There’s something about trees and storms in Iti Eta No. Heimat’s third album is an exploration of collage and landscape – not just the physical landscape of the French countryside where Olivier Demeaux (Cheveu, Accident du Travail) and Armelle Oberlé (The Dreams, Badaboum) moved after lockdown, but it’s visceral, emotional imprint. A violent storm left trees scattered across the road, and that image inspired the atmosphere of Iti Eta No. Heimat’s early records were a deliberate exploration of ‘Eastern’ tonalities, but Iti Eta No sees the group moving away from that kind of orientalist imagery. It feels more refined, like deviant pop made dance-floor accessible thanks to Krikor Kouchian’s (L.I.E.S, I’m a Cliche) mastering. There is a distinct sense of…
Category: indie
30th anniversary remaster. Included is a second disc with 7 bonus tracks from the era, some unreleased, some remixes and reinterpretations.
It’s been observed that while the bleeding edge of what’s cool continues onward, there are always plenty of people still exploring styles long deemed outdated, sometimes finding something new and exciting as a result. Such is the case with Pittsburgh’s Lowsunday, led by open fan of ’80s British post-punk rock Shane Sahene. Drawing inspiration from such pioneers of emotional, thrilling music as the Sound, Bauhaus, the Chameleons, and Echo and the Bunnymen, vocalist/guitarist Sahene originally formed and led the group in the mid-’90s as a quintet called Low Sunday Ghost Machine.
Making a choice among artists who create ambient music veering into modern classical is becoming harder by the day. It is becoming hard sifting through hours of music and finding the ones that don’t end up into a musical wallpaper territory, the ones that keep up in both quality and emotional intensity.
That list is quite rarified these days, but you can easily add Southend-on-Sea visual artist and musician Adrian Lane and his latest album Their Ghosts and Ours to it.
Lane, who has been releasing music since 2013 on various independent labels, is among those who combine acoustic sources with electronic/computer-generated embellishments, something that has been done a lot these days.
After over 600 gigs, London based brother-and-sister duo The Molotovs have finally released their debut album. It’s fair to say that for a band so aligned with punk, Wasted On Youth is much more of a hark back to Britpop and 2010s indie rock, but despite a slight lack of self-awareness, it is studded with promise.
Indie cursive singing is a bold move, and one that has attracted a lot of attention on social media in recent years by millennials cringing at their youth. There’s an extremely thin line between The Kooks asking the ironically iconic “do you want to go to the seaside?” and Arctic Monkeys presenting the timeless introduction “I said who’s that girl there?”, but it’s very clear which side of that line you want to be on. Unfortunately, it would…
The Rifles have been making waves on the indie-rock scene since their debut album release in the summer of 2006, ‘No Love Lost’. Like many before them, members of the band found themselves compelled to form a band after seeing Oasis perform. This influence is noticeable throughout their previous releases without falling into the often tripped trap of Oasis-Mimicry, the group instead keeps an interest in an over-saturated genre through a healthy dose of New Romantic ideology mixed into a more classic indie high impact rhythm.
In the last 10 years since the the band shared their first release, The Rifles have honed their art and formed a dedicated fan base, and now as a gift to these fans we look at the last decades worth of material and reimagined both the hits…
Throughout 2024, the Swedish duo Club 8 released a single a month, then gathered them up on an enchanting record titled A Year with Club 8. The idea was such a good one that they did the same thing in 2025.
This time the resulting album was titled Seasonal Echoes and it finds them walking a similar path of warmly melancholic indie pop spiced with the occasional burst of noise pop and a wistful ballad or two. This is the kind of music Johan Angergård and Karolina Komstedt were seemingly born to make, and it should heat the hearts of pop lovers both vintage and newly minted to hear them still making music this sweetly real. As always, Angergård constructs perfect pop miniatures for Komstedt’s lilting voice;…
Syd dePalma’s Paris is dreamlike. Echoes abound, sculpting recognizable rock, folk, and pop stylings into imaginative new shapes. As he plays with light and shadow, the borders between fantasy and reality blur. The familiar soars. An eerie melancholy fills even the most straightforward of dePalma’s melodies, a desperation buried deep in the foundation of every line he sings. The lyrics are uncanny, the sounds constantly shifting. Only two years out from debut, El Lugar de Arder, Paris is a ferocious next step for dePalma, one that radiates surreal energy.
