CBGB’s was the center of the N.Y.C. punk explosion, as well as a welcoming place to play for all the artists and bands who followed in the wake. CBGB: A New York City Soundtrack 1975-1986 is a four-disc set that seeks to paint a picture of the original scene as it burst out into the open as well as detailing the various sounds and movements, like no wave and hardcore, that were born in the ensuing years. All the groups one would hope for are here, represented by slightly deeper cuts — Talking Heads’ sprightly live version of “A Clean Break” for one — along with a ton of lesser-known bands and a healthy dose of super-obscure ones. It’s the kind of collection where even someone with a healthy knowledge of the scene will be constantly surprised. One surprise element…
Category: indie
a nothing / a void is an album of “fragments, detours and half-formed ideas” that coalesce into a whole – even if this is not the composer’s intent. Asher Fusco (St. Catherine’s) is more interested in texture than in form, process than in result; yet the mind’s tendency toward pareidolia places the puzzle pieces together, from frame to interlocking fragment. The album is incredibly homespun, recorded on the banks of the Delaware River, on a porch in Saugerties, New York and at the artist’s home in Brooklyn. In deference to its title, a nothing / a void feels like a solid something, operating as a sonic diary of snapshots and intimate moments, occasionally reminiscent of Philadelphia’s Hour but touching on the pointillist leanings of ’80s micro-electronics as well.
Caitlin & Brent don’t initially sound like a natural pairing. Singer-songwriter Caitlin Sherman released her debut, sure-to-be-breakthrough album Death to the Damsel in early 2020, just in time for the world to shut down and her career to go sideways. A dark, artsy record between pop and Americana, the album wasn’t fit for its time and didn’t get the attention it warranted.
Brent Amaker has been playing with his band, the Rodeo, for 20 years. He sings with a deep baritone, and it’s hard to tell just how much of the act is tongue-in-cheek. The band plays strong country & western music (heavy on the western), but the whole project has the feel of performance art. Amaker’s greatest strength might lie in merging his authentic country music with…
Ty Segall’s 2016 Emotional Mugger Tour was a blistering assault of psychedelic surrealism. The power derived from the multiple-guitar, six person set-up of Mikal Cronin, King Tuff (Kyle Thomas), Emmett Kelly, and Wand’s Cory Hanson and Evan Burrows. The surrealism came in when Segall donned a baby’s mask, filtering his rock star persona through a shroud of carnivalesque disguise. When the band turned up at Mark Riley’s BBC recording studio, they had already logged 50 shows. It was mayhem — how could it not be? — but finely tuned.
This five song EP revisits the glorious abandon of that mid-teens iteration of Segall’s art. It delivers four songs from Emotional Mugger, plus a rabid but abbreviated run-through of…
Kiss Big is an album about the end of a long-term relationship (classic, really) and the disorienting aftermath of losing the person you built a life around. It explores feeling untethered from them, yourself, who you thought you were and the world. As well as how, with time, everything rearranges and restarts. The cyclical nature of love and endings. The way we keep beginning again, regardless of how we say we won’t.
Ailbhe Reddy is a Dublin-born songwriter whose music captures the quiet intensity of life’s in-between moments. Her third album Kiss Big is a breakup record – but not in the traditional sense. It explores what happens after the fallout: the numbness, the confusion, the brief flashes of clarity. How identity slips, rearranges…
A journey through the musical life of Gary Young, the subject of the SXSW-winning documentary Louder Than You Think and the wild polymath best known as the original drummer for indie royalty Pavement: from early hardcore punk and post-punk recordings to the merry chaos of Hospital, whose ‘Plant Man’ ended up being an improbable MTV favorite.
Original music created by Noah Georgeson and Edward W. Dahl is presented alongside ultra-rare Pavement live tracks and something quite special: a Gary Young-penned oddity that Gary’s old friend Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg turned into a suitably trippy musical track (spiced with some Stephen Malkmus feedback yowls), recorded for the movie shortly before Gary’s passing in August 2023.
