Not to be confused with Stranger Things: The WSQK Collection — a fun, in-world treat from the same season — this official soundtrack for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things includes much of the same that fans have come to expect: beloved classics and forgotten throwbacks that tie neatly into the plot of the show. While there’s no big “Running Up That Hill” moment here, the mixtape feel of the track selections makes it a decent compilation. One can imagine — if one is old enough — sitting in front of a boombox with the pause and record buttons compressed, waiting for just the right moment to bridge an early Michael Jackson gem with a Tiffany smash hit. Meanwhile, ABBA, Bowie, and Iron Maiden weave seamlessly with Pixies, Butthole Surfers,…
Category: indie
The pearl of Aotearoa, Bic Runga, returns with her sixth album Red Sunset, an aesthetic blend of the familiar with a lively, blossoming charge.
In the decade since her last album, the largely covers project Close Your Eyes, and the 15 years since her last album of all original songs, Belle, Runga has expanded her indie-pop palette even further. The subtle electronics, old-school R&B, and French exotica first introduced on Belle are now joined by elements of gritty, lo-fi funk, nu-disco polish, and bedroom synth pop, adding up to a greater depth of sound that feels recognisably hers, yet slightly alien in an appealing way.
Returning to Paris – the city that birthed her stellar 2005 album Birds – inspired Runga and her partner Kody Nielson to start work on…
To parse the logic of Sex Mad, one must first inhabit the isolation of 1985 Victoria, British Columbia: a provincial capital where middle-class security doubled as a picturesque cemetery for the newly wed and nearly dead. Here, as the looming artifice of Expo 86 threatened to modernize the coast, the Pacific horizon acted as a literal dead-end and the Wright brothers’ basement as a laboratory. While the global hardcore scene was calcifying into a thudding caricature – The Exploited’s gurning pantomime merging with the metal-hocked bluster of the US crossover set – Rob and John Wright were busy deconstructing the very physics of the power trio.
When guitarist Andy Kerr completed the circuit, internal pressure reached a critical mass.
The Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi embraces the imperfections and transience of creation. A potter might express wabi-sabi through the art of kintsugi, the mending of broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with dust from precious metals. Raúl Sotomayor expresses his version of wabi-sabi on the latest album from Sotomayor, his duo with sister Paulina, which represents a shift from seeking perfection to pushing sonic boundaries. “When I started making music, I tried to make everything sound clean and proper,” he said in a recent documentary on his creative process. “Now it’s how much can we clip it or distort it, or how much can we stretch it and it’s still gonna sound good?” The result is a record both calculated and chaotic, crafted by artists who have…
Released by Houndstooth (the in-house record label of London nightclub Fabric) in partnership with Mastery-a London sound studio best known for putting on installations and live shows with a host of performers-Quantum Sound is billed as a record “for listening with eyes closed.” You can listen to each of the comp’s 12 tracks in its entirety or, for maximum transcendence, an hour-long continuous mix crafted by composer and club supremo Hannah Holland, who also contributes two excellent productions of her own. The vinyl even comes with an eye mask if you buy it from Fabric’s website.
The air of peace and tranquility permeating this music is to be expected. But it comes from several unlikely sources, author and TV personality…
A powerful new archival release from the legendary experimental project Muslimgauze, titled Muslimlahore. This album continues the ongoing posthumous excavation of Bryn Jones’ vast and politically charged body of work, offering listeners a fresh immersion into his unique blend of ethnic electronica, dub, and tape-based soundscapes.
Muslimlahore presents a suite of tracks that reflect Muslimgauze’s enduring fascination with South Asian and Islamic themes, filtered through his signature style of layered percussion, field recordings, and hypnotic loops.
