Across numerous releases since they formed in the mid-2000s, London’s The Leaf Library have experimented with everything from a gentle fusion of indie pop and post-rock to experimental indie electronica, noise, and drone minimalism. With their fourth studio album, After the Rain, Strange Seeds, the group wanted to prioritize more-traditional, structured songwriting over sounds and atmosphere. Longtime fans will likely be happy to learn that the results are still notably textured and adventurous. To start, they combine distorted, slowcore-adjacent rock timbres, strings (by guests Iskra Strings), and lightly bouncy, sweet vocal harmonies on the deceptively tuneful “Colour Chant,” a song inspired by shifting weather. As the album title implies, the great…
Category: indie
Xylitol‘s first release for Planet Mu, Anemones, drew from atmospheric jungle as well as Krautrock and minimal wave, creating a wondrous form of breakbeat-driven electronic music that levitates as it crushes. Blumenfantasie is the follow-up album, and it’s no less impressive, strengthening the elements that made its predecessor stand out. Opener “Chromophoria” has just the right amount of atmosphere to momentarily make you feel like you’re falling through time, paired with bugged-out breaks that snap everything into focus. The title track slips Cluster-like puttering drum machines beneath shuffling drums and a flood of bass. “Melancholia” takes its time to let a sorrowful atmosphere unfold, then erupts with perfectly timed hard breaks.
Los Angeles-based duo Green-House first surfaced in 2020 with Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, an EP of calm, delicate, flora-inspired synth instrumentals accompanied by bird song and other natural sounds. Appearing soon after the much-heralded reissue of Mother Earth’s Plantasia by Mort Garson, it slotted nicely into plant-themed playlists of ambient and new age music, and became a streaming favorite during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Green-House’s music continued to celebrate nature and domestic environments on subsequent releases like Music for Living Spaces and A Host for All Kinds of Life. After releasing most of their work on Leaving Records, Hinterlands is Green-House’s first effort for Ghostly International. It maintains the same soothing feel…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…
Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats — the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, the 9 to 5 — into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them.
She trades in stories of glamorous disarray, all bruised egos and Irish exits and rambling thoughts. By Ives’ own estimation, she spent the three years after the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, crashing out: drinking too much, pushing people away, falling down, etc. Eventually, she ditched booze, made for Los Angeles, and learned to drive, soundtracking her rides with Peter Gabriel, Mitski, and her personal top-ranked song of all time, Kesha’s “Die Young.”
It tracks that Girlfriend, her resplendent and…
When Cayetana disbanded, Augusta Koch found an outlet for her increasingly personal songs in Gladie. After a pair of albums produced by bandmate Matt Schimelfenig that framed discontented lyrics in an appropriately scrappy grunge-pop, they decided to bring in an outside producer for the first time for their third long-player, No Need to Be Lonely. While this move may cause one to think of cleaner surfaces and a generally stronger, more streamlined sound, in this case No Need to Be Lonely benefits from something else: a more impulsive, immediate sound generated with help from their choice, indie punk hero Jeff Rosenstock.
The album opens with filtered, muffled guitar and half-drums alongside a jagged, cracking vocal melody that begins with the words…
Continuing the sonic universe they first unveiled on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, drawing as heavily from jazz and funk as from progressive rock.
Clarion Call Media sent over these details: Moving further into the world they began shaping on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, pulling from jazz and funk as much as progressive rock. The scope is still ambitious, but the lens has shifted.
Where Antimai spoke from the collective voice of a city, Sunya is personal. The songs follow a single perspective stepping beyond the walls for the first time, confronting both the physical…
Hurray for the Riff Raff release Live Forever, a new live record on the exact two-year anniversary of The Past Is Still Alive-named one of the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far by Pitchfork, and one of the Best Albums of 2024 by the New York Times, Atlantic, Associated Press, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Out, Mojo, Uncut, and a multitude of others.
Live Forever was captured over the course of two sold-out summer nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music in bandleader Alynda Segarra’s new home of Chicago. Spanning 14 songs, Live Forever presents The Past Is Still Alive in its entirety, as well as a selection of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s show-stopping, set-defining staples: decrying ICE on the poetic “Precious Cargo”…
The year is 2026, the rollercoaster ride that was Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine has long since been shut down and covered in tarpaulin to make way for a 21st century theme park of bland pop.
Formed in 1987 by Fruitbat and Jim Bob, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine burst onto the scene with their signature style of punk-pop infused with samples, drum machines, and social commentary. Join Jim Bob and Fruitbat, as they take a retrospective look back at the complete Carter U.S.M. singles, from 1988 to 1997.
First released in 1995, Straw Donkey is an essential introduction to Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, featuring the U.K. Top 20 singles ‘The Only Living Boy In New Cross’, ‘After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way)’, ‘Rubbish’…
…For this anniversary release, the album has been fully remastered, and accompanied by an additional LP of bonus tracks, including the 2005 tour EP, a trove of previously unreleased studio and live tracks, and rarities like “The End’s Not Near” (as featured on The O.C.) and a demo version of “The Funeral.”
