On his previous album 2022’s Avatars of Love, Sondre Lerche hit on a sound that really worked for him. Super sophisticated with loads of strings, smooth textures, and intricate instrumentation, the backing was perfect for his wistful tales of love and heartache. It was such a perfect amalgam of sound, emotion, and performance that it makes sense that for his next album Lerche would want to keep things roughly the same.
2026’s Acrobats brings back the strings and smoothness, as well the pristine arrangements that frame the songs, sometime with sensitive grace, other times with almost bombastic power. It’s a bit of a shift from Avatars of Love in that the songs and sound are a little more insistent. “Drive Me Away From You” is strident and pulsing…
Category: indie
…a digital deluxe edition of the album with three bonus tracks.
The U.K. band Wolf Alice have been making eclectic pop-rock for a decade, specializing in textural music that swings big emotionally while moving within different sonic settings, proving what a guitar band can do to stay on its game in a post-guitar world. They’ve never put it together with the sweep and depth of their fourth album, The Clearing, steeped in classic Seventies and Eighties influences yet never feeling like they’re just firing up a playlist of old bangers.
Singer-guitarist Ellie Rowsell goes all-in on huge rockers while delivering serious personal impact on this album’s softer stock-taking moments. Musically, they’re sharp as ever.
Art is rarely as orderly as a gallery — or a rock album, for that matter. Even when restraint is involved, even when it’s finished, shit’s all over the place in the studio. That’s kind of the point, really: There’s always a bit of chaos in getting the ideas down. Tyondai Braxton understands this. Those who existed, perhaps lived through the late 2000s, recall his stint as frontman of experimental wunderkinds Battles. But his path was never truly meant to be with a rock band, as the aftermath of his exit indicated. Rather, it was to revel in the discord of music in different forms through composition. He’s the type of guy who fits in more with collaborators Kronos Quartet and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma than, say, Grizzly Bear. Braxton was more at home with orchestras and museum…
On Melting Days, the tenth album by Lusine, Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain brings two decades of production experience to bear.
His particular brand of ambient electronica has a wonderfully tactile quality, juxtaposing warm surges of thickly textured synth against crisp rhythmic and melodic details. Counterbalancing the macro with the micro, there’s a sense of both suspension and subtle movement, simplicity on one level and complexity on another, which keeps these ten tracks immersive.
“Bird’s Eye” has a rapidly whirring clockwork intricacy to its bright arpeggiation, while its slow chord changes muster a feeling of humbling grandeur. “Apparition” conjures the radiant luster of Michigan trio Kiln, while the glitchy…
Who is GB? When Danish record label Posh Isolation called it quits in early 2025, one of the final records in its 16-year run was a mysterious album of savvy post-punk by an unidentified artist whose initials were scrawled in blue across its cover, with very little other identifying information. GB later turned up in The Guardian’s profile of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory — the educational institution that has attracted recent media attention for producing renowned graduates including ML Buch, Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne, Smerz, Molina, and Clarissa Connelly — and was later revealed to be one Gustav Berntsen, a recent graduate of the program who has been active in Copenhagen for many years.
As frontman for the band Pardans, he’s…
Finding glimpses of joy is very much the theme of Mystery Jets’ seventh album, A Hole to See the Sky Through. Across – for example – the title track, and ‘Godrays’, the indie stalwarts sing of “seeing a rainbow through the thunder” and someone who’ll “clear a hole to see the sky through”. The irony is that listening to A Hole to See the Sky Through often feels like a similar exercise: searching patiently for fleeting flashes of excitement.
Predecessor A Billion Heartbeats felt urgent, spiky, and politically-charged. It was a record that crackled with purpose, sounding worlds away from the sugary exuberance of 2008’s Two Doors Down. A Hole to See the Sky Through never quite matches the urgency of the former or the charm of the latter, often content to drift into…
“If I just get on my bike, I’ll outride any heartache,” sings Ella Williams on “Surfing USA,” a yawning, lovelorn paean to heartbreak in the Great Lakes. Since making her label debut as Squirrel Flower in 2020, Williams has translated her rich emotional life into a catalog of smoky indie rock and folk that careens between whispered intimacy and cathartic sprawl. She’s a Boston native who found her voice in the Midwest, beginning her career in Iowa, then adopting Chicago as her hometown and frequent muse. Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going is her fourth album for Illinois indie Polyvinyl, and finds her in a similar sonic space to Tomorrow’s Fire, the 2023 album she made with co-producer Alex Farrar. This time around, she and a group of Chicago collaborators cut a live,…
Get ready to dive into Wild Pink’s sixth long player, Still Coming Down, which clocks in at just under 33 minutes. The notably concise record finds frontman John Ross trimming the fat in favor of swaggering rock and roll. After the songwriter’s battle with cancer and being a father for the first time, he learned there was plenty of meaning to be found in going back to the basics. The band’s approach exemplifies this newfound vantage point, even if the album would have benefited by creating some space every now and then.
