Dreams can be either of two things: alluring or fleeting. It can either pull you into its fascinating details, stirring enough to stick with you for quite some time. Or it just washes over you, where hazy moments can be observed, but feel like there’s not much to glean at the end of it all. Sassy 009’s newest project, Dreamer+, falls under both edges. Carrying an intriguingly amorphous character to its soundscapes, yet simultaneously never fully embracing its capabilities.
Take the meditative, atmospheric rock of “Tell Me”. Its moody presentation and Sunniva Lindgård’s airy singing eventually bring Blood Orange into the fray. His voice nestles well within the song’s atmosphere, yet the track just ends there, like a faint breeze that glides across. Its impact…
Category: indie
Despite only being in his twenties, Cavetown, aka Robbie Skinner, boasts a large discography – five studio albums, a live album, several EP’s, and more – each track detailing a phase of his life with disarming honesty. From the palpable teen angst in his first two albums, to the soothing sense of self-acceptance in his 2022 album, worm food, Skinner never shies away from exposing every part of himself. His sixth studio album, ‘Running With Scissors’, is no different.
Cavetown’s discography tells a tale of growth, with Running with Scissors at the forefront, exhibiting a new chapter in his life – one of self-assurance and self-expansion.
Using his introspective lyrical talent to shine light on happier experiences, Skinner…
Ya Tseen is a continually evolving musical collaboration guided by Nicholas Galanin/Yeil Ya Tseen. Born into the Sitka Tribe of Alaska (Tlingit) Galanin is L’uknax.ádi (Raven Coho clan). He began learning music from his father, Dei Kee Tla Tin (Dave Galanin, 1955-2021), an accomplished Blues guitarist who performed under the name Strummin’ Dog. In 2013, Galanin was in a serious boat accident while returning home from a hunting trip that broke his back and ribs. He recalls the stars overhead as he was airlifted from the boat, connecting him to his earliest memory of looking up at the night sky, and his connection to Land. Galanin has returned to this experience of intense connection to Land throughout his career; in many ways, it guides his creative practice.
Mel, the second East River Pipe album released by Merge Records, will be reissued on vinyl this January as the label’s first entry in the Secretly Society. Going beyond bringing a long out-of-print classic back to wax, the reissue represents the first time Mel has been available in full on any physical format, as “Spotlight,” exclusive to Merge’s 1996 LP and CD, is joined here by “The Way They Murdered Me” and “Miracleland,” which were exclusive to the Shinkansen CD issued outside of North America.
Like all of East River Pipe’s output, Mel was written, performed, recorded, and mixed by F.M. Cornog on a Tascam 388 mini-studio at his home, which was then a small apartment in Astoria, Queens.
Within that space, he conjures nothing less than the fullness of life beyond it, the characters…
London’s groundbreaking psychedelic pioneers, still led by founder Paul Rudolph along with former Hawkwind bassist and Lemmy protegé Alan Davey, return for a brand new album Covered In Pink cover songs. The Fairies tear into some of the classic rock’s biggest monuments from “American Woman” to “Mississippi Queen” to “Baby’s On Fire” and “Communication Breakdown” PLUS a brand new version of their proto-punk hit “Do It” and original tune. Includes special guest appearances by Nik Turner (Hawkwind co-founder), Michael Moorcock (Hawkwind) and Danny Faulkner (Pre-Med).
The excessive, drug-fueled Pink Fairies grew out of the Deviants, a loose-knit band formed in 1967 by members of the West London hippie commune Ladbroke Grove.
Amanda Bergman has long been one of Sweden’s most quietly powerful singer-songwriters. Her best work to date, Your Hand Forever Checking On My Fever, was only just released in 2024, making it a fantastic surprise to receive embraced for a second as we die so soon afterwards.
Where Bergman previously folded her vulnerabilities into folksy arrangements, here she leans into a soft-rock warmth.
