In parts of Southern Italy, the separation between music and everyday life has only grown, as traditions have been flattened and “folklorized” into postcard versions of themselves. On their self-titled debut, Palermo collective Lero Lero push against that logic. Drawing from 20th-century Sicilian sound archives, they treat this material not as something to safeguard, but something to work through, asking what it means to inherit a tradition that has been interrupted or distorted.
Alessio Bondì, Donato Di Trapani, and Fabio Rizzo pull from agropastoral songs, laments, lullabies, and canti di sdegno, holding onto their emotional weight while driving them into new terrain. Though their process starts at the source — learning the songs, the shapes of the melodies,…
Category: indie
Described as a “musical poem”, Mount Analogue is a lengthy meditation on the works of avant-garde poet and writer René Daumal that’s passed from Bill Laswell and P.St (plus an ensemble featuring Nils Petter Movaer, Anna Clementi, Hideo Yamaki and others) to guitarist Henry Kaiser.
Mount Analogue is named after Daumel’s most well-known book, the self-styled “Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing” that emerged almost a decade after his early death at just 36 in 1944. That text is excerpted here on the album-length title composition, that Czech experimental sort P.St leads on electronics alongside Laswell, Kaiser, vocalists Clementi and Percy Howard, percussionist Yamaki, cornet player…
But a single listen to Heart Songs is required to recognize how natural a fit Cassie To is for Nat Bartsch’s Amica Records imprint. As the eight pieces featured on the thirty-three-minute album reveal, the Sydney-based To composes music possessing many of the same qualities that distinguish Bartsch’s own: heartfelt, intimate, elegiac, and harmonious neo-classical settings that couple piano, strings, and painterly dashes of woodwinds, synthesizers, and electronics into transporting chamber wholes.
Both artists produce spiritually replenishing music of humanity, integrity, and authenticity. Consistent with To’s own comment that “running through all of it is a thread of hope,” her music chooses uplift over resignation. It’s not…
Jeffrey Ericson Allen’s Chronotope Project embodies narrative convergence, which is as it should be. The cellist, composer and philosopher has spent much of his life as a storyteller, but in recent years, he’s reshaped his own narrative to focus more on the music that has always been a primary focus. Since his librarian days concluded, the mode of inquiry has shifted, so that now, he tells stories in music more than in words. His chief vehicle, the afore-mentioned Chronotope Project, is a solo effort that labeling “ambient” resides somewhere between a deserved badge of honor and a near disservice. Rather, this music shares certain characteristics with one of Allen’s influences, Brian Eno, in that it can function in the background but rewards deeper listening with…
“I find the Scritti Politti syndrome absolutely hysterical,” said Duran Duran’s fedora-topped bassist John Taylor, reviewing the singles for Melody Maker in September 1982. “All these… radical Rough Trade bands suddenly deciding they want to be pop stars. They seem to have everything right but the songs. They have no perfect pop writers.” Taylor could speak with commercial authority at least, but the tell was he’d heard about Scritti Politti and their scheme to invade and master pop. Green Gartside’s new doctrine had spread in mere months.
Only in May, Green had laid out his starry ambitions to Lynden Barber, again in Melody Maker. “I think [Songs to Remember] is… a bit of a milestone in British pop,” he claimed.
On their debut album One More Thing, Lime Garden‘s unapologetically messy, vulnerable chronicles of the highs and lows of their lives as early twentysomethings were a study in contrasts: irreverent, self-aware indie rock set against introspective ballads. On Maybe Not Tonight, their perspective has shifted. As they trace a night out from beginning to end — and the self-doubt and bravado in between — Lime Garden is bigger, brasher, and a lot more pop.
