…Tenderness was born out of a tough storm of circumstances: the pandemic, a cancelled tour, a break-up, and the loss of her father. Furloughed and with too much time on her hands, Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) began to write new songs in her north London living room, windows wide open to the hot summer outside. In August 2020, during that “weird window” of the pandemic where lockdown eased up enough for a trip to the seaside, or across London, Young visited producer Euan Hinshelwood (Younghusband, Cate Le Bon) at his Greenwich studio. In two days, the pair recorded eight demos with no pressure or plan. The final recordings are sparse in that country way but layered with Hinshelwood’s carefully chosen textures: synths, drones, rich…
Category: indie
Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral tropical unease, and a fantastic album about working at a nightclub that sounded like a party heard through the wall. His latest endeavor is a rotating collective with a name so florid it makes Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 seem like a perfectly modest moniker, and the theme this time is rock music, stripped of orthodoxy.
Zeisig assembled The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore…
Out of a ten-day dog-sitting stint in the countryside came Milwaukee-based singer-songwriter Maximiano’s second release: Rokeby. Rokeby is the name of a historic district in upstate New York, along the Hudson Valley River. It happens to be where Maximiano crafted these songs, but it is also a place named after Sir Walter Scott’s Rokeby, an epic poem set during the English Civil War, a time of chaos and division.
There are a few things at work here. The rural aspect comes through the album’s folkier cuts and arrangements. As far as Scott is concerned, the songs in Rokeby reflect a literary streak to the singer-songwriter, with lyrics referencing Rilke, Max Porter, Dickinson and Highsmith; but thematically, they also express…
Why are some harmonies so pleasing to the human ear? Actually, to the human brain. A physicist might answer that it is due to simple mathematical frequency ratios. Well, maybe simple to a mathematician, but Greek to an arithmophobe. But not ‘Greek’ to some actual Greeks, such as Plato, who were on the vanguard of trying to answer what is truly an ancient question. So, 2,500 or so years later, what is the answer? Don’t know, don’t care. But you know it when you hear it. And you are going to hear a ton of it on Rebel Joy, the debut album by americana duo Roswell Road.
The harmonies that saturate this album might lead one to believe they are so-called ‘blood’ harmonies, also known as ‘sister’ harmonies, to denote the type of perfectly matched voices…
Rennes-based, self-described feminist punk trio Île de Garde have an unusual configuration; synths (Cécile Aurégan), drums (Morgane Poulain) and low-key, mostly spoken word vocals (Klara Coudrais), but it proves to be a flexible and mostly powerful one. This six-track EP or mini album is their first release and it’s promising and varied enough to wish it was a full album, though not all its strands are equally thrilling.
Looking analytically at their songs, it becomes clear that Poulain is central to Île de Garde’s appeal. The synths are generally retro-‘80s flavored and provide the melodies, and the vocals range from delicate to imperious, but it’s the drums that seem most of all to determine the character of each song, with one exception that proves…
“Bariken” is a 2004 album by Merzbow, and as its title suggests, the theme of this work centers on the Bariken itself. The Bariken, also known as the “Taiwan Duck,” is a species of duck and has some characteristics that are its vivid green and ultramarine plumage and the red caruncle that extends around its bill and eyes.
Around 2003, I happened to notice a peculiar-looking duck in a river near my home. Upon investigation, I learned it was a Bariken — likely one that had escaped or been abandoned after being kept for food, subsequently adapting to the wild. There were also Bariken inhabiting the pond of a nearby Japanese garden. At the time, it was common to see ducks swimming in the rivers and ponds of Tokyo. A few years later,…
Previously known as a member of Afrobeat fusionists NOMO and for his introspective indie rock songwriting as In Tall Buildings, Erik Hall reached a new audience with his acclaimed solo recordings of minimalist works during the 2020s. Turning the genre on its head, he recorded Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians by himself, multi-tracking all the instruments without any pre-programmed arrangements or loops, and he did the same with Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato. Following Solo Three, which included pieces by Glenn Branca, Laurie Spiegel, Charlemagne Palestine, and Reich, Hall released a different version of Canto Ostinato, this time performed with two of his regular collaborators, Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion.
Following albums made in his home state of New Jersey, across New York State, and while living in rural Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, John Andrews‘ fifth LP was written and recorded after a move to the industrial, maritime neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Its working-class setting and Andrews’ seasonal job with N.Y.C. Parks both work their way into the warm, reflective fabric of the self-produced Streetsweeper. It also marks his relocation from the Woodsist label to Earth Libraries. This time around, Andrews’ semi-fictional band the Yawns consists of Luke Temple (bass, guitar), who also engineered the album, as well as his returning Cut Worms touring bandmates Noah Bond (drums) and Keven Lareau (bass). Star Moles’ Emily Moales lends backing…
If 2025 was the year the UK reclaimed its rock ‘n’ roll crown with the Oasis reunion, 2026 is officially the year Richard Ashcroft reminded us why he was always the movement’s beating heart. Fresh off his massive stint as the special guest on the Oasis Live ’25 tour, Ashcroft has dropped Live Vol. 1, a career-spanning collection that feels less like a standard live album and more like a victory lap.
Recorded during his triumphant run of shows following the stadium mania of the previous year, Live Vol. 1 captures Ashcroft at his most potent. From the opening chords, it’s clear his voice hasn’t aged a day; if anything, it’s gained a soulful, weathered depth that adds new layers to classics like “The Drugs Don’t Work” and “Sonnet.”
The production strikes a perfect balance.
Minneapolis trio Spaceport is back with their second album Cut the Lake, with many missing their first offering Window Seat (2023).