Vivid imagery abounds: of body parts, desire, tears, the sky, the ground, the city, the country. As lead singer on almost all tracks, dePalma makes for a compelling guide to his uncanny world.
Five years after releasing Twelve of Hearts, Daniel O’Sullivan reconvenes with Richard Youngs for another intense minimalist meditation.
On their debut collaborative album, Youngs and O’Sullivan used a single chord progression to distill various pop idioms into twelve succinct tracks. And they try something completely different on Persian Carpets, a blissful, longform experiment that’ll be more familiar to anyone who’s been keeping up with Youngs’ Black Truffle sides. Youngs plays zither here, following O’Sullivan’s trance-inducing piano repetitions that recall his collaborations with the great Charlemagne Palestine. But it’s not only repetition that drives ‘Persian Carpets I’. O’Sullivan varies his phrases by altering the dynamics as he plays, creating waves of noise…
…2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track ‘Sacrificial Code III’.
The first and only time that Kali Malone sat down for a lesson on the pipe organ, she managed about five minutes at the console before begging her teacher to take her inside the belly of the beast. That desire is borne out in her music: Listening to her expansive, slowly moving compositions, which bristle with dazzling arrays of layered waveforms, you feel like you are not just inside the organ — pressed against its pipes, vibrations coursing through your body, air whisking over your skin — but enveloped in the sound itself. The simplest interval might throb like an outboard engine, every new chord triggering wave after rippling wave of beating effects, vibrations as…
Music from Memory presents Aquáticos, a collaboration between Los Angeles producer Eddie Ruscha (aka E Ruscha V / Secret Circuit) and Brazilian guitarist Fabiano Do Nascimento. Blending Nascimento’s expressive, Afro-samba- and choro-inflected guitar with Ruscha’s cosmic, groove-driven sound, Aquáticos marks the start of a vibrant musical partnership — an organic, free-spirited collaboration full of interplay and vitality.
Conceived during the early 2020’s, Aquáticos grew from a series of recording sessions in which the music unfolded naturally, in a state of effortless flow. Album opener ‘Nascer,’ the very first piece they recorded, captures such a moment perfectly: Nascimento’s 7- and 10-string nylon guitars weave seamlessly with Ruscha’s modular synths,…
If the latest offering from Bird Streets (the alter ego of John Brodeur) sounds a little paranoid and isolating, you can chalk that up to the global pandemic. Four years in the making, much of The Escape Artist, the third effort from Bird Streets, was written and recorded during the lost COVID years, where uncertainty was a running theme in everyone’s lives.
As the restrictions finally started to loosen in 2021, Brodeur met up with his longtime collaborator and producer, Jason Falkner (Jellyfish), to start recording what he had. The die is cast from the first moment of the opening song, “Bedhead,” where Brodeur sings “Another gray December morning fell upon my head” over a lonely acoustic guitar, before an even more maudlin violin…
Since leaving Dutch band The Ex, GW Sok – real name Jos Kleij – has spent the last two decades channelling his muse through various projects. His dry wit and often caustic worldview can be heard in collaborations with Oiseaux-Tempête, Lukas Simonis, and King Champion Sounds, to name a handful. The GW in his stage name stands for geitenwollen, and here geitenwollen sok, or sokken (‘goats wool socks’) are the Dutch equivalent of the hair shirt, or the socks with sandals brigade. An implied morality Sok has been happy to subvert this past forty-odd years.
