As the latest emo revival continues apace, and particularly as midwestern heroes of its second wave like American Football enter into whole new chapters, some of its more modern stalwarts continue to go from strength to strength. That would appear to be especially true of Philadelphia mainstays Tigers Jaw, as they enter into their third decade together with this scintillating eighth record. Over the years, they’ve alternated between lush, multi-layered sounds and rawer, noisier work; both sides of that divide are in evidence on this first album in five years, Lost on You.
There are poppier, more melodic moments – the standout ‘BREEZER’ is appropriately titled – as well as more reflective indie rockers that play like paeans to some of their forebears;…
Category: indie
Following the two-person effort Could Have Done Anything (2023), Charlotte Cornfield‘s sixth album, Hurts Like Hell, is a much more collaborative outing as well as her first for Merge and her first since becoming a mother. Not coincidentally (and despite its title), it’s a warm, touching set of songs that is still packed with her often profoundly intimate observations, but this time there’s a subtle shift toward gratitude and perseverance. The collaborators include producer Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Lonnie Holley) and a backing band consisting of Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar, vocals), Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney (bass, vocals), and Wilder Maker’s Adam Brisbin (guitar, pedal steel) and Sean Mullins (drums). The album was recorded at Weinrobe’s…
Throughout his career José González has been a pacifying voice, delivering quiet, organically-made records that emphasize patience and humanity. He’s not particularly prolific, though when they arrive his albums tend to hit their mark — consistency, both in tone and quality, is one of his hallmarks. González rarely employs more than one or two guitars and the occasional second harmony, nor does he need to. His gentle, though commanding tenor and deft fingerpicked arrangements are enough to fill the rooms he creates. Understated as they are, his songs are also not without weight and his fifth album, Against the Dying of the Light, is his heaviest to date. It’s posed as a more outward-focused sequel to 2021’s Local Valley, his meditative fourth…
It’s instructive that The Twilight Sad’s first album since reducing to founding duo James Graham and Andy MacFarlane yields the most powerful version of the band’s cathartic soundworld. Perhaps the subject matter helped: It’s The Long Goodbye documents Graham losing his mother to dementia while simultaneously becoming a father, a real-life crossroads detailed with unsettling candour from the first line of the opening song (“And we slowly watch you go”).
To counterpoint the singer’s mournful Scots folk timbre, MacFarlane’s euphoric post-punk schemes roughen the shiny patina of 2019’s It Won’t Be Like This All the Time for a transcendent blend of New Order, My Bloody Valentine and, inevitably, The Cure. He’s previously covered…
…features the original album plus ‘Live at Third Man Records’, a 10-song live album.
On his debut for Columbia Records, Pete Yorn wears his heart on his sleeve like Ryan Adams, sings in a husky croon similar to Jakob Dylan, and earnestly plays into passion and emotion like Jeff Buckley. The year 2001 belonged to Yorn, and his critical praise was not unwarranted, with Musicforthemorningafter marking the stunning beginning of a long, varied career. It’s a raw selection of heartland and American trad rock, yet Yorn’s love for Brit-pop is also quite evident, with several breezy acoustic-based songs (“Sense,” “Simonize”) resembling threads of the Smiths. Yorn’s voice may crack at points, but it contributes to the dusty feeling of the entire…
As Pan•American, ambient musician Mark Nelson has gradually shifted through different phases of style and sound while maintaining the same emotional core of muted longing. Nelson was playing in the equally atmospheric band Labradford when he launched Pan•American in the late ‘90s, first exploring dark and dubby electronic landscapes and slowly expanding into more beat-focused pieces and then an Americana reading of his spacious ambience. Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane is another shift for the project, moving away from the high and lonesome acoustic touches of his 2010s and early-2020s output into something that’s at once more playful and more serious. The instrumentation takes different forms over the course of the ten-track album.
…features the original album as well as sessions, B-sides, a live show from the time and a complete disc of demos from Chapel Studios.
