Koen Holtkamp is a master of creating spacious sonic environments, both with his long-running instrumental duo Mountains, on many collaborative works, and with solo albums of electro-acoustic beauty. With Nightlife, Holtkamp centers his compositions around modular synth patches he designed to mirror the plucked sounds of stringed instruments (often looking especially to the sounds of chordophone instruments like the kora or the harp), and invites interplay from drummer Greg Fox and sax/flute player Matt Bauder on many of the pieces. As with so much of Holtkamp’s body of work, the sounds here are slow moving and thoughtful, built on subtlety and gradual evolution. Informed in part by a relocation from urban Brooklyn to the relatively woodsy…
Category: indie
Two decades have passed in the land of Gnod, yet the psychic travelogue only becomes more enthralling as it goes on. And whilst this band has flourished via dauntless conviction, hive-mind magic and a fierce and uncompromising spirit, one ingredient has served as a crucial fuel for the fire – the monolithic singularity of the riff.
This second chapter of Gnod’s sort-of-anniversary trilogy also originates in the same six day sessions as the first, at Hellfire studios near Dublin with producer Spud Murphy. Yet the focus this time is on the transcendental heaviness and repetition that the band have often used as a primary fulcrum of their approach. This volume captures the sound of strings flayed, throats shredded, skins punished by the organic chemistry of this…
…features two brand new songs, alongside “New Desire,” as well as a rework with John Glacier and remixes from various artists including Jacques Greene, Nosaj Thing, Lil Silva and Oscar Farrell.
Arlo Parks has long made a home in vulnerability and poetic lyricism, and on Ambiguous Desire, she doubles down on that instinct with confidence. The album is full of psychedelic textures, punchy basslines, and dreamy vocals that blur together into something hypnotic but anthemic.
While the coherence of the record sometimes lends itself to monotony, the darker sonic undercurrent, coupled with a newly found more intricate and explorative sonority, has a sensation of quiet and dreamlike absorption.
Across the whole record, Parks’ vocals are…
Over the years, Imperial Teen’s brand of high-sass, joyfully brash power pop has kept rolling on without losing any of its potency. The group began in the ‘90s as an outlet for the more melodic tendencies of songwriters Roddy Bottum and Lynn Perko-Truell to contrast the aggressive sounds of their other bands Faith No More and Sister Double Happiness, and over time they grew into an identity of their own.
Their seventh studio album All Over You arrives as part of an established pattern at this phase of Imperial Teen’s lifespan, one where the band- members all live in separate cities and don’t get together often, but put together a new album in intervals of six or seven years, checking in on where they’re at personally, as a group,…
Los Angeles garage punk rockers Death Valley Girls have always mixed elements of irreverence, revolution, and compassion in their music, but their 6th album, Welcome to Earth, is an especially community-minded one. It follows the loss of bandleader Bonnie Bloomgarden’s home and belongings in the Southern California wildfires of early 2025, which she escaped thanks to a ride and a place to stay from her landlord, an offer she accepted while leaving even her phone and her car behind. Although they can sometimes be hard to discern on the noisy, group-sung LP, some of the collaborators here include former member Laura Kelsey, fellow garage punker Seth Bogart (Hunx & His Punx), Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Gretchen Parlato, and a children’s chorus.
BODEGA have spent the past decade being filed under post-punk and art rock, a label that made sense when the Brooklyn band made wiry, rhythm-heavy records that seemed to have one eye on Talking Heads, Devo, and the artier corners of punk. With All Inside Aquarium, BODEGA have turned toward straight-ahead rock.
The guitars are bigger, the melodies are more prominent, and the performances have a looseness that makes this feel like a genuine change of direction for the band.
The album opens with Ben Howzie fronting the titular track and immediately signals that this isn’t the same sound found on past albums like Endless Scroll or Our Brand Could be Yr Life. The track features a slightly hazy, guitar-driven…
The Lone Star State is a hell of a long way from the City of Angels. Anyone familiar with U.S. geography knows this, but no one understands the lengths of that journey quite like Jess Williamson. Not only does the born Texan walk the line between country and indie, she literally splits time between a tiny town in West Texas and her adopted home of Los Angeles. Williamson was feeling stuck between these two stations when she struck gold on her last album, Time Ain’t Accidental. A Mile South of Heaven navigates the same emotional terrain from a slightly different direction. It’s still rewarding but requires more than a little patience for less in return.
Arriving back at the crossroads Williamson reached on Time Ain’t Accidental, “Goodbye to…
The 2020s have been a decade marked by loss. We’ve lost faith and trust in institutions that were already slowly collapsing. A whole generation lost out on formative experiences without the turbulent disruption of the pandemic. And in the music world, we’ve largely lost the kind of artists who could emerge organically without the noxious influence of algorithms or million-dollar spends. It’s a miracle, then, whenever a legitimate gain comes along, and for the music industry in particular, someone who could both draw from the traditions of American rock and bring them to newer, deeper, unexpected places. Although his success was partly engineered by a digital marketing agency, Cameron Winter has proven to be a vital addition to this increasingly endangered species of performers…
Search for Dalarna, Sweden, on Google Maps, and the red pin pops up in what looks like the middle of nowhere. Around the red pin are many towns that, apparently, are so small that Google doesn’t have a picture for them. Dalarna is a province (culturally) and a county (administratively), and the two don’t necessarily have the same boundaries. But somewhere in this mostly rural area, Kristian Matsson grew up in the 1980s and ’90s.
