Black Sea Dahu crafts music that feels like standing in a storm – raw, exposed, and profoundly alive. Led by Janine Cathrein, whose voice carries sorrow and resilience in the same breath, the Swiss band blurs the lines between folk, pop, and rock, creating a sound that is both vulnerable and ferocious.
Their latest single, One Day Will Be All I Have, stands as a luminous reflection on grief and courage in the aftermath of personal loss. The song opens a space where sorrow and hope intertwine, framed by cinematic, emotionally charged arrangements.
The single sets the tone for the band’s new album, Everything – a record born from grief, speaking to death, self-reckoning, the act of…
Category: indie
The Enemy went straight to number one with their debut LP, We’ll Live and Die in These Towns, in 2007, and their follow-up, Music for the People, reached #2 in 2009. They also enjoyed a run of Top 40 hits during the same period. Supporting acts such as The Rolling Stones, Oasis, and Manic Street Preachers, they left a clear mark on the UK music scene. The trio from Coventry disbanded in 2016, briefly reuniting in 2022 for a run of shows. They now return with their fifth studio album – and first since 2015 – Social Disguises.
After such a lengthy absence, it’s fair to wonder whether The Enemy can still capture the spirit of their earlier releases. “The Boxer” hits with real punch and is easy to imagine as a future live-set staple. There’s a slight weariness…
Combining elements of jam bands and electronic dance rock, Lotus was formed by brothers Jesse Miller (bass/sampler) and Luke Miller (guitar/keyboards), Steve Clemens (drums), Chuck Morris (percussion), and Mike Rempel (guitar) while they were attending Goshen College in Indiana in 1999.
Rise of the Anglerfish explores a dichotomy between light and dark blending live guitar, bass, drums, and keys with warped samples, modular synths, and electronic beats. The result is a wide array of colors and styles unique to Lotus.
As bassist and producer Jesse Miller explained in a statement, the record reflects a dynamic creative period. “We’ve been working on these compositions and recordings for the last two years…
Remastered by Mark Beazley.
On The Boy and the Tree, Susumu Yokata continues the trajectory of ambient albums formed by Sakura and Grinning Cat. Like Sakura, The Boy and the Tree is gentle and buoyant, but for the most part Yokata leaves guitars behind for odder instrumentation — plinks, clacks, gurgles, gongs, and bells. The result, especially on tracks like “Live Echo,” sounds like Brian Eno crossed with the ancient and pastoral. “Fairy Link” dances through a dreamy repetition until it floats into even less grounded territory, “Secret Garden” employs hushed, indiscernible vocals that suggest some magical twilight realm, and “Red Swan” finds an exotic, sparkling Middle Eastern groove. “Thread Leads to Heaven,” possibly the best track on…
The Patterns Lost to Air is Marielle V Jakobsons‘ first solo album in a decade, though she’s collaborated with guitarist Chuck Johnson in the duo Saariselka. The album was recorded in a studio she built in Oakland, California, and its sonic palette consists of violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch. It marks Jakobsons’ intentional shift from drone-based music to harmonic composition, utilizing her classical training. The release is a reflection on renewal and loss, informed by a long-term case of the COVID-19 virus. Jakobsons’ music has always sounded warm, immersive, and exquisite, but this is her richest, most melodic, and most sonically detailed work to date.
Opener “Warm Spring” is an inviting blend of rippling synths, chiming Rhodes keys,…
After building momentum over a few years of local shows and an international tour, Hong Kong shoegaze quintet Lucid Express returns with their second album, Instant Comfort. Blurrier and less glossy than their 2021 debut, the new record is situated at the sweet spot of screwed-down dream pop, ethereal vocals draped over lush guitars and synths, with a few tense, discordant edges.