Maybe this time around that initial slip will be corrected, as the band’s creative force, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Arianna Wegley, seems be in full form.
Spaceport’s sound might be in that nether ground many indie bands operate in these days – the subdued guitar rock full of quality melody hooks, with added elements from elsewhere.
Spaceport’s added elements though cover quite a wide ground – on that indie rock base they add folk, classical, and ambient/electronic sounds. Of course, the possibility of a sound mess is there, but Wegley and her band seem to swim…
Maria Taylor started working on Story’s End — her latest LP — six years ago, beginning with a handful of quiet, stripped-down demos in her home studio. There was no real rush to follow up her 2019 self-titled effort, but fractures in both her marriage and a close friendship found her leaning back into these songs once again.
The result is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Songs of marriages and friendships falling apart sit alongside moments of optimism and renewal, making Story’s End an emotionally powerful journal set to a lush soundtrack. The opening title track features Taylor’s hushed vocals floating over a maudlin piano before strings — and eventually drums — enter the mix. It’s a deeply affecting opening salvo.
…4CD deluxe edition include the remastered original album, previously unreleased demos, John Peel Sessions (some never broadcast), and unreleased 1979 concert from Troon.
…Originally released in 1979, Stiff Little Fingers were Ireland’s answer to both the Clash and the Sex Pistols. They had the personal and political stance of the former, and the noisy, pissed off, slash-and-burn musical aesthetic as the latter. Fronted by guitarist and songwriter Jake Burns (he collaborated with journalist Gordon Ogilvie), SLF took off with their two singles “Alternative Ulster,” and, for that time, the utterly out of control screaming that was “Suspect Device.” These two singles make the purchase price of the album a priority. They represent barely contained youthful…
The Shits have been a band for a little under nine years and Diet of Worms is their third album. Neither of which is especially eye-catching as statistics go, but noteworthy in the context of the Leeds DIY punk scene in which they originate, where bands (including ones featuring members of The Shits) frequently rise and fall leaving hardly any documented evidence they were there. A lot of the groups who historically pre-empted the sound heard on Diet of Worms – noise rock, pigfuck, scum rock, sludge punk or some other microgenre terminology – didn’t stick around for anything like this long either, implosive tendencies being a common issue.
So while The Shits’ notoriety has been boosted by the rowdy aura around them,…
After an album– 2021’s For Allting — where they added new wave polish to the furious indie pop with teeth sound, Makthaverskan come roaring back to full power on 2026’s Glass and Bones.
The group are at their best when the raucousness of the music matches the unstoppable energy and passion of singer Maja Milner. She’s in fine form here and the band are too. It’s a bracing album that sounds like a collection of hit singles, broken up by the occasional stripped down and stark ballad. Yes, ballad. On two songs — “Black Waters” and “Anytime’ — the band step out of the spotlight almost entirely and let Milner take centerstage and get her long-deserved close up. It’s a stunning shift and on first listen it’s easy to wish for the return of the full band and all their…
…remastered edition with bonus tracks.
As the title suggests, Akira Kosemura‘s entrancing Polaroid Piano is a wistful meditation for minimal piano and field recordings, bleached out with old light. The glitchy electronics of Kosemura’s prior work are gone. The music is so hushed you can hear the action of the pedals, the keyboard shifting in the body of the piano. This quiet rumpus serves as a relaxed rhythm track — one suspects Kosemura mic’d the piano to capture these extraneous sounds, drawing them purposefully into the music. The gesture is Cagean, but the questioning, wonder-filled style is pure Satie. The cover art captures the mood perfectly, although a blue sky filled with kites and balloons would have been just as apt.
This tenth anniversary edition of Venetian Snares’ ‘Traditional Synthesizer Music’ adds ten bonus tracks and alternative versions originally available only on limited edition compact disc from the artist’s Bandcamp.
For an artist whose recordings typically consist of intensely edited, sample-heavy sonic constructions, the “traditional” way to go about making music is to spend countless hours programming an overwhelming modular synthesizer system that takes up an entire room. Aaron Funk has explored analog synthesizer music before, but he usually saves this type of work for his Last Step moniker, which veers toward acid techno rather than the frenetic breakcore of his more well-known guise, Venetian Snares.
2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Nightmares On Wax‘s (George Evelyn) seminal In a Space Outta Sound, as a dub clash with On-U Sound producer and mixing desk wizard Adrian Sherwood titled In a Space Outta Dub, revisioning eight of the 2006 album’s songs. While the original tunes remain recognizable, Sherwood adds his own visionary sonic signature full of humid warmth, languid rhythms, and sultry grooves
Opener “You Bliss” is a sonic redesign of “You Wish.” The original William Bell Stax guitar sample remains, but it’s submerged by smoky saxophone and an organ that sounds like it was lifted from the Doors’ LA Woman sessions. Sherwood’s trademark dread bassline is boosted, heavily reverbed, and echo-laden. It sounds quite…
The album Reach Their Final Destination and Play Their Greatest Hits by Geof Tick & the Howling Fantods is a masterclass in conceptual noise and experimental soundscapes, released in early 2026 under the Easyriders Noise imprint.
Despite the title suggesting a conventional “Best Of” compilation, the record is anything but. It functions as a dense, atmospheric journey that feels more like a career-spanning manifesto than a simple collection of tracks. The album leans heavily into the “extreme sound” aesthetic typical of the label. It blends harsh industrial textures with moments of haunting, melodic decay. Geof Tick utilizes the “Howling Fantods” moniker to explore themes of finality, transition, and sonic exhaustion. The “hits” here are reimagined…