Located in south-central Sweden, Dalarna is often seen as the place to reconnect with traditional Swedish culture. For Mattson the kid, it was a place to escape, and his love of American rock, followed by his obsession with American folk and blues, gave him an escape route. For the last twenty years, Matsson has been performing…
How to persuade men to open up about their feelings has long been an issue that has perplexed mental health professionals, an intractable problem leading to a range of outside-the-box solutions: men’s sheds, cycling groups, even, you suspect, the repeated commissioning of Mortimer and Whitehouse’s Gone Fishing. After hearing Do Not Dare To Dream, however, any future campaigns should think about signing up Teenage Fanclub as musical figureheads. Their thirteenth album might have been recorded in an isolated environment – the current quintet of Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley, Euros Childs, Francis Macdonald and David McGowan gathering on the Scottish island of Great Bernera – but it’s far from remote, its songs of sadness, alienation and creeping…
Canadian writer Anne Carson, whom Jules Reidy has cited as their favorite essayist, recently penned an intriguing review of a Rosalía concert. It’s a fish-out-of-water debrief from a critic skeptical of the singer’s use of spectacular “pop-song procedure” to upscale the emotions of flamenco. But her critique is not in bad faith: Carson rigorously investigates how the Catalan singer’s stage presence — as a hyper-stylized, quasi-religious vessel for ecstatic attention — commands her audience. The essay evaluates an artist’s methodology for contacting and channeling the divine, and a similar curiosity can be found in Reidy’s work. The Berlin-based guitarist seems to anatomize their own music, using complex tuning systems and a patient, cerebral…
Rose Delta Rising is the latest LP from Derbyshire-based guitarist Nick Jonah Davis, his first solo full-length release since 2020’s When the Sun Came. Davis is best known for working solo; guitar, lap steel, the odd field recording. Rose Delta Rising is a band record. Arts Council England funded the sessions, which brought in drummer Joe Danks, bassist Neal Heppleston and composer Richard “Biff” Birkin on string arrangements. They recorded at Black Bay Studio in the Outer Hebrides and Pete Fletcher produced.
…Black Bay Studio is situated in the Outer Hebrides and overlooks the staggering landscape of that area: windswept hills and clear bodies of water. There is something magical and otherworldly about the Hebrides; a starkness and raw…
London-based songwriter Kamran Khan is no stranger to the inner workings of the London indie scene of the last decade. Through such escapades as his previous works with BBC Radio 6 acclaimed act Pencil, and widely respected solo project entitled Fake Laugh, Khan has built a fantastic rapport with indie lovers in the capital. For these reasons, Khan’s newest output, his debut album entitled I Came from Nowhere & Nowhere Is Where I Am Going promises great things. His first record under his real name, Khan admits that “With this album, I felt I could draw a line — and put my own name to it for the first time”, which adds a profoundly personal aspect to the record, which deals with a collection of personal traumas Khan has battled with throughout his…
Benny Sings embraces home and family on his sweetly intimate 2026 album, 22 Durnham Dew. Named after a recently renovated house where he has settled with his wife and children, 22 Durnham Dew finds Dutch singer, songwriter, producer Tim van Berkestijn (aka Benny Sings) in a good place, drawing inspiration from his home-life while still digging into the lyrical and dancey, ’70s-style pop his fans love. There’s a relaxed vibe to the album, even as Sings digs into his influences.
The opening “You Love Me” in particular grabs your attention with its Commodores-inspired R&B groove. Similarly evocative, the title track brings to mind the kind of warm, singalong style Paul McCartney mastered on his solo work in the ’70s. Equally compelling, cuts…
At what point does a song stop being a song? Strip away the beat, harmony and narrative; leave behind a voice, a melody, a few repeated words, the hiss of a phone recording. Merryn Jeann’s Fear of the Beauty Parlour seems fascinated by precisely that threshold.
Jeann has never been particularly interested in conventional singer-songwriting. In the Australian artist’s music, the voice can transform into an instrument, a simple melody can suddenly break off, and an intimate story can give way to a field recording, a strange synth sound or a seemingly random noise. On Dog Beach, producer Rob Ellis helped her organise these eccentric ideas; on her second album, Jeann takes control of the production herself.
For almost a decade now, South London artist Klein has been a compelling figure at the very vanguard of British avant-garde music.
Ever since Tommy, her scrambled, glitching breakthrough EP released on Hyperdub in 2017, her fractious sound collages – tapestries of steely, shuddering textures and disembodied vocals – have earmarked her as an artist who really gets the paranoia and neuroses of the age in which she is working. Meanwhile, her prankster tendencies have ensured that you simply never know what she’s going to get up to next.
But in spite of the many accolades her music has won her, the legions of famous fans and collaborators she’s accrued – Arca, MIKE, and The Avalanches, to name a few – Klein’s…
Anna Atkins, the 19th century botanist and photographer whose Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is widely regarded as the first photographic book, made her images by placing algae directly onto paper coated with a light-sensitive solution. Where the plant blocked the ultraviolet light, the paper remained white. Everywhere else, it turned the deep Prussian blue that gives the process its name. At the center of each image, the algae’s fronds produced their own negative.
Emily A. Sprague first encountered cyanotypes while shooting film photography in her bathtub around 2018, when she was experimenting with leaking light into film and altering development times and temperatures. As opposed to her…
Son Lux — the trio of keyboardist Ryan Lott, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang — were already known for a sound that is simultaneously apocalyptic and rhythmic, melancholy and rousing, and warped and intricate by the time they completed their Tomorrows trilogy (their sixth, seventh, and eighth albums) in 2021. The trio went on to compose the scores for three films, including the boundary-defying Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Marvel blockbuster Thunderbolts. These ambitious film projects, which took Son Lux’s music out of the clubs and headphones and into other dimensions, narratively speaking, seem to have influenced the trippy and sometimes dazzling Out Into, their first album of original songs in five years.