There is a specific kind of bravery required to be “post-cool.” In an industry obsessed with the frantic energy of the new or the polished artifice of the established, Bristol’s The Lovely Basement have opted for a third path: a relaxed, literate nonchalance that feels less like a performance and more like a conversation. Their 4th album, Lowlands, is a shimmering collection that suggests the band isn’t “too old to care,” but rather old enough to know exactly what is worth caring about.
Released through Precious Recordings of London, Lowlands is an album that demands a shift in the listener’s internal metronome. It has been described as an easygoing listen, but don’t mistake that for background music. This is music that lowers your blood pressure…
Category: indie
More than 25 years after Bruce Haack became a cult favorite, there were still corners of his discography waiting for proper reissues. Plenty of attention has been given to works like Electric Lucifer, Electric Lucifer: Book 2, and the wildly eccentric Haackula, but aside from early collections like Listen Compute Rock Home and Hush Little Robot, his music for children has often been overlooked. Shimmy Disc rectifies this matter with their reissue of 1975’s This Old Man, which was remastered by Kramer and released on vinyl for the first time in 50 years. This Old Man is something of a mirror twin to its predecessor, 1974’s Captain Entropy. Falling somewhere between the activity songs of the Dance, Sing, and Listen series and the lysergic visions of Electric Lucifer, both…
And so continues the Californian quartet’s mythic two-part journey. Horizons/West – the twelfth studio album from Thrice – might not have arrived quite as hot-on-the-heels of first parter ‘Horizons/East’ as some might have liked, but better late than never eh? Where 2021’s ‘Horizons/East’ opens with the soft glow of possibility, though, its counterpart crashes in with the aftermath. Less a sunrise, a warming haze of hope, and more the moment the sun disappears, the long shadow cast by the doubts that came before. If ‘Horizons/East’ asks what it means to believe, ‘Horizons/West’ asks what remains after belief has been tested, cracked, and dragged through the murky waters.
Opening track ‘Blackout’ feels like the negative…
Nearly three decades since their debut, Good Charlotte return with Motel Du Cap, a raw, heartfelt revival that bridges nostalgic pop-punk spirit with seasoned emotional depth.
From the grind of Waldorf, Maryland, to selling over 11 million albums worldwide, Good Charlotte didn’t play by the rules; they smashed them. With fists-in-the-air bangers like ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’, ‘I Just Wanna Live’, and ‘The Anthem,’ they wore their hearts like battle scars and never backed down.
There’s something poetic about a band rediscovering its spark in a place as dreamlike as the south of France. For Good Charlotte, it was a private wedding gig at the illustrious Hotel du Cap in 2023 that reignited the flame.
Having earlier issued ‘t Geruis material on Lost Tribe Sound, LAAPS, Line, and Quiet Details, it was perhaps inevitable that Daniël Jolan would one day do the same on Home Normal. After all, Ian Hawgood’s imprint is a natural fit for the kind of lo-fi ambient the music producer from Belgium traffics in. It’s not the first time Jolan’s brand of dusty music has entered the world, but The Kindest Encounters finds him bringing the style to an advanced degree of artistry. As the album plays, it’s almost impossible not to draw a parallel between it and the nostalgic feeling that sets in when faded colour photographs are viewed. Much as in that case, one feels in listening to his music as if the world presented is both familiar yet at the same time impossibly out of reach.
Born out of the febrile Basque Country experimental music community and infused with the weirdness of the early 00s New York noise scene, the former solo project of Bilbao’s Alvaro Matilla (now joined by Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini, and multi-instrumentalist, serial collaborator Mattin) sounds wild and untamed and bursting with possibility.
…Mattin’s output is so prolific that sometimes it becomes impossible to fully grasp for most of us. He’s part of the bands Billy Bao, Regler and Al Karpenter and has over 100 releases on different labels worldwide including recent collaborations with Keith Rowe, Annea Lockwood and Valerio Tricoli. But it is also amazingly diverse, unconventional, rough, uncomfortable,…
If you’re worried that you’re a latecomer to the work of uncategorizable Chicago musician Ben LaMar Gay, take solace in the certainty that you’re not alone. Gay’s new album, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, supposedly draws from seven of his previous records, with curious names like Grapes, Benjamim e Edinho, and Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks. But when you start googling, not one of these albums surface. In this age of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, the cornetist, composer, and vocalist recorded seven albums in seven years but never let anyone outside of his inner circle hear them. Instead, he worked with jazz and experimental artists like Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, Nicole Mitchell, Jaimie Branch and Bitchin Bajas while…
Following between their three studio albums; 2017’s The Assassination of Julius Caesar, 2020’s Flowers of Evil and 2024’s Liminal Animals which showed Ulver’s move into traditional song and production levels, their next album marks a new beginning in the band’s history who have moved from the sounds of black metal, ambient, synth-pop and experimental music, haven taken a dive into the underwater worlds of continuing their electronic sound on their new album, Neverland.
Here, Ulver have taken the biggest step into the world of changing directions by setting foot into the Berlin school of music, video game and film scores combined as if they had created this pattern, revealing a world on the brink of collapse, now in its ghost town, pin-dropping…
…features 9 tracks of unedited live performance, including pieces that became parts of his seminal ‘World of Echo’ album.