Puscifer, one of the music projects helmed by Tool/A Perfect Circle main man Maynard James Keenan, has big plans for 2026, with a new studio album and tour lined up for the months ahead. Titled Normal Isn’t, it is the group’s first record since 2020’s Existential Reckoning.
Written and recorded across Arizona, Los Angeles, and on the road during last year’s Sessanta tour, Normal Isn’t blends the dark electronics and sharp humor Puscifer is known for with a more spontaneous creative process. “From the outset, we had discussed an element of rawness and edge, which guitar brings,” shares Mitchell, who co-produced the album. “We got rid of the guard rails and made the music more aggressive.”
For Keenan, this release represents a new…
Geologist is the nom-de-théâtre of Brian Weitz, whose pursuits have been an active part of the music underground since since he was 15, playing and working in alignment with an organic ensemble of friends that would one day choose to call what they were doing Animal Collective. Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? migrates from that tradition, containing a number of surprise affects of its own. #1 is that it is the first-ever proper Geologist solo album! For real. Surprise #2 is its pursuit of a musical answer to the not-oft-enuf-ast question: what if, back in the 80s, Ethan James had made a hurdy gurdy album for SST?
Geologist’s affirmative answer to the question begins with another question — Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?.
Lia Braswell’s Rising is forceful and expressive. Each song sounds an individual statement without there being any real sonic outliers (or weak points, for that matter) in the bunch. This makes for an intense listen, but a rich and engaging one too. The musical backbone is a relentless dance rock, mixing the thundering beats and assertive electronics of Pet Shop Boys or the Eurythmics with the breakneck, organic rush of Florence + The Machine and the complex, artful freedom of Wye Oak.
“Out of Sight” belongs to the 1980s, with a thudding, dead-eyed beat, glancing, urgent bleeps, and big burns of synthesizer that curl into a spacious instrumental bridge. “One Too Many” is another for the Less Than Zero crowd with some Duran Duran menace programmed…
Toad the Wet Sprocket has issued some intriguing anthologies over the years, including P.S. (A Toad Retrospective) and In Light Syrup, but it’s arguable that none are so fascinating as Rings: The Acoustic Sessions.
Anyone surprised by the appearance of this unorthodox album hasn’t been following the band closely over the years. Originally emerging in the late ’80s and achieving some measurable success in the next decade before its dissolution, the quartet subsequently regrouped frequently over the ensuing years on both the stage and the studio. A formal reunion in 2010 only reaffirmed the DIY idiosyncrasies the quartet worked so assiduously to establish at the outset of their existence, first independently, then on Columbia Records.
The press release for Pop Ambient 2026, the 26th installment of Kompakt Records’ influential ambient compilations, paraphrases Heraclitus, comparing ambient music to a river: “everything flows, nothing remains.” It’s an apt summation of what makes the Pop Ambient series such a compelling listen, even if it is mostly quiet, unobtrusive and unassuming.
Pop Ambient 2026 leans ever-so-slightly towards the “different” end of the ambient continuum, although you’d have to really lean in to notice. On its surface, Pop Ambient 2026 radiates the same pastoral, vaguely melancholic mood that has made the series such a mainstay for the past quarter-century, but there’s something more, a sense of the human wandering through the garden of machines. Take Segensklang’s “Schauer…
Electric Cowbell Records announces the launch of Richmond Relics, a new archival imprint dedicated to preserving the city’s musical history. Its inaugural release is a newly remastered reissue of FA3574, the sole album from Richmond, Virginia’s legendary supergroup Famous Actors From Out of Town. Originally self-released in 1986 as a limited-edition, cassette-only title, FA3574 was recorded at Floodzone, a repurposed tobacco warehouse studio in Richmond.
