Sometimes, a new album’s opening track shows you a band picking up right where they left off. In 2024, Philly indie rockers Queen of Jeans shared All Again, a record that showed frontwoman Miri Devora caught in a codependent loop with a withholding partner, closing with her admitting that, given the chance, she’d go right back. Under a minute into All Again’s follow-up, hard/SWEET, Devora swears she’s done and, in the same breath, begs the avoidant object of her affection to “come over one more time.”
hard/SWEET oscillates between romance and rejection, tormented and enraptured by a love for another person that comes at the expense of loving oneself. To capture that tension, Queen of Jeans got back in the studio with All Again…
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Somewhere in the middle of the Bone Bame touring cycle, 10LEC6 stopped being able to work. Nicole, the singer whose voice is the entire centre of the group, was served an OQTF, the French administrative order requiring a person to leave the country. The practical result was that the band could not honour festival bookings outside France. A Paris collective built almost entirely on movement, on diaspora, on rhythms carried between continents, was pinned to one territory by paperwork. It was Nicole who then told the others the legend of 
Future modal jazz dub, heard thru a Y2K lens by legendary blowers Pharaoh Sanders & Graham Haynes, and diffused in Bill Laswell’s illbient dub style & pattern. A slept-on, cross-generational ace sure to pique interest FFO Jon Hassell to Talvin Singh, Lászlo Hortobágyi to Material.
To some extent, a person is an entity made up of the things they have experienced. The same could be said of a band, and few bands embody this idea as succinctly as Good Habits. The core songwriting duo of Bonnie Schwarz (cello, vocals) and Pete Shaw (accordion, synths) first began recording together while stranded in New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Have you ever watched a band perform and known, without a doubt, that they were on the cusp of becoming far, far bigger than they are in the moment you’re seeing them? If you’re a regular concertgoer, you’ve known the feeling of watching bands perform that will never outgrow their enclosures, and you’ve also known what it feels like when one is about to have a growth spurt. In 2025, a year and a half after the release of We’re Starting to Look Like Each Other, the debut album of Atlanta emo-folk duo hey, nothing, they performed at Salt Lake City’s Kilby Block Party. Despite sharing a time slot with indie-rock legends Built to Spill, the teenage duo Tyler Mabry and Harlow Philips delivered a performance that put the minds of anyone who skipped out…
Martin Zeichnete is working as a sound editor in the DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) animation department in Dresden but his mind is elsewhere. Like many young East Germans of the time he listens furtively to West German radio at night and becomes infatuated with the ‘Kosmische Musik’ drifting across the divide from his neighbouring country. Martin, a keen runner, hits upon the idea of using the repetitive, motorik beat of this new music as a training aid for athletes. He believes these pulsing, hypnotic rhythms will have a positive mental as well as physical effect if used correctly.
Drawing from musique concrète, post-punk, free psych, kosmische and of course dub, Valentina Magaletti, Al Wootton and Susumu Mukai’s Holy Tongue surpass themselves on their second album, turning in a set that’s almost completely unmoored from time and space. It’s heady, essential listening FFO The Pop Group, Popol Vuh, Equiknoxx, John T. Gast.
This unusual pairing of two veterans from different genres is a welcome reminder that musicianship speaks a common language regardless of categorical metadata. 
In 2019, Anne Helen Petersen published her widely shared BuzzFeed essay, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”. It examined the exhaustion of a generation expected to thrive in every area of life while taking on more debt, enjoying less security, and working harder for increasingly uncertain rewards. Even basic tasks could become insurmountable as the promised returns on all that effort slipped further from view.
Everyone Says Hi return with their second album 
Mika Oki’s art installations are all smoke and mirrors, quite literally. Roiling clouds of fog are lit by prismatic lights, while images are variously reflected, distorted, and projected through frames, making doors become mirrors and mirrors become windows. They are more experiential than physical, serving to make reality oddly illusory. They are also a great introduction to 
The Howlers return with their sophomore album Heavy, following on from their debut, What You’ve Got to Lose to Win It All. The opening couple of tracks stay in fairly charted indie-pop territory, with lyrics focused on romantic encounters, relationship trouble, and mistrust, though the group do a good job of keeping it catchy and to the point. That being said, the track ‘Late Nights’ is where some of the lyrics are too on the nose to allow the listener to consider their own impressions of the song; “You never knew love could make you feel sad” is the most pertinent example of this. The Howlers could benefit from some further use of metaphor in their writing process and leave a bit more to the imagination.
There’s a charming spit-and-sawdust quality to Linda’s Head, the new album from 
After creating something more down to earth with 
The Smashing Times do one thing and they do it really well; make catchy, jangling guitar pop that sounds like it was recorded in the bottom of a well. Inspired by other fidelity challenged bands like Guided by Voices, Television Personalities, and Times New Viking, they add some freshness to the bloodline. Their 2019 debut cassette EP 
…Originally self-released in 2023 as an ultra-limited cassette run of about 50 copies, the album received a wider official reissue on vinyl, CD, and digital formats on September 4, 2026 via Perennial and K Records.
Edge Conditions stands apart from anything else