Instant Comfort was recorded in the band’s studio, an island within an island, perched in an industrial district outside central Hong Kong, with views of both skyscrapers and the Chinese border. It’s a sanctuary from the grinding realities of the city, and their music likewise plays like a delicate and immersive retreat, a space that feels temporarily above reality. Vocalist Kim Ho’s…
A lot can change during the fraught time between when a musician finishes recording an album and when it’s released, often months later, per a label’s schedule. For Mirah, everything changed. In the summer of 2018, two weeks before her sixth album, Understanding, came out, the indie rock songwriter lost her beloved father. Four months after that, she gave birth to a son. A year after that, she attempted to resume life as a touring musician, only for the pandemic to nix her plans and intensify her postpartum anxiety.
All this heavy stuff — death, birth, grief, joy, “the whole turn of the earth,” as she sings on “The Beginning of Time” — beats inside the impossibly tender heart of Dedication, Mirah’s first album in seven years, a lifetime of change.
…Vocalist Rae Haas got the idea to name their band MX LONELY because that’s the nickname they gave the shadowy figure that would appear during their bouts of sleep paralysis. The Brooklyn band’s debut full-length All Monsters arrives this Friday, and it’s a comprehensive introduction: The album’s eight songs signal the band’s reverence of ‘80s indie rock, contemporary noise rock, and all the pedal-loving guitar bands they bonded over when they first met in Alcoholics Anonymous just ahead of the pandemic.
With a lot of its lyrics rooted in the Jugnian practice of shadow work — achieving self-acceptance by prodding at the more shameful, suppressed facets of our personalities — All Monsters, like Shelley, argues that monsters are more…
My Days of 58 is the eighth Bill Callahan album, his first since 2022. The twelve tunes here open uncanny depths of expression as Bill continues to blaze one of the most original songwriting-and-performance trails out there. With My Days of 58, he applies the living, breathing energies of his live shows to the studio process, sharpening his slice-of-life portraiture to cut deeper than ever before.
The core musicians featured on My Days of 58 is the group that toured for 2022’s Reality: guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White, whose synergy was evident in 2024’s live Resuscitate!. This showed Bill, as he puts it, “that they could handle anything I threw at them,” adding:
“Improv/unpredictability/the unknown is the…
…features five new bonus tracks.
Coming off an extended three-year hiatus, the Neighbourhood deliver a hushed yet hooky fifth album with 2025’s Ultrasound. The LP is the group’s first since 2020’s Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones and finds them moving away from that previous production’s glittery, conceptual sci-fi David Bowie intimations and back toward the shadowy alt-pop of their early years.
Notably, it finds them reunited with producer Justyn Pilbrow, who helmed 2013’s I Love You. and 2015’s Wiped Out!, as well as Jono Dorr, who contributed to the band’s 2014 mixtape #000000 & #FFFFFF. Consequently, many of the tracks have a soft, dreamy quality, recalling the late-night beach party melancholy of the group’s early…
Third Man Records have released the first-ever live anthology from Ann Arbor, MI–based noise rock legends Laughing Hyenas.
That Girl – Live Recordings 1986–1994 collects 18 ferocious tracks, painstakingly compiled by founding member John Brannon from his personal archive of cassette tapes, then transferred, mixed, and mastered by Grammy® Award–winning producer Bobby Emmett (known for his work with Sturgill Simpson, Jack White, and The Sights).
The collection captures the band’s full-on sonic groove assault in its purest, most unadulterated, and gloriously abrasive form. Highlights include such hard-hitting classics as “Here We Go Again,” recorded live for NYC’s famed WNYU in 1990.
If ever a band deserved an LP of live material…
We last encountered Midori Hirano in the company of a pair of Berlin electronic improvisers, noting that “A grounding cadence of piano arpeggios, a tremulous wash of strings, the fluting pulse of synthesizers, Berlin experimental artists Sebastian and Daniel Selke (“the brothers”) and Midori Hirano mix together organic and electronic sounds in this meditation on the scale.”
Here the Berlin-based artist — who trained on classical piano but has more recently shifted to analog and modular synths — revisits the spare, searching aesthetic on her own, mostly on synthethic keyboards but also on piano.