Sok’s new collaboration, Sopa Boba, with dramaturg Jean Vangeebergen and musician Pavel Tchikov, is something else again. In the project’s record, That Moment, Sok narrates…
House, techno, and garage were respectively invented in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, but the U.K. embraced them and took underground club sounds into the pop charts during the 1980s and ’90s. Burn It Up: The Rise of British Dance Music 1986-1991 explores some of the many developments that took place during the era, from the U.K.’s first attempts at acid house to early rave anthems. Like other Cherry Red anthologies, this one casts a wide net and tries to tell a comprehensive history of its subject, making room for established classics as well as rarities, curiosities, and inclusions that might be kind of a stretch, but hear them out anyway.
The collection starts with Coldcut’s “Beats + Pieces (Mo Bass Remix),” representing…
Imagine you were a collector of folk songs in 1970s Kyiv, a student at the Conservatory, and a member of the Leninist Youth League (obligatory if you wanted easier access to higher ed). Coming back from weekend expeditions to rural villages, you would deposit your field recordings in the archive, but not before you edited them — excising references to gods, Christian or otherwise, or songs too tragic for the Communist Party, which expected optimism from the folk. Composers in the Conservatory might draw from your collections and adapt them for the saccharine folklore ensembles sponsored by the Soviet state.
Imagine you wanted to sing like the women you heard in the village, with the full gritty materiality of your body, even though…
Tight and Loose is an artifact of a time before San Francisco became a bedroom community for the tech empires. Back in the late 1980s, it was still possible for people living there to work in record stores and other non-advancement enterprises to invest their time in creative endeavors that mocked the notion of redeeming values. World of Pooh was one such endeavor.
The band comprised Barbara Manning (voice, guitar, bass), Brandan Kearney (voice, guitar) and Jay Paget (drums). While it was considerably closer to conventional rock ’n’ roll than many of the other combos its members played in (Caroliner, Archipeligo Brewing Co., Glands of External Secretion), World of Pooh was no one’s ladder for pop success. Therein lies some of…
European Sun came together when musician/writer Steve Miles met U.K. indie pop stalwart Rob Pursey (of Heavenly, Tender Trap, the Catenary Wires, etc.) through a mutual musician friend. With Miles on lead vocals and guitar, and backed by Pursey and his frequent bandmates Amelia Fletcher and drummer Ian Button, they launched European Sun with an eponymous album in 2020. It showcased Miles’ anxiously observant, underdog-minded spoke-sung lyrics within a tuneful, D.I.Y indie pop setting. With the vocally kindred Elin Miles stepping in for Fletcher on backing vocals, their second album, When Britain Was Great, sees Miles let loose more as a writer, with confessional songs full of observant social commentary, pop culture references, and timidity.
Has the singer-songwriter categorization, as a genre, lost its meaning? If you think of it solely in the sense of its origins (a solo artist with an acoustic instrument, such as an acoustic guitar or piano), it surely has. In response to this, many modern artists categorized as singer-songwriters defy the genre’s original definition. They achieve this by incorporating diverse musical elements and combining them with a wide array of instrumentation and arrangements.
Listening to Kira Metcalf’s latest album, Lessons in Majestic Humiliation, you can conclude that she is sticking to both the old and new concepts of the singer-songwriter genre musically. At the same time, lyrically, she sees no boundaries, with darker overtones leading the way.
While many of us are bundling against the elements, cursing an abundance of cold, we pause to remember that a year ago a hotter weather event was unfolding in Southern California. The initial warnings called the combination of accumulated drought and fierce wind “a particularly dangerous situation.” On January 7, the first plumes of smoke appeared. Ian Wellman was there, using his field recording equipment to document the sounds of the Santa Ana winds. As the day went on, he began to smell the smoke; he saw the moon turn crimson as ash accumulated on his clothes. When he returned home, he had begun to realize the extent of what was unfolding. The Palisades and Eaton fires would burn throughout the month, demolishing 180,000 structures,…