Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE recorded in grief or in hope at producer Seth Manchester’s Machines with Magnets studio, with touring bassist Liam Andrews contributing to the group’s recording sessions for the first time. The result is the most texturally detailed, sonically overwhelming BIG|BRAVE record to date. Nearly every moment is bristling with blown-out distortion, yet it’s shaped so that there’s enough space for all the elements to breathe instead of cancel each other out.
On opener “what may be the kindest way to leave,” waves of doom-laden noise set in, with Robin Wattie’s manipulated vocals floating in the center, and when the bass pierces through towards the end, the impact is felt deeply. Then, “a shape of shame” gently rocks back and…
Category: post-rock
Working with guitars, drum machine, sampler, self-built electronics, and all manner of percussion, BASIC, the trio of Chris Forsyth, Mikel Patrick Avery, and Douglas McCombs, synthesize the vast influences and distinct histories of each member, producing a boundary-less, rhythm-forward amalgam of art rock, trance jazz, collective improvisation, and humming electronics on their new eponymous full-length for No Quarter.
Philadelphia’s Chris Forsyth, known for his lyrical guitar compositions and mercurial improvisations as leader of the Solar Motel Band, founded BASIC in 2022 naming the project in homage to the 1984 Robert Quine/Fred Maher album “Basic,” yes, but also to indicate a desire to get down to fundamentals rhythmically and musically.
When MONO recorded their previous album, OATH, with longtime production partner and friend, Steve Albini in 2023, they never fathomed that it would be the final studio album they made together. Albini tragically died the following year, and that loss left an incalculable void in the lives of not just everyone who ever knew Steve, but everyone with an attachment to any of the thousands of records he helped bring into world over the past four decades. He brought a clarity to the chaos, and a selfless sense of service to art and artists that was unrivaled. On both a personal and practical level, the loss left MONO faced with profound grief and uncertainty. Albini had become a fundamental part of MONO’s unmistakable sound, and the thought of replacing him was daunting…
Often, a single sentence can say more than a manifesto spanning several pages. Especially when it is repeated, rewritten, and allowed to take on a life of its own. A phrase written two centuries ago can suddenly sound like a commentary on the present. A handful of words can become a refrain, an axis around which entirely new meanings begin to accumulate.
Horse Lords’ new album begins with such a phrase. Drawn from the nineteenth-century hymn, published in The Sacred Harp – one of the most enduring traditions of American sacred music – the line “We seek a city yet to come” becomes the album’s conceptual and sonic centre of gravity. Sung by Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor, it is looped, stretched, fragmented, and subjected…
When considering the title, one might imagine the answer as “sound,” as the post-rock collective Hanry, as the album, or all three. Defined as a “meditation on emergence,” What Came From Silence is a celebration of music and a coming-out party for the French band, who has released a series of EPs and singles leading up to this full-length debut.
The core trio becomes a quintet for this release, the typical post-rock setup enhanced by piano, cello and electronics. In deference to the title, the set starts with “Noise Drowns Out,” which rises from silence rather than attacking; this smooth entry allows the theme of emergence to take hold. The background sheen is like a drone upon which the percussion – both organic and…
Last Time Here serves as a stunning sonic time capsule, capturing The Album Leaf at a pivotal moment in the project’s evolution. Released in 2026 as a companion to the 25th-anniversary reissue of One Day I’ll Be on Time, this live collection transforms the delicate “bedroom” intimacy of the original 2001 recordings into something far more expansive and cinematic.
The album thrives on what critics call “aural photosynthesis.” While the original studio tracks were celebrated for their minimalist restraint, these live versions breathe with a new intensity. LaValle’s signature blend of Rhodes piano, glitchy rhythms, and soaring guitar loops feels more organic here. Tracks like “Vermillion” and “The MP” benefit from the live energy, where the transition…
Nowhere Faster, the 11th studio album by post-rock duo El Ten Eleven, is a bit of something old and something new. The most notable change to the group’s sound is the addition of piano and strings for the first time on any of their recordings, which make the album easily the most cinematic-sounding project they’ve ever released. The duo also decided to bring back the delay pedal which was central to their early sound.
