Buzzy Lee has a couple of tricks up her sleeve. She acts, writes, performs, and on occasion collaborates with musical powerhouses, notably Denzel Curry and JPEGMafia. Now, Buzzy Lee, frequently known to the masses as Sasha Spielberg, joined Harry McNally, her partner, and close friends along the way to build her third solo album, Shoulder to Shoulder. At first, the couple enlisted Nick Millhiser of Holy Ghost! though the team unanimously decided to keep the working process intrinsic — making her album naturally come alive.
Shoulder to Shoulder is unexpectedly soulful with accents of groove. Buzzy Lee delicately caresses her words in every track. Remarkably, she experiments with piano as a foundation while piecing together the right moments to test her…
Category: indie
During the late ’70s, the beginnings of a wave of music heavily inspired by the garage rock and psychedelia of the 1960s began to swell. Chalk it up to many factors — the availability of a number of reissues, especially the Pebbles series, a disillusionment with the restrictive rules of punk rock, the passage of enough time so that the era seemed glamorous, the chance to get cheap vintage gear — but the result was an underground that evolved in many interesting directions and even went quite overground at different times. Cherry Red’s 2026 collection This Can’t Be Today: American Psychedelia & the Paisley Underground 1977-1988 looks to document the scene, gathering together the many strands and sounds of the time to present a comprehensive view.
Mark Fell has spent much of his career building castles out of splinters. Or their digital equivalents, anyway: The Sheffield native’s music is an amalgamation of shards, fragments, and slivers of electronic sound sculpted into dazzling arrhythmic bursts. Composed on software platforms like Max/MSP, his pieces are rigorously formalist in nature, their shapes largely determined by the interaction of elements within closed systems. Even in the absence of understanding just what makes his music tick, one intuits the action of inscrutable processes at work, arcane rules generating sequences that unspool at the speed of black MIDI. To listen to Mark Fell often feels like standing in the shadow of the mathematical sublime.
Still, while the effects may be bracing, titles…
How do you move from electronic dance music (or EDM, if you will), with 14 million views for your Boiler Room set, to creating a boundary-pushing label and post-modern classical music that veers into ambient? It might sound perplexing on paper, but for an inventive, classically trained composer/musician, in this case German-Italian pianist/composer David August, it seems a breeze, as his latest album Hymns showcases.
And yes, August also runs 99CHANTS, a label that is supposed to push boundaries between genres, but also art forms.
It seems that Hymns serves as some kind of career deconstruction/reconstruction move for August. Going back to his classical piano training, August moves from prime EDM to…
Lauren Auder‘s journey from Soundcloud uploader to embracing pop sensibilities has been a long one, but by the sound of Whole World As Vigil, it could be one that’s coming to fruition.
Auder has been recording music for over 10 years now, working with the likes of Slowthai and Jeshi and self-publishing a variety of demo songs. This led to a series of EPs, and eventually a support slot with Christine and The Queens. Her debut album The Infinite Spine showed that she was a dab hand at baroque electronics but her second album feels like a massive step forward – a record that finds the sweet spot between industrial grit and arena-sized ambition.
Having apparently started off life as a series of voice notes recorded while walking round…
…includes several ‘cuts’ reimagined by friends and collaborators, as well as previously unreleased demo drafts from the original recording sessions.
Those familiar with 2022’s Squeeze might find themselves disillusioned here. Where Sasami’s albums once began with frustrated vocals atop a brash metal backdrop that gets off on rodent torture, they now arrive hosting a succint, full-blown pop record perfectly acceptable for daytime radio, nurtured by a newfound superstar alter-ego. Predictably, she’s shied away from diving too deep into the pop realm up until this point. Immediately upon entry, however, Blood On the Silver Screen makes an effort to blend the barriers separating rock and pop: Sasami wakes us up to her serious ability to excel across both fields.
Scout Gillett’s Tough Touch chronicles the experience of a touring musician and the constant sense of change road life entails.
On this record, Gillett’s powerful vocals and artistic presence is in constant motion, as she adeptly applies stylistic variety over Tough Touch’s ten tracks. We get songs that range from country-flecked folk beaty to spiky blasts of angsty uncertainty. Gillett and company have learned how to manipulate strong emotions and the desire to experience something new and exciting that continuously drives her forward.
“Coney Island,” one of Gillett’s finest songs to date, is a haunting contemplation on youthful innocence and loss. Gillett’s vocals have a bit of a young Emmylou Harris tone here, whereas…
Nene H’s best work is born from disruption. While her singles and EPs are often flirtatious and infectious, she is at her most compelling when cross examining the kind of upheaval that gives way to self-transformation, fusing electronic music genres with the sounds of her SWANA heritage. Her striking album debut, Ali, followed the passing of her father — a body of work that doubled remarkably as both a haunting rumination on grief and a dancefloor weapon. Second Skin similarly wraps itself around loss, inspired by a recent breakup, but rather than ruminate, as on Ali, here Nene annihilates.
…One need not have experienced a breakup to relate to the music, which pulses with industrial power, especially on standout track…
In 2023, the CalArts centre for contemporary arts, REDCAT, exhibited Lisa Alvarado’s Pulse Meridian Foliation, a multidisciplinary work that consisted of paintings, textiles, murals, photographs and a sound installation.
Pulse Meridian Foliation explored the interconnectedness of geological processes, deep time and the politics of repatriation. Images of the installation show beautifully patterned abstract pieces: double-sided, large-scale textile pieces that hang from the ceiling and startlingly bold designs painted directly onto the gallery walls. The visual aspect of Alvarado’s work owes a debt to her Mexican heritage: aesthetic vibrancy and political astuteness become inseparable.