On the synthy side, consider the purity of “Before the Silence,” as it negotiates a brief but luminous keyboard riff. It rolls like a wheel,…
Peaches is primarily known as a purveyor of transgressive, sex positive anthems that have no room for shame whatsoever. This is just as it should be, although her music might not be for the easily offended, and her seventh album is not only one of her best, but possibly her most audacious too.
No Lube So Rude is packed with hardcore punk attitude, biting sarcasm, raw electroclash grooves and is blatantly sexually explicit throughout. Seemingly, as she stares down the barrel of her sixties, Merrill Nisker feels no need to veer towards the middle of the road, declaring herself “a horny little fucker and I’ll bring you to your knees” on “Fuck Your Face” and “a woman in control of all her holes” on “Panna Cotta Delight”…
In order to escape the world’s pressures, Moby often finds refuge in ambient and neo-classical music, and Future Quiet is one of several ventures into such territory. It isn’t the type of extended meditation session he reserves for his lengthy ambient releases, instead coming a bit closer to his orchestral releases on Deutsche Grammophon.
The album begins by revisiting “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die,” the elegiac closing number to Everything Is Wrong that gained a new audience after it soundtracked particularly emotional moments during three seasons of Stranger Things. Jacob Lusk of Gabriels stays faithful to the Mimi Goese-sung original, if anything making the song sound more intimate and sacred. Two songs from the previous Moby album,…
Getting so obsessed with a band that you book a local show just to see them play — we need more freaks like that in the world, and that’s what Merge Records’ Mike Krol did this spring when he put together a bill featuring himself, Shannon Shaw’s new group Voilà!, and this not-so-known New Orleans duo Twisted Teens, Krol’s recent fixation, here in Los Angeles. “I blasted it in the car at night with the windows down, tracked down records, mailordered merch like I was 16, and all of a sudden I felt excited about THE CREATION OF MUSIC again,” he wrote on Instagram. “I couldn’t believe a band I didn’t even know existed at the beginning of this year made — quite possibly — my favorite record of the past 2 decades.” Amen, Mike. This shit tears.
Violin is a site of adventure for Darragh Morgan. The Irish violinist performs compositions that unite the instrument’s sweet acoustic timbre with electronics, enhancing and warping its sound. His 2017 record, For Violin and Electronics, first presented this interest through six icy meditations. On For Violin and Electronics II, he follows that experiment with nine more pieces that showcase the versatility of this instrumentation through the eyes of nine different composers.
Uniting strings and electronics isn’t a new concept, but it’s one that continues to offer plenty of leeway for expanding the possible textures and timbres of age-old instruments like the violin. Groundbreaking works like Steve Reich’s Violin Phase, for example, brought the potential of…
Six years after his Grammy-nominated LP5, Sascha Ring – aka Apparat – takes a bold dive into the complexities of life with his sixth studio album.
A Hum of Maybe is detailed, finely crafted, and wonderfully unpredictable. At its core, the record is about love – for himself, his wife, and his daughter – and holding onto it, protecting it, and constantly recalibrating as it is in a constant state of flux. As the title suggests, the songs explore being stuck in between: not a clear yes or no, but A Hum Of Maybe.
Ring elegantly combines the perspectives of an electronic producer and a classical composer, working closely with long-time collaborators Philipp Johann Thimm (cello, piano, guitar) – who also co-wrote and co-produced the record…
Labeling any music as spiritual can play as a (fiery) double-edged sword for any artist involved, and if that is your debut full-length album, like is the case with Brooklyn’s multi-media artist AnAkA, and her album Crisis of the Concrete, those edges just might get a bit sharper, and those edges might spew just a bit more fire either way.
Of course, that spiritual element that the artist might be trying to evoke could have more or less openly religious content (less in AnAkA case here), and it can involve a number of musical elements and/or genres, and AnAkA certainly goes that multi-genre route here. Very often, the best music with that spiritual element was done with quite a few jazz elements, and AnAkA certainly doesn’t shy away from bringing them in,…