It is testament to the astral, prolific talent of Arthur Russell that two decades after the first reissues of his archival material garnered widespread acclaim, crystals of such high quality are still being unearthed. 2023’s Picture of Bunny Rabbit and 2019’s Iowa Dream hinted at the depth and breadth of what remains unheard in the Arthur Russell Archives, but it is perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for a high-quality live recording to see the light of day. 2020’s Sketches for World of Echo: June 25 1984 Live at Ei and 2021’s 24 to 24 Music Live at the Kitchen both went some way to unravelling the enigma,…
Brighton, England’s Fickle Friends choose pop happiness on their effervescantly hooky 2025 eponymous third album. The album arrives almost five years after Are We Gonna Be Alright?, a period that found singer Natassja Shiner and her bandmates going on a two year hiatus to recoup from touring and reconnect with their passion for making music. The time away seems to have proven fruitful and Fickle Friends once again reveal themselves as one of the sweetest sounding bands you might not have heard of.
Self-produced, the album feels at once lighter than past albums, and yet full of serious emotional weight as Shiner takes a deep look inside herself, unpacking her anxiety and fear in ways that seem nakedly raw. It’s feeling of speaking…
With For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name, Peter Knight extends his fascination with the porous relationship between body, instrument, and environment into one of his most personal and immersive solo works. The album takes its cue from extended fieldwork and improvisations undertaken near Yeerung River on Krowathunkooloong land, where Knight spent much of his early life. Each of the album’s pieces grew organically from direct encounters with that setting — the pulse of wind against brass, the crackle of heat, the buzz of insects — forming a meditation on sound as both a reflection of and response to place. It is a work of quiet fluidity, at once structured and spontaneous, where texture and tone gradually shape entire topographies of listening.
…The slightly delayed 20th Anniversary Edition comes with a second disc of standout remixes from the time, plus a handful of fresh versions.
Banco de Gaia (basically studio wiz Toby Marks and whomever he invites over) get their ethnic-electronic groove on again, but this time with extra vision. Maybe it’s the four years since the last proper Banco de Gaia album, or maybe the troubled globe of 2004, but whatever it is, You Are Here feels better put-together than any other Banco album before and the most direct message to the listener that Marks has ever attempted. You can use the cover art as a representation of the general feel of the album. Marks’ music is elaborate as ever but it’s compact in purpose, like the cover’s red dot and just as vivid. If Banco could…
New Risen Throne (Gabriele Panci) does not release albums often, but when he does, it is an event. His work represents a quintessential sound in dark ambient music over the last two decades – the synths, the drones, and the atmosphere – that others have taken in new directions, such as leaning toward industrial or techno variations. But Panci continues to perfect his art, of which the double album Journey to Reach the Fathers is the latest instantiation.
Here, he combines sustained tonal layers, sweeping yet breathy effects, odd vocalizations (throat singing and chant), electroacoustic elements, and distant booming percussion to create echoing subterranean soundscapes. This produces a full, rich listening environment that…
Ukrainian composer Katarina Gryvul stunned us in 2022 with the indelible Tysha. This year, on the heels of an astonishing collaboration with The National Museum in Warsaw, she returns with a set that is even wilder and more intense.
SPOMYN means recollection, and the album delves into the manner in which memories are fragmented, disjointed and reassembled, a process Gryvul imitates with fragile electronics, eruptions of sonic power and layers of voice.
The artist calls each track “a flicker of something lost, distorted, or forgotten.” It’s impossible not to think of the ways in which entire cultures are under attack, their artifacts and collective memory threatened by invading forces; or the rewriting of narratives by the opposition.
Kansas City, Missouri native, Matt Pryor, is a household name for anyone who was attuned to the second and third waves of emo. His genre-defining band, The Get Up Kids, were among a small and legendary group that has shaped the musical landscape for years.
…Most recently, on his latest album under his given name, Matt Pryor has presented the world with The Salton Sea, and it is abundantly clear that this is the continuation of a decades-long love affair with music and being outright obsessed with songwriting. Steadfast fans of Pryor’s prolific career will also find themselves treated to a style that is more reminiscent of the works of Paul Westerberg and Red House Painters, that is of course laden with Pryor’s signature style, whose…
…remastered & with 5 bonus tracks.
“Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”, maintains Paul McGann’s character near the start of Withnail and I. He plays Marwood – the ‘I’ of the title – in a drunken and druggy but decidedly unpsychedelic cinematic glimpse into the late 1960s. The film initially flopped in cinemas at the height of 1980s yuppiedom, only to find cult adoration (and over quotation) via subsequent release on video. Everything has its right time in the end. And so it is with Henry Badowski’s one and only album Life Is a Grand, which is finally getting the reissue it justly deserves after all but disappearing, along with its creator, to near complete indifference following its release in 1981. Indeed Badowski himself seems more…
Over the past 15 years Devin McKnight has been building his musical path in bands like Grass Is Green, Speedy Ortiz, Philadelphia Collins, and his own three “solo” releases as Maneka, building quite an impressive resume. McKnight’s releases as Maneka have been increasingly varied as he’s melded jazz (check the Wes Montgomery smoothness in “Throwing Ax”) hip-hop, goth tinged post-punk, searing guitar, and maelstroms of distortion into his songs, sometimes all at once. McKnight has been probing different ways of manipulating sounds to create a very unique adventure in musical expression and his fourth Maneka release Bathes and Listens keeps pushing against the made up boundaries and limitations of “genre.” McKnight and associates…
When Eraserhead premiered in 1977, it didn’t just mark the beginning of David Lynch’s singular career — it rewired the language of underground cinema. A nightmarish journey through industrial decay, existential dread, and fractured identity, the film remains one of the most haunting works ever committed to celluloid. Shot in stark black and white, Eraserhead unfolds like a fever dream — where sound, space, and emotion bleed into one another in an uncanny, hypnotic dance. But what truly sets Eraserhead apart, even beyond its disquieting visuals, is its sound. David Lynch, working closely with sound designer and technician Alan Splet, constructed an aural landscape as vital and disturbing as any of the film’s images. The soundtrack is not built…