The band enlisted an A-list producer for their second album (Charlie Andrew, who’s worked with artists ranging from Wolf Alice to David Gilmour) and it definitely sounds like it: Maybe Not Tonight is a wall-to-wall collage of noisy rock and electronic sheen. “Cross My Heart” piles…
Although it still contains signs of the project’s distinctive blend of earthy folk-rock, woozy psychedelic pop, and whimsical electronics and effects, something feels more than a little more mature and serious on Johnny Lynch’s sixth Pictish Trail album, Life Slime. It turns out that it was born of a period of emotional turmoil resulting in his most personal album yet. In another adjustment, Life Slime was produced by first-time collaborator Mike Lindsay (Tunng, LUMP) at Lindsay’s M.E.S.S. studio in Margate, England, in addition to including contributions from longtime collaborators like Rob Jones and Joe Cormack.
Inhabiting a warm, synthy, midtempo soft rock, the album’s resigned title track includes a reference to the ubiquitous K.C. Green comic of…
There’s an almost supernatural quietude in Juni Habel’s music, a calm that reaches out of the speakers and stills the soul. The Norwegian songwriter tends to sing in a near-whisper, close to the microphone, sometimes competing with the ambient hum of the room, but don’t mistake her low volume for a lack of power. Habel is in total command of all her instruments — her gentle but resolute voice, the fingerpicked acoustic guitar that encircles her singing like a tangle of vines, the subtle strains of organ and piano that serve as moss on the forest floor of her songs. Her third album, Evergreen in Your Mind, is pastoral folk music as slow cinema; meditative but deceptively intense, and impossible to turn away from once you’re under its spell.
“I hate this country, and I hate this island – but sometimes the people make it all worthwhile,” sings Simon Tyrie on ‘Space un the Cab’, the wonky disco banger that kicks off The Itch’s debut album It’s the Hope That Kills You. The track cuts decadent club euphoria with a general feeling of unease while calling out Britain’s slowly eroding nightlife scene. Across the ten infectious songs that follow, The Itch – Tyrie and Georgia Hardy – push back against everyday rage, disillusionment and frustration with party-starting electro-punk tracks that demand human connection.
The community celebration has been there since the start. After years of making music together, Hardy and Tyrie formed The Itch after taking part in the annual Byrne’s Night gig, which…
It was something of a miracle how long They Might Be Giants managed to preserve their trademark madcap optimism intact. It lasted right through to their last album, Book (2021). In The World is to Dig, they are still holding on to it in some tracks, but in others it is clear that even they have finally succumbed to ubiquitous world-weariness.
Maybe the surprise is that they stayed immune from it for so long. The band’s two Johns, Flansburgh and Linnell, are now in their mid-sixties, their band has been going for over four decades, this is their 24th album. But it is hard to ignore a new vibe of gloom in many songs, starting with the opening track. The lyric “It’s great to be back in Los Angeles” comes from a singer who just sounds mightily hacked off.
Esoteric Recordings present the release of Gemini – Pieces for Piano, a brand new album by Ant.
Gemini – Pieces for Piano was recorded between October 2022 and October 2025 and features what Ant describes as the best of the keyboard compositions he has written since the release of his previous solo piano album Soirée in 1999. The title of the album comes from a piece of the same name that Ant wrote for the celebrated pianist Martha Argerich, who premiered the work in duet form in 2018. Gemini – Pieces for Piano includes Ant’s solo version of the track. Anthony Phillips has stayed the course, having long mastered the art of the quiet overachiever. While many of his contemporaries have settled into a predictable cycle of nostalgia, ‘Ant’ continues to operate as a singular moodsmith.
Making music that’s jittery, neurotic, darkly comical, but also powerfully catchy, the Violent Femmes are a pillar of the American underground movement, and one of the best early examples of alternative rock.
40th anniversary reissue of their long out of print third album The Blind Leading the Naked. Features fan favorites “I Held Her In My Arms” and “Old Mother Reagan” along with their classic cover of the T-Rex song “Children Of the Revolution.”