Songs like ‘grasp’ feature unashamedly ’80s arrangements, big open road melodies and hooks that feel almost Californian, somewhere between the glow of Dylan’s Infidels and the clean, sun-soaked sound of HAIM.
These songs exist in the space between despair and consolation. The grief-stricken never…
Nashville-by-way-of-Philly musician Langhorne Slim has released more than half a dozen records blending folk, Americana, and the occasional indie-pop song. But five years after Strawberry Mansion — a deeply personal, post-pandemic record that in part documented his journey to sobriety, delivered through often delicately beautiful musical movements — he has found his way to a louder amp and strapped on an electric guitar for his next offering.
Appropriately enough, he’s tapped producer Sam F. Kiszka, whose group Greta Van Fleet is one of the biggest guitar bands of the past decade. The result is a surprisingly natural evolution for Slim, keeping his deep lyrics at the core of these songs.
Even the recording process was a step out…
…The remixed and remastered expanded edition of ‘Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong’ includes ten previously unreleased bonus tracks presented as a ‘mini’ album.
Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong is the debut album by the London-based duo Woo. Originally issued on the Sunshine Series imprint in May 1982, it was subsequently picked up for a 1987 US release by the LA-based Independent Project Records label. After this, Woo’s second album, It’s Cosy Inside, came out in 1989 on Independent Project Records. There was no UK version of the follow-up album back then; a US reissue on Drag City followed in 2012.
When Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong appeared in the UK in 1982,…
There are at least three ideal situations in which to listen to Tragic Magic, the gentle, contemplative new collaborative album from the ambient composer Julianna Barwick and experimental harpist Mary Lattimore. The first is on an early morning train ride across the country, cocooned in liminal space where you feel both exhausted and alive, wiping the dreary sleep from your eyes in anticipation of the destination to come. The second is during a languid stroll through the city at night, your mind cradled by the soft glow of streetlamps and the insulated warmth of the snow-blanketed streets. And finally, in the bath, if you’re the kind of person who bathes.
Like any good ambient music, the songs on Tragic Magic have a balming effect…
There’s a slight “Sympathy For the Devil” tone to the opening seconds of “Pendulum Swing”, the first track on the US country adjacent stylist and former Grammy nominee Courtney Marie Andrews’ ninth studio album – the descending piano figure, the circling percussion. As the song opens out, it develops into a dark-light exercise in contrasts, along the lines of the more muted moments of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
Ambiance set, the ensuing nine tracks evince a similar restraint, where a low-key vibe is punctuated by flashes of gospel-esque drama. A lot of Valentine, Andrews’ first album on her own Loose Future label, is recognisably rooted in country. “Cons & Clowns” has a Dolly Parton vibe. “Only the Best” is similarly slanted.
Having been friends and occasional touring partners for well over a decade, Asheville, NC-based singer-songwriter-guitarist Tyler Ramsey and My Morning Jacket guitarist Carl Broemel have at long last made their full-length recorded debut with Celestun. A marvel of interwoven musicianship and testament to the duo’s singular camaraderie, the album encapsulates the two veteran guitarist-songwriters’ mutual admiration and effortless compatibility as they swap and share nine new songs of dazzling dexterity and grace recorded almost entirely recorded on acoustic guitars. Though their initial objective had been all instrumental, the natural flow of the sessions led the duo to begin incorporating vocal tracks. Stark yet intricately arranged songs…
Like with any other rock genre (or sub-genre), the death of psychedelic rock has been proclaimed so many times that the proclamation itself became redundant. The reasons may seem quite simple – the appeal of psych rock remains to this day, whether in its original or ever-coming changes in shape or form, with the original core (and ideas) remaining intact in one or more elements that define psych rock as such.
With Under Dark Skies, their latest album, Los Angeles outfit Tombstones in Their Eyes just prove the point. With the band going through intense personal changes (including the passing of guitarist Paul Boutin this October), the band still firmly remains in the songwriting hands of John Trainor, one of its original founders,…
…author of the immersive Manu Chao biography, Clandestino, roving world music journalist, composer and “nomad pianist” Peter Culshaw released his previous set, Music from the Temple of Light, in 2023.
