…There’s a moment on Sluice’s new album, Companion, where frontman Justin Morris sings about being a kid reading in a bunk on a tour bus, crying and asking “what happened to it all feeling so good?” It’s a question that drove him out of music entirely — and, eventually, back into it on very different terms.
The Durham, North Carolina quartet — Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle — release Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut, on March 27th. It follows 2023’s Radial Gate, the album Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking…
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Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney are music lifers, married parents of two who have been the core of the band Big Harp essentially since they met two decades ago. As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Drootin committed to the DIY scene early, joining bands as a bassist before she could drive and bailing on high school with only a year left in order to tour. After Senseney met Drootin on the road in 2007, they accidentally moved to California together, got married, had their first kid, and then started Big Harp. They are lifers, and lifers make it work.
Only a year on from the release of their self-titled debut album, supergroup Butler, Blake & Grant have released the follow up, Murmurs, via 355 Recordings. The record sees the trio – Bernard Butler (Suede, McAlmont & Butler), Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub) and James Grant (Love and Money) – reimagining songs from their respective back catalogues.
The breathless opener ‘How to Exist’ takes off at a breakneck pace, as if lyricist James McGregor is banging his head off the wall. The lyrics replicate pacing the floor, this stream of consciousness implying a pent-up frustration. The rapid fire start to The Clockworks second album The Entertainment ends abruptly with: “I’m looking for something to believe in”. It lays the groundwork for the rest of the album. Experience has provided The Clockworks with a shift in perspective, inevitable after all as these young men admit their debut album 2023’s Exit Strategy came as a result of four lads making a noise in a room. The world keeps turning and experience creates change which in turn seeps into their creativity. Rather than the micro-observations on the debut,…
Some bands respond better to spontaneity than others, and more than four decades after their first album, the 
In 1974, Merle Haggard released Merle Haggard Presents His 30th Album. Having released thirty albums is in itself a remarkable accomplishment, but it was all the more impressive that Haggard cut those LPs in just nine years. It’s a shame Haggard never talked to 
Just over two decades ago, 
…Original album recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in 2000 and remastered by Bob Weston in 2025 and never-before-released live studio album, ‘True Live Tapes’, recorded by Greg Norman in 2000 and mastered by Bob Weston in 2025.
The “post-tour musings” album should be a privilege to make. It typically arrives a few years and releases into an artist’s career — that is, if they’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go out on the road. This is the very moment we find the Chicago-based trio, 
Opening the album emphatically, ‘Flowers in the Water’ is a refreshing return from The Boxer Rebellion. Brimming with optimism and positivity, lyrics such as: ‘Don’t obsess, be an optimist/ The glass half full is bottomless’ feel like an ode to overcoming adversity and living in hope rather than submitting to despair. Their first album in six years, The Second I’m Asleep is “10 songs mapping the emotional landscapes of life – moments of clarity in chaos, letting go of old ghosts and the art of understanding ourselves in a rapidly changing world”, as the band put it themselves in the album’s press release.
Curated by Ricardo Villalobos, 
…includes new tracks such as “song for tik tok” and “strange request” alongside “bedroom versions” of previous hits.
The duo of Verity Susman and Matthew Simms don’t change the basics on the second 
After spending a few years exploring his gentler, more singer-songwritery side, Kyle Thomas moved back home to Vermont, dug out his old guitar and tape machine, and welcomed back 
They say timing is everything. The time to meet the right person. The right time to start over. Blink, and you might miss them. But is there ever really a perfect time? Or does timing just feel perfect when we’re finally ready to listen? The release of Full Circle at the first hint of spring feels almost too on the nose: an album about retreat and renewal arriving just as the world thaws out. For Tom Misch, timing does a lot for narrative work. After years of constant motion, his long-awaited second studio album captures the lightness of transformation and the undeniable bounce of realising you’re once more in bloom.