Band of Horses is the phoenix ascending from the carcass of Carissa’s Wierd, Ben Bridwell and Matt Brooke’s former band. (But what happened to the proposed November 16th?) While the penchant for beautiful melody is present everywhere here, that’s pretty much where the similarity between both groups stops. Whereas their former project centered itself on slower-than-codeine-cough-syrup-on-a-cold-day, lushly…
There should be no lingering doubt that Avalon Emerson has fully arrived, on a mesmering album that has to be heard to be believed.
It’s been a colourful journey for the Californian electronic pioneer so far, even on 2023’s debut album & The Charm the sheer scale of ideas radiating from the album were mesmerising, if that was Emerson in cocoon form then there is no doubt that Written into Changes is a blossoming, and a victory lap for an artist that has grown into a fully realised songwriter, which was never ever going to wobble on uncertainty.
Playful, emotional pop that captures the feeling of an artist in motion, The album is a memoiristic album and the product of five years of constant travel – including multinational…
Some artists follow a consistent developmental path in their work, others are more mercurial, the routes they take less predictable by comparison. That overly simplistic binary’s challenged by German ambient pioneer Markus Guentner: his output on the one hand seems to have developed organically, with each step naturally leading to the next and all exemplifying his particular sensibility; he’s also, however, someone capable of a sudden left turn in stylistic direction.
Consider how different his 2025 release, Black Dahlia, is from his latest, On Brutal Soil, We Grow. Whereas the earlier set feels like an unremitting plunge into a Black Hole, the new one feels at times celestial by comparison. The titles Guentner chose mirror that change: Black Dahlia is…
Jürg Frey album Je laisse a la nuit son poids d’ombre (“I leave to the night its weight of shadow” in English) is his thirteenth for the label, some as composer, some as musician.
…Impressive as Frey’s tally of releases with Another Timbre is, it is worth remembering that in his earlier years from 1996 to 2010 most of his releases were on Edition Wandelweiser, which also catalogues his compositions (currently up to 188 of them) varying from many compositions for a single piano up to several compositions for a full orchestra. The composition which gives this album its name dates back to 2019-20 and was written for two soprano voices, cello, violin, trombone, clarinet, tuba, flute,…
This release from instrumental drone trio Setting (Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly and Joseph Westerlund) sees them complete a trio of live albums before they drop their second studio effort next year. at Public Records was recorded last spring when the band descended on Brooklyn to play a bill with Philadelphia band BASIC (previous Setting live albums at Eulogy and at Black Mountain College Museum were recorded in the band’s home state of North Carolina).
In a sense, this set plays out as more of a sibling piece to Eulogy than Black Mountain, with a darker and more urgent feel in places than the latter. After an edgy start, combining percussion that sounds like ghosts in the attic with eerie beeps and an insidious, undulating drone…
If you think that covering the songs of others is easy by just picking up your instruments and microphones, than you are quite mistaken.
Sure you can do that, but then you are just a cover band/artist. Injecting something new and/or your own into the song you are covering is another kettle of fish, and doing it in a completely opposite style/genre just doubles the complexity of your undertaking.
All the possible hurdles didn’t seem to deter the Italian duo of Giacomo Pedicini and Claudia Sorvillo and their huge cast of guests to cover all their favorite hard rock/heavy metal anthems in a completely different manner on their third album under the moniker of Driving Mrs. Satan – “Late Ever After.”
Sometimes, ends come unannounced. In the mid-2010s, Britain nurtured a second generation of the unfortunately named genre, “soft grunge” (ironically, an outgrowth of emo and hardcore).
At its forefront were Milk Teeth, Wallflower, Muskets, and, the era’s breakout stars, Bloody Knees. They released only four EPs, but bumped shoulders with national stars like Wolf Alice and Soft Play. By 2019, they had disappeared, and so had their contemporaries.
In 2026, soft grunge’s descendants are as prominent as ever, from Midrift to recent One Step Closer to the doom-shaded Die Spitz. What Else comes perfectly timed. Recorded in 2020, the question lingers: is it a time capsule of a brief moment, or did Bloody Knees forge…
Under the Sign is Irvine Myling, and this is his first Cryo Chamber release. Other than that, he has little visible online presence or prior discography. Nonetheless, whether he is a newcomer or veteran, Conflux is a commendable effort. The album is an interesting and unusual blend of instrumentation, drones, and effects that could be roughly classified as tribal ambient. But like with many such classifications, it is only somewhat descriptive of the actual sound.
Indeed, the album is centered around indigenous or folk drumming, low-end strings, and flute motifs. Atop this are keyboard drones and throaty vocalizations. The sound is frequently dense, full, and varied. It is arguably cinematic, but different from the dark ambient leanings of…
Sydney’s Itchy and the Nits are back with their sophomore album, chronicling the joys of telling lies, stinky stinky men, and nudie beaches. For a taste of summer in the darkest of times, look only to Itchy and the Nits to toss you a swimsuit and make a splash.
Following their scrappy debut EP and two years touring across the US, EU, and Japan, the Nits have amplified the charm, crisped up production, and continued on their mission of spunky, fast punk akin to the Ramones meeting Courtney Bartnett at a beachfront concessions stand. Greetings from Itchy and the Nits is rife with hits and slam-danceable classics. Boasting only 22 minutes of runtime, the 12 track album is endlessly repeatable.
The Nits are full of fun, but there’s also…