Opener “Uncanny Valley Girl,” meant as a commentary about AI taking over the world, is El Ten Eleven at their best. It starts with an angular but funky bassline which ping-pongs through the speakers as the delay dices it up, and the pianos and strings refreshingly add textural depth. Then the rhythm comes together as…
Limited edition CD of “Anata” includes exclusive bonus track “Quatro Horizontes”.
In a recent interview with the great Joshua Minsoo Kim, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton explained that, whether in his music, his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori’s, or theirs as Los Thuthanaka, being loud is a part of the physical experience. “You’re supposed to feel the sound,” he elaborated. “It’s not supposed to be painful, but it’s supposed to change you, it’s supposed to make you feel healed in some way.”
…That disruptive power comes alive in Crampton’s universe, too — in the staggering, festering expanse of “Awila,” a 12-minute kullawada dance teeming with awakened guitars and wall-to-wall elementalism. It’s the building, confounding…
Humanity’s future — or so we are told — is dependent on technological advances, powered by millions upon millions of computer chips, the primary components of which can be found only in rare-earth deposits. Brazil is among the most important chess pieces in the globalist metagame; it’s home to nearly a quarter of the world’s rare-earth reserves, with next to no regulation (but plenty of corruption and deforestation).
No Ritmo da Terra, the brilliant new album from São Paulo producer and sound designer Antropoceno, is a musical projection of this future, constructed in part as a warning and, mostly, as a statement of Latin American resilience in the face of colonialism. By bridging Brazilian folk and Amazonian field recordings with…
YODOK III is something of a catch-all outfit, part free improvisation, part post-rock, part ambient, and a few other parts. The group consists of Tomas Järmyr (drums), Kristoffer Lo (tuba), and Dirk Serries (guitar), who have been performing and recording together for over a decade. Here, they are joined by organist Petra Bjørkhaug on a 54-minute improvised set recorded live at the Nidarosdomen Cathedral in Trondheim.
The album consists of one self-titled piece that begins quiet – not just ambient but hovering at the edge of perception – and slowly builds into a crescendo of sound nearly a hour later. Nidarosdomen’s organ has 9600 pipes and this performance must have been a spectacle, with subsonic frequencies that you could feel…
There are artists who treat solo albums as side notes, and there are those who seize the chance to excavate new terrain. With Taproots, Robin Richards, principal composer of Manchester’s idiosyncratic art-pop band Dutch Uncles, delivers a record that feels less like a digression and more like a statement of intent. If Dutch Uncles built their reputation on angular pop exuberance, Richards’ debut long-player re-roots him in a more contemplative, exploratory soil: part electronic meditation, part modern classical suite, part intimate diary.
Richards is no stranger to ambitious projects. With Dutch Uncles, he helped shape six albums that earned comparisons to Talking Heads for their wiry rhythms and brainy exuberance.
Arriving two years after Women, which found the quasi-instrumental psych rock combo expanding their nostalgic, style-shifting sound with string arrangements and guest vocals, Pur Jus is so named because it gets back to basics.
Inspired by near constant touring, the album was entirely written, performed, recorded (live in the studio), and mixed by the Bergen, Norway-based trio, using only guitars (Øyvind Blomstrøm), bass (Chris Holm), drums and percussion (Kim Åge Furuhaug), keyboards (Blomstrøm and Holm), and the occasional vocals. The results may be less diverse and dramatic than their predecessors by comparison, but grooves and chill-out feels are still in plentiful supply.
The album kicks things off with a drum fill…
The title As Human carries a multitude of meanings. What is it like to be human, or to pass as human? At what juncture might one lose or gain one’s humanity? The Chicago band calls the title track “a meditation on vulnerability and the small triumphs that come with choosing to feel, even when it hurts.” The Color of Cyan paints with a wide swath of moods, plumbing the depths of human experience and exploring its potential heights.