Surrender to Love is spun from the same threads that were woven through that Temple of Light – mixing an ambient piano as a grounding for the music, with a range of Eastern and Middle Eastern instruments and voices, and a ruling spirit and approach that’s drawn from the Sufi wing of spirituality – a music and practice associated with Islam, but one that perhaps predates it, stretching away into older, even prehistoric means of devotion and surrender.
The authority in these Sufi-inflected pieces is…
In even the most straightforward Tanner Matt production, there’s a moment where everything threatens to disintegrate. Since he began putting out leftfield house music in the early 2010s — working under aliases like Hashman Deejay, Studio Mody, and Ttam Renat, and in the groups Aquarian Foundation, Kinetic Electronix, and INTe*ra, among others — the Vancouver electronic musician has specialized in stripped-down tracks with shaky foundations and a sneaky dub underpinning. He’s fond of twisting the delay knob until the groove wobbles at the knees, or tweaking the syncopation until the downbeat disappears. A recent series of 12″ EPs with the similarly elusive producer C3D-E has taken his trickster tendencies to the extreme, stretching blunted,…
After nine albums with indie rock trio Peter Bjorn and John, Peter Morén began to confront the issue of who he really was as a songwriter. Given plenty of time to think during the pandemic, he emerged as SunYears with a debut album, Come Fetch My Soul in 2023. It had elements of guitar pop, indie rock, and folk, a mixture he’s evolved on his second album, The Song Forlorn. Morén credits The Beatles’ Revolver and The White Album as influences that leaned on a variety of styles. There certainly is something for everyone here.
Things kick off with ‘Where Are We’, a grumbling garage rock instrumental leading into the folk rock of ‘Dark Eyes’, inspired by a friend in the throes of depression. A theme continued by the piano ballad ‘Your Dad Was Sad’, written…
Listening to Excess of Loss, the new album from Xol Meissner, one can’t help but be transported to a different time and place, where the haunting baritone vocals recall Scott Walker, Nick Cave, and Jacques Brel, and the instrumental accompaniment consists of a hammered lap steel. The combination invokes a dream-like state that is dark and mysterious but oddly intoxicating. Excess of Loss draws inspiration from many places, but still sounds like absolutely nothing else.
Xol Meissner is the alias of New York City-based composer Mauro Hertig. Classically trained and the 2019 Laureate of the Voix-Nouvelles Académie in France, Hertig had regularly used text in scored works prior to writing songs full-time. His unique style of lap steel was previously…
On Bloodline, singer-songwriter Mon Rovîa approaches his complex upbringing with an impressive clarity of vision. Born in Liberia during the West African nation’s civil war, Janjay Lowe was adopted by a white American family that moved around the U.S.; eventually, Lowe would come to call Tennessee home.
As a teen, he picked up his brothers’ taste for Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, but seeing few Black artists working in that genre, Lowe started making R&B. As he found a TikTok following, he gradually re-introduced those indie-folk influences, embracing the ukulele he’d played as a kid and coming to recognize his place in a long lineage of Afro-Appalachian music. Bloodline, his full-length debut, follows a series of EPs and…
Ten years ago, La Tène released their first record, then as a trio with Cyril Bondi, d’Incise, and Alexis Degrenier. A decade, four albums, and multiple collaborations later, the group returns with Moreïne/Déclives — an album that feels as much like a celebration as it does an upheaval. True to its identity, La Tène continues to explore the cracks between tradition and experimentation, between hypnotic drone and repeated gestures, but this time they choose to move onto new ground: the hurdy-gurdy, the group’s emblematic instrument since the very beginning, disappears in favor of a stripped-down setup centered on two electronic percussions and live dub work.
It proves very difficult to tell what is electronic and what isn’t on La Tène’s cavernous and…