A more mainstream effort courtesy of producer Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads). Gordon Gano returns to his troubled teen persona and the Violent Femmes rock harder than on their previous two releases. A nice cover of the T. Rex classic “Children of the Revolution”…
Celebrating 20 years of Frank Turner’s solo debut EP Campfire Punkrock, Xtra Mile Recordings release a special anniversary extended edition of the seminal release. Featuring the original EP tracks and 6 further live tracks recorded from Frank’s 50th solo gig in London 2006 – taking listeners right back to where it all began at the very early days of Frank’s incredible solo career. The 12” LP features new reworked artwork with shiny gold campfire on matt black cover plus coloured vinyl.
The original EP was recorded by Frank’s guitarist Ben Lloyd at the Oxford home of Turner’s bass player Tarrant Anderson and mixed by Tristan Ivemy. If features fan favourites ‘Nashville Tennessee’, ‘The Real Damage’ and ‘Ballad Of Me And My Friends’
With the release of Kammerkonzert, Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) continues his career-long obsession with the intersection of human performance and machine-led precision. However, this 2026 offering marks a significant departure from the improvisational jazz-fusion of his previous eras, opting instead for a rigorous exploration of neoclassical structures through the lens of hyper-modern electronic synthesis.
The album is structured as a 14-movement suite, chronologically titled “K1 Advance” through “K14 Welbeck”. This nomenclature immediately signals a move toward a proto-classical framework, distancing the work from the club-oriented aesthetics of IDM. The “Kammerkonzert” (Chamber Concert) concept is not merely…
Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, the eight-piece collective Fauna offer up a colourful tapestry of sounds in which Eastern instruments and styles interweave with psychedelic guitars, atmospheric effects and electronic beats. Swedish compatriots Goat are an obvious point of reference, though Fauna’s focus is more firmly rooted in the dancefloor. The band are at their best when they slowly build up a blend of musical layers.
‘En Munfull Sand’ begins with tribal drums and circling Anatolian rock guitar riffs before ritualistic flutes, darbukas and chanted incantations create a deep, trance-like groove. ‘Bland Träden’ opens with swirling vocal atmospherics before deep rumbling basslines and tabla beats underpin a slowly unfurling blend of electronic…
After Black Midi called it quits in 2023, bassist/co-vocalist Cameron Picton eventually started making music on his own. Although he was drawn to a more spacious, acoustic sound than that of his former band, his approach was still dramatic and unpredictable in nature. Not quite sure if he wanted to be in another band, he ultimately did bring in collaborators for his debut album, among them members of experimental London group caroline, singer/songwriter/composer Kiran Leonard, and veteran percussionist Steve Noble. Featuring shifting, often trippy narratives (he cited King Crimson as an influence), he named the project and the album My New Band Believe. Without offering much in the way of a through line other than the concept of “dream logic,”…
Nowhere Faster, the 11th studio album by post-rock duo El Ten Eleven, is a bit of something old and something new. The most notable change to the group’s sound is the addition of piano and strings for the first time on any of their recordings, which make the album easily the most cinematic-sounding project they’ve ever released. The duo also decided to bring back the delay pedal which was central to their early sound.
Opener “Uncanny Valley Girl,” meant as a commentary about AI taking over the world, is El Ten Eleven at their best. It starts with an angular but funky bassline which ping-pongs through the speakers as the delay dices it up, and the pianos and strings refreshingly add textural depth. Then the rhythm comes together as…
The lapping water that burnishes the edges of this collaboration between multidisciplinary artists Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou – friends for over 15 years, kindred spirits for eternity possibly – holds the multitudes of humanity’s draw to the sea. These Water Poems sit in a lineage with the trireme of Ancient Greece, sickly Victorians at the coast for healing, writers beckoned to Tangier, and point-and-shoot film photos in a box in your family home, sunbleached and filled with bright swimsuits. Atkinson and Vantzou channel their own oceanside dwellings into ambient sounds tinged with nostalgia, joy and hidden depths.
It manifests in compositions that subvert the usual calm of water-based field recordings. The repeated piano chords and chanted mantras…