Eduardo Cintron’s striking cover image is available separately on t-shirts and linoleum block prints; the vinyl is offered in red-and-white variants. The rich red hues prompt the listener to imagine lifeblood flowing and spilled, even before the record is spun. (For those who are curious, cyan was incorporated into the cover art…
…You’ve likely heard of Sam Slater as one-fourth of much-celebrated experimental heavies OSMIUM, a supergroup of sorts featuring Hildur Guðnadóttir, Senyawa’s Rully Shabara, and emptyset’s James Ginzburg. And sure, Lunng shares at least a little aesthetic and conceptual DNA with Slater’s more well-known side gig. For a start, both projects seem propelled in part by a compulsion to explore the idea and feeling of metal without really playing metal as such. But where OSMIUM’s thrilling, alien sturm und drang rigorously explores a relentlessly dark palette, Lunng’s proto-dystopic swatch book is much broader and more varied in hue. Slater’s heaviness makes ample room for moments of delicacy and fleeting beauty and vulnerable humanity. Shafts of pink and…
Nothing about this album suggests that it’s a debut. Shaking Hand’s eponymous introductory shot is so assured it sounds as if an awful lot of groundwork has preceded its appearance. As it happens – beyond live shows – the only thing paving the way was a single issued last June.
Shaking Hand are a Manchester trio: Ellis Hodgkiss (bass), Freddie Hunter (drums) and George Hunter (guitar, vocals). They deal in a guitar-centred art-rock with touches of Slint and Tortoise, and a muted math-rock feel. There are also hints of Field Music around the time of their 2010 Measure album and a muzzy, out-of focus psychedelic sense of distance – the latter trait emphasised by George Hunter’s distracted, this-close-to-flat singing style and the hard-to-parse…
Few musicians have scaled the progressive rock battlements with such elegance as Jo Quail. From multiple collaborations with post-rock and metal bands – MONO to Enslaved and beyond – to her own steady flow of extraordinary, genre-melting releases, the cellist is acknowledged as an essential player in the creative underground.
Part of Quail’s charm is that her music is pointedly alive: a never-ending work-in-progress that she returns to in performance, feeding off the tunes, tones and spontaneous ideas that appear to magically coalesce in her songs.
This is particularly prominent on Notan, which features a brand-new version of ‘Rex’, a song originally found on her solo debut From the Sea. In its earlier form, ‘Rex’ was dazzling but…
Multiple recordings are available featuring Melbourne guitarist Cam Butler with ensembles of varying sizes — in addition to the eleven solo instrumental albums he’s issued, Butler’s also contributed to other artists’ projects — but there’s something undeniably special about one featuring him alone. In that context, his command of the instrument and associated gear is especially apparent, especially when it’s not put to self-indulgent or egoistic ends but instead used to realize the artistic expression for a given piece. It also allows his singular tone to be heard clearly and for the listener to better appreciate the textures he coaxes from his Gibson Les Paul.
Being an album of unaccompanied pieces, Spirits Flying Home is naturally intimate and…
If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation.
But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump,…
Pullman is a studio-born acoustic supergroup that emerged from Chicago’s post-rock milieu in the late ’90s, uniting Ken “Bundy K.” Brown (Tortoise/ Directions in Music), Curtis Harvey (Rex), Chris Brokaw (Come), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day); drummer Tim Barnes later joined, solidifying the group’s core lineup. They debuted on Thrill Jockey with Turnstyles & Junkpiles (1998), a hushed, live-to-2-track collection of interwoven guitars that critics likened to John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Gastr del Sol. Their follow-up, Viewfinder (2001), expanded the palette with percussion, subtle electric textures, and multi-track layering, while maintaining Pullman’s rustic, cinematic restraint. Across both albums, the band became a touchstone for…
It’s been a year and a half since BASIC first emerged out of a bare bones set up of two guitars (Chris Forsyth and Nick Millevoi) and a drum machine. That early experiment, inspired by the 1984 collaboration between Robert Quine and Fred Maher, put a boxy, machine-drilled framework around open-ended guitar jam. Mikel Patrick Avery tended the rough propulsion of the drum machine, enriching its stutter with additional improvised percussion, while Forsyth and Millevoi slashed away at one another on conventional and baritone guitar. It was, at once, disciplined and free-spirited, and you can see why it appealed to Forsyth. Christian Carey reviewed the full-length debut last year, writing “With a rattling drum pattern, synth lines embellished by bent notes…