The album’s title evokes the city of Lahore in Pakistan, situating the music within a broader context of post-colonial identity, resistance, and cultural memory.
femtanyl’s method for cover art involves doing an illustration and then using a phone to take a picture of it on the computer screen, spawning cruddy little Moiré pattern grids. It’s a good analog for femtanyl’s digital hardcore music: bitcrushed, compressed, spewing and screaming to a doomsday drum thwack. But while the artwork — femtanyl’s trademark feline creature Token engulfed by flames — still teems with digital artifacts, the music on this debut album seems keen to transcend the screen. MAN BITES DOG might be at the laptop rave, but it’s thinking about body-bashing in a dank DIY venue.
Noelle Mansbridge is assisted here by Juno Callendar, who arrived as a live drummer and now plays multiple instruments and helps…
For years, Angel Du$t was Justice Tripp’s balmy reprieve from Trapped Under Ice. When he fronted the Baltimore hardcore band, he cursed out ice queens and swore he’d “stay cold forevermore” to protect his heart. These tormented songs were molded by the trauma and violence that Tripp endured during his hardscrabble upbringing. Angel Du$t’s 2014 debut, A.D., with its pink cover art and perky pop-punk sound, showed that he was learning to leave the past behind and warm up a bit. On subsequent Angel Du$t records, the music got even softer, the imagery cozier, and Tripp’s lyrics, which once focused almost solely on heartbreak and regret, became intoxicated by the fumes of romance (“Deep Love,” “Big Ass Love,” “Love Slam”) and rock’n’roll…
Is any chore more humbling than cleaning the refrigerator? Every few weeks, I cringe as I scrape up leftovers that never met the microwave and toss produce that never saw the stove. Philadelphia indie rockers Remember Sports have long documented mundane shames like this; their sophomore record All of Something ended with a song about washing blood out of bedsheets.
Their fifth, The Refrigerator, takes many more passes at the humiliating cycles of domesticity: shoes you tie that will come undone, food waste you forget and then-ew-rediscover. “Say that there’s more to life than cleaning up my room,” singer Carmen Perry belts and pleads on the fuzzy single “Bug,” a song in which she steps on a leftover chip from a bowl she ate days earlier.
Life feels a bit of a grind at the moment. Every news headline seems to suggest the world’s going to hell in a handcart, and rain has become an almost constant fixture during the early weeks of 2026.
So, as an antidote to indie navel gazing, here comes Brighton quartet Congratulations with a debut album that feels like a big day-glo shot of adrenaline. The four-piece have spent the last couple of years building a name for themselves as a band with a live show defined by chaotic energy – it’s not unusual to leave a Congratulations live show after witnessing frenetic ‘running on the spot’ dancing performed by a group in matching jumpsuits.
So can the frazzled, sweaty atmospherics of a Congratulations gig be accurately recreated…
Numero present ’90s shoegaze band Should’s ’98 debut ‘Feed Like Fishes’ + 10 period bonus tracks.
The folks in Phoenix’s Half String talked up this trio when they were Austin, TX’s shiFt (before they moved north to various universities and gave up their name because of another band called Shift). And it’s easy to see why: Should would have fit perfectly into Arizona’s former “beautiful noise,” post-dream pop scene.
Even without the interestingly sedate but grasping cover of the Wedding Present’s “Spangle” (and, on another record, 18th Dye’s “Merger”), their sound makes it apparent that they can match the English in pairing inventive, modern guitars to lulling tunes for nighttime singing. You could see “Sarah Missing” appearing on a Slowdive…
Like so many 20 year olds before him, Zion Battle found something transcendent in Joshua Tree National Park. Since age 16, Battle had been working towards becoming a musician, studying for a time at CalArts and New York’s The New School. Then, in 2024, he left behind his academic training to begin making music as Katzin, exploring a more intimate sound shaped by a healthy love for the bedroom dream pop of early Orchid Tapes releases and the fuzz of 1990s indie rock. He linked with friend and producer Max Morgen, and the duo temporarily decamped to California and set up a makeshift DIY studio near Joshua Tree to fine-tune Katzin’s debut.