Having exorcised enough bile for two bands on their rickety release Interim, The Fall loosen up their attitude, tighten up their delivery, and squeeze out a rocking album that relies heavily on its highlights. Fortunately, there’s plenty, most hitting with the thwack of the “Sparta FC” single or the Light User Syndrome album. “Pacifying Joint” is a punchy exercise in hooks and sheen, “What About Us” is snide Mancabilly of the highest order, and “Blindness” hypnotizes and chugs its way into the Top 25 original Fall tracks ever. Flashiest of the lot has to be a soaring cover of the Move’s hippy anthem “I Can Hear the Grass Grow,”…
It’s been a long journey for Lindsey Jordan, better known as Snail Mail. From the fledging steps that were 2016’s Habit EP, in which a 16-year-old Jordan released more heart, feeling, conviction in song format than the indie genre had seen in many moons. In many ways, she arrived fully formed, surfing to the front of the indie rock genre on a wave of pure honesty and talent for guitar prowess. With the release of 2018’s debut album, Lush, she became one of the most recognizable voices to skate the scene. With the exceptional and expanding follow up that was 2021’s Valentine, it’s hard to believe that it has been close to five years since Jordan last released an album.
Ricochet at its most honest is a stellar reintroduction to the world of Snail Mail,…
Following a three-year studio hiatus and the arrest of their now-former drummer Joe Seiders on child pornography charges, Canadian indie rock supergroup The New Pornographers are returning with their new LP The Former Site Of.
Many musicians have come and gone from the New Pornographers over the past 30 years, but the core lineup of Neko Case, John Collins, Carl Newman, Todd Fancey, and Kathryn Calder remains. They were joined on the album by session drummer Charley Drayton, though Josh Wells will be behind the kit when they tour.
According to a press release, The Former Site Of features “ten short stories of people at personal and societal extreme.” In a November 2025 exclusive interview with Rolling Stone…
Last time this writer spoke to Courtney Barnett, she dismissed her label’s claims that her third album, 2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time, marked the debut of “Courtney 2.0”, describing it as “just an extension of the same thing I’ve always been doing”. Seismic aesthetic shifts aren’t Barnett’s style; after happening upon her laconic, chugging mode with 2012 debut EP I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris, her vibe has been: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Even the relative experimentation she undertook on Things Take Time… with Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa has been abandoned here in favour of her trad indie-rock setup. The title feels like an admission: that Barnett is the creature of habit, returning to the familiar.
Limited edition CD of “Anata” includes exclusive bonus track “Quatro Horizontes”.
In a recent interview with the great Joshua Minsoo Kim, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton explained that, whether in his music, his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori’s, or theirs as Los Thuthanaka, being loud is a part of the physical experience. “You’re supposed to feel the sound,” he elaborated. “It’s not supposed to be painful, but it’s supposed to change you, it’s supposed to make you feel healed in some way.”
…That disruptive power comes alive in Crampton’s universe, too — in the staggering, festering expanse of “Awila,” a 12-minute kullawada dance teeming with awakened guitars and wall-to-wall elementalism. It’s the building, confounding…
Author Philip K. Dick spent his career poking at the porous boundary between reality and illusion, questioning the reliability our perception and memory. Using motifs such as artificial intelligence (AI), mind-altering drugs, simulated realities, and corporate and governmental power, he examined our sense of identity, the nature of truth, and the very essence of reality. Given recent advances in AI as well as ongoing sociopolitical changes, Dick’s work now seems more prescient than ever.
Ubikuitous, yet another thematic compilation from Unexplained Sounds Group, uses experimental ambient and acousmatic music – with a touch of glitch and techno – to explore these concepts. Many of the 14 tracks employ synth-based droning with dark overtones as a core element,…
It’s taken Sealed records more than five years to put this release together but finally it’s here. The one and only Bikini Mutants. The Bikini Mutants were from Yeovil, Somerset and part of the All the Madmen world. In their short life as a band they recorded two demos at Monitor Studios, Milborne Port in Somerset in 1982.
