somewhere in their minds and surely in their music collections. As a solo artist, Jarboe has made a series of career-defining recordings, 15 in all, before Sightings, her latest. Yet, it took her some eight years between The Cut of the Warrior (2018) and her latest offering, so what is there to expect?
Well, the musical direction is the one Jarboe followed from the beginning of her career, and in that respect, there’s nothing new to report. Yet, what did change is that the quality of her songwriting and performance has grown for the better as time passes. There is a sort of assurance that comes along with experience that exudes here, with practically no lapses in…
The music of Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński and Slovenian multi-instrumentalist Iztok Koren (Širom) finds its fullest expression as a practice of attentive, high-resolution listening. In a world of overstimulation, Nocturnal Consolations operates through a logic of reduction. Intensification emerges at the point of sharpening. Every gesture, every vibration of a string, every resonant surface exists in suspension. Meanings arise only through the relations between sounds.
The idiom developed by Rogiński reaches an almost crystalline form here, best exemplified in ‘The Spirit Is Becoming a Desert’. His playing has long oscillated between reconstruction and erosion, drawing on traditions (Jewish nigunim, Middle Eastern music, and broadly…
It’s simple enough to account for the cutthroat kind of gravitas at the forefront of Consuelo, the sophomore release from experimental Catalan duo Los Sara Fontán. Like most of us, violinist Sara Fontán and percussionist Edi Pou are fed up with many of the phenomena that shape our small world: rising authoritarianism, the worsening climate crisis, the slow and fast violence borne of technocapitalism, war, genocide, and the rest. Accordingly, they have a lot to say about Consuelo, an album remarkable for the messages it conveys through the aural construction of intensely evocative soundscapes that feature not a single spoken word.
The sonic does not stand alone on Consuelo, to be sure. Fontán and Pou make their…