Alongside her work as a visual artist, Alvarado…
Recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Music for Intersecting Planes captures the immediacy of sound in space.
Cellist Leila Bordreuil and organist Kali Malone dubbed the session back in 2021 when they were given access to the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, a chapel with two organs that’s just near Lake Geneva. Malone plays organ and sine tones while Bordreuil plays cello and feedback, leaning in to the building’s natural resonance.
As night fell, they lit candles and began to record, letting the natural ambiance from outside (birdsong, church bells) bleed into the air, focusing their performance to bring out the most disquieting resonances.
Matinee Acoustic Live at the Prince Albert finds Johnny Moped taking an unexpected turn with an acoustic set that, against all expectations, proves both engaging and highly entertaining. The very idea of a Johnny Moped acoustic performance might raise eyebrows among longtime fans, but the results speak for themselves.
Historically known for their chaotic and unpredictable shows, Johnny Moped have, in recent years, evolved into a far tighter and more dependable live act. That doesn’t mean the band have lost their edge—mistakes still happen, but within the Moped universe, they only add to the charm. What truly drives the performance is the same energy and excitement that has always defined them, and it remains fully intact here.
To many in the know, Brian Foote-who cut his teeth raving in Wisconsin-is as synonymous with Chicago label kranky as the albums they’ve released. Foote has worked alongside co-founder Joel Leoschke as a publicist for the label since 2005. But he’s also a label boss in his own right. Inaugurated in 2012, L.A.’s Peak Oil (run by Foote and Brion Brionson) is a home for the kind of “strange and mysterious” heads-down electronic music that grows in dank basements: ambient-adjacent, breaks-friendly, and with the club never too far from its mind. One of the label’s recent “stars” (insofar as an underground group can attain that status) are Brooklyn ambient trio Purelink, who to date have released two albums of critically acclaimed chilled electronica that feel part of a wider return…
Rogue Wave began almost by accident.
In early 2002, faced with the sort of existential crisis unique to the newly unemployed, Zach Rogue decided to take some time off from his home base of San Francisco. He set off with a one-way ticket to New York in March with the intention of recording one or two songs with a friend, in an effort to exorcise his demons both artistically and personally. He came away with both a new lease on life and an album’s worth of material that would later become Rogue Wave’s stunning debut, Out of the Shadow.
At the end of 2002, while preparing the album for self-release, Zach rounded out the band’s lineup with the addition of Pat Spurgeon (drums, keys, samples, vocals) Sonya Westcott (bass, vocals)…
Haiku Salut are one of a kind and always have been from the moment their debut EP, How We Got Along After the Yarn Bomb, landed in the summer of 2011. Fusing elements of folk, classical, chamber pop, lo-fi indie, and electronica, the trio — Louise Croft, Gemma Barkerwood, and Sophie Barkerwood — have made creating the unconventional into an artform. They’ve been lauded by both music fans and critics alike, not to mention other artists — some of whom have collaborated with them over the years, such as Public Service Broadcasting.
Over the course of the band’s 16 years of existence, they’ve put out five albums plus a handful of EPs and singles of music that refuses to conform to any structured genre or fad. As multi-instrumentalists of various facets themselves,…
Shinichi Atobe’s arresting house and techno beams with inimitable candor, built from bright, phlegmatic loops that run on an eccentric internal logic. Now a quarter century into a career largely characterized by mystique and a seeming avoidance of the public eye, Atobe has spent the better part of the 2020s slowly opening up, with some bemusement. His laconic interview with Tone Glow in 2024 — most noteworthy for being the first time anyone had asked the alleged recluse to go on the record — revealed an artist with little interest in extended introspection or narrativization beyond a few quaint details. (His favorite hobby? “Sleeping.”) Accordingly, Atobe’s sound has evolved laterally over the course of the decade, reupholstering the artist’s quirks into a series of…
Kinshasa isn’t the kind of city that waits for you to be ready, the city just takes over your experience. It is a metropolis of staggering contradictions, where the ghosts of Belgian colonialism collide with the relentless, vibrating hustle of hyper-capitalism. To attempt to capture the essence of this place on tape seems like a fool’s errand, yet this is exactly what the Kinshasa-based street art collective KINACT have achieved with their debut LP, Kinshasa in Action. Founded in 2015 by Eddy Ekete, KinAct first made their name not on stage, but in the gutters, markets, and intersections of the Congolese capital. They transformed public spaces into living, breathing theatres of the absurd, constructing elaborate regalia from the city’s discarded detritus, bottles, wires, tires, and dismembered…
Dream pop is a genre that takes a great deal of attention to perfect. It’s not enough to write idiosyncratic lyrics set to a jangly beat; there are holes to be filled between drum cymbals and bass chimes. Burning at Both Ends aims to hit that sweet spot between wakefulness and drowsy activities. The finished work is a more palatable equivalent to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, a facet that will enthrall some and disappoint others. Nonetheless, Hit Like a Girl take no prisoners, presenting a well-formed record that resides comfortably in the dream pop canon. Led by Nicolle Maroulis, an artist who uses they/them pronouns, the group achieve a sonic meditation on 21st century living.
“Only Have Myself,” an angry rocker, is dotted with ferocious exhibits of screaming from…
After more than a decade of relative silence, Diana Darby’s Otterson offers a new chapter of the singer/songwriter’s uniquely haunted sound. The insular style Darby found on previous albums remains consistent throughout Otterson, but this time around the construction was a little different. Pieced together from new songs and some older material while Darby was making the transition from recording on four-track to working with Digital Audio Workstations. Though the overcast character that has defined much of her discography doesn’t change much with these technological advances, there’s a different tint to Darby’s muted colors throughout the album.
Opening track “April” is spare, with clinks of a lonesome tambourine keeping time for…