Let’s Mutate collects these two demos on one LP, along with a 20 page booklet featuring photos, lyrics, reviews, interviews and much more. The band played mostly in Yeovil and the West Country along with the Mob and the Review, and even though they were part of the West Country anarcho scene, the sound was a mix of scratchy post punk and indie pop. Members of the band went on to be in My Bloody Valentine and the Chesterfields.
After 33 years, Guitar Wolf returns to Goner Records, where they started! Way back in 1993, Wolf Rock was released by Goner and immediately, around the world, people enthralled with raw rock n roll and pure Japanese enthusiasm for over-the-top noise realized they had a new band to watch out for.
Many tours, many records, and many eardrums later, Guitar Wolf has returned for the latest, and greatest Guitar Wolf record yet – More Jet. More raw, crunching guitar noise, frantic rhythms, and unpredictable screaming! More head-scratchingly-great song topics! The perfect blend of Link Wray / Ramones / Joan Jett / Cramps sound and attitude mixed with industrial-strength noise.
Led by singer and guitarist Seiji the group’s…
Chicago-born record label International Anthem capped off an entire year of anniversary activities (under the IA11 chrysanthemum banner) with a very special event celebrating the label’s actual eleventh solar return at their new Southside Chicago HQ inside Theaster Gates and Rebuild Foundation’s latest space-based project, The Land School.
The evening featured a performance by Rob Mazurek with Matthew Lux and Mikel Patrick Avery (the ensemble behind Alternate Moon Cycles, the very first album in the IARC catalog, which was originally released December 2nd, 2014), in what Mazurek refers to as “A Polysonic Resonance Field in One Continuous Movement.”
About the performance, Mazurek recalls: “At the invitation of International Anthem, I gathered…
1. The Black Crowes – Cruel Streak
2. Snail Mail – My Maker
3. Andrew Wasylyk – Private Symphony #2
4. Courtney Barnett – Mantis
5. Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection – Rowan Tree
6. Flea – Traffic Lights (feat. Thom Yorke)
7. Bruce Hornsby – Indigo Park
8. Tinariwen – Imidiwan Takyadam
9. Ellie O’Neill – Anna with the Silver Arrow
10. The Long Ryders – Stand a Little Further in…
11. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Hey Little
12. Memorials – Dropped Down the Well
13. Charlotte Cornfield – Lost Leader
14. Billy Fuller – Rummer
15. The New Pornographers – Ballad of the Last Payphone
1. The Studio 68! & Dani Turner – Funky People
2. The Delines – The Meter Keeps Ticking
3. Altin Gun – Öldürme Beni
4. Bill Callahan – Stepping Out for Air
5. Marielle V Jakobsons – Everything Lost Remains
6. Ulrika Spacek – Picto
7. Iron & Wine – In Your Ocean
8. Cardinals – I Like You
9. Crooked Fingers – Haunted (feat. Sharon Van Etten)
10. KMRU – With Trees Where We Can See
11. Hen Ogledd – Clara
12. The Wave Pictures – The House Painted Blue
13. Buck Meek – Ring of Fire
14. Clémentine March – Lucie
15. Isabel Pine – Fables
The ousting of Bassvictim from Berghain feels like a Biblical prophecy: Of course these electroclash expats, who fucked around and crystallized a fried twee-pop resurgence, would be banished from the Garden of Eden. Just two years ago, Maria Manow and Ike Clateman were heirs apparent to “indie sleaze,” a catch-all whose constraints, musically and aesthetically, boiled down to “kinda Crystal Castles coded.” Here was a photogenic boy-girl duo with two wonderfully wubby albums, a vague air of disaffected cool, and a very active Instagram account. “I’m not joking/I’m being hella serious,” Manow had drawled on “Air on a G String,” their silly-sexy breakout hit. Even with the explicit clarification, the canon they seemed to be entering — sleaze first, sincerity second…