Wild Pink lean into the fact that this is a genuine rock record with big arrangements and even bigger riffs. The recording process at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, with producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza,…
Taking a cue from Happy Mondays‘ smash’n’grab approach to making music, this super-deluxe reissue of the group’s totemic third album raids an array of previous Mondays releases. Alongside a new remaster of Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches is an amalgamation of the Madchester Rave On and Hallelujah EPs; Baby Big Head Bootleg Album, the “unofficial” 1991 live recording originally let loose by the band themselves; and a slew of remixes, some lifted from original singles, others from projects issued earlier this year.
It all makes for a gloriously heady package which befits the Mondays’ time-warping maximalism. With grunge, Britpop and hip hop all outlasting the Madchester scene the Mondays birthed (and transcended), it’s easy to forget that…
2026 may have been a pretty depressing year in many aspects but one thing is for sure – the British music industry is in rude health. This year, bands like Mary in the Junkyard and Man/Woman/Chainsaw have built upon their burgeoning live reputation to deliver stellar debut albums, and now they’ve been joined by Westside Cowboy.
The Manchester quartet have spent the past few years releasing a string of EPs and touring their guts out – if you’ve been anywhere near a festival during 2025, it’s more than likely you’ll have seen them on the bill. The good thing about It Goes On is that the band have successfully transferred their jittery, intoxicating live sound into the recording studio, resulting in an immensely satisfying debut album.
When Chelsea Wolfe was interviewed by the Guardian in 2015 about her fourth album, Abyss, she revealed that her music had been informed by the bouts of sleep paralysis she’d suffered from since childhood. The condition – a transitional state between being awake and asleep – affects sufferers in different ways. Some wake up feeling paralysed, others see ghosts or demonic figures. For the California-born singer-songwriter, it meant “waking up, and you can move your body and your eyes are open, but there are figures and people from your dreams still present in your room”.
No surprise, then, that her music – a blend of drone, alt, folk, industrial and doom metal – had ended up so spookily unsettling. She appeared on album covers with pupil-less eyes, spoke…
In the latter portion of their recording career, The Cramps seemed to lose their calibration of the giddy perversities that propelled their best music. There’s a distinction to be drawn between being in on the joke, winking, even drooling, and being the joke itself. Songs like “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” (1990) or “I Wanna Get in Your Pants” (1991) reduced the band’s fascination for the demented kitsch of American pop culture to kitsch itself, repetitions of gestures that were empty in the first place. You can forget what a feral, fearsome force the Cramps were, as the 1970s spilled into the 1980s like fluid from the bottom of a split trash bag. Gravest Gravy features the band on the cusp of that fearsomeness, capturing the results of the Cramps’ 1977 Memphis recording…
Even for longtime fans, the Afghan Whigs still have some surprises left in them on Soft Control, the fourth release of the reunion era. Greg Dulli has always been an album man, and Soft Control follows the Whigs 2.0 blueprint in this regard: ten tracks, not quite 40 minutes, and a track sequence that makes you adapt a side A/side B mentality. Soft Control front-loads its most accessible tracks on side A, and side B begs to be listened to on headphones.
“Jungle Roux” kicks off this collection with a slithery synth before Dulli joins in, sounding as good as ever. It contains many Whigs signatures, but blends them in a new way. In a way, it’s as bold a start to the album as the roaring, Stooges-like “I’ll Make You See God” from 2022’s…
As a fearless thought leader named Todd once argued, Weezer have had a far more interesting career than fair-weather fans who stopped listening after their first two albums realize. It’s been a turbulent ride through beautiful highs and brutal lows — sometimes within the same song, as on 2022’s wildly uneven SZNZ EP series. It’s not always been fun, but it’s certainly been interesting.
The missing ingredient, even throughout Weezer’s best post-millennium moments, has been the production. Increasingly, it sounds like frontman Rivers Cuomo makes albums sitting in front of a laptop with his guitar plugged directly into the interface with an amp sim in his DAW. Heavier rock material like 2021’s Van Weezer and the following year’s SZNZ: Summer has never hit quite…
Visions of Sodal Ye, is eerie and disorientating – the sound of ecological dread – and named for the prophet character in Brian Aldiss’ 1962 novel Hothouse, who realises that life on a far-future Earth is doomed. The record was released by a vanity publishing label who never said ‘non’ as long as they received a fee and a tape. While this should be inconsequential it reveals much about the French counterculture at the end of the ’70s.
Claude Cuvelier and Jean Skowron, the two provincial northern French music nerds who created Mar-Vista, wanted to reach a big audience but suffered countless knockbacks from ‘real’ French labels. The pair came to the conclusion that “the recording industry in France wasn’t interested in our kind of music” and could…
After releasing six albums of varying heft under his Melaina Kol alias between 2016 and 2022, Nashville’s Logan Hornyak has taken longer over this one, time spent adding strings to a sometimes literal bow. Up to now, his output’s been decidedly loose and unbuffed indie pop, like an even lower-fi Sufjan Stevens combining a fragile voice, acoustic guitar and cheap electronics, all held together with paper glue. For Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then, he’s learned cello and harp, remembered some ancient piano lessons and found inventive ways of making solid song-like shapes out of them. The results are still small and delicate, but the focus is new.
First, the fibs: Hornyak claims to have moved away from guitar and electronics for this, but…