The bright and sweet Buckaroo radiates sincerity. Battle’s biggest strength is his…
Vast, the fourth studio album from Vermont’s Wet Tuna to make its way to vinyl and first since 2022, presents a wide-screen slab of irreverent, playful psychedelia that could have only come from the hands / brain / interstellar groove telescope of Matt “MV” Valentine.
Over the course of ten tracks you are hit with slice after slice of pleasantly disorienting, secretly whip-tight rural funk that is truly out of time. One tune in you start to feel gravity lighten your grip to the earth. By track three that lightness gives way to a distinct “when was this recorded?” vibe. 1960? 2170? 2280? By jam ten you’ve been so soaked in the aura that you no longer care as you know that you are here now. Where else have you ever been? Or wanted to be?
Live at Nelsonica & Clothworkers Hall – this is the first ever released recording of this unique trio comprising of: Bill Nelson (Be Bop Deluxe/Red Noise), Theo Travis (Soft Machine/Robert Fripp/Steven Wilson), Dave Sturt (Gong/Jade Warrior).
The trio performed various concerts between 2009 and 2019 often as part of Bill Nelson’s ‘Nelsonica’ conventions. Following years of planning and preparation, this album consists of live recordings made by the trio in 2011, 2012 and 2018 from 3 concerts in Leeds and York.
The music, a broad sound palette from ambient soundscapes, to rocky workouts and ethereal mood painting was improvised over loosely prepared structures. with occasional use of backing…
In a musical landscape where the ‘indie pop’ label frequently masks a lack of melodic ambition and a reliance on tired tropes and recycled aesthetics, The Would-be-goods remind us that the genre can and should be a vehicle for high art. Their latest offering, Tears Before Bedtime, arriving this February via Skep Wax Records, is more than just a collection of songs; it is a curated gallery of human experience, painted with the finest brushes of wit, melancholy, and cinematic flair.
Jessica Griffin, the visionary behind this long-running project, remains one of pop’s most literate and idiosyncratic voices. Nearly four decades after the cult success of ‘The Camera Loves Me’ (Él, 1988), she continues to operate in a league of her own, blending the refined elegance…
On their 2013 debut and 2015’s Then Came the Morning, The Lone Bellow sounded like the new darlings of the Americana movement, blending blues, country, bluegrass, and roots rock with energy, smarts, and unpretentious sophistication. With 2020’s Half Moon Light and 2022’s Love Songs for Losers, they shifted gears, adopting more ambitious production and aiming for a sound that was more strongly informed by indie rock and adult alternative acts.
Clearly this is a group with no fear of changing lanes, and for 2026’s What a Time to Be Alive, the Lone Bellow take another detour, only this time they’ve split the difference between their rootsy and indie inclinations. The recording of the album was unexpectedly eventful — the band’s…
John Beltran is Detroit techno’s foremost daydreamer. His first albums under his own name, 1995’s Earth & Nightfall and 1996’s cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers. By 1997’s The Cry, the first album released under his Placid Angles moniker, Beltran had drifted even further into new-age sounds, the beats dislodging themselves and seemingly hanging in mid-air.
As the next generation of electronic musicians, including Four Tet and Skee Mask, absorbed…
Dominik Felsmann and Patrick Tiley have made hard trance records together under a handful of different names since 2003. For their eponymous project, they’ve shifted to a drum-free, cinematic form of music with more of a neo-classical and progressive electronic inspiration, as well as a retro-futuristic synthwave sheen. After issuing their debut album as Felsmann + Tiley in 2018, the duo went viral with their haunting reinterpretation of M83’s “Solitude.” They went on to rework songs by Moby, Muse, and the Irrepressibles, in addition to releasing two EPs and a few singles. The pair spent several years envisioning ambitious, immersive live performances in seated venues, filled with lights and animated visuals. Protomensch, the act’s first album since signing with Mute,…