The album features ten original instrumental tracks that capture the group’s kinetic chemistry and their off-kilter blend of late-’70s/early-’80s art rock, jazz, noise, and improvisation. Nearly forty years later, the recordings remain strikingly vibrant. Now fully remastered for vinyl, FA3574…
Rock ‘n’ roll needs two things to be successful: a biting riff, and a playful groove. It’s what distinguishes The Rolling Stones from The Animals, The Jam from AC/DC and The Stone Roses from Oasis. The responsibility is shared between the lead guitarist and those following in the rhythm section. It’s not enough to rock, you also have to roll. Luckily, Hot Face have got the mixture right on their biting debut Automated Response: a bracing, unabashed thrill ride with as much emphasis on the bass grooves as the power-charged electric guitars. Combine the giddy impishness of Ash’s 1977 and the savage, carnal energy from The Who’s A Quick One, While He’s Away, and this is probably the album you’ll get.
Emotionally coiled guitars cement “Liar”, aided…
…Remastered by Bob Weston.
Having fully made their case with Venus Luxure, Girls Against Boys kept on course with the equally fine Cruise Yourself. The hints of lounge and Vegas were even more explicit here — the cocktail artwork on the CD, the fact that one particularly bitter number is called “My Martini.” Again, though, these weren’t the gauche clichés of characters like Combustible Edison, but signposts of a vicious, cutting quality in lyrics and music. McCloud’s purring rasp again serves as one of the band’s chief qualities, perfectly suited to the sassy, snarling burn of songs like “Cruise Your New Baby Fly Self” and “The Royal Lowdown.” Though backing vocals aren’t specifically credited, it’s Janney adding the high parts here and there,…
James Walsh’s It’s All Happening is a masterclass in quiet intensity. The Starsailor frontman has always had a knack for turning fragile and thoughtful moments into rousing anthems for the band. With his latest solo offering, he strips everything back to raw emotion – stripped of spectacle, It’s All Happening is Walsh at his most intimate: tender, precise, and quietly electrifying.
Every track feels lived-in, the kind of songs that could only come from someone with James’ songwriting pedigree. Following 2023’s Coming Good, Walsh continues his reflective solo journey, exploring love, heartbreak, and the empowering triumphs of self-discovery.
Written, produced, and performed by James, the album flourishes in its restraint.
A common theme through The Soft Pink Truth’s records of the 2020s is music’s ability to build sanctuaries. As the world’s got harsher, SPT’s albums have got lusher.
2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, recorded during the first Trump presidency, saw the project, led by Matmos’s Drew Daniel, blur propulsive deep house into velvety minimal composition. 2022’s Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?, made during pandemic lockdown, is a glimmering electro-orchestral record played by a ‘fourteen-piece virtual disco band’. Latest album Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? meanwhile, is a suite of largely drum-less chamber music played on harps, pianos, acoustic guitar and strings.
Pop iconoclast A. G. Cook has been the spearhead of a shift in mainstream music throughout the past decade. His (now defunct) label, the seminal PC Music, disrupted the DNA of pop music, the first domino to fall in the emergence of dozens of internet micro-genres. The Moment (The Score) marks Cook’s first solo effort since 2024’s Britpop, a post-PC Music triple disc of shiny digitised, almost indie, tracks. That record came with a multiverse of characters, timelines, even online games and bonus downloads. Like with his time at the helm of PC, Cook is surgical and intrinsic, managing to construct and curate worlds even with the most dizzying or abrasive of material.
Scoring a film is the natural step forward for someone like Cook. It’s also a surgical and…
Ben Cook, the pilot behind the controls for Young Guv, now known as GUV, has never shied away from trying his hand at a musical style. Previous works found him digging into new wave, country rock, glam, chillwave, and most impressively power pop. No matter the style his unerring way with a melody, his note-prefect production skills, and overall way with a song has mean that every record he’s made has been well worth hearing, and even sometimes bordering on brilliant.
For 2026’s Warmer Than Gold Cook swerves into the sound of the U.K. guitar rock scene of the first half of the 1990s. Taking inspiration from the Stone Roses — most notably “Fool’s Gold” — along with My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, and other paragons of baggy, shoegaze,…