Six years is a long time, about one-and-a-half generations in pop music and a fairly large chunk out of anyone’s life, two sentiments that come into play on the Beastie Boys’ sixth album, 2004’s To the 5 Boroughs. When the Beasties last delivered an album, it was in the summer of 1998 as the Clinton impeachment scandal was heating up, and just as that sordid saga closed the curtain on the swinging ’90s, Hello Nasty served as both a culmination of the New York trio’s remarkable comeback and as a capper to the alt-rock boom of the ’90s, the last album of the decade to capture what the ’90s actually felt like. Not only is the political and cultural landscape of 2004 much different than that of 1998, the Beasties are a different band in a different position.
Category: indie
Winston Hightower is indisputably punk. That’s not just because he’s been a touring bassist for hardcore bands like Soul Glo, Minority Threat, and Twompsax. The Columbus-born musician first began self-releasing his music over a decade ago, and across countless releases — most of them hard to find these days — Hightower’s career so far has seen him subtly incorporate post-punk, rap, and jazz into his ramshackle indie pop. He’s accrued the type of vast, elusive catalog that seems requisite for a DIY legend in the making. Judging by his songs, he’s an outsider, but he’s also a deeply connected player in the Midwest’s underground scene. His fringe appeal and defiant spirit together position him to be a celebrated cult favorite in the future. A few decades from now,…
La Peste was Boston’s first true punk band. The material in this compilation comes from the studio session that produced the Better Off Dead 7”, their 1979 session with The Cars’ Ric Ocasek, a 1979 session at Electro Acoustic Studios, 4-track loft recordings and the the band’s very first studio sessions with Curt Naihersey (Pastiche, The Kids).
Originally formed after frontman Peter Dayton witnessed The Ramones perform at CBGB in 1975, La Peste became one of Boston’s first true punk bands. What started as a group of art students who had never played instruments quickly evolved into a force that helped define the city’s burgeoning punk scene. Despite releasing just one single during their initial run-1978’s ‘Better Off Dead’-the band’s sound and attitude…
Two mainstays of Boston’s independent music scene join forces, just not in the way you probably expected. Tanya Donnelly (who doesn’t live in Boston any more) is best known for the yowling, uninhibited punk rock of Belly and the Throwing Muses, as well as her more recent guitar-driven work with 50 Foot Wave. Brokaw has done a million things, including genre-establishing bands like Come and Codeine, but he’s never done anything like this. The “this” in this case is a quartet of medieval choral songs, arranged for Brokaw’s moody, atmospheric guitar and Donnelly’s airiest, purest vocal stylings.
The project began as a one-off when the pair played a benefit in late 2004. Brokaw had been exploring early music influences, finding…
Nine Inch Nails‘ collaborations with Boys Noize began in 2024, when the German EDM producer remixed Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ Challengers soundtrack, and it blossomed last year when NIN made a short set of songs with Boys Noize a centerpiece of their Peel It Back Tour.
Now, they’re releasing a unique, “purely electronic” full-length Nine Inch Noize album recorded “all over the place – some of it’s live, some in studios, hotels, planes, etc.”
“The creative fulfillment of working on the Challengers and Tron scores with Boys Noize led me to think that including him in the Peel It Back tour could be an interesting way to express NIN in more purely electronic terms live – a concept I’ve wanted to explore for some time”…
First ever CD release for this incredible live concert from Ian Dury & The Blockheads at London’s Dominion Theatre on Christmas Eve 1980. Originally transmitted as a special TV performance for the ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ on BBC2 TV and for John Peel on BBC Radio 1.
Following on from the run of singles “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3”, “I Want to Be Straight” and “Sueperman’s Big Sister” 1980 saw the release of new album ‘Laughter’ by Ian Dury & The Blockheads. The ‘Laughter’ tour took place in December 1980 and on Christmas Eve Ian Dury & The Blockheads performed at London’s Dominion Theatre live on Radio 1 and on TV via BBC2’s ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ – introduced on TV by Annie Nightingale and on radio by John Peel.
Supergroups have a history of not being particularly super, but Tomora are different. This alliance between the Norwegian electro singer Aurora and Tom Rowlands, of the 1990s dance-floor maximalists The Chemical Brothers, is a mesmerising melding of two minds unified by a love for stomping choruses and banging rave beats. They put the mega in megaduo – to the point of overcoming that clunky portmanteau name (which is also, apparently, Japanese for a “friendly companion on earth”).
Stomping and banging truly are the words. Their debut album, which follows on from several guest turns by Aurora on Chemical Brothers records, is a glittering juggernaut where everything is supersized. This is hardly out of character…
Despite its sound owing much to late-‘90s alternative – and that it’s coming two years on from her initial breakthrough – there’s something so beautifully ‘now’ about Little Miss Sunshine, this debut full-length from Eaves Wilder. Not the ‘now’ that one might imagine rapacious, cartoonish A&Rs to seek – that’s already been and gone, despite their efforts, if it even existed. But a ‘now’ that, among other things, has digitally-literate teens metaphorically crate-digging in a way that’s seen many a veteran act performing to audiences younger than their biggest hits; Olivia Rodrigo using her stage as a pseudo mixtape, Hayley Williams spilling her own guts across new material, and acts like Mitski, Wolf Alice and Wet Leg crossing over into pop spheres…
‘No Time for Poetry (Easy Listening Edition)’ is a reimagined instrumental version of the 2025 album ‘No Time for Poetry’ by the Oakland-based duo The Saxophones. This edition replaces the original vocals with saxophone, bass clarinet, and alto flute lines to create a smooth, “easy listening” experience.
With their first three albums, The Saxophones — married couple Alexi Erenkov (vocals, woodwinds) and Alison Alderdice (drums, backing vocals) with multi-instrumentalist Richard Laws — have established a haunting and dreamy, lightly jazz-inflected style of minimalist indie pop that evokes smoky back rooms, seaside reflection, romance, and the analog era.
Their fourth LP, No Time for Poetry, finds them…
Flying Lotus (or Alice Coltrane’s great-nephew) proves that Plug Research is the perfect home for him with his debut full-length, 1983. Sounding like a mix between Ammoncontact and Dntel, Lotus layers spacy keyboards over bass-heavy beats, clearly very much influenced by the whole free jazz-based electronica and hip-hop Sa-Ra craziness that’s prevalent in the L.A. area (he also takes a cue from Stones Throw producers Madlib and J Dilla, using fractured rhythms and subtle chords to propel the songs forward). However, unlike many of his labelmates, Lotus doesn’t drag out his pieces; instead, all but two of them fall neatly under four minutes, keeping 1983 from becoming a masturbatory exercise in keyboard lines and instead making it very…
In the heart of Tunisia lies a giant salt lake called Chott El Djerid, or “Lagoon of the Land of Palms”. Measuring 160 miles across, the lake has been the subject of numerous works of art, most famously Star Wars, where it was used as a filming location in A New Hope.
Although Chott El Djerid is crossable by foot or car in the summer, when the lake is dry, this is generally inadvisable — the salt crust on the surface is often thin and unstable. What appears as a desert can quickly turn into a drowning pool.
It’s against this backdrop that Chott arrives, the second full-length album from Tunisian producer Taroug, out via Denovali Records. Everything about this LP is echoey and huge, from its searing string arrangements to its down-swooping…
The very first release on Frontier Records in March 1980 was an EP by Pasadena’s Flyboys – a power pop/punk band that began in 1977 with singer/songwriter John Curry and Jim “Trash” Decker from The Crowd (and tangentially, Jay from The Simpletones, who would later sign to Posh Boy). Flyboys gigged all over the Southland, paying their dues opening for every national and local punk band from Huntington Beach to Hollywood. They were anything but typical punks with their day-glo clothes, Cuban heels, and maddeningly catchy songs. Infectious hooks and John Curry’s bleached-blonde pompadour were the band’s trademarks.
Lisa Fancher interviewed Flyboys when she was a rock scribe at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The band’s lack of traction…
When deary, the dreampop three-piece composed of Ben Easton (guitar), Dottie Cockram (vocals, guitar) and Harry Catchpole (drums), named their debut album Birding, it wasn’t just as an homage to our feathered friends, they were referencing the sense of expansion, wonder, and abandon their music evokes. They chose the title to draw attention to the direct impact humans have on the world around us, whether that be nature, or ourselves.
“I got really into reading about birds and all these historical stories and poetry about them,” says singer/guitarist Dottie. “You find these beautiful images of birds that represent hope, but they’re also animals. Some of them, like vultures and crows, are a sign of death to some people. They represent all these different…
For years, Cactus Lee has quietly built a singular body of work, playing honky-tonks around Austin while releasing records at a steady, self-driven pace.
Lee’s Dream, his second album for Western Vinyl, feels like the natural distillation of that journey-written on the road, refined at home, and shaped by the push and pull between devotion to music and devotion to family. Conceived during a monthlong solo tour through the Midwest and South, the songs began as sketches written in vans and motel rooms, sparked in part by a visit to Guy Clark’s reconstructed basement at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Returning home to personal upheaval, Kevin Dehan turned inward, writing songs…
There’s often a fine line between homage and pastiche, between influence and theft. And all too often, bands fall on the wrong side of that line. Not, however Middleman. The London-based four-piece, who formed just a few years ago, certainly don’t hide who and what their influences are, but rather than crafting a watered-down version of them, they use those influences as a foundation and stepping stone to bring them into now with youthful exuberance and energy.
Caught between power-pop and punk rock, Following the Ghost is the band’s debut LP, and comes off the back of two acclaimed EPs, December 2022’s ‘Cut Out the Middleman’, and 2024’s ‘John Dillinger Died for You’. Raucously unhinged yet simultaneously full of catchy hooks,…
It’s been seven years since we last had a solo album from Joseph Arthur. But it’s not as if the singer/songwriter, perhaps most famously known for his single “In the Sun” (featured prominently in the satirical teen comedy, Saved, about Christian fundamentalism starring Mandy Moore and Macaulay Culkin) hasn’t been busy. Quite the contrary, as Arthur gets set to release an ambitious three album project created and honed over a six year period.
You’re Not a Ghost Anymore will come out in three separate musical movements: Faith, Heart and Fight. Arthur describes the records as “states of being” written across “collapse, recovery and return”, as opposed to three separate musical genres.
“Learn to hate in the light of day,” is the refrain from the first track of Station Model Violence’s totemic, self-titled punk record. Right off the bat, the band parlays the stakes and tone of their work, grinning their teeth through a quarter smile, but not the gums; not all of their fleshy parts displayed at once.
Whether a subconscious or overt homage to the patriarchs of post-punk, a twelve string guitar intones unceasingly, familiarly, on “Learn to Hate.” Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” — with its clanging opening 12-string and prophetic ’80s punk production — lures the listener for only so long before the synth hook snags on. The twelve string and driving beat on “Learn to Hate,” by contrast, announces that the melodic shifts…
This rather beautiful, unhurried recording is the work of guitarist and composer Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and musician and intermedia artist Matthew Sage, who also works with Chaz on their Fuubutsushi project with Patrick Shiroishi and Chris Jussell. Although the jazz stylings of Fuutbutsushi are absent here, the lightness of touch and delicacy of playing is present across the five songs.
Shelter began life back in 2022, as both Chaz and Matthew settled back into the rural mountainous landscapes of Utah and Colorado, where each resides. The skeletons of these songs are the live improvisations played by Chaz and Matthew in the pole barn studio Matthew set up, with Chaz on electric guitar and Matthew on piano. Over time, the duo very delicately adorned…